Underappreciated movies part 2

All right. I am writing this because I have nothing else to do. Its my summer leave and right now I don't have much else to do than sleep and eat. So here is the continuation to the sensational post (link) that had hit the blogosphere like a level 5 tornado.

Don Juan Demarco


It bombed at the box office and got mediocre reviews, but I loved it. Johnny Depp plays the titular role of the worlds greatest lover. Actually he is a delusional schizophrenic who dons the personality of the famous character when a centerfold he is obsessively in love with shuns him as a creep. In the opening sequence he displays his charm by seducing a woman at a restaurant and then shows his insanity by trying to suicide because his true love does not want him. He is taken to a mental hospital by Marlon Brando, a successful psychiatrist who is about to retire.

In each evaluation session Depp narrates his imagined life story (some very funny scenes there). Brando's character slowly gets enraptured by Depp's incredible vision of reality. He soon enjoys a reinvigorated marital life by increasingly thinking like his delusional patient. I cant help but think that people will be happier if they are delusional or ignorant of reality. Sure reality will catch up with you once in a while and deliver a sucker punch. But that's OK.

Ladies should especially enjoy this movie (I think they are the target audience), it has some very interesting dialogues. For example once Depp says "Have you ever loved a woman until milk leaked from her as though she had just given birth to love itself, and now must feed it or burst?". And yes that Bryan Adams song is the sound track of this movie.

Great Expectations


We all know the story. Fisher boy meets beautiful but bitchy Estella and falls in love. Boy never forgets her, gets rich. The girl grows up into a succubus kind of hell spawn and tramples over the boys heart. But he still loves her. Finally she develops more humane feelings and there is a possibility for a happy ending. I like the movie because it is superbly artistic. The cinematography both in Florida and New York, background score, settings/props and costumes are all fantastic. View it only for that, if you expect a realistic portrayal of the Dickens's masterpiece don't bother watching this adaptation. Also Gweneth Paltrow is very convincing as the heart breaker.

Guna


Here is another Tamil movie that has been completely ignored. It is not a masterpiece. It is a brutally realistic film about a mad man (Kamal Hassan) who is obsessively in love with an imaginary celestial beauty he calls Abhirami. There is no glorification of the hero, he is simply a mad man. He meets a beautiful lady and is wrongfully made to believe that she is his Abhirami. He ends up abducting her and hiding in a jungle. She begins to see that he almost worships her and that his love for her is boundless and she falls for him in spite of his insanity. In the jungle they both refuse to accept reality and the mad man's delusions are all that matter to them. Very good acting and a few melodious songs add to the credits of the movie.

Old Boy


It hasn't escaped me that the three movies listed above all have similar story lines. Old Boy is not like any of those. In fact its not like any other movie I have seen so far. It is a terrifying story about the meaninglessness of revenge and has superb acting and direction. A small problem is that it is a Korean movie, but subtitled versions are available. I think a Hollywood remake is on its way. I am not going to describe the plot, just go ahead and watch it. Interestingly there was an unofficial remake (read copy) of the movie made in Bollywood called Zinda. This is fairly common in that talentless desert. When a original movie does come out of there it is drowned in a sea of mediocre or worse movies. I will respect them and their movies the day they respect others.

Indy's back, wish he had stayed put

What a waste of money. Definitely the stupidest movie I have seen in a long time. Even hardcore fans are going to have a hard time trying to like this one. I had enjoyed raiders of the lost arc and the last crusade. I found temple of doom to be horrible, especially so because I am Indian. The crystal skull is just plain dumb. The movie has a few good moments, it has the feel of the old movies but the plot must have been made up by a 12 year old. It does have a surprising end, it starts off as a good movie but when it ends everyones wonders wtf?? Do yourselves a favor and stay away from the theatres or go watch Prince Caspian. 

Tale of interviews: The last rejection

Nvidia too has rejected me now. Before the interview I had searched the web for their usual questions and found them to be easy. But the interviewer seemed to have his own method. He asked questions on one of my projects and tried to probe deeper into the area of computer architecture to gauge my knowledge. On seeing that everything was hollow in there he threw me an easy question:
Given 4 registers A,B,C and D write to B in such a way that the bits in C that correspond to 1's in A are copied to B and bits in D that correspond to 0's in A are copied in linear time.

He also asked me something about mutex and semaphores....... blah blah. But I still wonder why they took 10 days to make a decision about me. And yah the interview was for a software intern in device drivers development for their mobile team.

The Frivolity of Evil

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_oh_to_be.html

This is an excellent essay by Theodore Dalrymple. In my opinion man is inherently evil, but society is not. Each new outbreak of evil is met with rejigged notions of virtue, new stigmas and taboos while older ones are discarded. Under these new constraints men behave humanely untill some new form of wickedness catches on. The more alike an individual's notion of goodness is to that of society the less evil he is.

