Dangal - wrestling to Wrestle

I arrived late to the Dangal party. But thankfully, I caught up with this movie a couple of weeks back, before it moved out of most theatres. The uniform reaction I heard from people who watched the movie was “What perfection - everyone in the movie seems to have learnt & lived wrestling so much so that nothing appears to be an enactment”. I must agree, since I looked up Geeta Phogat’s Gold-medal winning ‘real’ match after the movie, and it didn’t come close to any of the prelims matches shown in the movie!

I’m a big fan of sports movies and particularly those inspired from real life events, for they celebrate triumph of the human spirit against insurmountable odds. They not just inspire people to march-on when massive challenges come in the way of their passion, but they also do the dual job of endearing them to a new sport. Several Bollywood movies have done an outstanding job here, like Chak de India (Hockey), Bhaag Milka Bhaag (Athletics), Mary Kom (Boxing), Lagaan & MS Dhoni (Cricket, though this sport hardly needs any further push). So have movies in Tamil like Irudhi Sutru (Boxing), Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu (Kabadi) apart from other commercial movies with sports as a key track - like Chennai 600028 (Cricket again) or Ethir Neechal (Athletics). They have done a world of good to promote sports and get audience interested in stuff beyond the obvious cricket bat-and-ball, when on the ground. Perhaps its no coincidence that a lot of non-cricket sports leagues have sprung up in India, in the recent years.

What struck me with Dangal was the incredulity that something like this could have happened in real life. The first thing I did after stepping out of the movie hall was to google and check how much of it was real vs reel. Understandably, the director has taken some creative liberty and added elements to make the movie work commercially - such as the antagonist character of Indian national coach and Phogat Sr getting locked up during his daughter’s Commonwealth Gold bout, to name a few.

Nevertheless, there are several aspects from Phogat’s journey that makes his real story on the love for wrestling & the doggedness to get a gold medal, incredible. Without doubt its good to see such stories come out in the open, be taken up commercially (albeit with some ‘reel’ embellishments) and achieve the reach they have, rather than taking a puritan approach by being a stickler for factual accuracy and bury such tales forever.

The Dhaakad video from the movie has been playing on repeat mode in my machine for a few weeks.

Artificial Intelligence debuts in Screenplay for a short sci-fi movie

These days its not new to hear on the advances in machine learning - how AI could eventually take up anything that humans do, and beyond. But we, naturally have been thinking linearly - starting with using AI for automation of low end manual tasks, then moving on to the mid-level tasks that need more cognition. The highly creative and artistic tasks that require great talent are reserved for the last, or some optimists like to keep them within the realm of mankind, assuming machines will never get there.

With bold and futuristic experiments in machine learning, it appears that machines are hitting it right across showing strong ability to pick up tasks at the top of job pyramid. As enthusiasts plug them into totally unexpected and not-ready-yet disciplines, they produce surprising results. Google's Magenta project recently presented the first-ever AI-composed music.

And now, AI has written its first screenplay! The machine was fed scripts from hundreds of sci-fi movies like Star Wars, Avengers, Avatar, Star Trek, Aliens, Terminator, apart form a host of other non-mainstream movies in the genre. A LSTM Recurrent Neural network was trained on these scripts, which eventually called itself 'Benjamin' and churned out its novel screenplay. Film makers had taken a target of 48 hours to direct whatever script comes out.

Here is the outcome - a short, 10 minutes video titled 'Sun Spring'. The script appears to be a cryptic interplay amongst 3 characters set in some futuristic world. Dialogues are never straight, and the monologues border non-sensical rants, but surprisingly it keeps you curious. If this is AI's first outing in screenplay, then perhaps it holds lot of promise. 

It is also the director and actors who have portrayed the characters strongly and elevated the script. But isn't that also too common in the human realm where experts churn out sub-par screenplays which needs technical expertise to rescue?!

Finding Dory.. and more money spinners

Couple of weeks back, I had planned to watch Disney's 'Finding Dory'. I had thoroughly enjoyed 'Finding Nemo' and a sequel though over a decade delayed, really didn't dampen the expectations. I was all the more excited about introducing my son to this franchise. When I told him about planning to watch an animation movie over the weekend, he surprised me by asking if it was for the new 'fish' movie!

Little did I realize that Disney had done a pretty good job of running promos on all their medium - one of them happened to be the Disney kids channel, which my son is usually tuned into. After all, the kids segment is such a lucrative market, and brand extension is the name of the game. Disney has been the master here with their movies minting money as extensions into TV shows - Games - Merchandise - Retail products - Theme parks, apart from others.

