ankurb – Page 478 – Ankur Banerjee's personal blog

I’m not Bach…

…but yes, I am BACK from my so-called vacation. Basically, it meant getting crushed under hugs from grandmom / grandpop / uncle / aunt sort of folks a lot in the Middle of Nowhere. I must confess though – I felt like a duck being prepared for a foie gras dish by Gordon Ramsay (not that he’d give it to anyone very politely, but…). It’s something that’s seemingly common to grandmoms – stuff kids with food until they beg for mercy. Once again, there were cries of “Eesh, tomake naki bangali bole” for me being vegetarian, despite the fact that this has been a fact for a long time. It helps me stay in shape though, all this. According to leading mathematicians around the world, round is also a shape.

Then, amazingly, I also took a sabbatical from all reference to technology. Rather I forced it upon myself. I did not check mails, nor even touch my cellphone to try and beat my high score of 6002400 in Club Pinball. Sigh. It was TOUGH. In the end, I couldn’t take it any longer and read (and reread and rereread…) this month’s issue of PC World.

The highlight of the trip though was the collection of NASA space shuttle flight mission medallions – by grandad has a collection of most of them. These are limited edition memorabilia released by NASA after each mission, depicting the intent of the mission, mission duration and astronauts who went up. Quite a few of them though, hell, many, had their intent written as ‘Confidential Department of Defense mission’. I hadn’t seen any of these medallions earlier, and my, were they stunning. I had an awesome pic of the whole lot, but somehow Mr Butter Finger Me managed to delete them from my cell. Thankfully, I DO have the three most important ones below. The one thing was, in of the medallions, they actually got the landing date wrong!

In some other updates, I was thinking of changing my blahg URL and / or name to GQ’s Blahg, but then I dropped it since I did not want to get sued for trademark violation; GQ is a magazine in real life. I did change the display name to GQ. Just wanted something short n’ sweet. I also changed the counter from Bravenet’s to StatCounter’s – because I was soon going to run out of capacity, and because Bravenet has too much downtime.

Got work to do now. I need to rebuild the Code Warriors site, and I’m also thinking of deleting, and shifting the DPS VK Quiz Club site.

Feels nice to be blogging again…

‘The Departed’ movie review

The Departed
My Rating: A (Outstanding) – Only the mindless killing-off of main characters at the end stops me from giving this an A+ which it deserves.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson

The first one minute of the opening will give you the message loud and clear – if you came to watch a family movie and dropped into this theatre by mistake, there’s still time to leave. I’ll keep this short, because I DON’T want to give the story away for this.

And why so late? I wanted to post this earlier, but after watching Marty crying after getting his Oscar, that spurred me on. Wow, he WAS overwhelmed when he got the Oscar. That too, to be given an award by his friends (Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas) when he didn’t get five times earlier must have been something. At the ceremony though George Lucas pretty much had the look of an out-of-work Santa Claus, as if he was going to clobber Marty and keep the statuette for himself. Then there was Jack Nicholson grinning sinisterly backstage, looking as if he would clobber the Three Wise Men if Marty didn’t get it. Anyway, Marty did, on a huge sympathy vote wave.

Which simply doesn’t explain this movie winning, because it deserved every bit of it. It’s not all about gore, as some people think before seeing this. It’s got an amazing story. It gives an insight into gang culture. It’s about Billy Costigan (Leo) who is a police officer working as a mole in gang lord Costello (Jack); and gangster Collin Sullivan (Matt) working as a mole in the police. The tension that tears these characters apart, the game of deception and cat-and-mouse is definitely more Spy vs Spy and not Tom and Jerry.

Personally, I’d say Matt Damon was the best, followed by Jack Nicholson. Leonardo was good too, except for the funny look on his face as if somebody had stuffed smelly garlic cloves inside his shirt.

There’s one interesting goof-up though. When you see Sullivan’s character using a normal PCs (if I’m not wrong, they show a Dell) at the police HQ, the interface on the screen looks like that of Mac OS X. Definitely Mac. I think visual effects team forgot that, the sequences of video team separate, and then recorded the screen captures in some swanky studio running Macs. The visual effects team also forgot 1) it’s not legal to run a Mac OS on a PC, and cops won’t do it; 2) cops might not have the knowledge or the time or the permission to switch OS at office; 3) all viewers are not stupid.

For music buffs, this is a treat too. They got biggies like Roger Waters and The Rolling Stones original performances, and there’s some amazing old school rock music. I still don’t get people’s fascination for associating Comfortably Numb with drugs, because I read on some music site that Roger Waters said they meant that the felt numb after getting medicines while sick in childhood.

The only thing I didn’t like is the killing off of characters. In fact, William Monahan the writer suggested a sequel, but that idea had to be dropped since, hell, all the main ones were dead anyway!

Seriously, don’t miss this movie. And don’t wait like Rach to buy a disc and rip its plastic off.