Let’s talk about Hera Pheri Trilogies, Priyadarshan and Plagiarism.

Phir Hera Pheri:

Plot Outline: Four London working class stiffs pool their money to put one in a high stakes card game, but things go wrong and they end up owing half a million pounds and having one week to come up with the cash.

Does it ring any bell? It’s the plot of the movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Incidently, this is almost the plot of Phir Hera Pheri as well. 70% of the movie was copied. The pity that it didn’t live up to the standards of Lock stock.. The movie starts of as one movie and soon after the interval it becomes another movie (a copy of lock stock). This means that the movie is 2hrs 45mins long!!

I recently saw this movie and couldn’t help thinking about the original classic movie by Guy Ritchie. Even though the movie was good in parts and comedy scenes actually make you laugh, there are so many good comedy movie (even in Hindi) that you can watch in lieu of this flick.

There are so many actors, but the movie revolves around Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal and to some extent Rajpal Yadav. The music by Himesh Reshammiya was bad. At one song he copied, the “Western music” which featured in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”.

Some say that the ending/climax was rip off from 1928 Charlie Chaplin movie: The Circus. I have not seen The Circus, but even if it’s copied, it’s kinda Ok. But the Gorilla scenes made me think: “What the fuck!”

Incase you’re yet to check out Phir Hera Pheri, then do yourself a favour and watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Phir Hera Pheri will suck in front of Lock, stock..

Hera Pheri:

I dint even bother to see the movie fully. It’s a “remake” of the Malayalam movie directed by Fazil Siddique Lal and the name of the movie is Ramoji Rao Speaking. Thanks to Riyaz for pointing out my mistake. Fazil directed the tamil remake: Arangetra Velai.The movie was so good and the Hindi remake sucked in front of it.

The music was also bad. No cookies for guessing who the Music director is! Anu Malik!! Compared to the Tamil remake, Illaiyaraja give his one of his best songs and music was top notch.

Hera Pheri Ek Aur Baar:

Hera Pheri Ek Aur Baar or International Hera Pheri is supposed to be the title for the next installment in the Hera Pheri. Ohh god! I don’t like crap comedies like this. Airplane and Dumb and Dumber were also in the same league. Although many would like these kinda of comedies, I’ll be least impressed.

I wonder which movie they’re going to remake (read: copy). Maybe Snatch. Snatch. was written and directed by Guy Ritchie (Madonna’s Husband) who also Directed Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The movie was kind of be a sequel to Lock, Stock.. It has the same cast from Lock, Stock.. and an addition Brad Pitt. I guess they’ll rip this flick and make the third Hera Pheri movie out of this!

Priyadarshan is a Plagiarist

I actually don’t like Priyadarshan, who made his living by remaking popular Malayalam movies in Hindi and Tamil. The movie (Hera Pheri) was copied frame by frame from Arangetra Velai. You can put the subtitle from Arangetra Velai to Hera Pheri. It would sync perfectly! I was kinda amused to know when Priyadarshan was angry when Neeraj Vora is making a sequel to *his original movie* which will loose it’s sheen! So he released Chup Chup Ke the same date as Phir Hera Pheri, which was a disaster at the Box Office and for your information it’s a remake of a Malayalam movie: Punjabi House!

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest - Review

After the ruckus that I created here:Pirates of the Caribbean: How it makes me a Pirate , I finally got to see Pirates loot the Box Office Collections. Yeah.. the movie was Über cool. It’s one of the very few sequels which don’t cash on the previous success and has quality content and a vibrant plot to keep the audience glued to the edge of the seat.

In the spirit of second acts, this installment is darker, both in terms of ambiance and character twists. Dead Mans Chest far surpassed my wildest expectations. I don’t think I have ever had so much fun at the movies. It may start off slow but once it picks up it rarely slows down. It is one wild ride. It’s called Pirates of Caribbean!

As “Savvy!” and witty as the first movie!

Depp’s Oscar-nominated performance as Captain Jack is still a marvel in slovenly pirate behavior, with his slurred speech, swaying swagger and slack, waving arms and..drinking RUM.

I had a great time in the Cinemas watching Jack Sparrow and his antics. Never had such fun and laughed in the cinema ever. We were actually clapping to many of the scenes.

I fail to understand why some people say it’s not as witty as it was in the first movie. We get to see goofy chases, comic references and witty dialogs. The theater was resounding with laughter..a small kid sitting next to us laughing all the time! If you liked the first movie, then you’ll like this one as well.

