BlogSat

....too bad about everything else.:)

It's been a really long time since I blogged about anything I've read or seen, so this is starting to play catchup. I realized that I got so, so used to seeing Hindi movies that were really bad (after the strike , and then this brain-cell killer which was the big-budget movie that was released after it), that my expectations had been set really low. In general in the past few months, I'd come to believe that if I don't cringe too many times during a movie, and there are at least a couple of things I find amusing, that's really all I have the right to expect. So one really good movie was great, a second really great, and a third left me uncomfortable with my sense of satisfaction; I probably need to reset my expectations from Hindi films again. Love Aaj Kal was incredibly good; well-directed, perfectly cast, incredibly romantic and funny. Even the surprising casting was effective. Life Partner: It was a pretty good Govinda movie and its been a while :); nuff ...

Yet again I've been catching more TV than I should over the past few months. Quick reviews of a few shows below: Hustle Their TV seasons may be much shorter (6 to 9 episodes), but the British really do their TV well. This is so slick and funny, despite following a predictable-ish formula and some loopholes, I've been devouring it on DVD for a while now. Mad Men I resisted even starting to watch this one despite the Soprano's pedigree , but when Comcast put the entire first season on demand over the summer, started getting into it. The setting (Madison avenue in the 60s) and the characters really make the show and it is smarter than your usual TV drama, though sometimes I can't help feeling it tries a little too hard to add in the gravitas. Weeds I thought this had jumped the shark a while ago, but they seem to have salvaged it just enough lately to make it interesting again. Gossip Girl I'm embarassed to even admit I started watching this :(, but dammit...I can...

Once again, the student of business in me is going "wow" , the student of life in me is going "really?" For reasons too personally confusing to get into, I started watching the Teen Choice Awards. Don't worry, I tore myself away after about an hour after convincing myself this was not age-appropriate behavior, and after all the teenage screaming started to get jarring. Also, I was multi-tasking at that time, so it wasn't thaat bad!:) Anyway, the genius of Murdoch's minions was to come up with an award for the best celebrity MySpace page (" Choice MySpacer "....really) The business gurus may sneer, but there _were_ thousands of teenagers screaming. Think about it; the Teen Choice Awards (and by implication teens and all the celebrities nominated) were endorsing one particular social networking site on a national broadcast. Now that's good marketing. I don't know how effective it'll be, but it certainly can't hurt. In general, th...

I'm a fan of the FX show " Rescue Me " I was lukewarm when Dennis Leary mentioned the mini-sodes on his Daily Show visit. But, for the Rescue Me's particular situation it works really well. First the mini-sodes are actually good! they use characters from the story and tell a little anecdote they were clearly pretty cheap to produce through what seems like a little bit of complicated mess, they're distributing like crazy: YouTube , Crackle (Sony's site), the FX site (powered by Brightcove), Hulu These do exactly what they're supposed to do new episodes aren't coming till Spring 2009 , the fans need something to tide them over and keep the show in their memory: done potentially rope in new fans (short episodes, lower commitment to start watching the show) without freaking out old school media which is loathe to risk potential DVD sales by putting older episodes/clips online: done Its not completely clear to me how much this is by their own design, and...

So here's what happened. Maybe because its set in Chicago, or maybe just because the writing is so good, I really like My Boys. So its on my DVR list. I get home excepting to watch the show a few Thrusdays ago, except that something funky happened and the recording got messed up. My options: wait a few days and record the re-run, or catch it online right away. I decided I wanted to watch it right then, and went to TBS' website. Here's what the th ought-stream went like after that Click. Woohoo, they have full episodes on the sites Click . Huh? Ok. the show isn't online yet; maybe in a few hours? Click . The new episode will be online on the 19th; exactly 8 days from now! Argh! WTF? Click . Fine, I still want to watch the show now, so twenty minutes later I did watch it on my laptop, but TBS didn't get a chance to serve me ads in the middle of the show and severely reduced the probability of my visiting TBS.com ever again. Using windowing strategies (i.e. making thi...

