Views of a Patzer!

I know this film is quite old now, but still, when I saw this again in DVD, I felt the same awe/confusion I felt when I watched it 2 years back!! This film can easily win a top-10 position in the most complex films ever made.

WARNING: If you haven't seen the film yet, go see it now and then read this. This post is just a big spoiler.

All the mystery/suspense movies you have seen so far, most probably, had the story unfolding in a linear fashion, right? Like, he found his wife dead, got some clues, solves one clue and finds a fellow/object. From there he goes to the next clue blah blah blah, right? This film shatters that normal (!?) way of story-telling. Actually, this film's beginning is its end. Confused? Don't be, because there is still more to come :-) Leonard Shelby is an Insurance agent. One fine day, his wife gets molested & killed by two men. He shoots one of them, a masked one, but the other one hits him with something hard. Leonard (Lenny) looses the ability to persist short-term memories because of this. Cops think that there was only one fellow; their version is something like, Lenny found a masked person molesting his wife and when that fellow hit Lenny on the head, he shot him. They don't believe Lenny's version of 2 men. Lenny remembers everything that happened right up to that incident, but nothing persists in his memory bank after that blow to his head. He knows his wife's molester is still out there somewhere. He wants revenge, he decides to go after some John G, who he believes killed his wife. But how do you find someone, let alone kill him, when you keep forgetting things that happened 10 minutes back?! He comes up with an ingenious solution - keeping notes & taking pictures. He has seen one of his clients, Sammy, suffering from a similar disorder. Lenny believes that by repeating things/facts, he can condition his mind to recognize them. He uses a Polaroid to take pictures of persons/places he wants to remember. He writes notes to himself on back of those photographs. He also keeps a detailed map, putting all these photographs in to a macro perspective, to know where everything fits. However, notes and pictures can be lost! So, he tatoos all important facts about his wife's killer in his body!! Since there is no memory of what he did 10 minutes back, he is vulnerable to exploitation by people who take advantage of his condition. Can he trust anyone? Can he find the killer on his own? These are the questions you get reading the story of a normal suspense thriller, but not here! This film totally produces a completely different set of questions.

As I said earlier, the film starts from the end. Firsy, you get to see Lenny kill John G! From there, the movie is in a rewind mode. There are actually two threads in this film: First thread takes you through this gradual rewinding, showing what happened before Lenny killed John G, in bursts of 10 minutes, while the next thread is in a chronologically correct manner. The second thread is shown in B & W. Slowly these two threads converge! This way of story telling, AFAIK, is (or atleast was, back in 2001!) very new. This could have easily left the viewers totally confused. So, every scene in thread one, has overlapping shots with the next 10 minutes burst. By some clever editing and a strong screenplay, director Nolan puts the viewers under a spell. Thinking about this, I remember one of my friends' comments: "Your humor is dry. It makes you laugh immediately, but later makes you wonder why you laughed!" You can say the same thing here. You are gripped by the way story unfolds, or rather folds, but when the credits roll, you are left with so many questions unanswered. You will see that many innocuous looking scenes that you previous overlooked have a hidden meaning! These unanswered questions, I am sure, forces you to watch the film again :-) I saw this twice and the second time, with the right perspective, I found many small things highlighted in the beginning that makes sense only when you have the total picture. The strong point of this film is, it doesn't say that something happened this way or that way, it leaves that to the viewer to conclude. So, everyone gets to form their own interpretations! This is a clever way of involving the audience. Unlike other suspense movies, this one doesn't straightaway give you the puzzle and its solution, instead it concentrates on giving you only the puzzle and many clues (or facts) from which the viewer can form any number of conclusions!! I loved this concept. Because of this, you think about this movie and its umpteen unanswered questions even after the movie ends! Isn't this what every director craves for?! Audience remembering the film for a long time to come!!

