Hollywood Movies - WALL E Movie Review

I watched the Animation movie WALL E yesterday. A beautiful, funny and a hearty Sci Fi film.

How Disney manages to come up again and again with beautiful movies is some thing that eludes me. WALL E is an animation movie created by PIXAR, now acquired by Disney but nevertheless remains a distinct entity not part of the Disney Animation Studios. PIXAR has some of the best animation movies produced to its credit including Toy Story I & II, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Cars and the recent Academy winning film Ratatouille.

I enjoyed watching this movie trememdously. This film seemed to light up and warm my soul, the bare simplicity and beauty of it was awesome and touching. The animation was like that of all Pixar films, ground breaking , innovative and visually striking. I particularly enjoyed the animation during the first 30 minutes of the movie. I was even more impressed by the sound engineering in the film. The sounds that the main characters in the movie made was very very representive of the feelings that were played on the screen. In terms of direction and technical work, this film is excellent.

Now a bit about the movie story itself. Wall E is the adventure love story of an extremely charming and sweet waste disposal robot. The movie begins against a very somber theme. Earth is a barren land, laid to waste by humans who have now left this planet. All that is now left in Earth are cities of waste. No plants, no greenery, no soil only drab dusty junk. Walks in Wall E, who's sole purpose of existance is to clear up this waste. For a robot, Wall E is a soulful creature perceiving and appreciating the value of tiny things like rubik cubes and zippo lighters in a huge pile of junk. His sole friend is a tiny cockroach. The relationship between the robot and the cockroach, although shown fleetingly, is a delight to watch. One day Wall E chances on a small plant, and takes it back to his workshop. Wall E watches Hello Dolly! on an Ipod hooked up to a VCR, facinated by the idea of love that is everlasting. One day, a super capable female robot lands on earth, sent by humans to check for the slightest indication of plant growth. Wall E is besotted with this super powerful female godess who can fly when he can only roll. Wall E courts her, making gifts out of junk and shows off. When he shows her the plant, she deactivates herself and sends a message to humans and a ship arrives to take her away. Wall E is in pain and does everything to get her back to normal. When the ship comes, he clutches to it desperately during takeoff, marking the beginning of an adventure in space.

As far as I am concerned, this may be a good film to watch with a very pissed girlfriend (or girl friends depending on how unlucky you are :-) ). It is romantic, funny and clean entertainment.

WALL E may very well become the most loved robot in cinema.

Rating -

Overall: 9/10 , Story: 8/10, Screen Play: 9, Technical Excellence:9/10, Watchability: 10/10

Poster Design - Wham !! Boom !! Whew !!

I just happened to come across some posters that I and one of my friend (a guy named Kannan) designed for some inter departmental events at college. We hung these posters as huge 6 feet by 8 feet banners throughout the entire length my my college corridors.

The ones below was designed for a basketball tournament.

The ones below were for the annual festival that I instituted.

It is great feeling to go back in time once in a while. :-)

Technology Takes - WWW & Internet (Take 1)

This post is the first of a 2 part post. I will touch base with historical developments that pushed the internet to become what it is now. I will also, in the second part of this post, expound in detail about technologies that I think will power the evolution of the internet for the next 5-10 years.

The WWW and Internet have metamorphosed in countless ways since the invention of the concept of networking in 1969 at ARPA , development of the first TCP/IP specification at Stanford in 1973-74, adoption of TCP/IP by the US Department of Defence as standard for military networking in 1983 and the invention of the web by Tim Berners Lee at CERN in 1990. The internet has certainly created a border less world, becoming ubiquitous in and radically transforming the way we lead our lives. What is incredible about the evolution of the internet is that this evolution is linked to and is the result of the invention of newer technologies.

The invention of Mosaic, a graphical web browser, released in 1993 propelled the internet to definite glory. Most popular browsers today retain the primary features of Mosaic. This was the beginning of a revolution because browsers in the early 90's were still text based. Mosaic was entirely different because it was based on point and click functionality.

Then in 1995, the invention of WebCrawler, a search engine that could search web content. Before WebCrawler, only web page titles could be searched. Lycos, which also offered web content seach also was introduced the same year and achieved critical business success.
Search was big business, and was ruled by Yahoo until 1998 when big daddy Google entered into the fray with a search engine powered by PageRank and started selling search ads (Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimates the size of this business in the next five-ten years to run into billions of dollars) in 2000.

The web in the end of 90's became the pretty much the in thing and made a lot of commercial sense. A lot of applications were built, and email became pretty ubiquitous. Businesses invested in the web, starting with a bang and a frenzy and ending with the 2001 dot com bust. This I think pretty much sums up what is known as Web 1.0.

