Apropos Kambakkht Ishq

No, I haven’t seen it. And no, I don’t have a burning desire to see it either.

What I was wondering about was this. The reviews (1, 2) of Kambakkht Ishq on rediff mention that the movie involves a bickering couple –  a stuntman and a doctor. So does it borrow, by any chance, a reel or two for Pammal K Sambandham, that Kamalhassan starrer where he plays a stuntman and Simran plays a doc?If anyone who has seen PKS happens to see this one, please do let me know. I’ll even pay for your therapy sessions.

While on the top of not-so-promising Akshay Kumar movies, I happened to watch Chandni Chowk to China recently on TV. Aside from the fact that it mixes Manmohan Desai, Kung Fu movies, The Three Amigos and a few fish-out-of-water movies into some sort of diabolical chow mein, what struck me the most was how easily this could’ve been a good movie.

There are around 20 minutes in the middle when Akshay is going through the manddatory training sequence at the hands of a Chinese ex-cop who happens to be Deepika’s dad. It is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, and Akshay’s comic timing is just spot on. Why the hell couldn’t the rest of the movie maintain that standard? <Sigh>

 

Open question: Schrodinger’s Death Match

I woke up early on Monday morning a week ago so I could watch the Oscarcast on TV. Most of it was fairly standard — Kate Winslet’s dad whistling and Philippe Petit balancing the statuette on his chin were the highlights for me. By my reckoning, that’s slim pickings. My wife missed most of it, so when we watched the retelecast in the evening, I noticed a couple of things:

1. Dustin Lance Black’s speech (Best Original Screenplay, Milk) was snipped a little bit from the morning, specifically the part where he tells all the gay and lesbian people out there that they are beautiful creatures of value, or something on those lines.
2. Sean Penn’s speech was also snipped. Which part? The ones where he uses the phrase “You commie, homo-loving sons of guns.”

It turns out that the STAR TV network did this across Asia. Once my commie, homo-loving son-of-gun self got over its outrage, my cynical self told me that I should know better than to expect unbiased coverage. At the very least, I should know better than to expect it twice in a row.

So here’s my open question for the day: If we we have a Celebrity Death Match between Sean Penn and Rupert Murdoch, who will win?

Penn’s experience in tactfully dealing with the paparazzi makes him the odds-on favourite. However, Murdoch’s handiness with a pair of scissors means that, if he has anything to do with it, we’ll never really know how many blows Penn actually landed on him. 

What do you guys think?

 

Short takes

Open question #1: I saw a “Buy One Get One Free” offer at a shoe shop the other day (Cosmos Mall in Bangalore, if you have money to burn and feel particularly pyro today). Do they mean pairs of shoes, or is it like the “Free Hotmail Account” offer I saw ages ago at a Net surfing place in Kolkata?

Open question #2: There’s a brand of bottled water (Manikchand, I think) that has the term Oxyrich on the label. Now, we’re talking water, right? Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, last time I checked. But an Oxygen atom looks like Godzilla next to the Hydrogen atom, so two of them still doesn’t mean much. So how the heck does Manikchand manage to make water more oxygen rich than it is?

More later. Do write in if you have any more open questions to add to this list.

The tag for this port is a reference to my favourite open question of all time: If you eat a dish made out of Venus Flytrap, can you consider it vegetarian? Maybe Sharanya Manivannan could answer this one