Visually stunning

The CGI graphics was great. It’s evident from Davy Jones and his crew look–all water logged and crustacean-like. We get to octopus faced and shark fish faced beings. Looks little gross but done to perfection.

The sets and the Cinematography was excellent. I thought in this regard it’s definitely better than the first movie. The special effect, costumes and make-up are visually appealing.

Watch Pirates loot box office collections

You got to see this movie to understand why this movie is a huge box office hit. A Damn funny movie, with a amazing star cast, lavish budget, amazing special effects, fantastic locations, a interesting plot and of course Keira Knightley… can’t make it bad. So it bring us to the question: Is it better than the first movie? As far as I’m concerned, it comes close to being as good as the first one but just not better than it.

The ending was a bit of a surprise and it leaves us all craving for more…just like what happened in the case of Lord of the Rings first movie and the second movie. And it’s disappointing to know that we need to wait for another year to see the pirates in action.

I’d have to say POTC lives up to the hype. Everything we’ve loved about the first one is brought back and improved upon.The best movie that I have seen in this year 2006.. better than V For Vendetta and Inside Man.On the way to becoming one of the greatest trilogies! Can’t wait for the next movie!

8/10
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest @ IMDb

Heave! Heave like you’re being paid for it!
Lift it! Lift it like it were a lady’s skirt!

Pirates Of Carribean - Dead Man’s Chest isn’t releasing in the same day as they release in other Indian Cities at Sathyam Cinemas, Chennai. I dunno about other theatres but sathyam guys said it was distribution problems. Screw their “distribution” problems.

It always happens in Chennai. So much movies are released late here. Brokeback Mountain, Munich and V For Vendetta (yet to be released!). They cook some story or the other. The movies hit here late with reference to other cities in India.

I’m little disappointed. I was looking for the release of the movie. I liked the first installment in this trilogy. As newspaper report, Keira Knightley is a beauty with a backbone. Keira looks stunning and absolutely gorgeous. Any man would fall for her. Johnny Depp is also cool and portray a man with an attitude.

This drives piracy. Already it’s hitting 2 weeks after it released world wide and now we dunno how long it’ll take to release. I might not watch the movies in cinemas if it had any other actor than Keira. After all if they take me for a ride, I’ll also do the same. Who is the loser here? Not me!

Check the Variety and Choices available at the moment in the “Internet”

Check the various releases of this movie which we can snatch for free:

Pirates.of.the.Carribean.The.Dead.Mans.Chest.CAM.XViD-dsF
Pirates.Of.The.Caribbean.Dead.Mans.Chest.TS.XViD-XanaX
Pirates.Of.The.Caribbean.Dead.Mans.Chest.TELECINE.XviD-DaNK
Pirates.Of.The.Caribbean.Dead.Mans.Chest.CAM.XViD-BatPoO
Pirates.of.the.Caribbean.Dead.Mans.Chest.TELESYNC.XViD.INTERNAL.READNFO-PUKKA
Pirates Of The Caribbean The Dead Mans Chest French Ts Repack 1cd Xvid Cobra
Pirates Of The Caribbean Deadman S Chest 2006 Maven Telesync Kvcd By Hockney
Pirates Of The Caribbean Dead Man S Chest With Chinaese Subs
Pirates Of The Carribean The Dead Mans Chest Tc Prevail
Pirates Of The Caribbean Dead Man S Chest By Fragg (DVD-R)
Pirates Of The Caribbean Dead Mans Chest Telecine Xvid Dank Brandnew Webseed

As you can see, we have choice and variety. We have copies with chinese subs, French source, KVCD, SVCD, Telesync (TS), Camera (CAM), Telecine (TC), XViD versions, DVD-R and more! We have the choice to select from 700 MB (single CD) or 1.36 GB (double CD) some copies with 6.1 AC3 surround sound.

Soon, we’ll have the DVD-R and DVD Rips floating around. No one will be truly interested in watching the movie in the cinemas, after we get the DVD versions for free and that too faster than it hit the cinemas! Brokeback Mountain also met with the same fate. The movie was released recently and it hardly ran for a week. V For Vendetta is also slated for release soon. Even I guess it won’t run as they might expect. After all most of the English movie watching juntas might know how-to-get-movies-for-free.

Still if they take another fortnight, it’s DVD-R or DVD Rip for me. Even if I want to watch in the cinemas, they make me a “pirate”.