From a Scrubs re-run: Kelso: "Are you an idiot?" JD: "No, I'm a dreamer."

There are moments when Stephen Colbert is absolutely matchless on TV. Yesterday was one of em. Clip below: Bunch of movies and new TV shows consumed in the last few weeks. Once sentence or less reviews below Blood Diamond : Wow Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Second best Indiana Jones movie ever; Speilberg has aliens on his mind too often. Bhoothnath: more fun than I expected and just the feel-good movie I needed at the time! Scoop: Woody Allen's awkwardness is now just supremely annoying instead of supremely amusing. Avatar (cartoon): surprisingly addictive Sex and the City: not ashamed to admit I saw it :), but eh... I prefered the TV show.

Just in time! I was getting really annoyed at the re-runs. Colbert and Stewart are going back on the air without a writing staff. Stewart; I can see surviving this and actually putting out something reasonable. If Colbert can be "himself" and put out "The Word" on his own day-after-day the man is even more of a genius than I thought.:)

Quick TV thoughts this week: Yeah, I know the quality of my blogging has deteriorated even further.:) SouthPark: ImaginationLand I'm definitely a SouthPark fan, though I've come to accept that a huge variance in quality is part of the game with this TV show. Some of the their episodes can be really bad, but then there are times when they can put out just sheer genius. The ImaginationLand trilogy was pure genius; some depth even if you weren't looking for it; incredibly, incredibly funny and as always, reasonable social statements were made. If you'd watched the show for a while, there were tons of "in" jokes as well, e.g. ManBearPig In other news, I'm surprised that this is a show I can't seem to look away from: Brothers and Sisters , and how good does a show have to be (this one: Pushing Daisies ) so that you actually think to yourself "Oh, I better not watch this on DVR now. My mood isn't that great, don't want to risk not enjoying it....

Google/YouTube mentions happen so often enough lately that I could make this a regular feature.:) From Reaper last week, (some paraphrasing) Sam (speaking to the Devil about finding an escaped soul from hell) : "But where is he?" Devil: "I don't know." Sam:"That's not helpful! Don't you have minions to find this guy? Devil: "Who do you think I am? Google?"

Some random observations as I watched late-night TV Catching Tucker Carlson on Real Time right now. My suspicion when I saw him for the very first time on Jon Stewart's now-classic, Crossfire-canceling appearance is confirmed: his arguments generally don't make too much sense, he seems to whine a lot, seems a little mean, seems pretty immature and isn't as smart as he seems to think he is. Enjoy his discomfiture below. I prefer Craig Ferguson so much more than Conan , NBC should be worried about that "Late night leader"-tag especially with Leno's forced retirement coming. :) Everyday for years my routine was set: catch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart , switch to NBC for up Leno, and stay there about half-way through Conan before going to bed. Now I almost always switch channels and make sure I don't miss Ferguson's energetic opening monologue. Apparently, his strong accent isn't proving to be as big a hindrance to his ratings as people once...

DVR = I can finally be more regular watching the Simpsons. Favorite lines today: Homer to tow-truck driver: "You mean you can make people miserable whenever you want...just like God." Bart: "Search for it on the Internet. Mom" Marge: "Oh, I don't want to bother the Internet with my problems."

Those who know me well, know I have an all-too-unhealthy addiction for TV...even bad TV. But is it just me, or does the average quality of TV shows on American (especially network) TV just keep getting better over the last few years? Anyway, I'm DVR-ing more shows than I can possibly watch..though I am trying.:) Top of my list of the many new shows that I like so far: Pushing Daisies : very quirky, sharp dialogue, imaginative cinematography, moves really quickly, unusual soundtrack; cannot possibly end well, but should be fun while it lasts...or until the writers make it jump the shark .

