Review

The Fountainhead – A Review

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Ojas reccomended this movie to me. The novel I had already read and liked greatly. The movie sadly fell short of expectations. It could have been a brilliant movie, and is in parts, but is paced so fast that, for someone who has not read the novel, it is difficult to put two and two together.

Movies based on novels very often do not do justice to the original. But there have been movies otherwise. The Godfather, the LOTR trilogy and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest being excellent examples. This however, belongs to the former category.

The major problem with the movie is the length of the movie. According to me the movie should have been at least 3 hours long. During most parts the movie seems extremely rushed and at times it is difficult to connect pieces. The screenplay by Rand is crisp but haphazard at the best. For example, the relationship between Roark and Dominique could have been explored a little more.

Gary Cooper are Howard Roark and Robert Douglas as Ellsworth Toohey are extremely good. The other actors however, do not leave a mark. Patricia Neal, playing Domonique Francon, is good only in parts but mostly has a wooden expression that fails to convince you.  Raymond Massey as Gail Wynand is ok.  Peter Keating, played by Kent Smith, hardly has any screen time to be judged.

The fans of the novel however, must watch the movie once. I rate it as 3.5/5.0.

Interesting: You can read a NY Times review (of 1949) criticising the philosophy behind the movie, and the movie itself, here (sign up required).

Bernardos – Goan food paradise!!

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Shivam Vij wrote a post a couple of days back about some fine Goan restaurant – Barnardos, right in our backyard in Gurgaon. So here comes the weekend and a gang of us start to hunt it down and try the food there.

The restaurant is hidden in some corner of DLF Galleria and geting to it was not very straight forward. But then all of us (10 in all, including Ojas, Shailesh, Undi and Pappu) made it to the restaurant finally. The first thing you notice here is the size of the place. It is small and donned with black and white photographs (of his family I am guessing).

Now comes the funny part. Though the non-veg options are plenty, three veggies (Neha, Madhukar and me) placed our order in this fashion, “Aapke paas jo bhi veg hai sab le aao.” He got four dishes in all including the starter.

The service is slow and at times frustrating. But, once the food arrives, you forget the cribbing and start enjoying. Fine food. One brinjal curry, an Okri curry and one coconut mix veg dry subzi, served with bread/rice, in all it made for a yum evening. Topped it of with (what I am guessing to be home made) chocolate cake and ice cream 🙂

Now only if Sudeep/Rahul/Thax come to Delhi, I would take them here. Rahul is coming here on 24th. I hope we go there then.

Yahoo! Bookmarks – Reincarnation??

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Mike Arrington thinks that Yahoo! Bookmarks has reinvented itself with its latest launch.

I however, beg to differ. I mean Yahoo! clearly has issues to sort out for itself. del.icio.us is clearly a better and easier to use service that Yahoo! Bookmarks and it would make things easier for itself by just integrating both. Clearly people do not like Yahoo! Bookmarks (despite its 10 million strong user base) as much as del.icio.us. I personally signed on to Yahoo! Bookmarks and used to create some 80 odd bookmarks but gave up due to the cumbersome process of bookmarking (that is taken care by the new toolbar) but have added 400 pages to del.icio.us in under 5 months, not a great number but shows how much easier it is to use del.icio.us.

What I like about the new service is the folders option and the snapshot view of the page cached. I wish Yahoo extends the folder feature to del.icio.us and maybe the snapshot view also while retaining the ease of use of del.icio.us. Tomi Poutanen (of Yahoo! Social Bookmarking) says that the major difference between del.icio.us and Yahoo! Bookmarks is that one is for social bookmarking and the latter for personal use. Excuse me!! Why not allow such an option in any one of the service itself. I mean del.icio.us already has an option to not share any bookmarked page. Keep it simple guys.

However, I must say that Yahoo! team is doing a great PR job by answering queries on a blog (not run by them) . Hats off to you guys!! You rock!!

It also highlights how companies take blogs as a serious platform for PR management. I hope a few people (who I know won’t understand) understand the value of blogs.