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Moneyball Review – Topnotch Entertainer

 Hollywood  3 Responses »
Sep 242011
 
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By Naveen

After reaching a bit too late for the 9:50 pm show and quite a bit early for the 10:35 pm show, being a cheap Desi I decided to sneak into Screen 2 where the Bollywood movie Mausam was playing. Two minutes of cacophonic nonsense in the name of a song on Punjab’s Sarson ka khet convinced me that the silence of the Screen 3 where Moneyball would be screened was a safer place to retreat. By the way, Screen 2 was nearly full.

Ah! I digress…

Moneyball is a sports-drama based on the true story of Baseball team Oakland Athletics’ General Manager Billy Beane.

The Bennet Miller directed Moneyball stars Brad Pitt, who is also one of the producers of the film. Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman make up the rest of the major cast.

2011 summer and early fall season have been relatively sober. Most of the promising Hollywood movies fell flat.

But today, thankfully Aurora Balaji granted me my wish for an enriching experience.

Synopsis

As I mentioned earlier, Moneyball is a Sports Drama / Biopic of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the General Manager of the Baseball team Oakland Athletics.

The movie opens predictably with Oakland Athletics losing not only their knock-out game but also three of their best players to other teams.

The GM Billy Beane faces the daunting task of rebuilding the team despite a severe budget constraint which limits his ability to have high-value / expensive players in the team.

Billy meets a nerdy economist Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and gets interested in Peter’s approach of using statistical analytics and logic to evaluate players and team composition rather than popularity and other subjective attributes. This approach reduces cost while theoretically retaining the capability of the team despite the loss of major players.

Billy hires Peter and adopts the unconventional approach to rebuild the team much to the ire of the traditionalist scouts and the coach. Continue reading »

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 Posted by SearchIndia.com at 5:01 am  Tagged with:

Mausam Review – Pankaj Kapur Hates Shahid Kapur

 Bollywood, Reviews  9 Responses »
Sep 232011
 
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We’d heard that some fathers loath their young sons.

Maybe, the fathers see their grownup, priapically obsessed youthful-looking sons as a rival for their wives’ affections.

But the wise souls at SI never believed in such Freudian drivel and Oedipal fiction. At least, not until we were confronted with hard, rock-solid evidence today in Pankaj Kapur’s directorial debut Mausam featuring his son Shahid Kapur.

For two hours and 45-minutes, we witnessed first hand the depth of hatred, the deadly venom oozing out of every pore of Pankaj Kapur’s body, aimed at his handsome son Shahid Kapur (by Pankaj’s first wife Neelima Azeem).

Folks, Pankaj Kapur’s is no run-of-the-mill Kutta, Kaminey kind of hatred.

Au contraire, this is one of those dreadful Maderchod, aaj tera gaand zaroor maroonga kinda, deep-rooted animus.

And guess what, true to his Mephistophelean game plan Pankaj Kapur acted the saboteur and buggered son Shahid well and truly in Mausam.

Beta Shahid won’t be able to walk normally for the next six months.

Boring Shit

To all those including yours truly who expected a beautiful piece of art from the talented Indian actor Pankaj Kapur in Mausam, all we can say is that the old man expelled one excruciatingly long, malodorous fart on Bollywood fans today.

Try as we may, we’re unable to find any exculpatory evidence.

You see, Pankaj Kapur is no babe in the woods. The old man’s been kicking around Bollywood films and Indian TV serials for nearly three decades.

Yet, the ‘movie’ he unleashed today shows that Pankaj Kapur has learned little of how things work behind the camera. Strange.

A hopelessly shoddy script, pedestrian photography (except in a stray scene or two), ordinary music, wildly implausible circumstances and a ridiculously happy ending dooms Mausam and tosses it on the mountainous dumpster of Bollywood.

Worse, Pankaj Kapur’s willful sabotage makes a mockery of the fine effort the acting crew put in.

Pankaj’s son Shahid Kapur, Sonam Kapoor and wife Supriya Pathak throw in respectable performances as do the others including Manoj Pahwa and Aditi Sharma.

Shahid Kapoor, along with Ranbir Kapoor, is the only hope for Bollywood to salvage its reputation with the Gen-Y crowd.

And we had no complaints against Shahid in Mausam. Whether as the young lad in Mallukot, the grownup Air Force officer or the pining lover, he delivers the acting goods.

Sonam Kapoor is getting better and in a Bollywood filled with two-bit *****  like Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai, it warms the cockle of this ol’ heart to finally see an actress with a good bit of class and lotsa grace.

