Gattaca movie

Gattaca (Yahoo! Movies page)
My rating: C (Mediocre)
Directed by: Andrew Niccol
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law, Gore Vidal
Released by: Sony Pictures

I saw Gattaca on Set Pix a few days ago…and I was greatly disappointed. I’d come across this movie on many ‘Greatest Sci-Fi Movies of All Time’ sort of lists, and had come to expect a lot from this movie. It must be something to have stayed at the top of so many lists. Sadly, it falls short of expectations. It’s hardly a ’sci-fi’ movie at all! It’s more of a human drama, a love story maybe with a futuristic setting, but true-blue science fiction it most definitely isn’t.

Plot development is very one-dimensional, because it focuses only on the fact that societies in the future may base a lot of their structure on genetic engineering. Ethan Hawke as the genetically invalid trying to go to a space settlement in Titan (a moon of Saturn) - that’s the end of the story. Oh, and with a love affair thrown in as an afterthought, which only develops in the last few minutes of the movie. I understand low budget, but this movie is pants! Those black-and-white monitors which act as biometric security gates look like they’ve been bought second-hand from the sets of 1984! They should take a few lessons from Kurt Wimmer on how to make a classy looking sci-fi movie on a low budget, like Equilibrium. It would also help to take advice on how to work with pathetic actors like Ethan Hawke.

Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of the character, while not as wooden and expressionless as other actors like Christian Bale, leaves a lot to be desired. I rather thought Jude Law as the crippled but genetically superior guy was exceptional in his role. He was the only person who gave a stellar performance in that movie. You also get to see a young Uma Thurman, who for once looks good; unlike her later movies where her age clearly shows. Uma Thurman’s character hardly gets to play anything, except in the last few minutes; that too seems like an afterthought to give a romantic angle.

Gattaca was a great disappointment for me, specifically because it was pitched as a science fiction movie, which it isn’t. Maybe if I had seen it expecting a drama, I’d have given it a higher rating. Maybe. Because Ethan Hawke isn’t going to win any awards soon.

At the time when I am writing this Benazir’s home coming parade has been ripped asunder by blasts which will soon give the final toll of nearly 140 dead, leaving the hearths of several families extinguished and creating a chasm of grief in several hearts. It will probably emerge that some ‘extremist’ faction of some obscure but threatening organization performed this barbaric assault over a democratic leader, whose biggest crime probably was the fact that she is a woman In due course of time the global media will bring forth the ‘moderates’ and tell how Islam is a peaceful religion so on and so forth (add to the ranks of these ‘peaceful’ religions Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and the other odd-thousands like them) and that it’s the policies of Mr. Bush and his unwilling dictatorial side kick Mr. Musharraf have caused ‘tensions’ to build up in the Pakistani society.

So far, so vindictive but what they conveniently overlook is the reason why this is happening in first place as Blaise Pascal eloquently put it “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction”, there is a lot of undeserved respect to these obscure figments of a violent, xenophobic, possibly drug addicted mind (take for example the book of revelations if that doesn’t scream LSD after every page then nothing does).

Yes, I think that without doubt that what we are seeing in the current social tapestry of the world is nothing new and probably most of it is the product of the religious mind whipped into a frenzy with the help of violent, xenophobic, misogynistic leaders. Why don’t we shudder at the sight of the ‘extremists’ and the so called ‘moderates’ picking up an ancient fabrication, filled with violent verses and then asking us to take our ‘morals’ from there? Which in the end means basing our society on it? Have the ‘moderates’ read what’s in there? Women being systematically subjugated and treated like property and the vanities of a god who uses copious amounts of brimstone to bring order for petty crimes, like picking sticks on the day of the Sabbath to feed one’s family? If you think that your religion doesn’t profess such things, then think again, each and every one of them is like the product of a violent, xenophobic, misogynistic mind and you are proclaiming to the world to take it’s morals from such a text?

Such books should be given to children as horror stories not for the purpose of moral guidance, true their might be some pacifist passages amongst numerous violent one’s but which one’s should we pick and choose to believe? If this is the case why believe at all? Like Richard Dawkins once said filling the world with Abrahmic religions is like flooding the streets with guns don’t be surprised if they are used.

