Cyriac George

Simply the B.E.S.T.

I dont have anything other than that for Slumdog Millionaire. First of all let me make a request to you guys, I made a mistake by watching this on my laptop. This is one of the very few films that you must watch in the movie halls. So please dont spoil the fun and do watch it in theaters.

What is so special about Slumdog Millionaire? Forget the awards and those big names you hear. It is simply an awesome movie. It has many thing which the films now-a-days lacks. Orginiality, Drama, Perfection, Suspense, Touch from real lives, Direction, Entertaining, Locations, Sets, Cast (!), Camera… the list goes on. Am not a serious film watcher or a genius in the film world, so i dont know the technical terms that is out there, which actually should be in the list above. So please bear that.

Slumdog Millionaire, basically is a story of a poor, uneducated village boy from the slums of Mumbai, who gets on a TV show;, “Who wants to be a Millionaire” and the bags the jackpot with correct answers. This is the outer skin of the movie, but beneath that it is the whole life (well not whole) story of the boy, right from his childhood, and the events he undergoes, about his love life and all.

Danny Boyle; the director of the movie, has done a wonderful job. I beleive its due to this English director the movie is this good, else any other traditional Indian director (there are good director, I said typical) would have stuffed un-necessary emotions and drama. Danny has done a perfect job by blending the right amount of drama and emotions throughout the film.

Orginiality

Story seems so original, and believable. I had only one part which I couldnt swallow; the brothers (the protagonist and his brother) were real slum boys and as they grew up, they suddenly start speaking English. But then i remembered about this guy. If he can do this, then why cant they do it!

The same kid after one year (now he knows he is famous)

Perfection

Not a single time during the 120 minutes, I felt the director is throwing BS at me. He did it all with great perfection. The various shots in the movie, they are so realistic that it gives you another image of Mumbai.

Direction

As i said the English director did his magic. The movie’s base line is the TV show, Who wants to be a millionaire. Its a show in which the player is asked a series of questions and for each right answer he is rewarded. The movie begins when the show has finished one day. Then its flash back time. We are taken through each question and how he knew the answer to all those questions. Its from his core life-experiences that he learned the answers. We have all heard experience is the best teacher. Here is the perfect example for that.

Cast

Forget the big shots, forget Anil Kapoor. Jamal Malik (the hero) played Dev Patel, is the guy in the spot light here. From the begining itself, i feel Dev is really the character, because he is so perfect for the role. Okay looks are good, but what about acting ? Simply awesome. I cant believe he pulled this off without any big shots in the movie to help him out. He has done very well his role. So did the other musketeers too. Oh i didnt mention that before. In the film, it shows the life of Jamal, his brother Salim and their friend Latika, whom the plot calls “The Three Musketeers”. The entire casting is perfect and everybody did their part very well. As i told the movie shows the life of those three lads from childhood, we see total 9 new comers in the movie, playing each characters childhood, adolescence, adulthood. The child playing Jamal’s childhood did his job pretty well that we feel his emotions sometimes in the film (@those who watched the film, remember the Amitabh Bachchan’s helicopter scene)

Camera

Something different. After a long time of BS movies out there, showing same old stories, with nothing fresh and new, Slumdog Millionaire is an eye-freshener. It gives a treat for your eyes with the exotic sets and locations. Dont misunderstand when i say “exotic”. Even though they show slums in the movie, it is shown in such a way that you love what you see.

So I have praised the movie pretty long, so is there is nothing wrong with the movie ?

YES. I felt something wrong with this movie. Just one thing. Its actually not a part of the movie. The last song, which A R Rahman bagged an award, is totally in-appropriate. I dont understand how does the songs fits or even appropriate for a movie like Slumdog Millionaire.

But dont worry that, this song is going to spoil your movie. Just stop watching when the movie is over, dont wait for the credits.

Till now, the movie has bagged 40 awards, 37 nominations and 10 Oscar nomination. No wonder why this movie bagged that much awards, its such a marvel. I truly wish that this movie bags this years oscar for Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published.

So go ahead and watch the movie (in the halls) and come back here and let us know,

How did you enjoy the film?

What do you see unique in this film?

Why did you like the film?

New wordpress (v2.7) is out and I’M LOVIN’ IT. Why, let me tell you about new features and upgrades in the new version of wordpress.

First of all to those guys who are not able to setup a blog yet, wordpress is a blogging platform (i would say the most easy and less complex platform). For you guys I will be giving a series on how to start a blog yourself. So if you dont want to miss that then subscribe to my blog right now. You can do that by entering your email address in the “Subscribe For Free” section in the top-right portion of this page, then click “Subscribe”. Once completed, I guarantee that you wont miss the wonderful tutorial am about to release.