To these fading eyes at least, Sonam Kapoor is a sunshine of delight in a Bollywood filled with varmint. Now, if only the girlie had a better bust, or at least one perceptible to the naked eye. ;)
Continue reading »

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 Posted by SearchIndia.com at 7:26 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Pankaj Kapur’s Mausam Opens to Poor Reviews

 Bollywood, Reviews  6 Responses »
Sep 232011
 
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Let’s start with a confession – We like both Pankaj Kapur and his son Shahid Kapur.

In a Bollywood littered with jackasses like the Khans and Bachchans, these two stand out.

So, it’s with great distress we pore over the poor reviews for Pankaj Kapur’s directorial debut Mausam featuring his son and Sonam Kapoor.

Here are excerpts from some reviews of Mausam:

Reuters:

If director Pankaj Kapur hadn’t gone to pains to establish that “Mausam” plays out between the mid-90s and the early years of this century, you’d be forgiven for thinking this film takes place in the 20s — when there was no internet, no phones and no technology. Why else would two, reasonably well-off, intelligent people who obviously have access to technology be unable to trace each other? It makes no sense, and instead of feeling sad for them, you feel frustrated.

That, in a nutshell, is how you feel about “Mausam” anyway. The promos describe the film as an “epic” love story, but the only thing epic here is the running time. The film runs for almost three hours, during which Kapur plays out the same meet-separate-meet-separate theme till you tire of it.

Rediff:

It is when the film changes gear from romcom to melodrama that both Kapur and his son struggle, going from light and likable to irritating and implausible. The couple that initially wins us over gradually emerges harebrained and inexplicably passive. We never root for either girl or boy, because they coyly retreat just when they shouldn’t. The passion the film began quickly turns lukewarm, because as Mausam and Shahid begin to take themselves seriously, we stop having fun. And, more importantly, giving a damn.

This is a love story gone awry purely because of undercommunication, and while that seems fine enough on paper, it’s rather hard to swallow two lovers cleaved for well over a decade simply because they don’t have each other’s forwarding address. Continue reading »

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 Posted by SearchIndia.com at 5:33 am  Tagged with:

iPad will be Cock of the Tablet Walk Even in 2015

 Digital Media, Tablets  18 Responses »
Sep 222011
 
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In what must come as a surprise only to the babbling Android fan-boys, a new study from market researcher Gartner forecasts that Apple iPads will continue to lord over the tablet market into 2015.

The number-crunchers at Gartner see Apple commanding a market-share of over 50% until 2014.

For the current year, the iPad is projected to account for 73.4% of worldwide media tablet sales, down from 83% in 2010.

Gartner's Worldwide Tablet Sales Estimates 2010-2015

According to Gartner VP Carolina Milanesi:

We expect Apple to maintain a market share lead throughout our forecast period by commanding more than 50 percent of the market until 2014. This is because Apple delivers a superior and unified user experience across its hardware, software and services. Unless competitors can respond with a similar approach, challenges to Apple’s position will be minimal. Apple had the foresight to create this market and in doing that planned for it as far as component supplies such as memory and screen. This allowed Apple to bring the iPad out at a very competitive price and no compromise in experience among the different models that offer storage and connectivity options.

Worldwide media tablet sales to end users in 2011 are projected to hit 63.6 million units, a 261.4% increase from 2010 sales of 17.6 million units.

iPad will Lord over Tablet Market into 2015Apple iPad – Far Ahead of the Pack

Gartner predicts tablet sales will continue to experience strong growth and reach 326.3 million units in 2015.

Apart from Apple iOS and Google’s Android operating system, Gartner does not expect any other platforms to win over 5% share of the tablet market in 2011.

Lower Forecast for Android

Android tablets are projected to ship 11 million units in 2011, accounting for 17.3% of media tablet sales compared to 14.3% last year.

Gartner has lowered its forecast for Android OS tablets by 28% from last quarter’s projection. The researcher said the reduction would have been higher were it not for the success of lower-end tablets in Asia, and the expectations around the launch of Amazon’s tablet.

Android’s appeal in the tablet market has been constrained by high prices, weak user interface and limited tablet applications.

On Microsoft’s prospects, Gartner expects the software giant’s platform will find its biggest opportunities in the enterprise segment, where IT departments could benefit from smoother integration with existing Microsoft software.