This is why there is no invariant definition of evil. For example if we take a good man from the 19th century and set him in a contemporary society he would quickly be outcast for mistreating women and children. May be in the future after being severely deprived of natural resources and suffering from ubiquitous pollution, even lighting a fire, the fire that is hailed to have started human civilization and is sometimes worshipped, will be considered a vice.

BLOODY Rambo

When First Blood released in 1982 it was a huge hit and it sparked off two sequels in the next 6 years. The second part was forgettable with an improbable gun totting, pencil thin heroine and part 3 was pure torture. In retrospect its even ludicrous considering that Rambo liberates Afghan Mujaheddin freedom fighters from the clutches of the evil Soviets.

Twenty years after the last sequel comes part 4. Stallone must have been hoping to rejuvenate his waning career. Or may be he is trying to make a lasting impression, his final contribution to cinema. Let's hope its the latter. The first few minutes were the usual. Rambo is leading a retired life in Thailand where he catches cobras for a living. He also drives a boat. The unwilling hero is urged to help a charity mission and after much pleading he reluctantly agrees. I think that pleading scene is the only one in the movie in which a dialogue lasted more than two sentences. The whole time I kept reminiscing the wonderful Hot Shots: Part Deux, which is an excellent spoof of the Rambo movies.

The charity team is caught by the evil Burmese army, they were stupid enough to walk into a war zone so obviously they got caught. If there was a message in the movie it would be: live for nothing or kill everything. Like Rambo tells the terrified missionary lady you cannot change what is. Now its up to Rambo to rescue them. He does that by killing what seems to be the entire Burmese army. There were supposed to be only 100 hundred soldiers in the camp but there were definitely many times that number of dead bodies.

You might ask how this makes it a bad movie. Each killing scene is shot so realistically that after the first few you either go numb or run out of the movie hall or puke. Realistic gore is sometimes required to impress upon the audience the gravity of the scene like in the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. But when the whole movie is about showing the different ways in which people can be killed, about how blood and entrails can scatter and about how big guns can rip off heads and arms and cut bodies into pieces, it becomes deplorable. In fact violence is a lead character in the movie and it is pictured so well and with such commendable depth that by the end you are accustomed to it and accept it.

There were many people who told me that the movie was good because it was very realistic. Realistic? Really?? In which reality will any one person see hundreds of bodies torn apart in the span of an hour. There are so many shots after shots of shocking, intolerable violence that it grabs your attention and by the end of the ordeal you appreciate the movie forgetting the reason you found it interesting is very base. All the creativity that went into making of this gorefest was intended to shock the audience with socially unacceptable imagery and that makes it similar to porn.

That said there are many other movies with similar or even more morbid violence. The newly released Doomsday has a few scenes that challenge our tolerance limits. The cannibalistic punks of future roast a soldier alive before they cut him to pieces and eat him. But the plot of that tasteless movie is itself asinine and beyond reproach.

Tale of interviews: Interview Experiences Part Deux

I had two more interviews since the first part of this post. The first one was with NVIDIA. The interview call lasted all of 3 minutes and 34 seconds. The interviewer, a senior executive in the company, called me 11 minutes late. After some preliminaries he asked me what my areas of interest were - whether I preferred mobile or graphics team. I had to pick one and I picked mobile.

Then he said "AHA! But I am from the graphics team. Good bye. Take care." Well it was something like that. But he did mention that he would forward my resume to the other team and now I have got another interview call from the company. I hope it too wouldn't be an anticlimax with the interviewer referring me to yet another team.

And now about the second interview. It seems my performance in the Google interview wasn't that bad after all. I had my second interview round yesterday. Please note that there are usually only two rounds of interviews in Google and if I get through this one I would hit the jackpot. But of course I didn't do it well. Obviously that's the reason why I am posting this. Remember the Shakespearean verse, "All ye, pity not thy fate but blog thy misery till thee plague all ye mates". OK I will cut the non-sense and go right into the questions:

1) Write code to generate spam messages. You are given a passage. Jumble the words from the passage and make a message of arbitrary size. A simple example can make it clear. For example the passage can be "Jumble the words from the passage and make a message of arbitrary size. A simple example can make it clear. For example the passage can be". The generated message should contain words from the passage with each word being followed only by one of the words that follow it in the original passage, like in "passage can make a simple example the words from the passage".
2) Give test cases for this code.
3) What is the complexity of the code?
4) Do you know oops? Good. What is an interface?
5) When you type in an address in your browser what are the steps that results in the web page getting displayed?
 

I am not a cruel person and so won't make you read through my answers. I mean you just might laugh your guts out.

[Update 04/07/2008 : I got a reject from Google. On the bright side now I know that the universe is back to normal]