Saturday, March 30, 2013

G.I. Joe: Retaliation - Sheer disappointment



Cast: Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum, Adrianne Palicki, Ray Park, Jonathan Pryce and Lee Byung-hun 

Running Time: Approx 1 hour 45 minutes


Dear Friends,

First of all belated happy holi to all of you. I hope this holi would have brought lots of joy in your life. For me it was an opportunity to break the routine and so I broke it by playing with small quantity of colors with my family after a gap of more than decade and it was indeed a happy surprise for them and in turn I felt happy too. Happiness is so infectious but obviously it should be of your loved ones not enemies :). Happiness of enemies is infectious too but in bad way.




Coming to the movie, sorry in advance for spamming the mailboxes of all those who are not fan of action movies. This weekend 2 major movies got released; I required to be super duper himmatwala to bear Sajid Khan's Himmatwala and even in my worst mental condition I can not think of watching that.The other movie which got released was much awaited movie for me. Here much awaited means I have been waiting for one year as the movie was earlier planned to be released in 2012 which was delayed till end of march 2013 to convert it into 3D. I liked the action in prequel G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and expected this to have at least same amount of action if not more than that.

Initially I planned to watch it with my friend in Noida in 3D but as an integral bad dream of software engineer's life, he got some production issues to spend his whole day with.I asked always ready to be my partner in crime; my brother to accompany me and thankfully he agreed this time also. As usual we were late again in entering the cinema hall so missed the first 5 minutes :(. Hope I did not miss much of it.

I have this problem while watching the sequels and you might be having the same problem too. As soon as movie starts, comparison started with prequel and my mind tried scene by scene mapping; expecting some similar level of action to begin. Though director of this part was different (Jon M. Chu; Director of Step up movies), he followed the same route. War sequence in start of prequel was matched with war sequence here too, though unexpectedly one major character of movie died in this.

You might have read or heard or experienced before also that English action movies are dumb and are mostly without story but this movie is an exception. This is much much dumber. I do not expect action movies to have any great mind boggling story but atleast for god sake there should be something which can keep the interest alive. If there is no story then I expect continuous action sequences but unfortunately if I leave bits and pieces of action, real action started after one hour of start and ended within 5 minutes.
This was one spectacular never seen before fight scene of samurais on the mountains of Himalayas. This is the only scene which I wished I could have seen in 3D. 

As there is no story so there is nothing to reveal. G.I. Joe is special team of USA for special missions which got destroyed as planned by team of antagonists by using political power as weapon. Survivors of G.I. Joe team regrouped and save the world by fighting with villains.

Movie kept on moving slowly without any story with some twists which were unexpected and unwanted. If you have seen and remember the prequel, one of the most enjoyed part was fighting scenes of Snake eyes and Storm shadow and here when they become one team it meant all that fighting got missed :(. Characters were half developed and every scene seems to be borrowed from mission impossible and die hard series. Only one actor impressed, Jonathan Pryce playing the role of Zartan disguised as president of USA. He was really excellent in his dialogue delivery. Bruce Willis was more of a guest appearance and in absence of any main character, it can be painfully assumed that Dwayne Johnson aka Rock was the main protagonist of movie. Adrianne Palicki tried hard to look glamorous but she looked quite older than her age of 30 years. 

After crawling without any objective for around 1 hour and 30 minutes, when in the end villain's main objective came up there was no surprise. If there are no aliens in English movie then one of the 2 things remain; Virus/chemical weapon or nuclear weapons. Chemical weapon was used in first installment so there is no award for guessing the central objective of this one. Yes, you need not be a Nobel prize winner to guess that once again Nuclear weapon is the idea which story writers have come up with. Only creativity is that they thought of using satellites launching the weapons.

In the climax, I waited for any one of the characters to press the stop button at the last moment to stop the destruction of world and yesss we were going to be destroyed yet saved again by USA. I must applaud the writers to give a very good message as a part of climax that whole world is sitting on the heap of nuclear weapons and buttons are lying in the hands of corrupt and illiterate politicians and slight laziness or foolishness of them can destroy whole countries or even humanity. But decision is in the hand of the authorities and average movie goer like me cannot do anything and this movie was so much below average that no one will notice this.

Finally, I will say that you can avoid this movie and only in one situation can watch this if you want to watch any movie with your friends this weekend and want to save your mind from torture of watching 
HIMMATWALA :). Too much bashing for Sajid Khan but he deserves that for this movie :).


Thanks for reading. Keep smiling.


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Hello Friends..Welcome Back to my world!!!!!


Hello friends. 

Hope all of you are doing great in your respective lives. It has been approximately 15 months since I communicated with you through my blog.

This was like an exile period for me as 2012 was one of the most forgettable year of my life and I am bit relieved that finally its over but not sure how much time it will take for its traces to disappear from my life. I am really thankful to all of you who stood by my side in this period and kept on listening to my rubbish talks with all the patience in the world and kept reminding me that I am not bad to that extent which I was made to feel. Many Thanks to all of you again.

