Reviews – Page 101

Yahoo! has recently launched (well, maybe not SO recently…), some services that are worth noticing. There are many new Yahoo! services coming out, which does keep me busy!

Then there’s been the news of Yahoo! acquiring Right Media for its ad business. It comes on the heels of Google buying a much bigger DoubleClick – but DoubleClick has been notorious for using tracking cookies, and regularly on adware searches. Interestingly, Google made no comment during DC’s buy-out on DC’s questionable practices. Once again, this acquisition shows the power of people on the Web – when Google had started out and needed money, they’d thought of taking ads from DoubleClick for revenue. Instead, they went in for what Larry and Sergey called ‘a patchy life preserver’ in the form of Google AdSense. That very AdSense has now given them the power to buy out DC, and establish a monopoly on the Internet.

Enough about Google for now, let’s have a look at those Yahoo! products I wanted to talk about…

Yahoo! Gallery: This is a one-stop shop for gadgets and bits o’ code that Yahoo! users have created to be used with Yahoo! services and products. Note that this is separate from Yahoo! Downloads, Yahoo! Widgets, or Yahoo! Developer Network — Yahoo! Gallery is more a democratic platform for people to share their code. And there’s bounties too for the programmers – make something really good which prompts a Yahoo! user to sign up for premium services, and there’s gonna be a paycheck for you.

Yahoo! Music Lyrics Search: Music lyrics has been one sore point in the digital music revolution. Of course, just do a search and you’ll be able to enough lyrics site – but they’re all user-generated. The music industry’s stance that song lyrics are copyright, and thus all lyrics sites are illegal is ridiculous. After all, what do they want to do – grab hold of someone by the collar for humming a tune while walking down the street, just because a song is copyright? Fact is though, all these sites ARE illegal, and prone to formatting / spelling, and sometimes, factual errors in lyrics. These are, at the basic level, the output of a bloke with too much time to pause a song every 10 seconds and type out the lyrics.

Yahoo! Music Lyrics tries to change this situation by providing authorized versions of the lyrics from the music labels themselves, legally. THIS, dear readers, is THE definite version of a song lyric, the one from the artists themselves, including the verse breakup, punctuation etc. Believe me, I’m very obsessed with the right lyrics when I want one. Having said that, I’d again like to criticize the record labels, because according to the agreement, Yahoo! can only provide the lyrics as an image file on its pages, which effectively means you can’t copy-paste it into your media manager. The lyrics are provided in association with Gracenote, the creators of the CDDB song database. More on song databases later on my blahg. The music companies should definitely be more liberal and ready to accept the change in the music scene.

For now though, people (including me) will still use the other lyrics sites for the first copy – after all, nobody will want to type out from an image file. However, whenever I take a lyric for my collection nowadays, I make sure to tally it with the one on Yahoo! Music Lyrics to check the authenticity. Right now, only around 400,000 songs on the Yahoo! Music database have lyrics, and the number is growing; but is only a fraction of the 6 million songs that Yahoo! Music has. I sure hope the number grows fast, for the benefit of all music fans.

Mr Bean’s Holiday (IMDb.com movie page)
My Rating: A- (Almost Perfect); ONLY because it pales in comparison to Johnny English.
By: Universal Studios / Working Title Pictures / StudioCanal / Tiger Aspect Pictures
Cast: Rowan Atkinson, Willem Dafoe, Emma de Caunes, Jean Rochefort, Max Baldry
Directed by: Steve Bendelack

When I saw the review in HT, where Vinayak Chakraborty said this movie was ‘Bean there done that’, I was sort of disappointed. He blasted it for using old jokes. Never mind, assholes that most critics are, I walked out satisfied out of the theatre. In what apparently will be the last appearance of Bean, a few scenes used old jokes, but it fitted in well – it’s really nostalgic. Seriously, the only thing Vinayak Chakraborty ever does is tell us which movies the actors have acted in earlier, which movies the director has directed earlier etc. It seems from the bloated face on accompanying photo that all he does when he goes to watch a movie is gorge on some complimentary nachos thrown in by PVR. In contrast to what he said about it being ‘totally slapstick’, I found it very engaging and funny, with loads of hidden jokes and sarcasm.

