Whitenoise

My friend recommended this movie saying its similar to another popular movie The Prestige.
The movie is based on a short story  ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist‘ .  The movie is set in Vienna during the  the early 19th century.

It is about a magician called Eisenheim. He gets into magic at an early age ,travels many countries and returns back as a master conjurer  to Vienna. People are spell bound by his many tricks.  But he displays his masterpiece at the end of the movie, for his love over childhood friend  Sophie (Jessica Biel).  I leave it to you to watch and enjoy that.

Verdict: What I liked most was the cinematography of the movie.The lighting used in the the movie was mind boggling.The shadows and  fading effects have come very nice. There is one amorous scene (where Sophie meets Norton at his place) which was quite exceptional for a love scene.  This is a good movie to watch with your friends. Watch it for the amazing cinematography in the movie.

I am a great fan of the XFiles TV series and I was eagerly expecting the movie from the team after almost a decade.

This movie is a ‘monster of the week’ type that shows some supernatural phenomena and not a mytharic one. In the movie, Mulder and Scully are no more with the FBI and they have taken different paths now. But they join hands to find a missing FBI agent. They take help form a priest whose gets visions of the agents whereabouts and is somehow connected with the villains of the movie .

I think the director wanted to show more on the life of Mulder and Scully rather than any paranormal phenomenon .Also the movie progresses bit slowly for a thriller.

As a long time fan of the series,I was disappointed with the movie. As mentioned here, i would wait for XFiles3 .Lets hope its more exiting than XFiles2.

Playing around with my PC was a favorite activity during college. I used to try various OS’s at home .Notable were QNX (provides a host of features including a HTML browser  at a size of 1.44MB Floppy)  and  BeOS (another interesting OS which used to run OpenGL stuff which was otherwise not possible with my  440ZX Motherboard.)

During this time, I came to know of Linux from a friend. The whole idea of installing an operating system whose source code is available for users to change, sounded very attractive . Besides Linux is  based on UNIX. and I always wanted a UNIX environment at home after using SCOUnix for programing at my training institute.

But Linux was notorious for its ‘usability’ issues and installation was not quite easy.  We had to manually configure the mouse, soundcard ,and the gfx card. This was not easy as it sounds. I used to have a diary with all the device names/ model number and IRQ assignments before starting to install Linux.

The first distro I tried at my PC was RedHat 6.2, that came for free with PCQuest. LILO was quite primitve and GRUB was  still in the alpha stage at that time. So the paritions have to be made in windows using some tools like Parition Magic.  Once the partitions are made, it used to be a 1 hour wait (thats what was possible with a Pentium 350 MHz, 32MB RAM) until all software gets installed by the Anaconda installer .

Unlike current versions ,Configuration of display happens almost at the end of the installation.This was most annoying part.  I had an AGP card on my PC and there was no inbuilt support for it in the kernel.XWindows never worked fine for me and I had to work on a 640x 480 resolution.

Fastforward to 2008 and it all seems funny.   Today Linux is a name you cannot ignore and the latest edition from Canonical (Ubuntu Hardy) has an installation procedure that is ALMOST seamless, except for a couple of ENTER presses. As a popular AD from IBM shows, Tux is no more the new kid on the block .

This movie is an adaptation of a popular German novel with the same name. Its about Jean Baptiste Grenouille ,who was born with a extraordinary sense of smell . This talent takes him in an adventurous journey to make the ‘ultimate smell’ , during its course he kills many people.

At the end he sentenced to death for his murders .His execution is planned in front of the whole city.  But something extraordinary happens when he is about to be executed. I leave it to you to watch and appreciate it.  The climax is impressive and has deep meanings.

This is a serious movie and some scenes are quite gross.  As Roger Ebert claims, its a very difficult movie to make .. How would you show an individuals olfactory sense on screen ? But the directory has done a decent job of it.

Verdict: This movie  is not for the faint hearted.  Avoid if watching with your family. But if are serious about movies, and wanted to know why Ebert gave a 4*’s rating and Stanley Kubrick said that a movie can never be made out of the novel, then go ahead. You’ll not be disappointed.

My friend  read this blog and gave  some comments. It was useful information that people should know when writing  public stuff like blogs.

I did some goggling on what is meant by  good writing to spruce up my skills.
Here is what a famous writer had to say about writing with style . A nice guide! Read it if you happen to blog.

I was very keen to watch this movie after all the hype it created. The movie lived up to the expectations and it was worth watching it on IMAX big screen.The only   bummer was the lack of subtitles at IMAX  especially with such a serious movie with  lot of ‘heavy dialogs‘. Waiting for the DVD of this movie  with subtitles.

The performance of Heath Ledger was top class. The Joker character has achieved cult status and IMHO , will be remembered like many other villains like the CSM ,Agent Smith etc. Too sad Heath Ledger  died this January.We will really miss his acting.Lets hope he gets an Oscar for his performance.

Chris Nolan deserves credit for making an emotional dark movie from a comic book. Is a new trend catching up in making ’serious’ adaptations for comic books? Lets wait and see.

Verict: TDK will be one my best movies this year.(Personaly I would rate “Into The Wild” higher than this).     Watch TDK in theatre once (for the special effects) ,and several times on DVD (for Nolan and The Joker).You will feel that there is some part of The Joker within you !

This was my first Tamil movie in theaters after quite a long time .The last was in 2002 while at college.

The movie is really childish..even cartoon network airs better sci fi stuff.. A clever ploy in keeping the storyline secret.

The good things: I accept its no small thing to act in 10 roles with 10 diffent body languages.Kamal aces in that.

And Kudos to the director. Great effort in putting together the movie. The first 5 minutes showing 12th century was well made. The camera was world class,especially the tsunami thing and the stunt with 3 kamals at the climax ..nice nice.

Stuff I didnt like: ( and which gave me a ringing headache for the rest of the day)

Since its a Kamal movie I did expect some ‘intellectual’ stuff in the dialogs..but this was too much. Kamal’s rant about God and religion continues on and on and on… At one point it was buffer overflow and I stopped following .
However there is only 1 Kamal who gives the fundas ..the others are pretty much dumb.. quite a relief there.

As mentioned in this review, Asin keeps talking, that too some weird sanskrit words. I am sure no one in Chidambarm or anywhere in the globe use these words now.

The makeup was mediocre ..Not at all good. Indian/Avvai Shanmugi makeups were much better.Maybe they wanted everyone to know its kamal who is ‘donning’ that role urghh..
Dialogues again: It would be good if Kamal stops writing dialogues.He is very good at acting but I think there are better script writers .

Verdict Frankly I expected more from Kamal…and less from KS Ravikumar.The movie experience was quite the opposite.  Watch it once for Kamal and the extraordinary effort of KSRavikumar.

If you dont like fast moving movies, dont go..you will get a headache. (personal experience).