Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days is, even with its flaws, a pretty darn good futuristic noir thriller. Ralph Fiennes as the weasely Lenny was awesome!

District B-13 Ultimatum: This was pretty disappointing. More of the same would've also been acceptable, but this was extremely dumbed down with action movie and racial stereotypes and with jarring arabic-hiphop soundtrack. Avoidable, unless you want to see a couple of those cool free jump action setups.

The Men Who Stare At Goats: An awesome cast and George Clooney definitely shines, and this could've been a good movie had it not lost it past the half hour mark. Worth a watch for the many quirky, funny moments, and to see Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey being all great.

Saw Ishqiya finally and it was an okay movie with some very nice parts and pretty good performances from the three main actors but overall just left me with the feeling that it could have been much better.

1. Iron Maiden - Death On The Road: Rewatched this yesterday. Its still a stellar DVD, despite the frantic switching which leaves you wondering what the hell everyone in the band is doing (especially notable in the first 4 tracks). Standout tracks include Lord of the Flies, Journeyman, Hallowed, Dance of Death, and Paschendale. Worth the money.
2. Batman Beyond - Return Of The Joker: One of the first feature length animated Batman movies which i'd seen. Still remains worthy of a watch. Although the new Batman doesn't hold a shoe to Bruce, the Tim Drake centric tale has the right amount of classic storylines to draw any Batman fan right in. Recommended.
3. Little Zizou: Bawas make the most interesting of people to study. Maybe its the innate stereotypical craziness, or their zest for life, food, and conversation. The movie does well to offer glimpses of all these, with superb performances by the two kids, Boman Irani and Zenobia. Imaad Shah does well, although the entire flight simulator angle is hardly explored enough to make me care a damn. Its a cute film for a one-time watch, nothing more, nothing less. Oh, and Kamal Sidhu. Rawr!!! And spotted: GARY LAWYER! Epic-ness ensured!

Saw Sleuth with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. Laurence Olivier is an upper class British types who writes hugely popular detective stories. His wife is having an affair with Michael Caine her hair dresser and has Italian ancestry. Olivier invites Caine to his house to discuss the matter of his wife and sets into motion a 2 hour lonf tense cat and mouse game with Olivier playing cat for half the movie and the roles being reversed in the second half. Excellent performances from both men and the movie is as much about the class system in the UK as it is about a jealous husband and his confident and young rival. Essentially a two man movie, the ending seemed a little extreme but overall just a really good film.

Ninja Assassin - Pretty disappointing overall. The way it started out, it was shaping up to be a blast, but the relentless plot banalities dragged it into the bog. Fine, the script was written in 53 hours, but that's no excuse. I could write a very shitty screenplay in 53 seconds. Play Ninja Gaiden instead - even that's got a better story.

District B13 Ultimatum - Again, ridiculously stupid story. Ok, the first one wasn't quite Ulysses, but it had some scrappy charm about it. Not to mention, the parkour scenes were terrific. Now that that whole theme has gone mainstream, the impact isn't quite there. The ending is hilarious, with all the gang leaders reaching the consensus, "Yeah we want parks and schools in our neighbourhood," nevermind the fact that doing so would put all their asses out of business. Then again, maybe they're not too bright. On the brighter side, Elodie Yung is a peach, despite her character's fashion sense being somewhat questionable.

The Mist (the new one): Holy Shit! How did this script get approved? It's so completely random that it has to be experienced to be appreciated. Basically, a mist sweeps over a location in small-town USA and people who get caught in it don't turn out too good, so a group of residents take shelter in the local supermarket to weather out the storm. What follows is quite unique. People randomly get irritated with each other with no apparent cause, sometimes entire groups get philosophical in unison, characters display prescience out of the blue and a lot of other bizarre shit. At least the movie delivers on one of its goals - stirring up hatred towards Christian fundies. But then again, that's not really hard to do. All that said, the ending is quite cool and earns a few stars for what is otherwise an abortion of a movie.

So yeah, I'd typed this mammoth post yesterday and it got swallowed whole by fuck knows what. Anyway here is a slightly abridged version of the same post.

