Wall E

Nobody likes to be lonely, not even Wall E, a robot, who leads a lonely existence on earth.  Earth is covered with litter and human beings live in a large space ship in outer space.  His job is collecting waste (e-waste), and compressing them into cubes and then arranging them.  The year is 2775 and 700 years ago, human beings left for outer space in a giant ship called Axiom.  This ship is controlled by machine "Auto."  Human beings have still not lost hope of living on a planet, and so send probes periodically to other planets to check for signs of life.  One such probe robot named Eva lands on earth and Wall E is head over heels in love with her.  He befriends her and invites her to his home and shows her his latest collection, a young plant that he has discovered.  Eva immediately places the plant inside her and goes into sleep mode as her mission is accomplished.  Wall E tries to revive her but to no avail.  When the mother ship comes to collect Eva, Wall E also jumps on it and thus reaches Axiom, where he sees human beings for the first time.  Human beings are now obese, fully machine dependent, unable to walk.  Wall E befriends a few of them.

The captain of the ship is happy on seeing Eva’s finding on earth, and decides to take Axiom back to Earth but Auto, the machine, which controls the Axiom is against it and a mutiny ensues and how Wall E, Eva, and his friends overcome this major obstacle forms the rest of the story.

The movie touches many aspects of life such as friendship, loneliness, environmental degradation, too much dependence on technology, artificialness of virtual life.

Direction, screenplay, and story by Andrew Stanton, this is yet another winner from Pixar studios. A must watch even if you are no animation buff.

Beautiful is Beautiful !

I went to watch V K Prakash's 'Beautiful' by default because I couldn't risk taking my wife to a late night show of 'Dirty Picture'. Vidya Balan in the posters was the only other woman in the entire Cinema complex. Hence we decided to watch 'Beautiful' and I must say, we came back reasonably happy.

Let me begin with the minus points. First of all there are some gaping loopholes in Anoop Menon's story and screen play. Most important being how John, the character played by himself fails to recognize Stephen [Jayasurya] as his childhood classmate till he stumbles upon an old photograph. This is baffling considering their age when they parted during primary school days.

The second point I found awkward was why does John walk away with the Police when a case of attempted murder was foisted on him when he knew very well he has done no wrong. What happens after that is too sudden a twist, perhaps to keep the movie under 140 minutes.

Coming to the positives, let me begin with the character 'Anjali' played by Meghana Raj. She is 'Beautiful' and oozes tonnes of oomph even while fully clad. She does full justice to her role. Jayasurya and Anoop Menon strike a nice male bonding. They bring the best out of each other. Both have given fabulous performances.

Jayasurya as the millionaire paraplegic goes on to scoff at Sanjay Leela Bhansaali's 'Guzaarish' and declares life is to celebrate. Even if he can't move a finger, he still loves to enjoy looking at 'Beautiful' things in life. In an interesting scene, he derides a TV host about our love and admiration lasting only a few minutes. Anoop Menon too refuses to sympathize with the paraplegic because he has seen worse. These moments add to the wholesomeness of the movie.

Rest of the cast has given commendable performances. The movie is easy on the eyes and ears with nice photography and background music. The twist in the tale at the tail end comes as no great surprise because there are enough tell tale evidences of where we are heading. But it still has been handled reasonably well.

This is a feel good movie about positive attitude. This is also slightly philosophical without being preachy. There is male bonding and there is romance with two ill defined love triangles. One involving John, Stephen and Anjali and the second involving John, Anjali and Meera.

None of the relationships are explored below the superficial layer because a lot of time is consumed by minor incidents like those involving the ashes of Kamalu's father. And finally there is a twist with a rather abruptly handled suspense angle. Thus even though we feel we have watched a 'Beautiful' movie, we still are left with a little bit of incomplete feeling.

I don't know if this movie is inspired from some Hollywood Cinema or Korean movie. Even if it is, I still would appreciate the effort that has gone into the making of the movie. Definitely worth a visit to the cinema.