Furthermore religion itself subjugates the person’s ability to rationalize and instead punishes independent thinking, labeling it as an impurity, this blind belief is a fundamental aspect of this grotesque system. So why be surprised if children are taught by decent, gentle, mainstream religious instructors who lined them up in their madrasas (or some other equivalent in some other equally repugnant religion) making them rhythmically bob their heads while learning every word in a holy book teaching them that service to god is the greatest virtue and that they will get paradise for martyrdom in ‘his’ service? Why be surprised at all isn’t it an obvious ambush?

Hence no matter how idiotic are Mt. Bush and his side kick we mustn’t forget the real reason this happens in the first place, the real reason why so many good men and women are prompted to give up their poverty ridden lives for a promised paradise. The only way out to apparent to me is the capability for rational thought present in, if not all, our minds most of us (I don’t think that the extremists retain their rationality)…..

At the end I just want you to sit back and think about it;
“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.” think what it means, think how profound the implications are. In the end all this mind numbing vastness is only bearable through love and I definitely think that these chauvinisms we are harboring are hindering our progress towards this goal.

photo credit: Brajeshwar

Funny, but true - I’ve been using Windows Vista for the few weeks. My desktop PC started acting up a few weeks back, and while it exactly hasn’t died out, it’s motherboard IS behaving quite erratically. So until AMD Fusion-based computers come out, or I stop being lazy, whichever is earlier, I don’t think I’ll be using a desktop PC running Linux for quite some time. Until then, my dad’s HP laptop has officially passed on to me, and it runs Windows Vista Business edition. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time, about my experiences as a Vista user.

It’s not that I didn’t think of installing Linux on it - I *did* install Ubuntu 8.04, but version 8.04 (mark these words, *version 8.04*) is truly pathetic. Yes, you’re hearing that from me, a Linux fan. I was shocked to find applications hanging all too often, and it’s accessibility features didn’t work AT ALL (I’m talking of Sticky Keys). It seems as if they put all their efforts into Wubi, and forgot about the distro itself. So until they get their act together, I decided to uninstall Ubuntu Linux, and give Windows Vista a try.

Now it’s not like I haven’t used Windows - I’ve known it all too much using it at school and every other place. That was Windows XP or 98 or 2000; I’ve even used Windows 3.1. The first thing you’ll notice about Windows Vista is that it looks WAY better than Windows XP. They way Vista allows you to tweak color schemes in a way you couldn’t earlier made me, a Linux penguin happy. The other thing I really really liked was the new program launching system, by clicking on the Orb and typing in the first few letters. I think it’s brilliant, especially since even a few letters works (you don’t have to type the whole name out). It actually IS faster than navigating through menus and sub-menus to launch a program. Windows Vista also indexes allows you to search through your documents from the same search bar, and that doesn’t have a noticeable lag either. Also, I didn’t find keeping indexing enabled to be taxing on my system, unlike some other people say.

A lot of people talk about how slow Windows Vista is, or how programs don’t work with - I may have said so myself earlier when talking about Vista - but that was before I used it. Frankly, even with an Intel T7100 Core 2 Duo processor and 1 GB of RAM (which is considered to be the ‘minimum’ for running Aero properly), I don’t feel the pinch - the system is zippy. Yes, it does take longer than Linux to boot, but that’s Windows. After it has started, I don’t feel the system works as bad as the critics make it out to be.

Multitasking is fine too - running Winamp music player, Mozilla Firefox with multiple tabs, editing multiple photos in GIMP, AND running OpenOffice (for typing out my blog posts) - at the same time works without the system feeling ’slowed down’. That’s an achievement, because I’ve already said earlier that OpenOffice is a big memory hog. I’m not a gamer, so I can’t comment on game performance. For a normal home or business user though, Windows Vista works nicely. Note that I’m using Windows Vista Business edition with 1 GB RAM - which some people would have called inadequate.

