they will no longer be entertained

Michael Caine makes Harry Brown work. He takes it past the rather obvious comparisons to Death Wish and drives by Eastwood's Gran Torino. Every muscle on the face of this great actor speaks volumes about Harry, his life and his thoughts in a film that despite its measured slow pace and its disturbing canvas of a neighbourhood poisoned by vice ultimately ends up being a muddle. It isn't enough of an action flick feeding our guilty pleasure for vigilante fare and it only cursorily examines the sorry state of law and order. However, it succeeds as a drama with characters interpreted by a competent cast led by Caine. Caine towers above the rest, aided in some measure by the fact that the film is about his character. This isn't a film in the Batman/Nolan canon where Alfred scores in his few scenes. This is an urban western about a man driven to do things he had sacrificed years ago by a personal tragedy. Where Gran Torino had a man discovering his better side in the twilight of his life, Harry Brown gives us a man transformed by grief and loss to action that fails to offer either succour or someone to play chess with.

thoughts

The total at the bottom of the scrolling list of purchases on my latest grocery bill was an oddity. A perfect integral value (the zeroes to the right of the decimal point meant nothing, obviously). I wonder what the odds are for such a thing happening (I remember only one other receipt ending up this way in the last year or so).

Tandoor on Powers Ferry Road in Marietta has been doing rather well over the last few years. First came the curtains on the inside. Then came the redesigned laminated menu cards instead of the scrawls on a couple of boards on the walls. The most recent additions are signs reserving a few spots in front of it outside and brand new tables and chairs inside. The food still serves your guilty pleasures -- the biryani, the haleem and the rolls with raita and onion juliennes, slices of lime and sprays of cilantro on the side.

Thanks to Pritam, Neeraj Shridhar has gone from being an interesting voice to a strong reason to skip the track.

If not for the silly suffix the revolution, Mehul Kumar might have been in the running for a record for making two Bollyflicks with the same name. So what if the new dung squadron is a sequel? The 90s flick Krantiveer got Nana Patekar a national award and established a new variation of the angry man -- he wasn't young, he wasn't clean shaven, but he was very very angry. The sequel is evidently an aural assault, but it also stomps new ground in the never-tiring field of English suffixes for Bollytitles. A Krantiveer is a revolutionary and not a revolution. Adding the suffix establishes a new pattern: hindi title describing a doer: english subtitle describing the action or what he/she hath wrought. Thus we should now expect Mrityudaata: The Carnage.

linky blinky

Phillip Su's farewell post as he moves from Microsoft to Facebook makes for some nice reading: it's Palahniuk or Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus) in style, but aims only to present observations from experience. Some of these should be stuck up on walls of offices run by people who never read Peopleware and who might fail to see the humour in Dilbert because they see it not as satire but libel and slander:

Don't fear process. Fear bad people dictating process. Fear process trying to make up for bad people.

People who expect their manager to make their jobs fun and interesting won't get far.

It's also nice to see some acknowledgement of people who might not seem as ambitious as every half-baked code monkey who wants to rise to be a manager, because he is terrible at dealing with people:

I had a coworker in Money who, by the time I joined in 1998, had already been at Microsoft for 15 years and could probably buy the county I grew up in. He drove a beat-up Datsun and coded every day in his office as an individual contributor. There is no doubt in my mind that he knows what he loves.

I hope he finds greatness where he is going.

adopted terror: orphan

The Colemans are a suffering family: their daughter Maxine is deaf, their last child was stillborn and Kate, the mother, is also a recovering alcoholic. John, the father, has his own problems, but mention of these only surfaces later in the film. An adopted child from hell is the last thing they need and exactly what they get. The film runs through its 3-act setup briskly. The gore stays faithful to the revised conventions of the genre (thanks to the advent and blossoming of torture porn) in being quite unsubtle, but is also unsettling. Isabella Fuhrman leads a set of great performances. Director Serra succeeds in making things creepy and interesting, while continuing to chug along to the inevitable third act featuring revelations, conflict, more gore, death and (mercifully) no wisecrack-laden ending. The only extra things on the DVD are some deleted scenes, including an alternative ending that owes a debt to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

the fine print: pre-screened offers of credit

It's yet another letter from a faceless money-grabbing corporation offering me an exclusive (which really means that I am just one of many recipients) pre-selected (which means that my name was among the results parbroken by some proprietary software that is privileged to view obscure metrics maintained by three faceless entities ("Credit Reporting Agencies") to control your perceived economic worth ("Credit")) invitation (standard template with empty slots for the name and address of the recipient ("Me")).