Did Lenny kill the right John G? Has he killed people before? Who took the missing pages from the police file? Is Lenny saying the truth when he is talking about Sammy? Does Sammy really exist? Are Sammy and Lenny the same persons? How did Lenny's wife actually die? Is she a diabetic? Did Lenny himself kill her? Did he strangulate her or just overdosed her with Insulin? Is searching for John G just a ruse for Lenny to be a psychopath? Woah! I need to see the film again!

Bottom line: This film has CLASSIC written all over it! Go see it. Do tell me what you think.

PS: Check out this page, which talks about the story telling technique used by Christopher Nolan. Excellent stuff.

Here are some things that caught my attention lately. Since I don't think these things deserve separate posts, here we go.

1) First, this Science-based story by Jeyamohan. I didn't know Jeyamohan writes these kinda stories too!! The basic story is about how different our Siddha Medicinal system is from Alopathy and how the system that we practise now is not the true Siddha. I got to know (learnt!?) a lot of things. Interesting read. But, after having read the story, I feel as if I went through a dense medical journal ("Siddha for dummies" !?)

2) When I was looking for some interesting blogs to read (as if I didn't have enuf already!) I stumbled on Sriram Krishnan's blog, He is a student (Wow!) in Chennai, a nerd & more importantly, has excellent coding skills! Good to see such motivated talents. He is really in to search technologies. Though, directly not related to my current work, I got kinda motivated reading all his articles. No denying that his "How to write a search engine in 16 hours" post brought back sweet memories of how I had only an evening to make our OS, which we did as our final year project, understand Tamil :) Good old days. I doubt I enjoy doing anything so strenuous lately. Professional life, for sure, takes out that enthusiasm and, sometimes, that curiosity to learn more & more things, out of you. This is my personal opinion, of course. Let's hope Sriram doesn't feel like me after 5 yrs of being in the field. Microsoft/Google, if you are looking for a talent, with enuf enthusiasm/motivation & technical know-how, you've got the right candidate here!

PS: Rama/Prem, this fellow is good, do have a look at his postings.

3) Latest *big* thing (& here's a going-to-be-a-big-thing! ;)) in Gollywood: Dhanush got married to Aishwarya, super-star's daughter.



Don't you think Rajini looks more like one of those ADMK ministers?? I can't believe this is the same person who attacked Jeyalalitha so ferocioulsy back in 1996!!

4) Mr. Duraipandi is strongly arguing that the number of characters alloted to Tamil in Unicode is not enough. I found this article quite interesting; Mr.Duraipandi gives a no-nonsense introduction to what makes Unicode tick, especially the Tamil part of it. He complains that if only Indian government had given a proper set of characters to be included in the Unicode, we'd have been typing much easier in Tamil. As a Tamil blogger now for close to 2 months, I have to agree! If not for the excellent software, e-kalappai, I'd have given up by now. One small grumble though: Mr.Duraipandi could've avoided the usual "Tamil is not given proper recognition, we are always the losers, blah blah blah" whining!