Legion A promising premise that gets pissed away in a remarkably short span of time. God's apparently had it with humanity and decides to destroy the world. The only thing standing between the apocalypse and humanity is an angel called Michael who decides to protect some random baby that's festering in the belly of a cookie cutter white trash waitress. Why this baby is so important is never really explained. Anywhoo the first 20 minutes of this movie are, I daresay, fucking great - the angel has a showdown with a possessed cop and a little old lady shows up at the diner where most of the movie plays out and assaults pretty much everything in it. Having blown his load early on, the director settles down into an immensely tedious and talky showdown between the angel michael and the rest of the heavenly host. I don't know about you guys, but I thought this was a scenario that would result in almost unparalleled displays of badassery. I mean we are talking about a pissed off God here, who in previous classics like the Old Testament was given to unleashing plagues, genocides, locust swarms and homosexual blinding, gay burning acts of fury at the drop of a hat. But god as channeled by the shitty script writers of this sorryass film is really fucking lazy and uninspired. He sends a bunch of zombiefied citizens. He converts all of one human being into an acid bomb of flesh. He sends down some poncetastic angel with blades for wings and a morning star. And then pretty much sits around with his thumbs up his almighty ass. Boring watered down PG-rated bullshit. I wish a good idea had not been wasted on the assholes who made this film.

Prince of Darkness Quantum physics meets Satanic WTFery in this uneven but still very compelling John Carpenter film. An ancient order of Catholic monks have been keeping a secret for several centuries running and blah blah - the apocalypse is at hand. Carpenter makes a fairly audacious argument for the anti-christ actually being anti-matter. Except he also cripples the film by making it play out at snail's pace and having the Chinese guy from Big Trouble In Little China reprise his smartass wiseacre role in a film in which such a character is horribly out of place. Alice Cooper is in this movie too but for all he does, they may as well have got a wax figurine of the Coop from Madame Tussads. However, like I mentioned earlier in spite of these caveats the film is quite engrossing and even manages a few moments of genuine disquiet.

REC 2The sequel to a pretty damn brilliant Spanish horror film that I wish had not been made. Not that REC 2 is a bad film - just a very unnecessary one. The last few moments in REC terrified me but the further explanations of what that was about just turned out to be very silly and robbed the original explanation of a lot of its menace. It's pretty much more of the same though with not as many leap out of your seat moments as the original. I don't think I'll be bothering with REC 3 that's suppsoed to be in the works.

Strange Days Another great film by Kathryn Bigelow in which Ralph Fiennes plays an ex-cop turned pusher peddling some illicit form of technical ecstacy only to find himself part of some very frightening web of police brutality, rape and murder.

Rokkkkkk Lousy piece of shit that tries to fuse the cliched 'jaadu tona' BS of indian horror with the tired as hell spooky little girl with hair on face from Jap horror. If not for some unintentional lulz in the dialogue department ( a cop saying "Main toh mar gaya yaar" after dying), this would have been totally irredeemable.

Thanks, Maa A horrific film about the lives of street kids in Bombay that's everything that Slumdawg Millionare didn't dare to be. There are no cutesy little assholes speaking the Queen's fucking English in plummy accents in this film; and no kids getting on a soapbox and sermonising the everloving fuck out of the audience - just a bunch of scruffy, uncouth urchins that you see and try to ignore on a daily basis if you live in Bombay. Municipality, the notional hero of the film, is a kid with a slightly more expansive moral compass than most of his friends (and the film supplies a fairly credible reason for this too) and while escaping the clutches of a pedophilous warden in a juvenile delinquent centre (played with a near nauseating degree of malice by Alok Nath. Probably his best performance ever), notices a baby that's been abandoned. Muncipality takes on the Quixotic task of reuniting the infant with its mother working his way backwards from the cab it was brought to the juvenile centre in. Along the way, many horrible things happen. You know that a film is seriously fucked up when junkies, drunkards and drug pushers are among its sympathetic characters. I did think that Thanks, Maa went perhaps a little too OTT in trying to make almost everyone the kids encounter very perverse or flawed in some horrible depraved manner, but it works fairly okay within the context of the film. It all builds up to one of the most heartbreaking conclusions this side of Salaam Bombay, a film that Thanks, Maa in its better moments leaves far behind in spite of being made with what looks like a much smaller budget and with a much more rookie film crew.

