Veruthey Oru Bhaarya

Veruthey Oru Bhaarya (Malayalam, release 2008)

This is a malayalam movie which got excellent reviews from everywhere.But I didn't find anything that great about this movie.

Movie is about a house wife who is never appreciated by her husband (Jayaram) for all the never ending chores she does in the house. She has enough and walks out on him, leaving him with their teen daughter. The guy doesn't know how to manage the house, his daughter lands up in trouble with another guy, guy becomes obsessively suspicious of everything and becomes sort of like a psycho. Finally mom returns and everything is brought back to normal.

Some of the situations in this movie feel like they have been created just for the sake of creating a situation, feels unreal. You watch the movie with casually and suddenly the story goes in directions which makes you say 'what the hell!!!"

Anyway, for the most part this is a watchable movie. Just that this is no Srinivasan story here, so there are small flaws here and there.

Jayaram has done ok and Gopika is nice too. Songs are nice.

Match made in heaven

Rab Ne Bana di Jodi (Hindi, released 2009)

I am starting to enjoy all these Yash Raj movies simply because they are great entertainers. These are very colorful movies, a fun to watch. Of course, don't expect a Srinivasan kind of story when you see these. We are talking pure entertainment value here.

A geeky looking guy (Shah Rukh Khan in a new make up) ends up getting married to a pretty girl (or so they say) in an unsual situation. The girl doesn't love him, but he does. So he comes up with an idea to change himself to win the girl's heart. Now comes the usual Shah Rukh Khan. The girl doesn't suspect that the two guys are the same because they do look different. She eventually falls for the modern version.

Watch the movie to see what happens next. Shah Rukh Khan in both the roles is rather funny in this movie. So is his friend, though I don't know the name of that actor. The girl is a new face, she has done ok too. Shah Rukh Khan in the modern macho role is especially fun to watch.

Nice, fun movie. Nothing gets too serious. You can go home easy after the movie.

Njaan Kadavul

Njaan Kadavul (released 2009)

This is a rather weird one. A man goes to kaasi with his young boy and comes back leaving the boy there, because some astrologer told him that the boy is bringing his family bad luck. After 15 years or so, the guy goes back to Kaasi with his daugther to search for his son and bring him back.

The boy has now grown into a man (Arya) and is now a swami, the type of swamis who walk around with skull and cross bones as a necklace. The violent, drug loving swami who lashes out at all evil and who has the power to take lives (Aghori).

So the son comes back to the village with his Dad. On a parallel story we have a group of beggars living there who is headed by a man who uses them for profit. This is where the story becomes a bit tough to watch. These beggars look like the real ones we see in India, people with various deformities.It's their story too. Some scenes are really tough to watch, so this is not for kids at all.

Anyway, the story goes on about the life of one particular blind girl (pooja, I really don't know how they made her look like that. Amazing) who is brought into the beggar group. They try to sell her off, the other beggars save her, Arya saves her, they again catch her, hurt her bad. And Arya saves her,as to how, is something you need to see the movie for.

Watchable movie, but let me warn you, not an easy one to sit through though the story is not bad at all and the acting is 100% true by everyone. Hats off to Arya and Pooja for donning such exceptionally different roles.

Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu

Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu (released 2009)

Movie is about a kabbadi team in a rural village in Tamil Nadu. They love their team and the game, but tend to lose in all the matches. So everyone makes fun of them, until they finally land up in a
situation where they have a great coach to train them.

It's a very simple movie, easy going, all new faces. It's taken very well. The amazing part is you will
like it even if you don't know anything about kabbadi. I really enjoyed it, except the last one scene.

So I would ask you to watch this movie for sure, but if you can don't watch the last minutes. Every
scene of this movie good, except for the last or in other words 99% of the movie is excellent.

Poo

Poo (tamil, released 2008)

This is about love, the kind of love that makes you ask 'is there really such a love?'. A village backdrop,Girl loves a boy when in school and in all innocence her ambition in life is to be his wife. They grow up, and eventually the boy moves to a big city for his studies. Girl stays back in the village itself doing asmall time job. She eagerly waits to see him whenever he returns to the village, though he doesn't see her love now. Finally he understands her love, but then there are some complications and so on.