Haven't we seen the reverse cycle play out equally successfully with Green Gold Animation's Chota Bheem? What started as a TV show has created an industry of its own, again spanning to cover rest of the categories - Games - Merchandise - Retail products, and... Movies. Of late, there have been many winners taking this path.

Getting back to 'Finding Dory', it was a good watch - giving one more of Nemo's magical oceanic experience. Though not ground breaking or a fresh concept like 'Finding Nemo', it has its special moments. Apart from the movie, I enjoyed the lovely pre-movie clip from Pixar studios - Piper! Check out the Youtube preview here. Won't be long before it spawns its own line of products.

A 'Good Dinosaur' themed party

Recently, we were hunting for a theme for our kid's birthday party. With a boy and girl to cater to, gender-specific themes such as 'Princess', 'Dora' or 'Cars' weren't appropriate. 'Mickey mouse & clubhouse' was an option, but it seemed old & cliched, atleast to us even if not for the kids!

Thats when the kid's growing interest in Dinosaurs and they getting besotted with the 'Good Dinosaur' movie provided an option. Apart from the interest, they emulated the characters as well: Arlo, big but a tad timid dinosaur, and Spot is the other extreme, a tiny baby with temerity to fight bigger things, while both are extremely protective of each other. After looking at other themes like the popular Chhota bheem-Chutki, we finalised this one.

However, since this theme was relatively new, no preset templates were readily available for the invitation cards, cake design or the stage decorations. With a couple of days left to prepare, we decided to customise and get the templates created. Picking up images from the various sites and the movie's posters as the base, we did some quick edits. Here is the collection of themes and templates we finally created on Sketch, and handed over to the respective vendors.

Invitation Card:

Cake:

Stage Decoration:

Please drop me a note if you'd like any of these templates shared.

Alexander-The Movie: Review

I’ve wanted to make this post for about 6 months now; anyway better now than never! Immediately after I had completed the Alexander tri-series tome by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, I was all charged up to watch the theatrical version of the story to see the whole lot of characters come alive – Alexander, Philip, Parmenio, Hephastion and Bucephalas.

I promptly picked up the DVD of Alexander (2004) and drummed up all expectations of an out-of-the-world experience. Perhaps, this was one of the reasons for the whole thing turning out to be damp squib. Overall, the movie was largely forgettable having done total injustice to inarguably one of the world’s best military generals. Here go my review (read complaints):

The Cast:
While Colin Farrell had done justice to his role as Alexander, Brad Pitt would have just been brilliant. Considering his exploits on-screen in the movie ‘Troy’, he could have fitted in the role to the ‘T’. Brad Pitt has played the legendary Achilles, who also turns out to be Alexander’s real-life hero which is an added plus. Angelina Jolie as ‘Queen Olympia’ and Anthony Hopkins as ‘Old Ptolmey’ are other classic cases of wasted talent!

Lopsided focus:
It is just unpardonable that the movie tends to zip past Alexander’s achievements and tends to brood too much on his not-so-illustrious periods. The movie creates a strong thread of negativity: right from the blatant reference to homosexuality, to execution of Philotas & Parmenion, to showcasing his temperamental nature at the Hydaspes the focus throughout the movie is on Alexander’s misgivings. This kind of an approach is understandable if the movie had been titled say, ‘The fallacies of Alexander’ or ‘Alexander: The human side’. I’m sure such an approach wouldn’t have managed to create even a peripheral interest in the subject. But then, why mislead the viewers and set wrong expectations? People expect glorification of a legend and projection of the super-human traits of a leader who was considered a Demi-God by even his contemporaries.

Missing Battles & Events:
There are several historic events/battles in Alexander’s history that aren’t recreated or at best just made a passing reference to. This includes Alexander’s tutelage under Aristotle at Pella, Battle of Chaeronea, Undoing of the Gordian Knot, Battle of Granicus & Siege of Tyre. These omissions apart, the movie doesn’t bring out Alexander’s out-of-the-box-thinking, the ingenious use of Phalanx as a fighting unit, unconventional military tactics and his strategies to unify the conquered lands. The only saving grace of the movie is the vivid portrayal of the crucial Battle of Gaugamela.

Here’s hoping that some movie studio would come forward to truly recreate the magic and aura surrounding Alexander’s life, yet again!