Forget me not....

Just been to see my first real Bollywood movie. It was called Ghajin, a hindi remake of a tamil remake of Memento.Ok... to get this off my chest to start with... it was pretty damn bad.

So the first 10-20 minutes of the movie were ok(ish), kind of a standard action movie, of a very impressively buff Amir Kahn kicking some guys ass, then working out who he is etc.... The movie takes the basic idea of Memento (and everything else), that the main character has no short term memory. In fact the director goes as far as to write this at the beginning of the movie just in case people can't work it out. Anyhow, the first 20 minutes is not half bad as an action remake of memento. Then the horror sets in...

Suddenly, the movie drops into a flash back of our protagonist's life before he looses his memory. In summary, he's the owner of a huge cell phone company, amazingly rich and successful. A cute girl trying to get a break in the advertising film company she works in makes up a story that the big shot guy is in love with her and they're going to get married. Her boss is amazed, gives her breaks in the hope that the big shot will raise the profile of the company. The guy, hearing that a crazy woman is claiming to be engaged to him, secretly goes to see her, pretending to be an actor (she doesn't know what the big shot looks like), he falls for her. Much hilarity in sues... He ends up going to the company christmas party (where the big shot is the guest of honour), pretending to be himself (try and keep up). Even more hilarity ensues.

Ok, so that's the flashback... except that it isn't a flashback in the sense I'm used to, it is a whole (1.5 hour) romantic comedy that is dropped into the middle of the action film. As this is Bollywood, there are several song and dance numbers, which fit in as naturally as a sumo wrestler in a nunnery.

Thankfully, half way through this there is an interval..... Then it just keeps on going, dropping back into gritty action (think John Woo with indian accents), the girl rescues a train full of abducted children, is latter hunted down and killed in front of our hero, who is lobotomised at the same time, hence the memory loss. Eventually revenge is got, with the help of a somewhat awkwardly inserted female med-student character. There are more songs, people die, people cry, eventually memory man ends up caring for small orphans (I'm actually serious).

Apart from my basic hatred of musicals, whatever language they are in, it was just a damn strange movie. Most of the dialogue was terrible, the writers took the idea of memento, simplified it lots, took out all of the confusing cut scenes and re ordering. Added lots of fights and more cute women (although being a good Indian movie no one gets kissed). My guess is that after this, a studio exec decided that there weren't enough songs, or is wasn't enough of a family movie, so dropped almost a whole other film into the middle. After all, who cares if the film is nearly 4 hours long, there's an interval....and now its a family movie, with singing and dancing, and I'm assuming a catchy soundtrack for the small children to buy (to drown out the nightmares of the scenes of the nice lady being beaten to death with a metal bar).

Damn damn strange. Not going to buy the DVD.

Great blog...

Just found this great blog (via BoingBoing of course). Lots of pictures of professionally decorated cakes gone wrong...
(such as the 'When Harry met Sally' cupcake above).

genius...

Cool fish tank

Totally cool, totally too expensive, totally unnecessary....still, I love these little creatures, first saw them at Underwater world in Singapore... amazing little angels...

current mood

Festive greetings

from here

I'm longing for a past age, the time of Sherlock Holmes, the time when opium was the opiate of the masses....

then I fed myself to th fish....

Went on a trip to a Fish Spa in Buggis Junction. Totally surreal experience.
You start of sitting around a small (in this case) pool (1x2m) full of doctor fish. You sit on the side, and even before you put your feet in, the fish start swarming, waiting for food. As soon as you put a toe in, a few fish latch on and start cleaning. It fells like being tickled with a rough brush. The more foot you put in, the more fish you get. Then its just a matter of sitting back for half an hour and let the fish clean your feet and eat off any dead skin. I'm not ticklish, so I quite enjoyed it, although the previous people who went were giggling lots. The fish are pretty thorough, the auntie who ran the place suggested I spread my toes a bit and immediately the fish started weaving between my toes. My feet feel very soft and pampered now, although it would probably take several hours to get rid of all of the hard skin on my heals and the balls of my feet.... Still, pretty good fun for S$15.

yet another wonderful piece of furniture...

Tea-bagging

Great design for the ends of tea bags. (from Boing-Boing)

Ninjatastic fridge magnets

Totally cool fridge magnets...

Das Experiment

(Pic from here)

Went to see an interesting play on Saturday. The Play is called "Das Experiment: Black Box". It is based on a German Movie. Which was based (loosely) on the Stanford Prison Experiment, a psychology experiment I remember studying in Psychology at school.

In a nut-shell, a group of people sign up for an experiment, in which, half will play the part of prison guards, half as prisoners. The are left in a 'mock prison' with the guards being given instructions on how to behave and how the prisoners days should be structured. This is pretty similar to the original experiment, which was stopped after 6 days because the guards and prisoners got too involved in their roles....

The cast was an interesting mix of western and local actors, with a couple of very impressive performances. (Really should have bought a program). Interestingly the play was performed in something similar to part of a mall, with a large balcony above the main area (the prison) being used as the guards room and scientists' observation rooms. This actually worked pretty well, especially as the prisoners managed to keep in their roles very well and using their body language excellently.

The part I found most interesting wasn't so much the interaction between the prisoners and guards, but the interaction between guards. The guards started with a mix of personalities, and gradually pressured and coerced each other in to conforming or ignoring what was going on. For me, the end was a bit too Hollywood, I would have been happy if they had stretched out the first half, where tensions build and people slip into their assigned roles.

An interesting exploration of the psychology of conformity and power.