One of the most entertaining parts is the Prescreen and Opt Out Notice, which is compliant with 16 CFR part 642 and looks like this:

You can choose to stop receiving "prescreened" offers of credit from this and other companies by calling toll-free 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688) See PRE-SCREEN & OPT-OUT NOTICE on other side for more information about prescreen opt out

The actual notice it refers to looks like this:

If you do not want to receive prescreened offers of credit from this and other companies, call the consumer reporting agencies toll-free, at 1-888-567-8688, or write to: Trans Union LLC, Attn: Name Removal Option, P.O. Box 97328, Jackson, MS 39288-7328; Equifax Options, P.O. Box 740123, Atlanta, GA 30374-0123;or Experian Opt-Out, P.O. Box 919, Allen, TX 75013.

The important thing to remember is that "pre-approval" is an etymological weapon of confusion: it does not mean "all you have to do is say yes and you will get this exciting new credit card"; it actually means "say yes and we'll then really check your credit and might even reject your application, because we didn't really check carefully the first time." The consequence of a rejected application -- thanks to the Rube Goldberg-ian algorithms in place for this "Get punished without doing anything" setup can be a dark spot on your credit. Opt out or just hurl this thing into the shredder.

Read the finer print at the end of this exciting letter to learn about MCCs (Merchant Category Codes), which offer these credit companies another weapon to deny you "rewards"; take a look at the big fat disclaimer at the end:

The rewards program is managed in part by independent third parties, including a travel agency registered to do business in California (Reg. No. 2036509-50); Ohio (Reg. No. 87890286); Washington (6011237430) and other states, as required.

That travel agency is most likely Travel Leaders Group, LCC, which spun off from Carlson Travel Group in 2008.

hay un amigo en mí

It could have ended up like The Godfather: Part III or the final edition in the Matrix saga. Instead, with Toy Story 3 Pixar delivers another heart-warming tale laced with excellent computer animation, in-jokes and thrills. If Toy Story 2 was a tribute to science fiction and fantasy films, the final(?) edition in the trilogy (yes, I know a trilogy has three parts, but that didn't stop Douglas Adams, did it?) tosses odes to thrillers, horror flicks, the western and the prison film. You can spend your time keeping up with the jokes in a simple narrative, relishing the plot twists, spotting the first(?) explicit nod to Satoshi Kon and Studio Ghibli, wondering if a lot of Timothy Dalton's work was left on the cutting floor, admiring the animation of hair and fur or just wondering how these people manage to pull off one success after another, while making it all so effortless. I regretted missing the 3D version of Up, but was sure I wanted the 2D version of this film. I regret missing the sound mix, however, but I am glad I caught this flick on the big screen. Despite what a lot of people are likely to say, there's a lot you miss when you watch Pixar's creations on the small screen (unless you have your own theatre). I wasn't as moved by the emotional elements of this film as in Wall-E or Finding Nemo, but I still enjoyed myself (although not as much as when I watched The Incredibles). Don't miss the end credits.

bollygroaner

One of the many shards of "exciting" Bollywood news floating about notes that Akshay Kumar refused a Rs. 15 crore offer to star in Faltu (not to be confused with the already-made critically lauded Bengali film of the same name). The article cites problems with scheduling as the reason, we all know the real reason: अक्षय कुमार फालतू के पैसे नहीं लेता.

error messages for developers

All its corporate weight and worth could not save Reliance from the blight of the generally terrible state of web pages in Indian portals. The portal for Reliance India Call is an eyesore. It looks like a song sequence from a bad Raj Kanwar film. Make that a song sequence from any Raj Kanwar film. Of course, the portal offers a "Contact us" link right next to the apostrophe abusing FAQ's on the right top corner. Click that to be taken to a form that asks you for a lot of required information and a description of your problem. There is a field called "Issue/Feedback Type" which offers a dropdown control to select values. Once you do that, the whole page blinks (or flashes, if you're downloading a lot of songs and movies while doing this or if you have a modest Internet connection) and the values in the dropdown for the field below called "Sub Type" are generated based on your selection. When you finally get to the "Description" and type out your woes and click "Submit" you are likely to see the popup below:

The only way you can find out what was "invalid" is to view the source of the page. Search for this error message and you will stumble upon the following line:

ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_regvDesc.validationexpression = "^[a-zA-Z0-9.\\s\\#\\-\\.\\,\\/\\(\\)]{1,1000}$";

Of course they expected you to do this and to know regular expressions rather well so that you could figure out that they did not want you to put a semi-colon in that field. How simple!

addendum [October 06, 2010]: Add double quotes to that list. I think Reliance should just support a tweet appender instead of the form and limit all submissions to short inarticulate bursts of alphanumeric vomit.

addendum [October 19, 2010]: add question marks to that list. At this point, I wonder if anyone really cares. Try complaining about network connectivity and be prepared to try and figure out what the correct for the phone number is. All you get as a hint is a popup telling you that the format is incorrect. If you get it right the first time, congratulations.

itsby bitsy piecey

It's nice to know that your tax dollars are being put to such good use as to (soon) make it illegal for TV commercials to be louder than whatever it was you were watching before the commercial break.

The next stage in the slow and painful decay of the transit system in Atlanta is upon us. MARTA is celebrating with changes in its service. It's another greatest hits release: Bus schedules are changing, bus routes are being eliminated, some RideStores and restrooms are being closed, reduced customer service. MARTA's Facebook wall is a good place to see raw reactions along with fairly balanced responses from the staff at MARTA that have been cast to the wolves by their corporate bosses. Cobb County has decided to match the fares of MARTA (a tribute, no doubt, to "price matching") and will raise fares to $2 a ride. Gone are the days that you could use start on a CCT bus and use a transfer to get onto a MARTA bus and save a few cents. CCT has also eschewed all the euphemisms that MARTA chose and aims straight for your throat with the headline on their list of changes: fare increase service reductions and customer service changes.

most horrifying bollywood song of 2010

The licensed version of Elvis Presley's classic Jailhouse Rock in We Are Family by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (who were previously credited for usurping Roy Orbison's classic without the producers doing their bit with regard to copyright in Kal Ho Na Ho). I can't explain why I was revulsed the moment a tuneless female voice belted out the lyrics of dil khol ke let's rock (open heart surgery goes rock n' roll). I first thought this was Bhayaanak Bebo warbling away after tarnishing the Dev soundtrack years ago, but alas it wasn't. I couldn't go ahead and decided to listen to the songs of Shaapit instead.

munch moment: siam square

On Windy Hill Road, in an innocuous little strip on the way to nothingness, is a little restaurant called Siam Square. The place is open for lunch only from Monday to Friday and all you get on the weekend is dinner (which might comply with a strong tradition of offering the same or slightly more of it for a higher price). Your best bet is lunch. You have to steal your attention from the interesting decor (black and white location photographs against a red wall; ornate mountings on another wall; the hanging wine glasses at the counter) to run through a lunch menu that fills a single side of a laminated sheet with a delicious colour scheme and is arranged in blocks. All main courses have the same price (minus extras), so it's easy to pick. If you, like I am, love having your tongue's resilience challenged, make sure you tell them that you want your dish cooked "Thai Hot" (this is usually the highest level of "hot" in most Thai restaurants and Siam Square is also one of the few to actually live up to it). If you're used to the curries from Kerala, try the Siam Square Special (also known as Mom's Special). It comes with a side of cucumber salad (diced cucumber and onion in white vinegar with a dash of sugar -- sample it at the end of your meal to heal your taste buds). If you want to try one of the standard offerings and indulge in a comparison with the wares from another restaurant, try the Green Curry. Don't forget to say "Thai Hot." If you're aiming for the sun, ask for hot sauce as well. You'll get a holder with four containers of dried peppercorns (recommended), peppercorn paste, soy sauce and a lighter clearer sauce with fragments and peppercorns.

At Thai restaurants, there's always the possibility that you'll ask for some more rice. You can often decide whether to keep a Thai restaurant on your list just based on how the serving staff treats your requests for extra rice (unlike Indian restaurants, rice in Thai and non-buffet Chinese restaurants is expected to be on the house). Siam Square tackles this problem in an interesting way: the bowl of rice is inverted atop your bowl. You can then mix the rice and the curry and never really ask for more rice. Smart and apt.

