Solid Smoke

The 2010 remake of the The Karate Kid (1984) has Jaden Smith in the title role and Jackie Chan as his teacher. The movie is produced by Will Smith , father of Jaden Smith. The movie is about an American kid who moves to China and has troubles with his school bullies. His opponents are experts in Kung Fu, being trained by a vicious 'no mercy' teacher. Our hero gets an unlikely teacher in Jackie Chan, who agrees to train him so that he can kick the bad guys' butt in a martial arts tournament. If the theme doesn't interest you much, the screen adaptation will bore you to death. Jaden Smith gives a terrible performance as an actor (compare it to Haley Joel Osment 's performance in The Sixth Sense ). The story is very familiar and has no hidden surprises. The movie doesn't do justice to it's title since the martial art that's portrayed is Kung Fu, rather than Karate. So, this really ought to be 'The Kung Fu Kid'. There are several elaborate scenes in...

Ever since the project was announced, Raajneeti was hyped as based on the life of Sonia Gandhi , portrayed by Katrina Kaif . The creators probably thought this would give them good publicity. Later, as if they couldn't handle it, the director Prakash Jha and Katrina Kaif dismissed these reports. Anyway, as a result of all this, Raajneeti was widely associated with Katrina Kaif and nobody else (compare Google searches for "raajneeti katrina kaif" and "raajneeti ranbir kapoor". Arjun Rampal doesn't even have a chance!). In fact, the movie is not about Sonia Gandhi and nor is Katrina Kaif the lead character. So, what is Raajneeti all about. Just politics! Politics in north India, to be precise. But the movie is just an over-glorified potpourri of the epic Mahabharata and Francis Ford Coppola's classic The Godfather (1972) (screen adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel by the same name). The basic theme of the movie is Mahabharata with story elements and ...

Opera has been my favourite browser for more than a decade now. This under-appreciated product introduced many innovations (like tabbed browsing and standards compliance) that people usually associate with Firefox. Opera has a feature for searching using keywords in the address bar. For example, To search with Google, all you need to do is type: "g your-search-phrase" in the address bar and hit enter. Similarly, 'w' will do a Wikipedia search and 'y', a Yahoo search. I've seen lot of people get pleasantly surprised when I explain this handy feature that saves time. Adding a custom search Being a movie buff, I do lot of searching on IMDB and hence adding a custom search for that is very useful for me. Here's how to do it. Open: Menu > Settings > Preferences > Search Click on 'Add', type in the following: Name = IMDB Keyword = i Address = http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s Hit OK and you're done. From now on, you can just typ...

Curries is a new take-home counter from the famous Amritha Hotel group. It's at Kowdiar, right next to Cafe Coffee Day (yup, the old Nikki-Nikita place). The attractive food counter had a number of non-vegetarian dishes in the offering, but only one vegetarian dish. The servings are measured by weight and reasonably priced (250g chicken curry costs Rs.80). I tried the chicken curry (what better to try at a restaurant named curries ?). It was not very spicy and had too much potato content for my taste. The mutton fry (not too dry) was very spicy and quite good. The Gobi Manchurian was fine too. But the best part of the meal was the Rotis. They had little or no maida and were delicious enough to be devoured without any curry. To conclude, Curries shows lot of promise (unlike the previous occupants of that place). Do checkout their chicken bartha , it looked interesting...

Zinc n Rock is a stylish new café, located at the Vanross Junction. These guys have placed ads on every nook and corner of the city, and so we decided to check it out. It's a delight to walk in to this stylishly decorated restaurant. The theme seems to be 'Red & Black' everywhere and of course, rock music. An electric guitar adorns a wall and there's a durbar at a corner, where you can sit down on the cushions on the floor (if you are capable of bending your knees, that is!). But the constant rock noise (I dare not call it music) from the shabby speakers gets on your nerves after a while. I really cherished the moments of pause between tracks! The menu too is quite attractive with a variety of sandwiches, burgers and beverages. The prices were reasonable too. We marked our orders on a list provided and the waiter was very prompt to collect it from us. And then our loooong wait began. It took about an hour for our sandwiches/burgers to be served. When enquired, the...

"Mezbaan" - how does that sound? Well, if the title didn't tell ya, it's a new restaurant claiming to specialize in Malabari cuisine. It's on the ground floor of the Vyapara Bhavan building at Manjalikkulam (down the Gandhari Amman Kovil Road, towards Thampanoor). The restaurant is not very big, accommodating less than ten tables. The place looks okay enough. The palm-leaf and bamboo walls and kerosene lanterns (കമ്പി റാന്തല്‍) (they're just decorative, of course) are mixed with Chinese paper lanterns/lamps to give a colourful and mildly weird ambience. The menu is very attractive although the prices are slightly on the higher side. Chicken/mutton biryani are priced at Rs.100. As always, we (three of us) went for variety and asked for a sizeable number of dishes. To our disappointment, we found a large disparity between what's listed on the menu and what's actually available. The kitchen seemed to support only 30% of the menu :-( The menu claims th...