ankurb – Page 397 – Ankur Banerjee's personal blog

Tagore International School (Vasant Vihar) held their ‘Commerce & Humanities Competition’ Commties 2007 today, 3rd September 2007. Nothing bug, just four events – Aktad (pathetic name, ad-enact event), Impromptu (relatively better name, extempore), Politickle (best name, political caricature event), and Eureka (extremely cliched name, quiz event). Nice place for a computer science student (ahem, me) and a biology stream student (Varun) to go for the quiz. Ended up coming second in the quiz. Maybe commerce guys would have done better. Maybe they wouldn’t.

Day started as usual, setting off late because (other) people hadn’t turned up and stuff. Thankfully, not much of a delay because of anyone drinking tea. School’s close-by to DPS VK anyway. Written prelim had 25 questions to be answered in 20 minutes. The morons conducting it delayed it a lot – first they’d allotted all teams a letter, and then refused to start off until everyone was in the correct room according to their letter AND they were sitting in the correct order. Prelims itself were a joke – we got pretty much everything, and it was pretty general. So pathetic that I don’t even feel like typing out and putting this stuff up here. Left the room early to be the early birds at the refreshment counter, only that they didn’t give us any worms. Came back to endure a HUGE round of extempore and ad-enacts – some were good, most were boring. What was most irritating is that they had team letters for all schools from A to Z, and then A1 and B1 too. Time seemed relative, and even listening to h2g2 on my cell didn’t help.

Finally, time for the quiz finals came. The qualifying teams – us (top scorers in prelims), DPS RKP (not Ishaan, some commerce guys), St Columba’s (commerce folks again), and Amity. I guess we were the only students in an eco-fest. Still we picked up point and were leaders in the beginning in some of the more general rounds. Time soon came for hardcore eco though and we sunk faster than Titanic. A sample from the acronyms round, with our reactions:

1. NSSO – “Huh?”
2. CRR (our direct) – With no idea at ALL, we tried to make something up, “Erm, Calculated Revenue…”; [Quizmaster] “Wrong!”
3. SLR – “Wait! I know this! Single Lens Reflex!”. Actually, it turned out to be some liquidity ~~shit~~ piss.
4. PPP – “Ah, I know this. Pay Per Post. And it’s e-commerce too.” Turned out to be ‘Purchasing Power Parity’.

You get the drift don’t you? Still, we were surprised to see those eco chaps struggling to identify Arun Sarin (of Vodafone) while we got it. Missed a few sitters though. We were leading for a major sections of the quiz, but whenever we had those hardcore eco / politico rounds, our score took a hit. Finally, DPS RKP won in the rapid fire round, with us coming second.

The moral of the story is that me and Varun only went to miss the Monday test. And oh yes, do take a sensible eco person along in the future.

My rating of the movie Transformers (Yahoo! Movies page): 6.0 / 10
Directed by: Michael Bay
Cast: Jon Voight, Megan Fox, Shia LaBouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Anderson, Rachael Taylor
Released by: Paramount Pictures

Pop quiz – what do you get when you decide to make a movie based on a Hasbro toy line, and team that up with a director with a penchant for over-the-top delivery like Michael Bay and the financial backing of Steven Spielberg? The answer is Transformers. This movie IMHO, should only be seen for a) Megan Fox (a big reason in itself); b) the somewhat cool special effects (most of which were done by Industrial Light & Magic).

In brief, the story can be summed up in this – two races of extraterrestrial robots, the Autobots and the Decepticons, decide to fight it out on Earth for something called the ‘All Spark’, a cube-like thingy which can bring mundane devices to life. That, is where the story starts and ends. Throw in a couple of sex-starved teenagers with prominent in-movie advertising, and there you go. It seems that Hasbro / Michael Bay approached a bunch of excited young 8-year hyperactive kids who empty whole packs of sugar-bomb cereals daily, made them write a ‘story’, passed it on to a different set of sex-starved teenagers, and then put in the usual Hollywood mumbo jumbo to make this movie. +10 for style, minus 42 for nonsense.

Watch a trailer of the movie Transformers

I’ve talked about my digust of trashy tech scenes in movies, and Transformers works overtime to ensure that. Sure, sprinkle the whole set with Macbooks, but where the hell is the OS? Again, some *evil* Decepticon virus breaks into their defence network in ’10 seconds’. Suits me fine – it’s ET tech, that can happen; in fact their hot analyst chick (Rachael Taylor) wonders about it and says ‘even a supercomputer with brute force would have taken 20 years’. But then, that same hot analyst chick then takes it too some ‘zis hacker guy’ who can crack through their code in less than *5 seconds*. Right. Must be a PC from the Intel Core 2 Quad line, eh? :p Without being too demanding I’d also like to point out the ‘geek’ they brought in looked nowhere geeky, uhuh, not at all. And guess what, since the movie producers were paying this hot analyst chick woman for the tech-(trash)-talk, they decided to dispense with the need to buy firewalls on the set. So with a whole battalion of people monitoring defence networks, it *HAD* to be this hot analyst chick working in cordoned off area on some transmission from a US base in Qatar who had to find out the security breach on the network.

The other thing I got really pissed off about was the whole in-movie promotion thing. Using Linkin Park’s What I’ve Done (from their album Minutes To Midnight) in the movie is overkill, especially when the scenes had nothing to do with what anything had done except that Shia LaBouf was attempting to swallow Megan Fox’s tongue at that time. Then, there’s the Panasonic overkill – at one point that hot analyst chick simply copies data onto an SD card (a 2 GB one, if you really wanted to know) and walks out of a top-secret US military facility, but when she copies it and takes it out of the card reader, the camera perceptibly holds it and fills the Panasonic logo on the SD card. I did mention the whole Apple Macbook thing earlier too, but that’s ok. There’s the eBay overkill – it’s featured quite a few times in the movie. Apparently, these alien bots learnt about our culture using the World Wide Web and eBay. Talking about search engine superiority, it becomes clear after watching Transformers that even they prefer Yahoo! Search – because that’s what they use in come scenes. Of course, there’s the Chevy overkill.

Basically, if you desperately want to enjoy this movie, you’ll need to switch off your mind to enjoy it. Watch it for the so-so effects it has – it’s nothing path-breaking like 300 actually. Transformers‘ SFX gives you a feeling of deja vu, because this sort of stuff has been done. My bet for the visual effects Oscar would be 300, although I get this sad feeling that the moronic Oscar jury will give 300 the thumbs-down just because it’s gory. Transformers is a one-time popcorn flick that you wouldn’t mind if you accidentally broke its DVD.

PS – Megan Fox is so damn hot in this movie too! Remember her from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen as Carla Santini?