The Departed
My Rating: A (Outstanding) - Only the mindless killing-off of main characters at the end stops me from giving this an A+ which it deserves.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson

The first one minute of the opening will give you the message loud and clear - if you came to watch a family movie and dropped into this theatre by mistake, there’s still time to leave. I’ll keep this short, because I DON’T want to give the story away for this.

And why so late? I wanted to post this earlier, but after watching Marty crying after getting his Oscar, that spurred me on. Wow, he WAS overwhelmed when he got the Oscar. That too, to be given an award by his friends (Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas) when he didn’t get five times earlier must have been something. At the ceremony though George Lucas pretty much had the look of an out-of-work Santa Claus, as if he was going to clobber Marty and keep the statuette for himself. Then there was Jack Nicholson grinning sinisterly backstage, looking as if he would clobber the Three Wise Men if Marty didn’t get it. Anyway, Marty did, on a huge sympathy vote wave.

Which simply doesn’t explain this movie winning, because it deserved every bit of it. It’s not all about gore, as some people think before seeing this. It’s got an amazing story. It gives an insight into gang culture. It’s about Billy Costigan (Leo) who is a police officer working as a mole in gang lord Costello (Jack); and gangster Collin Sullivan (Matt) working as a mole in the police. The tension that tears these characters apart, the game of deception and cat-and-mouse is definitely more Spy vs Spy and not Tom and Jerry.

Personally, I’d say Matt Damon was the best, followed by Jack Nicholson. Leonardo was good too, except for the funny look on his has as if somebody had stuffed smelly garlic cloves inside his shirt.

There’s one interesting goof-up though. When you see Sullivan’s character using a normal PCs (if I’m not wrong, they show a Dell) at the police HQ, the interface on the screen looks like that of Mac OS X. Definitely Mac. I think visual effects team forgot that, the sequences of video team separate, and then recorded the screen captures in some swanky studio running Macs. The visual effects team also forgot 1) it’s not legal to run a Mac OS on a PC, and cops won’t do it; 2) cops might not have the knowledge or the time or the permission to switch IOS at office; 3) all viewers are not stupid.

For music buffs, this is a treat too. They got biggies like Roger Waters and The Rolling Stones original performances, and there’s some amazing old school rock music. I still don’t get people’s fascination for associating Comfortably Numb with drugs, because I read on some music site that Roger Waters said they meant that the felt numb after getting medicines while sick in childhood.

The only thing I didn’t like is the killing off of characters. In fact, William Monahan the writer suggested a sequel, but that idea had to be dropped since, hell, all the main ones were dead anyway!

Seriously, don’t miss this movie. And don’t wait like Rach to buy a disc and rip its plastic off.

The Departed
My Rating: A (Outstanding) - Only the mindless killing-off of main characters at the end stops me from giving this an A+ which it deserves.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson

The first one minute of the opening will give you the message loud and clear - if you came to watch a family movie and dropped into this theatre by mistake, there’s still time to leave. I’ll keep this short, because I DON’T want to give the story away for this.

And why so late? I wanted to post this earlier, but after watching Marty crying after getting his Oscar, that spurred me on. Wow, he WAS overwhelmed when he got the Oscar. That too, to be given an award by his friends (Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas) when he didn’t get five times earlier must have been something. At the ceremony though George Lucas pretty much had the look of an out-of-work Santa Claus, as if he was going to clobber Marty and keep the statuette for himself. Then there was Jack Nicholson grinning sinisterly backstage, looking as if he would clobber the Three Wise Men if Marty didn’t get it. Anyway, Marty did, on a huge sympathy vote wave.

Which simply doesn’t explain this movie winning, because it deserved every bit of it. It’s not all about gore, as some people think before seeing this. It’s got an amazing story. It gives an insight into gang culture. It’s about Billy Costigan (Leo) who is a police officer working as a mole in gang lord Costello (Jack); and gangster Collin Sullivan (Matt) working as a mole in the police. The tension that tears these characters apart, the game of deception and cat-and-mouse is definitely more Spy vs Spy and not Tom and Jerry.

Personally, I’d say Matt Damon was the best, followed by Jack Nicholson. Leonardo was good too, except for the funny look on his has as if somebody had stuffed smelly garlic cloves inside his shirt.

There’s one interesting goof-up though. When you see Sullivan’s character using a normal PCs (if I’m not wrong, they show a Dell) at the police HQ, the interface on the screen looks like that of Mac OS X. Definitely Mac. I think visual effects team forgot that, the sequences of video team separate, and then recorded the screen captures in some swanky studio running Macs. The visual effects team also forgot 1) it’s not legal to run a Mac OS on a PC, and cops won’t do it; 2) cops might not have the knowledge or the time or the permission to switch IOS at office; 3) all viewers are not stupid.

For music buffs, this is a treat too. They got biggies like Roger Waters and The Rolling Stones original performances, and there’s some amazing old school rock music. I still don’t get people’s fascination for associating Comfortably Numb with drugs, because I read on some music site that Roger Waters said they meant that the felt numb after getting medicines while sick in childhood.

The only thing I didn’t like is the killing off of characters. In fact, William Monahan the writer suggested a sequel, but that idea had to be dropped since, hell, all the main ones were dead anyway!

Seriously, don’t miss this movie. And don’t wait like Rach to buy a disc and rip its plastic off.

The problem with My Yahoo! is that although it allows you to add feeds easily, and indeed, is the most popular web-based feed reader around the world, yet, it does not give previews of content. So when I came across the new Yahoo! Alerts site which gave me the option to register for alerts whenever my fave feed is updated, I jumped for it. Already, using feeds was becoming a problem in Yahoo! Mail Beta because the new BlogSpot feeds which have a new ‘atom:updated’ field, which means that every time you make a post, the whole thing is republished and the new date gets added to each post. This is a big falw, because even if I’ve read something already, and then you make an update, it’ll come up as a new post. The workaround it to use something like FeedBurner to manage your post feed.

Coming back to Yahoo! Alerts, the problem I faced was that it wasn’t delivering me alerts whenever the feed URL for a BlogSpot blog was of the new style, as in http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and that really sucked. I, for one, knew that some blogs were updated, still no alert.

I racked my brains, and came up with a workaround. I think the problem is cropping up since no specific filename is used in the new style. I found that the old style feed URL (of type http://blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml) for Blogger.com blogs even on the new Blogger are still live. Subscribing to that solved my problem.

However, I did write to the Yahoo! Alerts team to do something about this, for comment feeds for BlogSpot blogs, which were not available earlier, and are of type http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default cannot be subscribed in any other way except the new URL. Correct me if I am wrong.

I may point out here, the problem only occurs with Blogger feeds, not others.

I never really liked any alternative like Bloglines or Google Reader. And with Yahoo! Alerts I’m happy. It also offers alerts via messenger and mobile.

Scholars criticize new Jesus documentary - Yahoo! News

This groundbreaking new documentary by James Cameron, in which he claims to have discovered the grave of Jesus, along with family. There’s a grave marked ‘Judah, son of Jesus’. If proved true, it could turn Christianity’s beliefs on its head. Something similar was shown by BBC earlier, and now, the Discovery Channel is going to take it up. Watch out for some big controversies now.