About Flip3D, the much touted windows switching style, it’s nice, but I’d rather simply minimize to the taskbar. Not because it’s slow or anything, it’s good for showing off, but during daily usage people don’t keep flipping windows. So my verdict on this is neutral - it’s not a bad thing, but I won’t shed any tears if it isn’t there.

As a Linux user, I’ve got very used to seeing thumbnail previews for almost all kinds of frequently used files, and Windows Vista’s capability to do that too makes me feel comfortable. This was something which earlier versions of Windows couldn’t do.

I was impressed by the amount of documentation with which Windows Vista ships. As I said, I’ve been using Linux distros for a long time, so I thought I wouldn’t exactly feel ‘at home’ with Vista. It’s Help and Support Center has extensive and exhaustive content on every kind of query, and searching works! Try loads of permutations of your query, and there’s a good chance you’ll find an answer. Not only is the software explained, but also brief explanations of related technical stuff. That really DID blow me out of the water - the DEPTH of documentation. After seeing this, I have to admit that Linux DOES have a LOT to catch up in this field - it’s simply NOWHERE compared to Vista’s documentation. Plus the search feature works nicely.

Speaking of configuration, I found Windows Vista’s Control Panel easy to navigate. It’s a lot like Mandriva Linux’s control center concept, except that you can search the stuff you want to do. It’s a big leap from Windows XP, where you’d have to dig into different sub-categories and guess out where a configuration option was, or go through a big list in the Classic View. As a newbie user (in a sense) to Windows, this greatly simplified things for me. Even otherwise, it is MUCH faster to search out what you want to configure than dig around in menus.

The other thing people crib about is the User Account Control (UAC), which prompts the user before elevating a program. A lot of people have called this nagging, but I don’t think so. UAC prompts aren’t that frequent, and even then, I’d rather have this sort of authentication system than allow malicious programs to execute. Maybe it’s because I’m used to elevating programs to higher privileges when needed from Linux.

Talking of stability, Vista is definitely much more stable than previous versions of Windows. I never had a very good impression about XP or 98 in this regard, but Windows Vista is pretty good in this regard. And I’m sorry for Linux when I say this, but Ubuntu 8.04 (specifically) is less stable than Windows Vista. Even if you do get the rogue non-responding application once in a while, the Task Manager launches quickly and it’s easy to kill an app. Haven’t had many system crashes at all, like I have with our school computers running Windows XP. Reliability and Performance Monitor’s System Stability Index is also a nice touch for gauging the history of your Vista PC’s stability since the time you bought it.

I think, after using this, that Vista is a very competitive option for business users, compared to Enterprise editions of Linux distros like Suse and RHEL. Small businesses may not have the resources to shift to alternative software for their needs on Linux, and compared with Ubuntu 8.04, Windows Vista Business edition IS more stable. Of course, buying genuine Vista also means that you enjoy customer support from Microsoft, which, according to The Tech Nut, is quite good.

Ankur’s note: I’ve already made a long review of the movie Transformers, but Anuj had something extra to add.

Transfomers movie poster (small)

If you haven’t seen this movie then I am advising you to drop any plans you have to do so, don’t waste your time. To tell you the truth all I could think of while watching this movie is you gotta be kidding me. Seriously the actors were rolling out jargon like the US mint, they had runaway intellectual deflation over there (seeing this movie can make your brain go into a recession).I didn’t know before watching this movie that DNA computers can perform quantum computation and why the heck will giant robots be bipeds at all and why walk at all? Bipedal movement is so imprecise and difficult to implement and why are they humanoids in the first place? Seriously the way they transform into small objects is totally ridiculous, I would like to know what happens to all that matter? Do they perform matter-energy conversions on the fly? I mean the only thing worth seeing in this movie are the special effects otherwise there is no depth in the plot which is virtually non existent.

I think that they should have seriously hired a technical consultant before writing the script or they could have checked it up Wikipedia. Maybe then they would have ALSO realized that the Beagle 2 was NOT a rover in the first place and that it was made by the British!

So this is a movie worth missing and the idea that modern technology came from alien technology is so 2001…