Companies/Marketing gurus are always preaching about how the path to (continued) success is to listen to your customers. Thats true most of the time... of course except when its not. There are many obvious case where this is not true: for example in the case of breakthrough /emerging technologies. Customers are generally pretty good at telling you about things they'd like changed about a product of yours they're using. But ask them if they're interested in a product of yours that they may not be very familiar with, with benefits they may not completely understand, and their answers are notoriously unreliable! Why do I bring this up? I signed up for DVR a couple of months ago. I also signed up for the HBO package for the very first time (more on HBO's really smart On Demand options later.) I didn't really expect DVR to significantly change the way I watch TV, but it has. Completely. I've basically stopped watching live TV; even when I show up in time to watch t...

A friend recommended the TV show Traveler to me. So far, I really like it! But watching it I just realized just how much my viewing habits have changed, how ubiquitous product placement can be and just how much can go just into the details of a TV show (also realized what a complete dork I am.:)) So, imagine this scene: the two protagonists (Jay and Tyler) need info on companies/stock trades/people (happens when you've been implicated in a terrorist attack), so naturally they do what everyone else does: they use a search engine. Except they don't google , they use something called "Kazew." The site (as shown during the show) had a ridiculously large Web 2.0-ish logo on the top left and plain vanilla Yahoo-ish results page. I couldn't resist, especially with my laptop just open: typing in "kazew.com" take you to the Warner Bros. homepage. They produced the show for ABC . The whois entry for the kazew domain, shows that they had Markmonitor , a fra...

A funny thing happend while watching the season finale of The Office . Based on a mention in the show, I found myself browsing CreedThoughts on the NBC website immediately after the show. It was kinda weird the blog exists since on the show the "blog" is just actually a Word document that the incredibly incoherent Creed is writing stuff into.:) But this did get me thinking as to how TV shows have moved beyond just television now (probably started with the lost 2 seasons ago.) After watching the season finale of Lost with friends (Thanks Faisal !), the next day I spent an hour on Lostpedia tying up so many things I'd seen earlier in the show. Spending time on the site makes you appreciate the show at a whole new level, adding even more depth to the entire experience. These offline components allow the fan base to galvanize which helps the show retain loyal followers and hopefully attract new ones. On the other hand, I really believe it also gives TV writers an incentive...

Creative advertising is always entertaining, and I've always thought that the best Indian ads have always been particularly brilliant. Past advertisements revolving around cricket though, even the good ones, always seemed to be based more around cricket stars rather than cricket. In general, Indian ads of late have been over-using celebrities. So I absolutely loved the energy of this new Nike advertisement (below), which though it has Sreesanth and Zaheer Khan, just has them looking on rather than being the focus of the ad. The ad is very Nike "Just do it" , but also very Indian and very cricket-friendly. The ad was done by JWT Bangalore , and the soundtrack is a lot of fun.It is a Konkani song so in theory I should get it, but given all the flavors of Konkani floating around, I can barely make out a couple of words.:) Incidentally, I stumbled on to this link on AdAge , which ranks the top 100 advertising campaigns of the century . Most are really old, but interesting r...

I'm a big fan of BBC radio . I used to listen to the online stream religiously for a while. I learnt two things today this week about the BBC that made me smile They have an incredibly ambitious Web 2.0 program (slightly negative tone to the paidcontent post though.) Given how much news tend to be over-sensationalized and needlessly analyzed today, I think its kinda cool that in 1948, the BBC radio broadcast said "There is no news today - goodnight." I can't find the link to the Economist opinion piece where I read it, but this a pretty funny spoof instead.:) They're responsible for the first three seasons of Coupling . Season Four was good, but... New ChiBus article out this week as well. Wrote it in a terrible rush, but it was the most fun I've had writing an article in a while.

I was watching an advertisement on TV and the background song was the muppet show "mahna mahna" song. So simple, but pure genius.:) The original clips are below Also, new ChiBus article this week. Update: I'm wrong on the origins of the song. Here's the wikipedia entry .