The story is about Bean who wins a raffle and wins a holiday to France, along with a Sony handycam. He goes there (and you’ll see some amazing raw cam footage throughout the movie), and after much ‘traveling’, reaches the station. There he makes a Russian jury member of the Cannes Film Festival get separated from his son, and the son then takes revenge by making Bean miss his train at a later station. The rest of the movie is how the duo try to get to Cannes after Bean has lost everything, and it’s one wild fun ride from there. I won’t tell more of the story beyond that, because it’d spoil all the fun… 😉

I have to admit that this movie will NOT be liked in India – simply because the majority of the movie going public here aren’t comfortable by the style adopted by the movie. I, on the other hand, simply LOVE the style. In contrast to the first Bean movie, this one has almost NO dialogs – it’s more about Bean and his antics, which remain funny and fresh as usual. What I liked even more though is the mix-match of camera footage, and handycam footage from Bean’s camera. Sony does excellent brand placement in the movie (remember Casino Royale? THAT was brand overkill by Sony…), and you’d really want to buy a Sony handycam by the end of it. After all, who thought that a Sony handycam can go on for hours and hours recording all the time, needing only a small 15-20 minute break after more than 24 hours? My, it has so much storage too then I guess. :p

Anyway, besides that error, the effect of a story being told through Bean’s viewpoint using the handycam footage is really engrossing, BUT that it EXACTLY why people won’t like it in India. The OTHER reason why it’ll not be liked in India is because the crowd won’t GET most of the jokes. For example, one oft-repeated joke in the movie is when Bean say ‘Gracias’ (it’s Spanish) whenever he has to say ‘thank you’, and my laughter was pretty much echoing in the hall because apart from me, only a handful of other people got it. Now THAT is a dampener. And believe me, there were MANY other moments when the crowd didn’t GET the joke [shakes fist in consternation].

A thing about the music (or Rach will pester me to death) – thankfully, it’s not cheesy like the ones on the TV series, or the first Bean movie. Frankly, I found the soundtrack on the above two mildly irritating, but this one doesn’t make that mistake. You’ve quite a few stretches without much distracting soundtrack in this movie.

Rach kept on asking me what “William Defoe’s role” was in the movie. I don’t know about ‘William Defoe’, but Willem Dafoe had a part in the film as famous actor-director Carson Clay. Sample this funny moment at the Cannes Film Festival (in the movie, that’s where Bean ends up at) where his new movie is being shown – the movie starts, and the intro credits are: “a CARSON CLAY production [pause] of a CARSON CLAY film [pause] featuring CARSON CLAY”. Dafoe hasn’t much to do in the movie, except show how moronic some directors are. Watch out for this scene, because this is one of the MOST hilarious in the whole movie, because this is when Bean crashes in and while the audio is of Clay’s movie, plays his own footage from his camera. Listen to the dialogs and correlate them to the video on screen, and it’ll have you ROFL. Act like the typical Indian movie-goer (which means “Don’t pay much attention to dialogs”), and you’ll find it boring.

Mr Bean’s Holiday is a fitting end to the Bean franchise (maybe?) – it’s is wildly funny, and yet, at one level, thought-provoking. It definitely has an undercurrent about a narrative on human nature. Rowan Atkinson may have found Bean to irritating and overpowering to continue with, but he definitely shines through in this one, as he always does. This is one movie which you’ll like if you get sarcasm without much thinking, otherwise, you’ll end up with a feeling that you were robbed at the box office. And I just LOVE the raw footage!

And then, I’m getting really irritated with PVR. When I went to watch 300, they had had some major problems. Similar things happened when I went to watch Bean – they gave a bloody TWENTY minute long interval TEN minutes before the movie ended, during which my tongue was as dry as parchment as I couldn’t leave to get my refill. Also, one thing I don’t like about theatre crowds is that they empty the hall in a few seconds, and I always like sticking around for the credits, but have to move before I can see them because the guards / employees think I’m some lunatic as I’m always the last to leave. Sigh.