Collective failure in any industry always results in critical introspection. The from the shadow of this failure emerges light and a newer outlook of things. The dot com bust in 2001 changed the internet in a number of ways. The most important was the emergence of new technology (or existing technology applied in newer ways). And so descended upon us thus the wisdom of crowds, or as I like to think - "From Collective failure arose Collective intelligence". Enter the Web 2.0.

RSS, AJAX, CSS, SOAP, REST, XML, PHP and Cloud Computing. These together, with other newer technologies make the new web extremely different, from a technical perspective in 3 ways - Rich Internet applications, web syndication and web services. I am sure non of this makes any sense :-). The point I am making here is that these allow you as an end user to do the following -
1. Experience applications like GoogleMaps, Orkut and Facebook
2. Actively distribute content that you put on the web to people who want to access it.
3. To socialize and network on the internet, exchanging information and ideas in ways never possible before.

Such collective efforts result in applications like Wikipedia and characterize Web 2.0. The web becomes a platform in its current avatar. Being a platform, Web 2.0 applications engage users and transform them into co-developers. Web 2.0 applications also become more rich in terms of the functionality they offer when more people use it. In effect, a Web 2.0 application is the result of the collective intelligence of the crowd.

Then there is also the phenomenon of virtual worlds like Second Life on the internet. The underlying concept is not new. The availability of cheap bandwidth which is only going to get cheaper, and advances in graphics and processor technology are making this possible. More on this in Take 2 of this topic.

Technology Takes- Web 2.0

Recently I came across a question that I found very interesting. The question was how can Indian technology companies help their clients to derive business potential out of Web 2.0 technology.

You are looking at an example of a Web 2.0 technology right now - yes, a blog is an example of Web 2.0 technology. Orkut, Face Book, Meebo, Wikipedia, Twitter, Flikr, Youtube are other examples. Now what is so interesting about Web 2.0 ? For a minute, think what is common to all of the examples above. Aha, you got it. In all of the above applications, a lot of people do a lot of things. People share stuff, give and take advice, communicate and network. I google for information and probably find what I am looking for in the blog of a guy sitting in Africa.

Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed 2 thing about the web -
1. Huge social communities are being created.
2. People are interacting with each other in newer ways.

I think that Enterprise customers will perceive maximum value from Web 2.0 technology that will enable the following -

1. Reaching out to consumer communities for (a) maintaining credible information channels, maintaining/ expanding competitive position and customer base and selling new services (b) engaging in meaningful two way dialogue to receive feedback and detemine consumer perceptions and new ideas.

2. Effectively engage with business partners and suppliers to improve communication.

3. Capitalize on the inherent potential of social communities to foster information and knowledge exchange, collaboration and networking to drive product design and development within shorter time scales.

We need to articulate propositions that can resonate at highest executive decision making levels of our clients. Such a proposition must alleviate business concerns, must clearly be aligned to the client's business strategy and must also offer economic and competitive advantages over any other non Web 2.0 alternatives.

Hollywood Movies - Hancock Movie Review

I watched the movie HANCOCK yesterday at Macau Tower.

Macau Tower is the worlds highest bungee jumping site in the world and I jumped off it a couple of months ago (check out my video in the Pick'n'Play section, more on the jump experience later). They have a pretty decent movie theatre, and the ticket prices are very reasonable compared to India; Only about 40 MOP or 200 Rs.

Anyway, the movie was pretty much OK. I have been a big time fan of Will Smith ever since I watched him in "Independence Day", "I Robot" and "In Pursuit of Happiness". However, this movie is not as good as his previous blockbusters. I would rate it the same as "I am a Legend".

I have a major issue with the story line. The movie started quite well but the story seemed to fizzle after some time, like a shaken bottle of coke, as though the director forgot about the actual story and went into coma. The twists in the story (seemed more like gaping holes to me actually) are also weak and do not, by any stretch of my imagination, make the movie goer stop sleeping and sit up in his / her seat. The action scenes are good but some how are neither visually striking nor lengthy enough to make them memorable. In all, the movie is as much lacking in sugar as is a black coffee drunk by a diabetic and as much lacking in salt as is an ice cream.

On the whole, it is a movie you can watch one time and forget about once you exit the movie hall. Definitely not Will Smith's greatest !!!!

Rating-

Overall: 6/10 , Story: 6/10, Screen Play:6 , Technical Excellence:6/10, Watchability: 6/10

I am eagerly expecting "Mummy - Part 3". I may write a movie review on "Hulk - 2" later.

Catcha all later !!!