01L2MDT

Ridley Scott's Body of Lies offers familiar tropes, familiar ideas and goings-on in a cinematic package that is engaging because of how it has been shot and cut together and because of the performances of the actors and actresses. There is no subtext in this product and I should not have been surprised that as soon as the end credits rolled with a Guns N' Roses song, I was thinking about something else already. The most entertaining (albeit unintentional, surely) bit of the film came from an abbreviation. The rest of it was well-edited exchanges of dialogue, a tour of several terror-infested parts of the world, a specious discourse in ideology, bureaucracy, jargon (Nitrate 37 slewing to all target ports now; IR 3.9, long wave 10.7, we're right on their six) and product placement (unsubtle Nokia cellphones, ubiquitous and more appropriate EMC data storage systems, the BlackBerry). I think I'll go back and watch Blade Runner again now.

signal-to-noise

Here's another email from some overpaid person who seems to want to appear responsive. It's got one line representing the content and that line is followed by a blank line, a line full of dashes and then the more verbose line "Sent using a mobile device with limited editing options, so please excuse typos"; This is someone who often has typos in emails sent using conventional devices not regarded as mobile -- laptops, for one, seem to be losing their status as "mobile"; the word has been hijacked by the BlackBerrys (or is it BlackBerries?) and iPhones of the corporate world. The disclaimer also seems to have been bowdlerised to remove all trace of the actual device being used. All this gives you 3 useless lines out of 4. This offers strong competition to those clueless one-liners followed by a 10-line email signature (HTML and a background image notwithstanding). Welcome the new cholesterol of the Internet.

robotrans

The poster for Robot represents another howler in what might prove to be a buffet. On the right are the famous technifictional specifications we've encountered on the CD sleeve before. No one can take a slogan like Man... Machine ... Mohobbhat seriously. What manner of astrologically misguided spelling is Mohobbhat? It shatters records set by the likes of David Dhawan's Yaraana. Why is there no mention of the cast at all on the poster, you ask? Neither Rajinikanth nor Madame Rai-Bachchan can draw in the crowds for a Hindi film. Simple.

raibot

Lines uttered by Aishwarya Rai in the trailers released for Robot:

खून कर दूंगी

he's (pause) unbelievable! he's (pause) like a superhero (with the Americanised "l" and rolled "r") (a tribute to William Shatner, no doubt).

अब मैं उनसे कभी नहीं मिलूंगी ... कहना(?)

i'm yours

hello! don't get any ideas

PS: Is that Anil Kapoor's voice for Rajinikanth? Sounds like Mr. Kapoor and it also makes sense given that he had starred in Shankar's first Hindi film, Nayak.

some pages turned over

The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron: My favourite section of the book covered the making of The Abyss. The portions about Harlan Ellison and the whole Soldier/Terminator only add to the mystery of the truth. Being an Ellison fan, I'd be tempted to hurl invectives at Cameron and Co. for not acknowledging a debt to Ellison's short story and the fabulous opener to the second season of The Outer Limits. But I also liked The Terminator and, had I not been any wiser, I'd have been inclined to dismiss Ellison's claims (as Cameron is quoted to have done in this book). What really transpired will unfortunately never be known.

The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown lives up to his reputation of writing something that makes you turn the pages as fast as you can, as you attempt to restore the narrative thread disrupted by one belch of expository preening after another. There is enough abuse of details in the descriptions of different things to make you shudder at the thought of turning over a page, afraid of what form of literary torture awaits you. I must confess, however, that it is a relief to be able to run through a whole book without once feeling intellectually tugged: Dan Brown makes sure that you, dear reader, do not have to pause, for one teensy bit, to evaluate the goings-on.

Death of a Politician: My first Richard Condon novel was a hefty challenge. I was unable to find much more about the book or its background and I was not as familiar with the politics of the 60s and 70s to spot the real-life figures that Condon was eloquently taking potshots at. This did not make the novel any less engrossing. The device of interrogations and reports takes some getting used to (The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders uses tape transcripts was easier on my eyes and brain). I hope the other books I picked up at the library book sale don't disappoint me. I'll save The Manchurian Candidate till the end; after all, I've already seen the film.

the good times at sigma draconis VI

Brain and brain! What is brain? (Spock's Brain)

After ranting away about the amateur dross that comprised Robin Cook's writing in the 21st century, I decided to try and read the books that had made him famous all those years ago just to see how much nostalgia had clouded my memory. My first pick was Brain, which was also one of the first (or perhaps the first) of Robin Cook's books that I had read. Interestingly, the book still held up well. The exposition was controlled and Cook's writing seemed to be more demanding of the reader's attention than his recent work that requires as much attention as a Top 10 countdown on Zee TV. I also learnt about RNs, LPNs and ASNs; since Cook does not commit expository abuse by explaining what they stood for, I went online. After ASN.1, Autonomous System Numbers and Advance Shipping Notices, I now had Associate of Science in Nursing; After Licence Plate Numbers I got Licensed Practical Nurses. RNs are Registered Nurses, in case you were wondering. Time to go back to Coma.

