Anurag Bhandari

Simply hats off to it! A brilliant and rare combination of a thriller script, excellent performances, state-of-art direction and moral value.

Very rare will you find such movies in the Bollywood industry, where most of the movies’ stories are derived from Hollywood or the films are made keeping in mind the action and comedy loving population.

It was a relatively short movie, as compared to the normal Bollywood standards, but its every minute was full of thrill. The film was devoid of any songs, contrary to 95% Indian movies, to make sure the quality of entertainment (which we get from the thrilling and chilling moments) does not fade away.

It seemed that Naseeruddin Shah put all of his life’s experience behind his stunning performance in the film, and he admitted that in a recent interview published in a local newspaper. Anupam Kher’s was also a brilliant performance. Other notable character was that of Jimmy Shergill; his was an impressive personality.

I just hope that more of such movies are made in Bollywood and we get to see such moral imparting stories in future. Other good reason to make such films is that people would get variety!

Finally, the movie shows the world that Bollywood is also capable of making excellent movies, as is Hollywood, and does not shy in making such movies with the fear of getting lesser revenues. 10 out of 10.

The Downloads page here has been updated by new stuff, like a report-cum-seminar on Introduction to Linux – A beginner’s approach. I have also updated the Resume page with the latest version of my resume. Further updates have come in the Movies section too, with myself giving my views and reviews on the about the movies I watched recently – Ocean’s Twelve, Good Will Hunting, Rock On!!, Equilibrium and The Spiderwick Chronicles.

I am also working on improving the Jumbled Words game I prepared in Python some time ago.

The college is going fine but with tight schedules. Also, perheps, it’s time to change my modem as it has been giving my constant annoyances since more than two weeks and giving me hindrance in coming online. I am just frustrated due to it!

Assignments from college are pouring in, and so are the little and big projects from the HOD and the Computer Center in my department in college.

Cricket season is off these days. I am waiting for the forthcoming Australia-India test series to begin.

I am finding the Cryptography subject, a part of my college curriculum, very interesting.

PC-BSD 7 has been released which is looking pretty interesting at the moment, though I have yet to try it out. A pretty software I tried out recently was Elisa (media center application), built entirely in Python. It’s a good app, though not fully functional yet and hosts quite some annoying bugs. But the aesthetics are pleasing.

Yesterday, I went to see Hancock in a theatre nearby. And that was the second day of film release in India. Although the original release date was on 4th of July, the release was delayed by one whole week due to reasons unknown to me.

The way Sony had been advertising Hancock on the television and on the Internet, I was pretty sure it would be a nice watch, and that is what it turned out to be in the end. The poor rating of the movie on IMDb (6.9) and Rotten Tomatoes (37%) didn’t deter my plan to watch the movie.

Yesterday was raining and raining wildly here in Jalandhar. But the rain had stopped till the evening, and my friend and I were able to reach the theatre in time. Despite the rain, the theatre witnessed a packed crowd, eager to see the movie, just like me, maybe drawn to the movie due to the wide-scale ads on TV.

The film began and the fun started. Will Smith in his best of form, and that too a comic form, just imagine. This was till the first half, which constituted a well-written script, good acting performances, and a nice story.

The second half began and the story got intense; intense to a point I didn’t expect it to go. The second half was devoid of humor, err… wild and funny humor. Ok, nothing wrong if we take the story aspect here and that was understandable. The story went on and the second half finished as it shouldn’t have, leaving me wanting some more out of it. The ending part could have been a lot better, but it wasn’t.

Anyway, the movie ended with closing credits and I got off with my friend towards the exit point. But before we could get out, we saw a short clip between the credits. It was a nice shot, Hancock saving yet another life.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad watch, it was rather nice watching it. But because of the second half, I am giving it a rating of 7, though I usually do not do this much harm to Will Smith starers.

Who knows Hancock could spark a new generation of superhero, a frustrated superhero (as they used to call him in the trailers)? Maybe, this was the first of the Hancock series to come ahead…

Oh boy,what a movie it was. I have from my childhood been a big fan of Batman. What ever type of a Batman fan I was, I was no big a fan than my best friend. He was kind of a “super” fan for Batman.

Anyway, as I was talking about this movie, I had a damn good time watching it. The first half was just incredible; nice story, nice acting, and nice direction. The second half was almost all action, but then, good quality action.

It is no wonder that this movie gets a 10/10 rating from me, and let me tell you that it is one of the rarest movies to get a 10 out of 10 from me.

I am eagerly awaiting the sequel to this movie – The Dark Knight.

I have since long been a fan of martial arts and kung-fu movies. Before watching this one, I had heard a lot of good things, particularly about its comedy. I got to see this movie today, and I must say what a watch it was.

Right from the beginning till the end, the movie was entertaining. This has to be one of the best Jackie Chan movies I’ve ever seen. Plotted in an ancient, mystical world, it had everything to be remembered for a long time. Although a bit predictive at times, the story was overall good. But I guess the “predictive” nature of the movie in my mind could just be because I’ve seen these type of movies in the past, like Lord of the Rings and alike (in terms of story).

And yes, the comedy was indeed good, if not the best, especially Jackie Chan scenes. And those of Jet Li too. Did I say Jet Li (that serious looking guy)? Yup, Jet Li was all impressive with his martial arts and a little bit of humor.

I would conclude my sayings on this movie by the very much cliched statement “It is a must watch!”, especially if you are an adventure & comedy lover, though I wish the martial art scenes were a little better and more realistic, especially the “kick-in-the-air” ones. But you don’t have to conclude anything with this point of mine; the martial arts fight scenes were incredible.

The Forbidden Kingdom will certainly go down in history as a very good Chinese fantastical story based movie.

IMDB Profile

Wikipedia Entry