Movie Marathon

This sunday was a movie marathon day. Here is a list of some of the movies i watched (at home) and how good/bad/ugly they were


1. Easy A

Started with this one as it promised to be a chick flick. And it was. Loosely inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel on adultery & romance,Scarlett Letter, this movie tells the tale of a high school socially inept teenage girl, Olive Penderghast who uses a rumor of her apparent promiscuity to climb the social ladder - stitching a red A to further add to her new reputation. The movie then becomes predictable on how she begins to  dislike her popularity, the guy she likes (who was uptil now ignoring her) suddenly falls in love, and other over-used plots of a teenage flick. The movie is a good for one watch- Emma Stone has done justice to her role- acting like a vamp in one scene and an innocent victim in the other. Penn Badgely (of the Gossip Girl fame) is totally wasted (though he does look good in his shirtless scenes :)) is the love interest of Olive. 
I'd give the movie a 6/10 for Emma Stone's performance only and making my Saturday afternoon thoroughly enjoyable.
(image source: mymoviecinema.com)


2. The Devil's Backbone

This one had been lying in my harddrive for a very long time, and i thought it was high time i watched it. This spanish horror/thriller by Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro is a MUST WATCH. Set in the Spanish civil war era,this movie is about a young boy Carlos who is left at an orphanage in the middle of nowhere  by his tutor and how he discovers that the place is haunted, what he does thereafter. Quoting AO Scott of the New York Times, "The director, Guillermo del Toro, balances dread with tenderness, and refracts the terror and sadness of the time through the eyes of a young boy, who only half-understands what he is witnessing".
I give the movie a 9/10 for keeping me hooked right till the end. 
(image source: moviescreenshots.blogspot.com)


3. Buried

This one is NOT for the ones who don't like closed spaces. I rarely like movies that follow a single character plot line and without many scene changes or character development.I tend to lose my patience watching such movies This one was no exception. While buried has received good reviews & it IS a good film, i fast forwarded it to the end mostly because i could not bear to watch any longer. It is about a truck driver (Ryan Reynolds) in Iraq who is ambushed and buried alive under the desert with a blackberry, knife, glow sticks, lighter & a hip flask. The ending is a surprise ( i read it in Wiki and then forwarded it to see it for myself) but is a good watch for those (especially men!) who like the how-will-he-survive kinda single plotline. For me, the movie is a 5/10.  


4. Animal Kingdom

I ended my movie marathon with this fabulous movie. Animal Kingdom is an Australian crime film which shows how a young teen is unwittingly caught in the drama that unfolds in his grandmother's life- who incidentally happens to be the matriarch of Melbourne's crime family. This award winning movie has Guy Pearce as the cop who tries his best to bring the family down. Watch the movie for its intensity & excellent character development. I'll give it a 9.5/10. An absolute must watch!

Free, is all you gotta be

We are born free & then as we grow up, we chain ourselves to self-imposed shackles. The need to be happy one time & sad the another, the desire to want someone & disown the other, attempts to trust & betray- all these emotions we build up to please others, ourselves, the society- unconsciously succeed in forcing us to become someone else.

Free. That is all that we need to be. Living for ourselves and doing what makes us happy. Free from the constant need to adjust to society & its norms.Doing what others think right.

Our time is limited. Do we really want to spend it inside a box?

Flashback of a Fool

Modern day tradition has it that we look back deep & hard at the year gone by & immediately convert it into a blog post. Sticking to convention, I am going to do the same. Having neglected my blog for over 2 months, it is only right that I give it the due attention it needs by a blog that sums up last year.
2010 can be easily summed up in one word- Change. It was the year that brought the most diverse experiences to me- some pleasant and some not-so-pleasant. I am attempting to put together all the things that defined 2010 for me - a year that was perhaps the turning point of my life.


1. Travel. 
2010 was the year of travel. From orlando, new york, to Ladakh, Mcleodganj to Chennai & Bombay- i had the best experiences of my life. I explored new cultures, cuisines, people & most importantly, myself. Travelling to all these fantastic places made me realise how little i know of this vast earth that we live in & how little time i have to see it all.
[Image][Image]

2. The Other Side of People
The past year also opened up a whole new side of people i had never expected to see. I saw some people behave, act & change - ultimately transforming into this new person that i suddenly did not recognise. This did two things - made me realise how bad a judge i am of people & that in life, as we move along, we are really all alone. We have to fight our own battles and no matter how much we want to help the other person, we have to let them fight on their own. 

3. New Career, New goals
What earlier began as a casual conversation with @_Anshul, soon turned into what would shape my career- Digital marketing. I moved from a role in organizational development into digtal marketing - the shift was dramatic. I did not know (and probably still don’t!) how would i turn a hobby into a career - but i guess i’m learning along the way. The proverb - “Find something that you really like & you will never have to work a day in your life” seems to be coming true for me. I mana

4. Books
The past year brought back my reading habit. As per my Goodreads update, i read almost 30 books last year (quite an achievement for me!) and managed to build up a small library of my own. 
5. Discovering new friendships
I made new friends - people who simplify my life and make it so much more fun. 