I have been using BitTornado for over 2 years. I’ve been using since my “Dial-up SuprNova” days. But of late, I pissed off a little by BitTornado and at one point I couldn’t resist trying out µTorrent when they released 1.6 (stable) version.

I was testing the waters for troubles for over a week before venturing out in the ocean. Been good till now and there’s no looking back ever since. For all these 7 days I dint even think of using BitTornado.

What made me switch to µTorrent?

• One of the strongest reason why I switched is the BitTornado was not resource friendly (atleast better than Azureus) and added to that sometimes the process still runs even though I have closed the application. We’ll have to manually end the process. It takes only about 5 mb whereas BitTornado used to take 20-23mb or even more. That’s a high amount for my old PC.
• We can’t run multiple torrent in a single process. It’s ok to use BitTornado if we use only Private Trackers, but most of the times you’ll have full BW speeds if you run Public Tracker torrents. So incase you want to run more than 1 torrent, the more resource it’s gonna take.
• Another good reason which made me switch is whenever my connection disconnects or the power goes kaput or any other reason when BitTornado had to restart, then it “Check for existing data” and some data is lost, that is, if I happened to leech 100 MB previously, after checking it might show only 80 MB.

  It was irritating when you have limited capped connection. Sometimes it checks even when you have paused the torrent before closing BitTornado.

• DHT Support. We can get more peers and logically faster speeds. But of course this feature will be irrelevant incase of Private Trackers
• Great for selective files upload/download. BitTornado has got problems with selective downloading, sometimes it’ll show error, in case it tries to download files that we wanted to skip. And partial upload is not possible (in older versions only and new versions got some bugs that needs to be fixed)
• Fancy features! I like to see more stats while leeching a copy. The one that I like is the Graph of the download/upload speed. The other feature that I like is that we can know what piece utorrent is downloading and also the total pieces (and the location) information.
• Visually appealing and Skinnable. It looks better than BitTornado. We can change the icon, toolbar graphic and status icon.
• Actively Developed and Improved. The bugs that appear are quickly addressed and fixed. The fact that this program is still new compared to other clients and they are improving.

There are problems too…
Using utorrent was also not a smooth ride altogether.

• Speeds are not fast enough. I can only leech around 90 MB in an hour. With BitTornado, I used to leech 95-100+ MB in an hour.
• Still I feel it’s not suitable for capped connections (like D1), so if you limit your upload speed, then your download speeds take the brunt. I cap my upload speed to 5 KBps (My max is only 6 KBps) and it limits my download speed to 30 KBps
• Even it take some time to get to the optimum speeds but anyway it’s getting better on this front.
• I think we can’t allocate particular BW for a particular torrent. That is if I have 3 torrents running and I want to allocate 60% of my BW to torrent 1 and rest shared between torrents 2 & 3.
  We have the BW allocation option but that is crap. We can only set : ‘High’ , ‘Normal’ or ‘Low’. And 90% of the times, it doesn’t work for me.
• µTorrent preallocated the disk space in our HDD, so people like me having less space on the HDD, it’s not good. If the file size is 900 MB and I have around 600 MB only in the HDD, then it’s a problem to leech as much as we want (or till we have space). It asks if we want to go ahead with the leeching, but still it’s bad for people like me.
• It hangs when I try to remove some torrents from list. It happens when I don’t “Stop” it. Even when I “Pause” the torrent and try to remove it, it hangs.

As you can see both the clients are not perfect. But weighting the options that I have and compromising a few for the greater good, I found µTorrent (just) better.

This post is dedicated to BitTornado which I bid a emotional adieu. BitTornado is a great client. I’ll recommend it to any newbies in the p2p world. But it’s time that I moved to bigger (and better) things. So long, BitTornado!

Oldboy - Review

I recently saw Oldboy (2003) and boy, I have never seen such a movie. It was gross, and had strong violence including scenes of torture. It’s a Korean movie and what made me see is that it’s listed in IMDb’s Top 250 movies and Zinda was Inspired from this flick.

I don’t want to get into the details, but just want to tell how gross the movie was.

Picture this:

• Bother fucking sister. Sister’s womb bears her child as well as her nephew.
• Father fucking daughter.
• Man chopping his tongue himself.
• Man fighting 20 men with a dagger stabbed (and he’s bleeding like hell) at his back.
• Man using hammer to remove the teeth of another man.
• Man eating a living octopus and even after it’s head is chopped off, it’s body parts wriggle in his mouth.
• Man piercing needles (read metal parts) in his body to make some signs to count days.
• Brother kills her sister whom he “loves”.
• Man using screwdrivers and killing another person.
• A Giant Ant with hairy legs. It looked really gross.