5) Saw some 10 - 12 movies since my last [movie] post here. Nowadays, I see so much *junk* that I keep forgetting the good films I see, along with those junk. Some films that I wanted to mention were "7/G Rainbow colony", "Bose" & "Bride & Prejudice". For those who haven't heard about these films, the first two are Tamil films and the last one is an Hinglish film. "Bride & Prejudice" (B&P) is directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bend it like Beckham fame). This film portrays a Punjabi family, literally preparing their daughters to be given in marriage to desis & only Desis! I didn't like the movie. Aishwarya was charming & beautiful as usual, the songs were great (except for the last duet song), some of the dialogues were good & sharp, so why I didn't like this?! I don't know; It simply is not the best effort by Ms.Gurinder. I have a detailed review of this ready somewhere in my HDD, might come around to post that sometime later (BTW, here are some Desi jokes). I think "7/G Rainbow colony" (7/G) is an excellent film by Selvaraghavan, director of "Thulluvatho Illamai" & "Kadhal kondaen". If you haven't seen this film yet, thinking that all Selvaragavan films are are always cheap and vulgar, you are missing a good movie; you have to see this film. The film was so captivating that I could not stop thinking about it for 2 days. If you think the songs are so good to hear, just see them in the movie in proper context, you will love them! I think Ravikrishna (hero) is a talented actor, but it is too early to say that. Sonia Agarwal has acted excellently. Yuvan shankar raja is fast becoming my favorite music director. I heard Karthik Raja, his brother, did the BGM for the movie, but who cares?! BGM is the backbone of this movie. It brings the emotions in every scene to life. Excellent work, again. Do not miss this movie. I read some reviews saying that only if you are/were in love, you'll like this movie, *shrug*, probably true! "Bose", I think, is one of those good movies that go unnoticed. It sucked for the first 15 or so minutes, but after that the screenplay really picked up pace. Srikanth copies Surya's mannerisms to show himself as a tough commando [sic!]. Sneha is charming & beautiful, as usu...Oops, I said the same for Aishwarya, right?! quick, think of something! Ok, "As usual, Sneha is beautiful & charming" ;-) I have a biiig review written for this too. I will post it one of these days.

Some movies I have a review written and stashed (lost?!) somewhere in my HDD: "Mr. 3000", "Beg!", "Herold & Kumar go to White castle", "The Forgotten", "Office space" & some more I don't remember now!!

I haven't totally recovered from my last ETAD (Embarassing, Totally Annihilating Defeat). If you remember, I bought CM 10 + White Belt + Black Belt to try to drown myself, but alas, it looks like I need more. So, today I went ahead and took a 3 months subscription to Chess Today. Chess Today(CT) is a daily newsletter, delievered to your mailbox as a PDF, with interviews/annotated games/puzzles et al. It is published by GM Baburin. I am hoping to see some good annotations for the ongoing Russian Superfinals games in CT as well as BlackBelt. Mig or Baburin? Lets see whose annotations I understand more :)

I was on a long vacation last week, enjoying not only playing with my brother's daughter, but also preparing to watch Russian Super finals :) How can anyone miss this one (even if that means missing a 2 yrs cutie's smile)!?

Russian heavy weights, Kasparov, Kramnik & Karpov usually do not play in their national championship, which, by the way, is one of the strongest events! In Russia, literally, you can find an IM-strength player in every house. It is a known thing that a Russian Candidate master is as strong as a FIDE IM. With its abundant Chess talent and more importantly, the excellent ambience which nurtures this Chess talent, it should not come as a surprise that Russia is the dominant Chess playing country. Russian Chess Federation head, Zhukov, announced last year that the winners of the 57th Russian championship @ St.Petersburg and Tomsk , along with top 7 Russian GMs (Kasparov, Kramnik, Svidler, Morozevich, Bareev, Karpov & Grischuk) would play in a super-final, finding a single Russian champion!

Kramnik & Karpov pulled out. The former producing a Doctor's letter saying he needs 2-3 months rest before any serious play and why the latter pulled out is still a mystery. To make a guess, I'd say Karpov would be at the bottom of the points table in this strong tournament if he played and he knew that :) If you think Kramnik's producing a doctor certificate reminds you of how we used to produce a proof for taking sick leave, back in the school, you are not alone! ;)

So, 11 players were confirmed for the Russian super-finals taking place from November 14th to November 27th.

First round pairings (Nov 15th)

Garry Kasparov (2813) - Evgeny Bareev (2715)
Alexander Motylev (2596) - Alexander Grischuk (2704)
Vladimir Epishin (2599) - Alexander Morozevich (2758)
Alexey Dreev(2698) - Artyom Timofeev (2611)
Vitaly Tseshkovsky (2577) - Peter Svidler (2735)
Korotylev bye.