Looking back, i don’t regret a day of my life last year & would probably do over everything exactly the same way. Looking ahead, I hope for 2011 to be bigger & better & simpler- a year that makes me happy in all that I do.

The Digital Revolution

A lot has changed since the onset of Digital Media. What earlier used to take days to reach, now takes only a fraction of a second to travel to the other side of the globe. Going digital has helped businesses reach out to a far greater audience spanning geographies, time zones and sometimes even cultures.

But all you digital gurus already know that, right?! So why am I rambling the obvious? Because, it is time for businesses to focus on the consumer more than ever. Increasing digitization has  made life simple, or even more complicated? 

I found this excellent piece on how the digital revolution is leaving the consumer behind by Simon Silvester, [written some time back but relevant even today]. Aptly titled- My Brain Hurts, this study tells us how the increasing pace of technology is overloading the consumer and that is it time for businesses to pause and help the consumer understand the technology that is supposed to make their lives simpler.

An excerpt:-

‘The new net boom’ announces Fortune.

In California, venture capital is flowing.

After five years in the doldrums, tech is back.

And it’s back big time

Last time it was only dotcoms, telecoms and computers

that boomed.

Today virtually every industry on Earth is experiencing

rapid change.

Hollywood is digitizing.

Airlines are digitizing.

Fast food service is digitizing.

Soon, with the arrival of radio ID chips on every package

in every supermarket, the humble food and drink

industries will digitize too.

But

But as the world again gets excited by all things tech,

perhaps we should pause.

Read more of this wonderful paper by Simon Silvester,Y&R EMEA here.

Leadership Lessons from Music: Itay Talgam

Off late, I've found myself reading up on the emerging management styles of corporations and how it will determine the course of their business. The success of any management style depends a lot on the leadership that is imbibing and driving it.

A lot has been said, written, debated and ignored about leadership. To put it succinctly- leadership in theory is overrated and in practice underrated. As someone who steers clear of management books, i wanted to relate leadership to the things i liked to do and see whether there were any lessons that could be learned from them.

Music tops that list and i began asking google whether it could show me what music has to teach us about leadership. I stumbled upon this absolutely mindblowing TED video of Itay Talgam, an Israeli conductor and a business consultant. In his 20 minute talk, he shows us how leadership is about enabling people yet at the same time being in control- one that does not stifle the individuals but energizes them to do more. He uses examples of some of the world's greatest music conductors and tells us how each one had a different kind of leadership style which led to varied outcomes.

Watch his inspirational TED talk on Lead Like the Great Conductors. 


Quoting Itay, ""But you can see the music on his face.You can see the baton left his hand. No more baton. Now it's about you, the player, telling the story. Now it's a reversed thing. You're telling the story. And you're telling the story. And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to." 

Perfume: The Book vs The Movie

I saw Perfume : The Story of a Murderer movie a few months back and i chanced upon a copy of the novel while browsing through the shelves in a bookstore. I picked it up to find out what elements of the book had the movie failed to capture. The main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is described as "one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages".
.
The story then moves to describe how as a baby (one who is born in the middle of the filthiest and smelliest parts of Paris), Jean Baptiste does not have a baby-odour or in other words, Jean Baptiste does not have personal human odor. What he does possess is an extraordinary "olfactory" functions- his heightened sense of smell. As he grows up, he develops an uncontrollable desire to create the perfect perfume- one that will make up for his lack of personal scent and transform him into a human. Grenouille is a cold hearted, emotionless individual who in the entire plot is only driven by his incessant need to create the perfect scent. As a reader,one cringes at Grenouille's life and ultimately at how it ends.


However, in the movie, Grenouille [played by actor Ben Whishaw], one cannot help but feel sorry for Grenouille and in a strange way, understand his need for creating the perfect scent.All in all, it was definitely the movie over the book for me. The book drags at times when it goes into details of the various processes that are deployed in creating a perfume- making one skim over several chapters. I'd give the movie a 8/10 and the book 6/10 for keeping me hooked

Le Divorce- Diane Johnson

This weekend tormented me with the lack of anything good to read. Last week, I started reading Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, an apparently “witty” look at the French and American ways of life and the mess that is created when the two collide. Sadly, the book did not match up to my expectations. The main plot revolves around two sisters- Roxy and Isabel- the former married to a Frenchman who has left her for another married woman and the latter, a free spirited film student who is in Paris to help out her older sister. Much of the book deals with the differences in the French and the American culture. The author spends too much time explaining these small irrelevant culture conflicts too frequently for me to carry on. I have currently given up reading the book simply because I lost interest and patience.