While I might trust the doctor to remove a splinter or lance a boil, I do not believe he has the knowledge to restore a brain. (Spock's Brain)

i have no brain cells and i must scream

Hey you, sitting over there in that cubicle on some conference call with your overzealous brethren huddled back home in some air conditioned conference room! Try talking into the mouthpiece instead of spraying your voice bits generously across the floor. I understand that you've been brought up to believe that ISD connections were poor and people had to yell to get some sound over the wire, but it might be a revelation that things have improved since then.

Hey you, sitting at that table behind me in this coffee shop! It's a cellphone not a walkie talkie, you nitwit! Take it outside if you want to scream out loud. It's not a conversation unless I hear the other side as well (perhaps you can try the speakerphone on your cellphone and become a certifiable jerk).

Hey you, over there in the neighbouring cubicle arguing furiously on a silly something as if it were the latest problem to befuddle nuclear scientists all over the world! Have you heard of conference rooms? The office surely has one available just to serve your needs. The whiteboards are larger and you can just get on the nerves of a few others like yourself, who presumably understand your babble.

You are all welcome to upload your essence into the Doom continuum as zombiemen. I'd be glad to blow your electronic avatars to pixellated goop.

daemon: neuromancer for the dan brown world

I just finished reading Daniel Suarez's Daemon, my first lead from Facebook, and I've had a great time reading it. The elements of an artificial intelligence growing in power and strength is not unfamiliar, if you've read William Gibson's Neuromancer. But Suarez's writing is not as complex and intricate in its argot as Gibson's classic (or for that matter, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess). The shower of technical jargon (which, combined with some of the elements in the plot is likely to leave someone less geeky out in the cold) is mixed with a reasonable level of exposition and it puts the ouevre of Dan Brown to shame without trying too hard. You are likely to find yourself turning the pages not because there's not much worthwhile on each page (as is the case with any tome in the Brownian canon) but because Suarez takes you from one narrative arc to another, keeping things suspenseful. The level of exposition is also less than that found in the novels of Michael Crichton, which I have enjoyed far more than Dan Brown's novels. The only problem I have with the exposition is that in some cases, it involves the reader directly instead of being presented to some character in the novel. Sections where this happens threaten to transport Suarez's entertaining fine novel into Brown territory. That is, however, a minor grouse, for an otherwise excellent début.

I'll be picking up a copy of the sequel Freedom from the local library soon and I hope it's just as much fun.

looped aphasia

Arguably, the quality of satellite television in India declined after the locals took over. It was disappointing to see channels dedicated to movies churning out junk that was anything but a full reeler. That it became harder to find a channel playing a long-forgotten flick after the land responsible for the making of the film replaced all goings-on with stercoraceous smegma was a form of irony that escaped the guano-brained executives.

One of the developments in the wake of the massacre of entertainment was the replacement of English flicks in the catalogue with versions dubbed into Hindi. Some of those chosen included the Jackie Chan films for Golden Harvest, which, originally in Cantonese, were released abroad (including India) dubbed into English. We now had a layered incongruity with Hindi sounds replacing English sounds while Jackie Chan's lips continued to mouth Cantonese.

An interesting variation was the case of South Indian flicks dubbed into Hindi. These poorly dubbed mind-numbing "entertainers" were christened using titles of existing Bollyhits along with a bonus suffix in English to comply with the de facto naming rule that was born near the end of the 20th century. This is why the Telugu movie Mass became Meri Jung: One Man Army. This also explains the curious case of a film named Arasatchi. Had it not been for financial hurdles, this would have been the first film starring Lara Dutta to hit the marquee (the unfortunate honour went to a case of bad eggs from the Bollyfold).

As was the norm, Ms. Dutta's Tamil voice was not her own. Years later, this film was one of the lucky several chosen to be treated to an inferior dubbing job. Inviting Ms. Dutta to try her hand at dubbing for herself in Hindi would have, unfortunately, cost the whole project a lot more. So they just had one of the people on the session call sheet to do the needful. One could only mourn the loss in translation. Again.