Kasparov - Bareev

Kasparov started off well by beating Bareev in a rare variation of Caro-Kann. Motylev unfortunately under performed and Grischuk easily converted the advantage in to a full point. Morozevich in his game against Epishin, looked dominating in the early stage, but Epishin neatly unwound himself and secured a draw. Probably Moro missed many strong continuations, but I am sure we can learn a lot from Epishin's play. Dreev & Timofeev went for a draw. In his game against Svidler, Tsheshkovsky blundered in the 29th move and, needless to say, Svidler converted the advantage in to a full point.

The final standing after Rd 1

(Thx Chessbase)
So, who is playing who in the second round?

Round 2 pairings (Nov 16th)

Artyom Timofeev (2611) - Vitaly Tseshkovsky (2577)
Alexander Morozevich (2758) - Alexey Dreev (2698)
Alexander Grischuk (2704) - Vladimir Epishin(2599)
Evgeny Bareev (2715) - Alexander Motylev (2596)
Alexey Korotylev (2596) - Garry Kasparov (2813)
Svidler bye.

Garry has to beat Korotylev today to keep his ELO above 2800 and to shake off his rust! Lets see if the old lion can still roar as it used to :)

When I first bought my computer (back in my first year of college), I installed and tried out all the things I could get. My 56Kbps modem, though trusty, couldn't get me all the things I wanted (like the complete OS/2 3.0, which I got with the first PCQuest CD back in 1995 :)). Luckily, I had a subscription for PCQuest, which delivered a CD full of goodies every month. One of the hot things at that time was voice recognition. IBM Via Voice & Dragon naturally speaking were two of the voice recognition software I tried out. Both, unfortunately, didn't have the technology developed/implemented to that extend where typing can safely be forgotten! It took me a long time to learn to dictate; Ya, it might sound funny, but try speaking like "This is a text UNDO test UNDO test PERIOD. SELECT TEST. BOLD.", your mom will think you have finally gone nuts!

It seems the hardware/software has finally evolved to make this experience enjoyable (I "enjoyed" my encounters too, but thats more fun, this time it is serious business). Check out this post by John Udell.

Click here to see the SWF video of Udell trying his hand (voice!?) at dictating, with the latest Dragon Naturally speaking 8.0.

Whew, what a month October has been! With the heavy weights Kramnik & Leko fighting it out for the Dannemann World Championship title, I have to admit, I didn't pay that much attention to the first 3 - 5 rounds of this year's olympiad. Of course, there were so many elite players playing including my favorite Chucky. But, more than Kramnik, I needed a break after those nerve-wrecking final 2 games of the WCh :)

When I finally caught up with it, 5 rounds had finished. Russians have won the gold since time immemorial, so, naturally they were the favorites for the Gold again. There were other strong teams to look for too, like Ukraine, Israel, USA (with Russian GMs in all boards), India, Armenia et al. India, with Vishy (Vishawanathan Anand) in board 1, was the strongest of all the Indian olympiad teams ever. India had 14 points and was placed 6th, after 5 rounds. Not bad! That too, when you have someone like Anand in the team, we already have got a psychological edge over all our opponents. But India started with an unimpressive score of 2.5 - 1.5 over Uruguay. Anand rested that day (why do you need rest in the first round?!). At the end of 5th round, Ukraine was at the top with 14.5 points and they had already played Russia! So, unless they blundered against some low-rated team, they had a chance to be in the top-3.

In the sixth round, Russia kicked Israel's butt, a 3.5 - 0.5 result. This is not surprising considering that even with out Kasparov/Kramnik & Svidler, the Russian team was one of the highest avg-ELO teams. Their average ELO was 2724 !!! Morozevich was in board 1. He crushed Korchnoi in round 2 in just 13 moves. Ok, "crushed" is too cruel a word! Korchnoi, a 73 yrs old veteran, blundered and Moro exploited it. Svidler was supposed to fly in and join the team from Brissago, where he was acting as the second for Kramnik. So, naturally, Russia looked all set to take Gold this year also! Ukraine continued to be in the lead with 19 points with Ivanchuk performing at 3000+ rating. Cuba was playing excellantly too.