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 Posted by SearchIndia.com at 8:51 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Stupid Fucks on HP’s Board Err Again

 Business, IT Industry  1 Response »
Sep 222011
 
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For all those schmucks who think that corporate boards are stuffed with wise old men who do nothing but bring their decades of ‘wisdom’ to guide businesses and pass the torch to a new generation, we say ’tis time to stop taking those deep drags from the fine California weed you got betwixt your lips.

A lot of corporate boards are stuffed with blithering idiots who won’t be able to find their cojones with two hands and a flashlight.

Case in point – HP’s board.

The venerable Silicon Valley company, founded over seven decades back in a garage, long before the current Messiah Steve Jobs was even born, has been tottering from one disaster to another, no thanks to the stupid fucks populating its board.

The diaper-wearing, incontinent dotards on HP’s board should be pilloried for their chronic, monumental follies starting with the naming of that fatuous creep Carly Fiorina to the top job.

From then on, HP board’s raison d’etre has been to drag the company into the ditch. And they’ve succeeded admirably in their moronic endeavors.

Frequent management changes, disastrous product launches (TouchPad tablet) and acquisitions (Palm) and low morale has sapped the company of its fighting spirit.

Less than a year after an ex-SAP hand Léo Apotheker was brought in amid cloying encomiums, the man has now been found unfit for the job and will exit with a golden parachute worth tens of millions of dollars.

Those with long memories will recollect a similar exit for Carly Fiorina when she left with tens of millions as a reward for a bad job.

Take a deko at the below excerpts from HP’s two announcements in the last 12 months of a new leader.

The more things change, the more, it seems, they remain the same.

Sep. 30, 2010 – ‘Strategic Thinker’ Léo Apotheker Named HP CEO

Léo is a strategic thinker with a passion for technology, wide-reaching global experience and proven operational discipline – exactly what we were looking for in a CEO. After more than two decades in the industry, he has a strong track record of driving technological innovation, building customer relationships and developing world-class teams.

Léo has been a leader in anticipating the transformation taking place in our industry, and we believe he is uniquely positioned to help accelerate HP’s strategy. He has demonstrated success in the U.S. market and also has vast international experience – which will be a major asset as HP continues to expand globally, particularly in high-growth emerging markets. HP has the right assets and market positions, and now we have the best team to realize the company’s enormous potential.
- Robert Ryan, lead independent director of HP’s Board, September 30, 2010

Sep. 22, 2011 Breaking News: Found Unfit to be HP CEO, Léo Apotheker is Kicked Out

We very much appreciate Léo’s efforts and his service to HP since his appointment last year. The board believes that the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes to successfully execute on the company’s strategy. Meg Whitman has the right operational and communication skills and leadership abilities to deliver improved execution and financial performance.

We are fortunate to have someone of Meg Whitman’s caliber and experience step up to lead HP. We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead. Meg is a technology visionary with a proven track record of execution. She is a strong communicator who is customer focused with deep leadership capabilities. Furthermore, as a member of HP’s board of directors for the past eight months, Meg has a solid understanding of our products and markets.

- Ray Lane, HP board member, September 22, 2011

HP’s Senile Idiots Err Again

In our not-so-humble opinion, HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman is the wrong choice for the top job at HP. Continue reading »

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 Posted by SearchIndia.com at 8:50 pm  Tagged with:

Internet Download Speeds – India Pitiful, U.S. Decent

 Digital Media  11 Responses »
Sep 212011
 
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If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times.

On all the things that matter, India is the pits.

Be it tackling poverty, addressing corruption, making watchable movies or fast Internet access the benighted country is hopeless.

Take for instance, Internet download speeds.

Despite the incessant noise about India harnessing IT and the Internet to forge ahead, India has one of the slowest average Internet download speeds (184KBps) for a supposedly fast developing country yearning for a place at the table of the advanced countries.

The U.S. is not bad with an average speed of 616KBps but South Korea is the best with an average speed of 2,202 KBps.

Sure, averages mask a lot of internal differences but you do get a broad idea of where a country stands vis-a-vis broadband by looking at the below interactive chart (move your mouse to see speed).

Our download speed in a mid-Atlantic state ranges from 20MBps-25MBps (i.e. 20,000 KBps-25,000 KBps)  during the morning hours but tapers off sharply  from 5:30PM-11:00PM to less than half.

But one thing that never ceases to amaze us is how Indians manage to illegally download all those pirated movies when they are handicapped by such low speeds.

Wonders never cease in Incredible India. ;)


Click or Move Your Mouse on Countries to See Download Speed
via chartsbin.com

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 Posted by SearchIndia.com at 2:28 pm
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