Smorgasbord Fantasia

The world is going to pay. May 2015 the demonic robot Ultron unleashes destruction and mayhem and our superheroes may be hard-pressed to really save the world. Like Thor-2: Dark World , this second movie that is bringing together all our beloved super-heroes is darker, grimmer and brutal. We knew it was all building to this with Captain America: Winter Soldier being the best outing from Marvel till date. I got some comments: - Mark " Hulk " Ruffalo really seems to be having a rough time. The superhero who pummeled "puny God" Loki like he was stone-washing him, looks lost and confused. I wonder why? - Tony Stark aka Ironman fucks up big time. Ultron seems to be using one of his suits to go about his dance of destruction. - Did Loki really die? in Thor-2 ? - I think I saw the Twins from Cap-2 make their appearance. Hooray !! Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch , but makes you wonder if they are the good guys or the bad ones? End credits of Cap-2 really didn...

So it happened again this year.  The yearly pilgrimage where we dutifully buy tickets and trudge to the big screens to pay homage to the King Khan, Shahrukh Khan . His 2014 movie, Happy New Year directed by Farah Khan got released today and Howzah! We were in on the celebrations. First day first show. Literally. 10 ‘oclock on the dot. A 2-day 1200 KM drive back – and – forth from Madurai didn’t deter our spirits. This was a yearly pilgrimage and we would never miss the darshan. Now with Farah Khan at the helm of the affairs, we really weren’t expecting this to fire up our brain synapses. We were fully prepared to leave it at home. We knew it is a heist movie. Not an Ocean’s Eleven. More like a Charlie’s Chalees Chor. You know what to expect. A fun-filled ride. Glitzy songs. Some slap-stick bro-code humour between the male leads. [ Apart from SRK, it boasts of at least three more : Abhishek Bachan the drunkard Tapori with a penchant to puke, yuck I know! Sonu Sood...

The Intern's Handbook by Shane Kuhn came to my notice after Mihir from FBC praised the book highly. His recommendations typically are spot-on and I didn't hesitate when I got a deal on this one. So yet another first-person narrative thriller that deals with white-collar assassinations using interns. Aha...After Boy Nobody  (reviewed here  ) I think I see a pattern here. Nevertheless, the cover ( Yo! Creative Genius You!) drew me in and the premise was the perfect hook. Use the non-paid persona non-grata interns - who by the way are worse than dead flies on the wall when it comes to a corporate cultures in NYC chockablock with Ivy league heavyweights fighting for a foot-space - to slowly interject into your corporate honcho targets' office and then finish them off in unsuspecting manners that smack of their most public enemies' signature kill. Yeah. That is what the book is about. The novel actually reads like a bible or a rough field guide for survival for t...

Shame on me that I've never read one of the greatest masters of speculative fiction - Robert McCammon . The Swan Song is perhaps his best known work - apparently rivaling The Stand (Stephen King - will always be the greatest storyteller ever for me!) as one of the best written post-apocalyptic literary works but The Wolf's Hour recounting the pulse-pounding harrowing adventures of a master-spy behind enemy lines during WW-II - who is also a werewolf - is so much pure pulp fun that it's irresistible and should count right up there on the top of the shelf! Robert's portrayal of Michael Gallatine - super-spy enlisted with the British Secret Service and also Werewolf - as a powerful Captain America pitted against the demented power-crazed absolutely evil Nazis - reads like an epic. Nail-biting action, heady adventure, underplayed romance, lots of sex and hell, brilliant behind-the-lines espionage. It's got it all and Robert brings it all together in a book set ...

A Christopher Nolan movie is always a gala event. And this time, it's E-P-I-C. Giving new meaning to that word yet. Nolan takes us to the stars and galaxies - in search of a new habitable world when Earth is facing extinction. Starring Academy Award Winner Mathew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway and Of Course, Michael Caine - This movie is on my highly anticipated top 10 list. And Hans Zimmer's music builds up that spine-tingling tension as to what this team of intrepid explorers will find out there in the Galaxy - with the future of human race riding on them.

A while ago, there came out a movie called Lucy - starring Scarlett Johanssen directed by the French director Luc Besson, known for his action-super movies like Transporter and a certain series in the 90's called La Femme Nikita. With the trailer released, we get glimpses of Her Hotness, Scarlett kicking some ass. Albeit a little spaced off like she's completely zoned-out of worldly things. We get excited, lick our lips in anticipation and then dutifully get down to watching the movie. But soon - the touted pseudo science-fictional thriller - exploring themes of half-understood evolutionary science, pulp-super heroine - comes across as a treatise in Luc Besson's amateurish ambitions at being intellectually towering - thus becoming a little boring. Falling half-way between nowhere and a space-void. But hey, the movie is still fun if you were to ignore the mumbo-jumbo of the human evolutionary arcs and primal apes and planetary movements. [ which trust me, is kind of...

Disclaimer : I got a copy of this book from the publishers on behest of the author for an honest review of the same. So when Manu first reached out to me, asking me to review a “humorous novel about a failing start-up based in Bangalore”, three words struck me. Humorous. Start-Up. Bangalore. How could I refuse? A very quick racy read – giving us a tongue-firmly-in-cheek look (or “thumb-firmly-up-the-ass, as the protagonist of Sales Room is wont to say) about a start-up based in Bangalore doomed to failure. The Sales Room brings to fore “all the action inside the ‘sales room’ – a no-holds barred parda-fash (the expose for those not familiar with hindi) and a behind-the-scenes look at all the levers and triggers that work behind running a start-up – all this from the scathing sarcastic point of view of a 26-year old engineer – with B-School aspirations – and a firmly unforgiving outlook on all the malpractices that keep sales in an IT Firm afloat. Chock-a-block with astute o...

A novel that really celebrates the bounds of human imagination setting a Vietnam War to be fought on the planes of Fantasy and to so consummately bring alive the minutiae of a guerrilla war-fare fought in the sweltering humid dense forests and to really blow the readers mind by bringing in…wait for it… Drrrr..agons - Fantastically towering achievement. Kudos to Chris. I confess I haven't read Chris Evans before. Acclaimed for the Iron Elves trilogy, Chris this time goes in for a completely new setting for his new book, Of Bone and Thunder . I got the ARC copy from Galley books and while it took some time to get around to it, once I got started, this was un-putdownable. ( There. damn you English Nazis!) Chris creates a brutal ruthless war where your foe is forever invisible, giving some real memorable characters to root for and back up all the way to the calamitous climax, slapping on gooey layers of politicking through some sumptuous world building and rounds it o...