Driven Before

There was something too familiar about the font used for the movie, Drive. I knew I had seen the same font and coloring used before. You can definitely tell from the letter "i".

Notice the font

Same font and color

But don't tell anyone in Hollywood. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to make a movie spin-off from the television series, Silk Stalkings.

Sir Geoffery of Lebowski

This past weekend, I went to CELLspace to catch a performance by The Primitive Screwheads. This Shakespearean twist on the Coen Brothers film, The Big Lebowski was very well done: quite funny, worked great with audience participation, went through the entire story and balanced incorporation of contemporary and "olde" elements. The production, Much Ado About Lebowski, has only one weekend left, June 24 and 25.

Verily, that rug did tie the room together

Dragon Day at DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks Animation recently released How To Train Your Dragon, which I think is their (our?) best work to date. Yes, I work at DreamWorks, but as a computer nerd I had nothing to do with the creativity which led to the magic of this film. Anyway, we celebrated the opening of this film on campus and I wanted to share some photos. I took some pictures too, but some coworkers took much better photos. Links to the complete sets of their photos are available at the bottom, and here are some photos from the day taken by others.

Dragon Wrap Party

The latest release from DreamWorks Animation is How To Train Your Dragon. We attended the cast and crew screening, watching the movie in 3D at the Gibson Amphitheatre. After introduction from the producer, directors and our CEO, a special guest came out to say a few words. Gerard Butler joined us for the screening and expressed how pleased he was with the film, where he voices the main character's father, Stoick. Something funny he mentioned was that he is concurrently in the best rated and worst rated opening films on Rotten Tomatoes, also starring in The Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston (as I write this, one is one hundred percent fresh and the other is eight percent fresh). Of course, this is not his first time working with dragons nor working on horrible films, as he was also in Reign of Fire.

DeLorean Time Machine Visits DWA Campus

One day during lunch in 2008, I saw this DeLorean parked on campus and realized it was done up like the time machine from the Back to the Future series of movies. As Doc Brown in the first film states, "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

You can even see the hoverboard

So, it turns out, this car was built by J Ryan and Sean Bishop, the first commented on my Flickr photo shown above. I am adding this to my blog to pass on their website link, which has some interesting information about the car. Another cool thing is that Sean Bishop built Ecto-1, from Ghost Busters.

Love Aaj Kal

Sunday - What To Do?

Sunday, we were feeling stuck at home. Anjali had a mending broken arm and I had a sunburn. We just wanted to get out for a while. Aha, Gold Class!

Gold Class

I could watch paint dry or grass grow in Gold Class. This is a movie theater experience where you sit with approximately thirty people in reclining leather chairs. A butler brings you food. It is nice to enjoy a movie while nearly falling asleep in an easy chair.

The Movie

Love Aaj Kal was not my first Hindi movie. I had viewed Delhi-6 a few months prior. For that movie, I had just heard the story of Rama and Sita, so I could draw parallels between the movie and what I had learned. Dialog was something which escaped me completely. In fact, I only remember identifying one phrase, "phir melange", which equates to "see you soon."

This movie was a typical chick flick. Two people are in a relationship in England, but the woman is moving to India for school and the man wants to move to California. So, they decide to break up, but never really get over each other. The guy strikes up a conversation with a restaurant owner, who reveals over the course of the movie to this young man his love story in India. Disclaimer: I may get a lot of this wrong, so gimme a break. The older gentleman, Veer, explains how he fell in love with a girl while they lived in Delhi, but she moved to Calcutta. He followed her, but found that she was engaged to another man. Likewise, the young, broken-up couple in the movie had moved on and the woman tells the man she has accepted a marriage proposal. She tells him that she will be getting married as they are flirting with each other via SMS, while both are sitting at dinner with their significant others. Anyway, the chick gets married and the guy lives out his dream of moving to San Francisco. The guy finds himself bored in San Francisco and thinks of the young woman. Perhaps it is just me, but he comes off as a jerk the way he only thinks of his ex-girlfriend when he shouldn't: when he is in a relationship with someone else and when his San Francisco life is not as great as he thought it would be. The young woman leaves her husband during their honeymoon. So, the broken-up couple end up together. Veer, the older man, ends the movie by returning home to his wife, whom you discover to be the woman he went to Calcutta for and was beaten by her fiance (and his friends) for his pursuit.

Understanding the Movie

I was able to keep up with a few things during the film. It was also cool to find out that some of the dialog was Punjabi and a phrase I have been saying for a while was revealed as something which makes sense (thanks Adi). When dialog passed me by, I focused on costuming, menus and other surroundings. I paid attention to locations in the movie which I might visit some day in the future. Who knows, maybe I will visit Calcutta some time soon, although a trip to Delhi is likely in my immediate future.

Rating

We got out of the house, enjoying some comfort snacks while sitting in an air conditioned theater. We watched a movie, a chick flick, and shared an experience. All in all, I would call that a good deal. But, Anjali has apologized a time or two about the fact that I had to sit through a foreign movie. Should I tell her that I have seen many foreign films without subtitles? Perhaps she will feel compelled to treat me to an evening movie with explosions, babes and/or spaceships...