Parvati as the girl has done a wonderful job, the story is actually about her. The hero Srikanth doesn't have much to do in this movie. Though the love in this movie is rather out of this world, they have made it very convincing and touching.

But the ending leaves you confused. It's as if you are the middle of an action sequence and suddenly the curtain drops and you are being told the movie ended!. If not for the ending, I would have really liked this movie. But defenitely a watchable movie.

Abhiyum Naanum

Abhiyum Njaanum (Tamil, released 2008)

Story is primarily about a father-daugther relationship. Prakash Raj and Trisha plays the part. Very nice movie. I am sure fathers who have daughters can easily see themselves in this movie. It's about the protective father, and how he deals with his daugther growing up, becoming independent, falling in love with a guy, marriage and so on. The story is told in a comical way, with it's touching moments. If you are a dad and you have a daugther, this is a must see. Otherwise too, this is a not to be missed movie. You can walk away from the theater with a nice feeling at the end of this movie. Prakash Raj as usual is excellent. Trisha too is good.

Golmaal.....returns.

Golmaal Returns (Hindi, released 2009)

This is the sequel to Golmaal, which is one movie I thoroughly enjoyed. That was when I found that Ajay Devgan could do comedy just great.

Anyway, this is an all out comedy movie. But I didn't find it as funny as Golmaal. I felt that Arshad Warsi was wasted here. But still, this is quite funny, not all serious and so go see it for fun.

Dil Kabbadi !

Dil Kabbadi (Hindi, released 2008)

This has a very adult theme, though very funny mostly.Irfan Khan can really make you laugh. Read somewhere that the plot of this is same as Woody Allen's husbands and wives. But I didn't see that, so I can't comment.

Story about two couples. The husband/wife losing interest in each other, falling into other relationships etc. Don't worry, there are no explicit scenes in here, it's just the theme and dialogues that are adults only here. And like I said, I found it funny.

I would say, it's a good comedy movie with an adult theme. Certainly watchable without kids or without kids who can understand the dialogues!

Varnam Aayiram

Varnam Aayiram (Tamil, released 2008)

Surya stars in this movie, which is about a father/son relationship. Surya plays a double role both as the father and son and he is done a good job. Story about a Dad who is more like a good friend to his son. The son grows up, falls in love with a girl, goes abroad, comes back all disoriented and so on. Though there is no real suspense, I won't ruin anything by telling you anymore.

The story naturally has a lot of touching moments, so get ready to feel choked up quite a bit. But it is nice movie, defenitely watchable. One of the best father/son (or sons) movie I have ever seen was Cheran's Thavamai Thavamirundhu, this one comes pretty close.

One of the most anticipated movies in 2008, watchable for sure.

Start..Action...Cut

Here begins my never ending review of movies!

Welcome to SajjanPur (Hindi, released 2008):

Nice movie, something along the Malgudi days style (though there is no little boy here). It is a story set in a rural village backdrop, about a guy who makes a living writing letters for others (who doesn't know how to read/write). The story is mostly told with a comic touch, so it's a ligh hearted movie which will make you laugh. It has it's touching moments at times. Only thing to watch out for is, the hindi is pretty hard to follow because it's rural hindi I guess. So either concentrate on the dialogues or see it on video with subtitles.

Made by Shyam Benegal, so it's quality cinema we are dealing with here. Shreyas Talpade leads the cast and does a good job.

Defenitely a clean, light, very watchable movie.

Buy an anti-spyware software, is that enough?

Struck Again!

So what if I have a paid version of McAfee VirusScan Plus which is supposed to deal with viruses,
trojans and spyware and all that jazz. And what if I made sure McAfee was frequently updated so that it had the latest databases. Well, that just ain't enough!