I really can’t imagine how gross a movie can get. It was too violent. It’s Rated R for strong violence including scenes of torture, sexuality and pervasive language.. I want to know if there is any thing which is “more” than R?

It’ll get you in ‘Bad Mood’

Even if the movie was kinda gross and the plot was new and I have never seen movies like this before. The movie left me in cold and I was sad and in a bad mood after I watched the movie.

It’s not that I don’t recommend this anyone but I don’t movies which get me in bad mood. (Note that I used ‘Bad Mood’ and not ‘Sad’) There are movies that are depressing like Midnight Express, A.I , Deer Hunter,etc.. but I was sad and unhappy. I liked those movies but I never got in a bad mood. I just want to know if anyone who has watched it actually liked this movie..

2/10

Oldboy @ IMDb

Roman Holiday (1953) - Review

I recently watched Roman Holiday and I was very impressed with the movie that I decided to write something in here. With references from IMDb… I saw in the original Black and white print, but I’ll try to get hold of the remastered DVD. If you scorn Black-and-White movies, then this is your change to love them!

Roman Holiday is Audrey Hepburn’s first movie. She won the Oscar for the best actress for this movie. What a mark to make on her debut!

A classic romantic comedies that you should never miss. It’s better than any one of the romantic comedies listed here: Top 25 Romance Movies .It’s so fresh and wonderful. It’s not the usual type of romantic comedy that you see these days. A priceless masterpiece that has no match!

The Plot - A Perfect Screenplay

It’s a wonderful love story. Hepburn becomes tired of the constraints of royal life during a tour of Italy and escapes into the streets of Rome at night. Peck so happens to come across her, not knowing who she is, and takes her back to his apartment (she is groggy from sedatives, but Peck thinks her drunk!). He soon discovers who she really is, and realises that he has the scoop of a lifetime- a report on ‘The Runaway Princess’. She wants to explore Rome as a commoner; he accompanies her in her journey, documenting her day in Rome every step of the way with his photographer pal Eddie Albert. But the pair start to fall in love, and Peck’s perfect plan goes awry.

A Roman Holiday in 118 minutes!

The movie is fully filmed in Rome. I really like all the locale that the filmmakers choose. I might ever get to visit Rome, but I got a first hand experience after this movie. My guides to this tour were Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck and William Wyler! We follow them throughout the day as they laugh, play, and bound.

The Vespa ride with Peck, her own Vespa Ride (in picture), Audrey’s first cigarette (which she smokes like an expert!), ‘Mouth Of Truth’, Gelatin treat, the boat dance at on the Tiber by Sant’Angelo, Audrey’s haircut at a local barber shop, Chariot ride…and of course the main places of interests in Rome…. they are so memorable and I was blown away by the way it was filmed that too in Black-and-White.

Awesome Audrey!

Audrey Hepburn is the most Beautiful Lady to have lived in Earth. Never seen such a elegance and beauty splashed lavishly all over. She plays “Princess Ann” in here. Believe me she looks really like a Princess. She is Charming, She is a “Rocker” (”Rocker” in this movie was described as a person with high level of charm).

Gregory Peck is completely overshadowed by her performance. She looked stunning with her long hair. When she cut her hair, she looked even cute. I got trapped to this lady and gonna watch most of her movies.

A Roman Delight - Not a Turkish Delight!

This movie has a mix to fantasy and reality. It got a ending that’s bittersweet. It’ll leave a lump on your throat. Though the movie unfolds in a light way, the climax was exciting. Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn together look fabulous in this one. Unmatchable Chemistry that torch the screen. The perfect pair, better than the Hanks-Ryan combo.

At no cost fail to give yourself a treat. The one and only movie that I saw for the full 118 mins without a break. A Roman Holiday in 118 minutes! I can’t wait to see Peck and Audrey romance again.

10/10

Roman Holiday @ IMDb

Princess Ann: At midnight, I’ll turn into a pumpkin and drive away in my glass slipper.

Superman Returns Review

Superman bleeds and is hospitalized. He was injured. So was the movie. If the Man of Steel can’t help himself, then how can he save the movie?

I can’t believe people thought this was a good movie. I couldn’t sit through the length of the movie. I has expectations were sky high, but they were forced to crash land by Brian Singer.