In the Loop Better people than me have given this hilarious Britcom a thumbs up. Watch it if you like your comedies served up very very vicious.

Mammoth Book of BNH 19: Just got this yesterday. Very effective first story by Michael Marshall Smith. Let's see how the rest pans out.

Road, Movie

whatever the experts are saying i liked this,especially the first half and after the interval,the first half of the last half! ;D
the locations are fantastic and Satish Kaushik,the dhaba kid and even Yashpal Sharma's small cameo are real fun! :D

Really Fantastic, Mr. Fox. Less deadpan and more physical and cartoony from Wes but it's his typical style otherwise - which I've always liked. Probably his best movie since Rushmore.

Talk about coincidences. I saw the fox movie last night. Pretty decent and much more happening than some of the other Wes Anderson movies I have seen (Rushmore, Tennenbaums). George Clooney was good in the lead role. My fav is still Life Aquatic.

TinTin:Destination Moon

@Hathya: Prince of Darkness is a total classic. The brainwaves from the future with the apparition standing in the church door (or that's what I remember of it from childhood anyway) used to give me nightmares as a kid.

In movies:

A Serious Man
This is probably my favourite flick from '09. I was surprised to see it nominated at the Oscars, but that whole show redeemed itself this time around just by giving Avatar the cold shoulder. A Serious Man is seriously becoming my favourite Coen Brothers movie and has all patented quirks and anomalies firmly in place while simultaneously raising the intellectual content above and beyond anything they've done so far. Larry Gopnik is a docile, Jewish Physics prof. whose life is falling apart for no discernible reason - his wife is seeing the neighbour, his kids are total pricks, his brother stays with him doing math and draining cystic discharge, and he's receiving libelous letters at school, jeopardizing his chances of getting the tenure he's been after. While the film is mostly a series of mishaps on the outside with typical Coen-style black humour - this time steeped in Jewish traditions and folklore - at its heart, it stays a meditation on why bad things happen to good people. Subtle, filled with LOL moments and 60s cultural references, this is a veritable modern classic.

Solomon Kane
Based on the Robert E. Howard character, this is the best fantasy film I've seen since the LOTR movies. While not a origin tale (I've only read a few Kane stories so I'm in the dark over the character's genesis), it does a great job of presenting Kane as cool, puritanical wreaker of Godly vengeance on the wicked and unjust. James Purefoy plays the lead, supported by known faces in Pete Postlethwaite and Max Von Sydow. Movie always takes itself seriously, doesn't resort to silly looking CGI, and is dripping with despair, malice, and foreboding. Decent fight sequences, some really cool BOO! moments, and competent performances makes this way better than anything that has come in the wake of the Lord Of The Rings.

Finally read John Saul's Suffer The Children, a very disturbing book with certain images that will need some thorough scrubbing to be erased from my mind. Children are generally off-limits as far as active participation in brutality is concerned, but Saul's classic debut gleefuly dives into the wreckage and plays with the gooey slop. The ending leaves a bit to be desired and the book sets up its plays relatively early, but just the depravity of it all had me turning the pages all through the night.

Yeah that figure in the doorway mumbling something that's both indecipherable and foreboding is quite fantastic.

Green Zone: This is a reasonably good watch from the same Bourne Series duo of Damon and Greengrass. Set immediately after the first attacks of US on Iraq, Matt Damon plays the role of an army chief assigned to search for weapons of mass destruction. It does not do much of political commentary which is good and sticks it what it can do best with Damon's superb screen presence and Greengrass's skills for thrilling action sequences(but still has the annoying shaky camera).

^^ looks like i need to watch this! i like Matt Damon, in the Bourne series,the Ocean series..anything else i have watched with him in it! :)