Ratatouille

Lead Actors: A rat and a boy!

Directors: Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava

The movie is about a rat that wants to be a chef!

If you find the above sentence absurd, no use reading further :P

Remy is a unique rat...a rat with an appreciation for fine taste. Remy gets inspired by  the famous chef Gusteau, having read his cookery books and aspires to be chef someday. But how can an animal whose very presence is scorned in the kitchen, rule it?

It so happens that Remy ends up all alone and bumps into the garbage boy in Gusteau’s restaurant (Linguini). How this chance meeting turns around the fate of Linguini as well as Remy forms the rest of the story.

 I felt Remy was such a cute little rat, so tiny, so furry and that cute little pink nose! I wish Remy was my pet :D Linguini’s character as that of a timid and gullible young lad is well-etched.

The portrayal of the collaboration and friendship between Linguini and Remy is adorable and sometimes humorous too! I loved the scene where Linguini lets go off Remy from the bottle after taking a promise that they would work together and Remy runs away from Linguini and then feels bad for the boy and comes back.

The animators did a great job in animating France (where the story is based), you can feel and see the beauty of the city though it's an animation. The food looks so delicious in the movie; I bet you’ll feel like trying out those dishes! The climax of the movie features a dish named ‘Ratatouille’ (hence the name of the movie); it looked so very yummy that I ended up Googling for the recipe. I must say I was very disappointed by the way the dish looked in reality! Hats off to the animators!

(Caution: I’m partial towards animation movies)

Verdict: A really cute movie that makes you feel good!

Rating: 3/5

 

Ye Maya Chesave

Lead Actors: Naga Chaitanya, Samantha
Director: Gautam Menon

First impressions:

- Samantha is so cute!

- Naga Chaitanya now knows how to act (somewat)

- The music is awesome; it’s dreamy and transforms you into another world

- Too many hugs and smooches

Boy (Karthik, played by Naga Chaitanya) sees girl (Jesse, played by Samantha) , falls for her and pursues her, the girl avoids the boy, the girl starts liking boy, then she says ‘just friends’, then she starts liking him again, then she hates him, then she falls for him, then she hates him again, then she likes him again, then she avoids him…….!!! Oh ya n I forgot to mention, every now and then she keeps referring to her dad – this is what the storyline would look like if you compress it!

I held my head in my hands and almost cried for the torture Jesse was subjecting me to throughout the second part of the movie. I felt like banging my head to something when I saw her in the climax! (sob!)

Now coming to the positive aspects of the movie, the music (by A. R. Rahman) is remarkable and does a LOT for the movie. All the songs are good; my fav are ‘Manasa’, ‘Kundanapu Bomma’ and ‘Ee Hridayam’. The style of narration, atypical for a Telugu movie, is remarkable; the movie’s all about the narrative. The scenes shot in exotic locales are really beautiful and are a treat for the eyes.

The chemistry in the movie is great – the chemistry I’m referring to is the one between the narration, music and exotic locations :P

This is not the type of movie that can/ should be watched with your parents/ siblings; unless they are very open-minded and you are open minded enough to watch such movies with them. Thinking of it now, I think even the ‘parents’/ ‘siblings’ of Karthik and Jesse did not know why they were in the movie! No wonder I saw just gangs of girls/ gangs of boys/ couples at the theatre! I did not find anyone above 50 years of age!

Was it a good decision to watch the movie? Well, I’m just about as sure as Jesse!

Verdict: Watch once in the theatre for the chemistry (the one I referred to)

Rating: 2/5 for the movie. (4/5 for the movie minus the dowdy story)

Quarantine

Lead Actors: Jennifer Carpenter
Director: John Erick Dowdle

A reporter (Jennifer Carpenter) is sent along with a cameraman to a fire station to film the activities of the firemen on the job. The crew has a pretty good time getting to know the firemen and doing things like sliding down the famous fireman’s pole.

The firemen get a call and they rush to a building with the crew tagging along where an old woman is sick and has apparently gone crazy and is attacking the other people. They soon realize that the old lady is infected with some disease and the people whom she bit start to fall ill and some even die.

While all this is happening, the building is sealed by the police with the residents, firemen and the reporting crew inside the building and these guys don’t have a clue about what’s going on. The infected people soon start attacking and biting the others and our reporter and cameraman are stuck in this mad frenzy. A resident tries to escape from a window, but he is shot dead by a sniper, indicating the graveness of the infection in the building.

It turns out that a strain of rabies that rapidly infects humans is what’s causing all this mayhem. The infected people turn into zombie like creatures and attack and eat other humans! (Yuck!) The concept of zombies may still be exciting to the film maker (gross makeup on some second rate artistes would do the job, eliminating the need to spend millions to animate some other scary creatures), but I can vouch that viewers hardly find the idea thrilling anymore.

The reporter and the cameraman survive till the end of the movie, the cameraman is killed first and the movie ends with the reporter being dragged away into the darkness.

The movie is shot from the cameraman’s point of view; everything is as seen through his lens. The last few minutes have the camera in the night mode. It was quite chilling to watch the movie, it’s good that there wasn’t too much of gore but the suspense wasn’t entirely effective; I never once got startled even though I was watching it all alone at night.

I thought the lead actress overacted in many places. In one situation, when things start to go really really bad in the movie, she starts panicking and trembling with fear in such a fashion that I found this part an ordeal to sit through and was irritated to watch all the over-action.

Verdict: An ok movie that can be watched for time pass. Not really scary.
My Rating: 2/5

What Happens in Vegas

Lead Actors: Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher
Director: Tom Vaughan

Joy (Cameron Diaz) stock-broker who’s recently had a breakup goes to Vegas to chill out with her best friend. Jack Fuller (Ashton Kutcher), a carpenter who’s been fired by his own father too lands up in Vegas with his friend at the same time.

They meet when they both are given the same room by mistake and end up partying together. The next morning, Joy wakes up to realize that she and Jack got married in their drunken stupor! Joy and Jack talk to each other and are relieved to find that neither of them wants to continue with the marriage and decide to annul it.

Just after their decision Jack uses Joy’s quarter in the slot machine and he wins a jackpot of 3,000,000! Joy then demands jack half the money as she is now his wife :D. They try to divorce but the judge, a person who finds such marriages and attitudes distasteful tells the couple to try to make their marriage work for six months, he threatens that else he wouldn’t let either of them get their hands on the jackpot money.

Joy then moves into Jack’s place and the rest of the story is about how they both try to outsmart, irritate, and even hurt the other to make them flee from the marriage/ jackpot. It isn’t tough to guess that they both finally fall in love with each other and ‘What Happens in Vegas’, stays long after Vegas too!

The movie is somewhat ok but does manage to elicit some laughs, esp. the scenes at the marriage counselor. In one scene, Jack’s friends hit him to portray to the counselor that he was abused by Joy; Jack appears with bruises and starts to whine about Joy when she coolly shows the counselor a video of the hitting – you should see the expression on Ashton Kutcher’s face (lol)

Verdict: A romantic comedy which is quite funny, but hardly romantic

My Rating: 2/5