Enough with promotion, lets get down to the features.

1. First thing is the visual appearance. It has been seriously over-hauled.

2. Re-structured the menus and added various new option.

a. Menu navigation is now side navigation .

b. Now its a drop down menu. It saves time by avoiding multiple clicks to reach a particular option. For ex: earlier it would take edit some theme (click Appearance>>Theme Editor), now you just need to drop down Appearance menu and then click directly on the editor.

3. A “Quick Press” box, which is very helpful when you have a great idea and you just need to save it as draft. It saves you from few clicks and does the job fine. Under “Tools” you will get a “Quick Press” button with which you can quickly make a draft of some text you have selected on some site or the URL itself. (I like this option. Very fast and cool)

4. Units in dashboard can be moved around. You can place them according to your like and it will stay like that. I would really like if there was an option using which i can add which all units should appear on the dashboard.

5. Quick edit options in comments/pages/posts- which is really good.

6. Quick comment editing, right from the Dashboard- now that’s cool.

7. A list of recent drafts on dashboard, so that you wont forget about it.

8. Quick Comment-reply right from the comments page itself, no need to go the actual post.

9. Thumbnail preview of images in the media library.

10. New plugin installer from site itself, no need to download/upload anything.

11. Plugin/Theme automatic upgrader. You dont have to download/upload anything. Just click “Upgrade”.

12. Advanced Import/Export options

13. New sticky posts. If you make a post sticky, the site will behave like usual blog, but one article will always remain on the top/front even of you update the blog.

These were the features which i found myself and interesting. There are even more features but it is highly techie which i dont think the public has any interest in.

Now should you upgrade your wordpress ? I would recommend YES. Do it ASAP so that you can enjoy its new features without loosing any more time.

Dont forget to subscribe to my blog and receive updates on when i publish the guide to start a blog yourself.

Am lazy to include pictures individually, so uploading it as a gallery. But check out the tags i have given for each picture.

I have been using Google Chrome for about five days. Am not much a fan of Google, but I accept they give they give great products. So let’s talk about their newest product Google Chrome.

First of all, it’s free ware and open source too. Since I have read a comic made by Google Chrome team which gives detailed information about the software I know how different the software it is. Let’s leave that now. First thing every body will notice about Google Chrome is how they tried to copy Mozilla Firefox. Their tab option, and looks are took and modified in Chrome. But for me, I like this new look, cause in Chrome all un-necessary menus and other options are stripped. This enabled Google to enlarge the address bar (and everything) slightly, which I like the most. It has sleek and cool looks. It’s like viewing Firefox in the full screen mode with some more options on the menu.

I use Google as my search engine, so the best thing about Chrome is, if I have to search for something, I just need to type that and press enter, and it will be automatically searched in Google. Another thing which I really like is their history option. It’s kind of spying but Chrome lists all the sites I have ever visited even with date and time. Ya Firefox also does that, but they don’t give dates and exact times.

Enough with goods, lets talk about some “I don’t like” stuff. First of all, there’s of all there’s no compatible plugins. I really like Google toolbar which gives me shortcut buttons, page rank, cache etc… tools, which is not there in Chrome. Another thing, there are many instances when I accidently closed a tab, Firefox would give me two options,

1. History tool in the menu
2. Using a plugin called Sessions Manager

But here there are no options, if I take the history option in Chrome, it would not give me any “recently closed tabs” option. Another one worth mentioning is; inline dictionary. Firefox has one, although not powerful but does the job. But sadly Chrome doesn’t have an inline dictionary. I don’t how Google guys have forgot to add this feature, but it was very necessary. One more thing, incompatibility with some sites. While I was using Chrome, there were many instances where the site was not loading or doing stuff the normal. First I thought it was the problem of the site, then I tried the same link in Firefox and it worked for me fine. Oh one more thing, on my laptop there’s a finger print reader, and the module for that has not yet released, so I cant save the passwords in Chrome using my finger print which is another fall for me. 

So what I am gonna do is, continue using Google Chrome but keep Firefox as a backup. Here is what I said about Google Chrome when it was just released. 

Are you using Google Chrome now? If you aren’t yet, do you want to? Then here is the download link, Download Google Chrome (Offline Installer). If you are already using Google Chrome do you have something to say about Google Chrome? Please feel to share it through the comments option.