A Wednesday - An Exciting Thriller

Generally I have a low opinion of the average run of the mill movies which get released by Bollywood or the other Tollywoods. They generally run on a hackneyed, beaten-to-death formula. But a few of them are gems. "A Wednesday" by Neeraj Pandey is one. It is a gripping thriller about a wednesday when a series of incidents changes the lives of all those involved.

The movie starts with a phone call to the police commissioner of Mumbai (played by Anupam Kher), about 5 bombs placed at various locations in Mumbai. The caller (Naseerudeen Shah) gives extremely detailed instructions about how to release known terrorists. From then onwards, the movie progresses into a gripping thriller, with many twists and turns to a very satisfying conclusion. The tempo of the film is maintained till the end, which is very rare. Most movies lose their tempo after a good start, but not this one. A definite must watch.

Five Stars any day...

MPlayer - Overcoming in-built low volumes of media files

Many times, the AVI files of movies end up with a very low audio volume causing a lot of pain for use with laptop speakers (esp like ThinkPad), which do not have a very wide range of volumes like headphones or traditional speakers. To overcome this issue, many media players provide an option to increase the volume more than 100% (upto 400% in case of VLC Media player).

After googling and RTFMing for a while I figured out that the way to do this in MPlayer is to use a software volume mixer instead of the soundcard's mixer. You can run mplayer with the following additional options

mplayer -softvol -softvol-max 400 

The 400 indicates that you want to increase the output by upto 400% of the base volume indicated in the media file.

This link has more information on using an audio filter instead of using a software volume mixer to do the same. Happy movie watching!!

Ripping DVDs into AVI files

Ripping DVDs in Linux using mencoder is tricky business. No doubt mencoder is the most powerful tool at your disposal with a wide variety of options to convert practically from any format to any format. This in turn also becomes its disadvantage - there are too many options, which an ordinary user cannot understand. There were nearly a 1000 options out there, with a variety of combinations between them, most of which keep taking about stuff like deinterlacing, quantization and key frames.

After trying a number of times to rip DVDs unsuccessfully in Linux, I recently struck gold, while googling, in a discussion forum on how to do this correctly. This is the command that worked flawlessly for me

/usr/bin/mencoder -vf harddup -vf-add 
 smartblur=.6:-.5:0,unsharp=l5x5:.8:c5x5:.4
 -vf scale=480:360 -xvidencopts 
 bitrate=900:profile=dxnhtntsc -lameopts
 cbr:br=128:aq=0:vol=1 -oac mp3lame
 -ovc xvid -o outfile.avi *.vob

The scale= could be used to set the new size of the AVI file. Lesser sizes will result in lesser space. The bitrate= also controls the quality of the movie generated, and is inversely related to the size of the generated AVI file.

Download the mencoder (located in the mplayer package) from some default distribution (I used yum to get it), so that most of the required options are compiled in.

Why I hate Indian movies - The Formula

Yesterday, I was able to watch the movie Dasavataram. Kamal was at his usual best. The 10 roles he played were in some form and degree related to the ten avataras taken by Vishu in Hindu mythology. The movie had a couple of mass elements in it. Although they were necessary to make it palatable to the masses, it is a pity that the movie had to stoop to those levels. It had potential. I know that to make any amount of money back, it has to do it. Every big budget movie that gets made in India has to follow the "formula" - a derogatory term for standard fare with different packaging - different people, same formula.

Lets see the formula for most telugu movies
- one or two mass songs (read as songs with busty babe(s))
- four or five fighting sequences (hero kicking ass)
- couple of sentimental scenes (hero feeling senti)
- hero is invincible, villan is evil
- Feel good factor

Although most hollywood big budgets are mostly mindless action packed fares, Sometimes you get to see some really good movies (Syriana comes to mind), played by good actors. There is a uniqueness to most movies. This is seriously missing with the typical Indian fare.

Another scourge of the Indian cinema is the "image". For an actor in the Indian industry, image is everything. A hero is a hero - he should be invincible in every movie... For the Indian movies, the word "protagonist" can be used interchangeably with the word, "hero". So most good actors do not get to do any roles other than those they have the "image" for. And those roles are always the macho man roles, because others carry the liability of at best addressing only a part of the market, and at worst destroying the image - rendering him "untouchable" in a bad way.

With respect to Indian movies, I see a beacon of hope in the Parallel cinema revolution that has arrived in Bollywood. These movies are sustained by the spreading multiplex culture in the Indian metros. But south Indian movie industry still has a long way to go, before big actors start acting in good movies.

The Weather Man

I recently saw this movie called "The Weather Man". The movie is a beautiful piece of art. It stars Nicholas Cage as David Spritz, a successful weather guy, who desperately keeps trying to get his personal life back in order. Cage's character suffers from Low self esteem which is reflected in various scenarios. The movie is a slightly dark comedy, and has a motif of random people on the street throwing fast food at him. The archery theme is also very well done. It has pearls of wisdom strewn all over. Some of them seem to be so correct, that it both frightens and enlightens at the same time

- "In Life you will have to chuck some things"

- "When you are young, you have this view of yourself in the future with many positive qualities. With each passing year, the qualities keep on decreasing, until you are left with - yourself."

The Man from Earth

One of the best films I ever saw... I came across this while looking through a list of Sci-Fi movies, and the concept behind the movie - a man who is 14,000 years old - struck me as interesting. It was an independent 2007 film with a little known cast, and a director whom I never heard about - so I was not having much expectations. How wrong I was!

I started downloading the movie, and read some reviews. Some were positive and others were negative indicating that the entire movie was shot in a single log cabin. I started watching the movie, and it was more like reading a novel. So full of depth. The direction and screenplay was awesome.

The best part was that, you feel like you are a part of the conversations that are going on. You do not feel that you are watching a movie, you get sucked into the world. Five Stars!