With your efforts and best wishes I have gathered enough courage to start interacting with all of you again. First of all belated happy new year and happy holi to all of you in advance.
Last year was said to be the year where world will end and I was almost wishing for that but as the director of famous movie '2012' on this disaster was busy in making movie to release in 2013 so there was not even minute chance of becoming it a reality. Many of the english people made fool  of themselves by staying in bunkers or moving to mountains after selling their property but we Indians as usual were happy as even though it was end of world but it was free of cost. 

It was not entirely a rumor, there was end of world for many of my friends in 2012 and in early 2013. Don't take it in negative way. End of world is not always a bad thing if it results in start of new world. Many of my friends got married and thus an altogether new world started for them filled with new responsibilities unknown to them till now. Some of  the married friends became parents which again was like a start of new world in which responsibilites became more than doublefold giving them the taste of what their parents must have said to them many times when my friends were not listening to them  "You will come to know when you will become parents".  Remember this phrase?

Now its upon you to decide whether your old world was better or you are enjoying more in new world :). We as a friend can just say best of luck and keep on reminding you that life is no longer the same for you :).

I would like to use this medium to give my heartily congratulations to my friends who made their parents very happy by getting married in 2012/2013:

(Thought of adding references so that its easy to identify common friends)

Shikha Singh (Satyam), Ritu Ranjan (Birlasoft), Anurag Sharma (NC College, Accenture), Karanbir Ahluwalia (Satyam), Harjot Sidhu (Satyam, Birlasoft), Ayshna Kaushik (Satyam), Ashok Kumar (NC College), Isha Chwala (Birlasoft), Amit Sharma (NC College),Pankaj Sehgal (NC College), Shiv Kumar Sharma (SD School), Ramji Pandey (Satyam, BirlaSoft), Ashish Gupta (NC College), Aman Arora (NC College), Priyanka Salaria (Satyam, HCL), Indranil Biswas (Satyam), Anil Malik (NC College), Rajan Chugh (HCL, Macquarie), Vishnu Singh (Birlasoft), Vikram Chandna (NC College) and Amit Rastogi (BirlaSoft)

I might not able to recall all the names and as I am not on facebook too (which is only medium now a days for being socially active) so I am really sorry if I missed your name. This also signifies that you have not invited me to your marriage :).

Many congratulation to the friends who promoted further by becoming parents and made their parents much happier by giving them their much awaited smaller version of you (Believe me wait starts as soon as you enter the world)   

Sumit Goyal (Satyam, BirlaSoft)  and Shinni (Sumit's wife), Preeti Gupta (Satyam, BirlaSoft) (End of 2011), Pradeep Kumar (Birlasoft) (Twins), Manjeet Singh (NC College), Vikash Kundu (NC College), Divya Puri (Satyam),  Jasleen Sachdeva (Satyam), Sandeep bhardwaj (Satyam), Ashish Rastogi (BirlaSoft, Satyam, HCL), Prateek Suneja(Satyam), HITESH ARORA (NC College) ( Latest entry in the list, blessed with an angel) and Swati Srivastava (Satyam)

Best of luck to my friends who have decided to take the risk and will soon sacrifice their bachelorhood in 2013:

Ankit Goyal (Macquarie), Sumit Narang (NC College), Dixit Pasricha (NC College), Ravneet Singh (Satyam), Ajay Kumar (BirlaSoft), Rashi Goyal (BirlaSoft) and Achin Gupta (BirlaSoft).

Many congratulations to those friends also who I missed in the lists above.

I am not sure whether rest of my friends who have almost finalized their life partners are comfortable in letting the world know or not so I will not disclose their names.

There are some of my friends lined up for becoming parents soon and again this might be confidential thing and I will not let their surprise known to you before them :).

Why to leave those friends who are happily managing their married life. Congratulations to those friends also who have completed their first anniversary or second, third and so on. Wish you make silver, golden or even platinum jubilee. 

My friends who are still bachelors I will just like to say best of luck in both the cases whether you want to get married or want to remain bachelor. Latter is much tougher thing as everyone around you will use every way possible to convince you to lose your bachelorhood but in the end its your decision.

I feel this post has become more of a newsletter and as it was a long time since I wrote so I 
thought of  dedicating this to the my priceless friends (in place of waiting till friendship day) as it is said "Friends are God's way of taking care of us" so friends please take care of yourselves and your friends and be in touch.

Before signing off, one small update from my side also. Please don't think otherwise, its nothing like linked to my marriage. Its for all of you who are not aware that I am back to Noida so whoever planning to come to noida or in noida and wish to meet then just drop an email or give me a call/sms (SMS in case if I don't pick up the phone) on +919717771457 and I would love to meet you.

Bye bye till my next post and thanks for reading it through.

I would love to see comments/updates from all of you.