Round 7 was crucial, as India played the leader - Ukraine!! That meant Anand would be playing Ukraine board 1, Ivanchuk. If a list of best players is produced based on the Chess understanding of the players, there is no doubt that Ivanchuk will be at the top in that list. Kasparov admitted once in the 90's that the only player he'd feel uncomfortable playing against would be Ivanchuk. He practically can play any opening. You just have to see him playing a game; He hardly ever sees the board. He stares directly at the audience or stares at the ceiling, anywhere else except the board. I always have wondered how he resembled a modern Intel processor, with 4 or more execution pipelines running simultaneously analyzing the variations! I tell you, these elite GMs are really aliens :) Biggest surprise of Round 7 was Bulgaria beating Russia. As expected (!?), India lost to Ukraine 1.5 - 2.5. Ivanchuk - Anand was a draw. Karjakin provided the only point beating Kunte in board 4. Armenia defeated Israel 3 - 1. England lost to Netherlands 1.5 - 2.5. Ukraine maintained its lead with 21.5 points, 2 points ahead of Russia & Bulgaria.

Round 8 saw India defeating Spain - A by 2.5 - 1.5. No major changes in the toppers list. Ukraine was still leading after beating Bulgaria 3.5 - 0.5. In round 9, India played Russia. Anand beat Moro in a complex Sicilian line, which I haven't yet understood fully. Probably, never will ! Harikrishna missed a tactics against Dreev as early as move 27 in his game and went on to lose the game. India lost to Russia 1.5 - 2.5. Spain-A, in which Shirov was playing, was soundly beaten 3.5 - 0.5 by USA (actually, Russia - B. All the players are either from former USSR or Russia) . Ukraine slowed down a bit and tied 2-2 with Armenia. Former FIDE champion Ponomariov lost again :) This fellow sometimes makes you wonder how he beat Ivanchuk in the FIDE WCh finals ! Round 10 saw India losing to Cuba by 1.5 - 2.5. Anand didn't play that day, which was a surprise considering that Cuba was performing very well so far. Ukraine was still leading Russia by 2 points. But, with 4 rounds to go, Russia once again became the favorites for Gold. Svidler beat Lautier in a nice game. Round 11 saw Ukraine playing Cuba. Ponomariaov lost again, this time to Lazaro! India defeated Canada 3.5 - 0.5. IM Bluvshtein of Canada is one of the talented upcoming players to watch out for. Russia defeated USA 2.5 - 1.5. Ukarain was still in the lead with 29 points.

In Round 12, Georgia defeated Russia 2.5 - 1.5. This was more shocking, more so for the Russians, who probably were already dreaming of celebrating the Gold with vodka in the comfort of their motherland ! Ukraine once more ukrained a team, Poland, to push their point count to 34.5. Literally unreachable by Russia & Armenia, who both were at 31. India had one more less-than-impressive performance, losing by 1.5 - 2.5 to Israel. Unfortunately for India, Cuba beat Slovenia by 4 - 0, pushing Cuba up in the standings chart. Still 2 more rounds to go. Ukraine looked all set to take Gold. So, the dog race was in full swing for the silver and bronze medals. Armenia threatened to overtake Russia for Silver. If it happened, it'd be a big blow for Russia. So, the final 2 rounds became very important. In Round 13, Ukraine went for a draw with Georgia. Russia beat Cuba by a negligible margin of 2.5 - 1.5. Svidler won a nice game against Lazaro Bruzon, though. India beat Poland by the same margin (2.5 - 1.5). Sasi played a brilliant Queen-sac game winning against Krasenkow and Anand won with Black. FIDE champion Kasimdzhanov displayed fine technique by beating Shirov, who is a great endgame player. Eventually, Spain lost to Uzbekistan. So, after round 13, Ukraine was at the top (36.5), Russians in the second position (33.5) and Armenia in the third (33). Israel with its 32.5 was fighting for the bronze too.

