Posted in Blogging, Daily Rants, Happenings, Life, Musings, Personal

2013 – Silence of the Blogs

My most silent year yet on the blog. Though I’ve put up a flimsy excuse of a reason on the sub-header of the blog title, it is just that – a flimsy excuse. Several other factors preclude that…but that’s for another blog post 😉

As they do every year, the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. So it goes…

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Posted in Bollywood, Musings, Reminiscence

Madhubala’s Rare Colour Photo

My earliest memory of the beautiful actress Madhubala was the song accha ji main haari with Dev Anand , which aired on Doordarshan on a balmy Sunday morning. The legendary Mughal A Azam was seen much later.

Also remember her iconic B&W poster on the walls of the computer center where I used to go for classes as a teenager. That image, for me, was always the enduring image of that ethereal beauty…

Until this ‘rare colour photo’ started doing the rounds on twitter. Beautiful!

Madhubala Colour Photo

P.S: the photo was taken by James Burke for Life Magazine, in 1951. [Source]

Posted in Hollywood, Movie Reviews, Moviez, Music, Musings, Reminiscence, Reviews

Movie Review – The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Having had shunned movies for a while, I was waiting for a good one to break the self-imposed exile – and The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn was definitely a good choice to do that. Director Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Georges Remi a.k.a Herge’s characters – the intrepid boy reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy and the foul-mouthed but likeable Captain Haddock – comes to life in an animated rollercoaster of an adventure.

I’m not a huge fan of Tintin and his adventures (well, there was the time when I used to diligently cut out the series’ pages from The Week and staple them to make a poor-man’s version of the comic book since the original ones were priced a bit high for my pocket money) but have read most of the works and also used to see the series on TV, even though the Hindi versions didn’t do justice to the characters or their utterances! The movie instalment, however, is an immensely enjoyable spectacle which brings out the comic world onto the screen in amazing vividity and vibrancy.

  Secret of the Unicorn

The movie follows Tintin and Snowy’s adventures as a wooden model of a long lost ship – The Unicorn – and the secret that it hides leads them onto a fascinating journey across the world. They come across Captain Haddock, whose ancestor the ship once belonged to and holds the key to unlocking the mystery behind it all. There are the bumbling cops Thompson and Thomson, the villain Sakharine, the mutinous former ship-mates of Captain Haddock, the singing lady Bianca Castafiore and a whole lot of fun, frolic and edge-of-the-seat thrills and spills.

The story is engaging and fast-paced and though it combines elements from three different Tintin books, the cohesiveness is there. Having the movie animated enables several scenes to be grandiose and large-scaled, something which would probably have been difficult to shoot the normal way, even with CGI. The animation also copies the look and feel of the original comic books and makes one feel that the books itself have come to life.

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