I have not seen the previous superman movies. I have never read a DC comic book in my life. Yeah.. I din’t understand some things in the movie, but atleast I have seen sequels which I liked and enjoyed without watching the previous movie.

It’s like downloading VISTA on a Dial-up

The movie is L—–O—–N—–G. Wish you had the backspace key while you see the movie. Superman Returns is a 2.5 hours of uninteresting, painfully long and dragging movie. It’s dull and flat. There is no buildup, no suspense, a mediocre plot, tangled love story, poor acting which all add up to your frustration (that too when Argentina and Germany fight it out in the Quaters).

In the absence of any kind of actual content to push the movie along, Singer instead relies on an endless string of movie clichés. A man sitting next to us, left a good 20 minutes before the credits roll. The end was long, drawn out, and choppy.

Many people criticized King Kong to be long and boring for 3 hours, but atleast I liked it and definitely watchable.

Brandon Routh is a Cardboard cutout of Christopher Reeve

Yeah.. it holds true in whatever way you think. He looks like him. His mannerisms, his body language and even his hair style (when he is Superman) is the same. But Routh just looks like him, like a cardboard, he can’t really be like the person he is resembling. He hardly gets to talk much (less than 25 lines in the whole movie). He sucked bad in the romance scenes with Lois.

I’m not sure if it was right to cast Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane. She does the acting part better than Brandon Routh and Lex’s partners. She doesn’t look that good also. Keira would have been perfect. Even if the movie sucked, she would have fluttered a few heart beats for guys like me.

Kevin Spacey can act (of course), but this movie hardly gives any justification to his acting. All I see him is fooling around with his three associates and doing some lame humour (about people eating dogs or jokes about one dog eating another dog). And I can’t understand how people who reviewed the movie earlier said that this was Spacey’s second best performance after American Beauty. I wonder how many Spacey movies they have seen? The best scene of him was when he tossed his wig to the little girl and said, “you can have this . . . the rest is mine,”!

Why the World Doesn’t Needs Superman Returns?

Gone for years, the world, including Lois Lane have moved on. She is a Career women and her works has not gone unnoticed. Lois has won a Pulitzer Prize for her article “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman“. But what’s wrong with this movie? Why did not like it?

Super Hero movies needs a good amount of action scenes where our hero does cool gravity defying stunts. But this movie dint have that many action scenes. The mid air Flight emergency scene was good, but otherwise you don’t to see Superman in action much.

Super Hero movies target young audience and kids. But is there any part to their likings? Krrish was not liked by many, but the kids loved it. Fantastic four was routed as the worst Superhero movie (even I didn’t like it) but the kids simply loved it. Kids don’t like sentiment-drama-romance much, but even then the movie was not good at that.

The plot is stupid and flawed. The movie was not a sequel of the original movies, but it’s a bad remake of the 1978 Richard Donner’s movie. The plot is similar to that classic. The movie was supposed to pay tribute to the old Superman Movies, but fails miserably and Brian Singer made a fool of himself. Donner and Reeve could feel let down if they watch this flick.

Superman should get your Adrenaline raising and keep you in the edge of your seat, but here he makes you boo him and makes you anticipate when the movie will get over. I yawned, and could not wait to get home.

Final Word

Before the movie: Man… I’m gonna catch up with Superman Returns! Ya…. Wooo hooo….!!
After the movie: Man…shit. F@%$; I wasted my time and money.

There aren’t much action scenes, so the movie was bad. The romance between Superman and Lois Lane were childish, so the movie was bad. The acting were amateurish (save Kevin Spacey), so the movie was bad. It’s is long and dragging so the movie was bad. The screenplay was poor, so the movie was bad. So whatever way I look at, I did not like the movie.

Coming to my favourite part in writing reviews… rating the movie! I’ll give it 2.5/10. I’m little generous here. The action scenes were good in some parts and I like Superman and his super cool powers. Don’t get fooled by IMDb’s 7.9 or the users comments over there as most of them are from USA and they love their Super Heroes just as we like Krrish, whether or not the movie was good or not. How much have you voted an Indian movie high at IMDb just because it’s our movie?

Don’t waste your time on this money. There are better movie than this and we have the FIFA World Cup. It’s not worth it. Rent a DVD or wait for some channels to air it or catch it with some other means. Even if you see for free, you’ll want to get back your time.

Steer clear from this movie unless you have seen the previous movies and a die hard fan of Superman. Even in that case, you might not like this movie.

2/10

Superman Returns -You’ll wish he stayed at Krypton

Superman Returns @ IMDb