In Round 14, Ivanchuk came back to board 1 after a rest day. Ukraine didn't allow for any last-minute surprises and made sure they get the Gold by beating France 3-1. Russians, who hadn't lost an Olympiad since 1978, had to settle for Silver. Armenia tied with Russia in terms of points. Both of them were 36.5, but based on the tiebreak scores, Armenia got only bronze. India got a victory against Bulgaria with 2.5 - 1.5 and took 6th. The final standings are

1. Ukraine 39.5
2. Russia 36.5
3. Armenia 36.5
4. USA 35.0
5. Israel 34.5
6. India 34.0
7. Cuba 33.5
8. Netherlands 33.0
9. Bulgaria 32.5
10. Spain A 32.5

Mr.Ilango is a Chemical Engineer by profession. What he has done to his birth village - "Kuthambaakkam" - is really appreciable & impressive. Click here to read an article in Vikatan to know more.. Can you believe the village shown in this picture is only 30Kms off Chennai?

Chessbase has a funny article on Bush vs Kerry here. Bush - Kerry game score is a neat idea. I also loved the way Kerry's play resembled mine! Great minds think alike? ;)

Also, Krush and Shahade look cute in their wigs :) That article has MiG written all over it, even though it lacks the touch of the good old MiG we all knew and loved.

After getting beaten soundly (you can still see the dark ugly bruises in my face) in Online Chess for 3 times in a row, yesterday, I did the Chess equivalent of drowning myself in Liquor: Went out and bought more Chess books! You see, everytime I have an embarassing, totally annihilating defeat, I get soooo "low" that I go out, buy a new Chess book, read the first chapter and hope it doesn't happen again. Does buying all these books help? I would say it only adds to the worries:

1. How to pack/unpack/shift some 110 Chess books blah blah blah. A constant reminder of how many times I have embarassed myself.
2. When am I going to go past the first chapter (?!) in all these books.
3. The alarming rate at which this collection is growing. This is my major worry. I don't seem to learn anything at all. Why?
4. Keeping a tab of books in which I crossed the first chapter. Ohhh..this is quite an irritating thing, believe me. Most of the times, I get so confused that I start from the beginning.

Enough rambling! When I had my latest ETAD (Embarrassing, Totally Annihilating Defeat), I didn't go out and buy any books. Does that mean I am cured? Nope! Since I couldn't find any books that I didn't already own, I bought Chess Master 10th Edition (CM) and subscribed to both BlackBelt and WhiteBelt.

I first saw CM in one of my friend's house. My first impression was "All nice graphics, engine is ok and has tons of tutorials. Wow!". But, soon that "Wow" factor gave way to "Doesn't look professional at all" feeling. Now do not get me wrong, I don't play Kasparov every other day. I didn't mean that kind of professionalism here. CM has that look that can't quite be termed as ...... professional, you know :) So, why did I buy it? I figured I do not need a Deep Fritz to train and anyway Deep Fritz bows out to CM when it comes to tutorials, which is exactly what I am looking for.

WhiteBelt and BlackBelt, for uninitiated, are the weekly Chess newsletters sent out by MiG. It is not free, BTW. But, I think, it's cheap (or does it look cheap just because I am desperate?!) . At $6/month it is worth a try. I already have got 2 BlackBelts and 1 WhiteBelt. WhiteBelt is supposed to be for my level of players (read it as "for patzers"). But, after going through WB, I tell you, only a "Sub WhiteBelt" or a "No-Belt" issue will make sense to me, I guess.

I have posted a 2 part document on algebraic notation titled "Algebraic Notation - An introduction" to my Tamil Blog. If you can read Tamil & interested in Algebraic notation, please go through that tutorial and let me know what you think. I'd appreciate if you post some comments on them. TIA.

These are the direct links : Part-1 Part-2