I found this the hard way a few days back when my PC started becoming slower and slower up a point where it was pretty useless. It would boot into XP and then would just sit there with the hourglass turning. There would be a random message saying my PC was infected and it needed to perform a scan and this wasn't from McAfee, I had a visitor or visitors in my PC!

The only way to go was to boot into safe mode, because in normal mode it just sat there with a busy
mouse pointer. So restart the PC, press F8 while restarting and select 'safe mode with networking'. So I am in safe mode and now I have to figure out what program to run.

I did have Malwarebyte's Anti-malware installed, but that wouldn't open up. So I finally found a tool
called "avenger.exe" which would run from safe mode (a lot of the other utilities wouldn't). It asked me to reboot the PC in order to continue the process. It then rebooted into normal mode and I got a message from avenger saying it had found some stuff and had cleaned it. So now, I was in a position to run malwarebyte's anti-malware which found a ton of other stuff in my PC. Had it clean all those up. Took off Mcafee, downloaded and installed Avast free version and I am back in form again.

Moral of the story, viruses/trojans now are much more sophisticated that what we had years before. So arm yourself with all the best ammunition you can gather (tools like Avenger etc).

Have a root kit free 2009!

Me Vs the 'Virtumonde '

Yesterday when I opened up my PC, I found that Internet Explorer wouldn't open up. It would just flash and close immediately. And XP's windows explorer wouldn't open either. And out of the blue, IE would suddenly pop up a window showing me a web site like prosearch.com and also some other never heard of before search sites. So I knew, some spyware/trojan had gotten into my PC somehow. And so I eventually find out that what is in there is a spyware program called Virtumonde. (Virus and spyware writers have an easy job of naming their programs. The first word that comes to their mind is what they name it. So not surprisingly none of them makes sense, not that I care)

Anyway while it was causing complete havoc on my IE, the ever faithful Firefox worked like a charm. These sort of browser hijacking problems never occur with Firefox yet we still continue to use IE! We only have ourselves to blame. On with the situation at hand, removing this sucker was no easy task let me tell you. Gone are the days when viruses were easier to troubleshoot!. It took from 7PM to 2AM to get this thing removed from my machine. The process went something like this:

Boot into safe mode, run HijackThis (which gives you a list of the suspicious registry entries),
Install and Run Spybot Search and Destroy, Install and run Ewido AntiSpyware (amazing program, I ought to buy this!) and run a Virtumonde removal tool. The spyware scan itself takes a long time.

Incidentally, my machine had the very 'efficient' microsoft's own anti spyware - Windows Defender. It didn't have a clue as to what was going on!. And I also have microsoft's antivirus - Windows OneCare Live - again no help.

It finally looks like my machine is free of this pestware (is there such a term?. I bet there is even something called sh*tware, for referring to sh*tty programs of course). But now I will be careful because I have seen how this thing works and how damn difficult it is to remove this.

So the moral of the story is, surf safe and use a good anti spyware program (non microsoft). And no, it's not enough if you have an anti-virus. You need an anti-spyware too, unless your anti-virus program can handle spywares too (keep in mind that a lot of them cannot or will not).

techsoul ?? who are you trying to kid ?

A blog is more or less like keeping a personal diary. Those of you who have ever had a diary writing habit will know that a diary is a very personal thing. You write things on your diary which you might not want anyone to see, and I mean no one!. Well, at least I was like that. But since a blog is a public version of a private diary, I think I can do justice to this blog only if I remain 'faceless'. Maybe it's a hangover from my diary writing days.

so here's me, very truthfully yours... or so I try. And in case you were wondering, no, I don't normally walk around with a bag over my head :-P

keeping it simple

Before I begin, here is the fine print, a disclaimer if you will!

1. What I say is my own opinion
2. What I say may or may not make sense
3. What I say is not intended to offend anyone

I have this blog because I like having one. I would be happy to know if someone found anything in here interesting or useful in any way. On a technical note, though I am a computer professional please use your own judgment before trying out anything I mention here.

samarpanam

I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side.

The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.
Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,

and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.
Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.
Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee,

and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.

~Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali)