Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Romancing The Stone Film Review

Romancing the Stone is an American 1984 action-adventure film.Directed by Robert Zemeckis, it stars Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito. This film was one of the best adventure/humor movies of the eighties. Not only did it boost the star rating of Michael Douglas, it helped launch Kathleen Turner into stardom. It also was Robert Zemeckis's first box office hit as a director.

The plot of the movie revolves around romance writer Joan Wilder, played by Kathleen Turner, who travels to Colombia to find her kidnapped sister. In time she falls in love with a soldier of fortune [Michael Douglas] and the two become romantically involved as they search for a precious stone which the kidnappers want.

The beginning of the film shows Joan receiving a package from her dead brother-in-law. Soon after the package arrives she gets a frantic call from her sister Elaine[Mary Ann Trainor] informing her that she has been kidnapped and needs the map from the package as ransom. Joan flies down to Columbia but she gets lost on the way to her destination. But eventually she runs into Jack T. Colton [Douglas] and offers him some money if he would help her find her way to Cartagena. He helps her to elude a few unsavory characters who seem to be following her.Oneof these villains just happens to be the leader of the secret police who is responsible for her brother-in-laws death. The other two zany characters are Ralph [Danny DeVito] and Ira [Zack Norman].

Jack uncovers the map that Joan is carrying and after some convincing she agrees to go after the treasure. They agree that after finding the treasure they can then give the worthless map to the kidnappers. After some unbelievable escapes, they eventually find the treasure which turns out to be an enormous emerald called the malevolent. Zolo and Ralph steal it from them but then the Colombian police show up. After getting the stone back from Ralph, Joan and Jack get separated but agree to meet at Joan's hotel in Cartagena, but when Jack doesn't show up, Joan starts to get worried.

She then meets her sister's captors[Ralph and Ira] and turns over the map. They are interrupted by Zolo who knows that the map is worthless. Zolo's men are holding Jack who refuses to disclose the location of the emerald. Zolo uses Joan as bait and tells Jack that if he refuses to disclose the emeralds location he will be forced to feed Joan to the crocodiles. Jack relents and gives up the gem and tosses it towards the crocodiles.Zolo catches the stone but his hand, along with the gem, ends up in one of the crocodiles stomach. A gunfight ensues between Zolo's men and Ira's men. This allows Joan, Elaine and Jack to escape. After a prolonged fight with Zolo's men, Ira and his men escape, but Ralph is left behind.

Zolo catches Joan and Elaine. Joan tries to kill Zolo with his own switchblade,but Zolo blocks the thrown knife with a piece of wood. After Elaine faints from the sight, Joan pleads for Jack's help. He must decide whether to save her or hold onto the croc which has ingested El Corazon. He decides to try to save Joan by scaling a rock wall to reach her. However, he arrives moments after Zolo falls into a pit full of crocodiles. Seeing that the women are safe, Jack leaves to pursue El Corazon once more.

Joan then returners home to New York where she is confronted with lonely feeling towards Jack. She writes a hit novel based on her recent adventures. But one day, as she is returning home she is confronted by Jack,who is wearing crocodile skin boots, waiting for her in a sailboat that is parked on the main street in front of her apartment. It seems that Jack managed to catch the croc who had swallowed the gem. The croc had suffered a fatal case of indigestion from swallowing the gem. The ending is a not so typical love story showing Joan and Jack kissing on the deck of the Angelina, which was named for Joan's fictional heroine, as the trailer that the boat rests on drives off into the streets of N.Y. City.

The Use of CD’s and their future?

CD’s initially started off as music on discs or audio format in the mid-to-late 1980’s. CD-R’s (R means recordable) then became popular when being produced cheaply. CD ROM’s (ROM means Read Only Memory) then shortly followed to provide data discs for computers which can not be written on.

CD-Rs – written to once only. This obviously didn’t help if you had made a mistake in creating your CD and was a waste of a disc, which was expensive back in those days. Unlike a cassette, where you could record over and over (do you know anyone who still owns a cassette these days?). Therefore, the CD-RW (CD-Rewritable) was created which means you could write over the data several times. The discovery of CD duplication and CD copying has also helped to keep the compact disc alive.

CDs today are used in all sorts of industries today. Obviously, the music industry is the main source of most of the discs we have around the house. However, over the past 5 years, CDs have become an essential tool for marketing, selling, promoting, learning, informing and many, many more. Examples are:

# Promotional CDs – marketing companies use them as handy aids to distribute either by post, or to hand them out at conferences

# Music/Audio – Artists use them to record albums and also use as language learning aids.

# Training – You can put a whole training manual onto 1 CD which is far cheaper to produce and much easier to send.

# Software – This is the most used second to music.

These are but just a few uses for CDs.

We all receive CDs in the post as part of product recognition or sales. Newspapers give us freebies with either music or software. CD printing has allowed these forms of marketing to be customized to improve the effectiveness of the overall campaigns. At the moment the demand for CDs is on the increase and looks to remain that way for the next few years anyway. However, just as it’s predecessor, the cassette, the CD may be superseded by the USB stick.

Shopping for a Piano: Acoustic vs. Digital

he most serious piano teachers will adamantly point their students in the direction of an acoustic piano. For serious piano studying, I agree with this completely for reasons I will discuss shortly. But for many reasons, a genuine handcrafted instrument may not be the best choice for you. With the affordability, portability, and the many features that come with digital pianos, you may wish to head the other way. Summarily, the question of acoustic versus digital boils down to a matter of authenticity versus everything else.

Mostly, the drawbacks of an acoustic piano are matters of practicality, such as price. For what you could get a new, decent quality digital piano with, you’ll be dealing with a rather meager acoustic. This can encompass a number of problems. For instance, aside from any tuning it might need, the overall sound quality of a cheap acoustic piano can be quite poor. This may not just be an issue of old strings, but can result from an infinite number of possible factors arising from any of the complex mechanics of the piano being in disrepair. Other common problems of old pianos are broken keys and sticky keys, which is when the keys fail to spring up the way they should. There may also be faults with the framework that can range from nuisances to impending hazards. The trouble of a bad acoustic continues indefinitely, and the piano may need a decent amount of initial maintenance, in addition to periodic maintenance, which is likely to pull a few additional large bills out of your wallet right way.

Also, because of its bulk and weight, an acoustic may be a very difficult accommodation for people living in tight or elevated spaces, such as dorm rooms and certain city apartments. Some buildings may even prohibit pianos, particularly on floors above the ground level because the weight and bulk of pianos make them quite cumbersome and possibly hazardous to either the tenants or the buildings themselves. This raises the issue of portability as well. Do you gig? Do you relocate frequently? Toting a 500 pound upright piano isn’t possible for most people; moving one across the room is a challenge for most people. If your music needs to be ready to go, your hulking wooden companion is not going to be sympathetic.

Acoustic pianos also lack the many features present in digital pianos nowadays that may be valuable tools to you. For example, volume control may be necessary in dormitory, or close living, situations. Newer digitals also come with a suite of onboard functions, including on-the-fly recording, voice customization, electronic metronome, and even music mixing features, which you won’t have. You will also lack the benefit of porting your music to your PC; a simple MIDI connector would feed your performance directly into your computer’s audio card without any ambient noise or loss of sound quality, which will probably beat any recording made with an acoustic piano and consumer grade recording hardware available at a neighborhood electronics store.

With an acoustic, you will surely be at, at least, some degree of inconvenience. Still, despite the great deal of effort digital piano makers have put into their product, none have been able to truly reproduce the sound and feel of a good acoustic piano. First, lets talk about the piano sound. To most people, casual or occasional listeners of piano music, the resulting sounds between an acoustic piano and a digital piano are quite identical and equally satisfactory musically. But listen closely, because there is an important difference.

A digital piano outputs high quality recordings of the sounds that were made by a real piano at one time. During the process of making a digital piano, each key of a real concert grand piano is struck a number of times at varying velocities and recorded with sophisticated equipment to be used as the digital voice. This will give the digital piano a sufficient range of tonality and an overall likeness to the sound of an acoustic piano in varying music dynamics. But once the notes have been recorded and finally integrated with the digital piano’s voicing mechanism, they are never going to be changed. Even though the aesthetic quality of the sound is state of the art, it is the way the sounds should behave but cannot because they are fixed recordings that is the fundamental problem of digital pianos.

An acoustic piano uses a complex array of hammers, strings, a soundboard, and other moving parts that function in collaboration. This means that when any note is played, it is not played with entire independence, but is highly affected by the current state of the surrounding components of the piano. For example, playing a chord on a digital piano will simply result in three notes being played, as they were recorded individually, at the same time, whereas with an acoustic piano, the three notes will interact with each other through the soundboard and become a stew of vibrations, producing a different, more complex, and ultimately richer sound. Lacking this quality, what comes out of digital speakers will typically be quite boring and unsatisfactory to aficionados of the true piano tone.

An acoustic piano is also an analog instrument, which means is has virtually infinite range. For example, there is no limit to the loudness or softness a note may be played on an acoustic piano. With digital pianos, there is a point at which a minimum or maximum will be achieved. This means there will be occasions when you will not be able to play a note as softly or as loudly as you wish. In order words, true pppp or ffff are probably beyond the reach of digital pianos without you resorting to adjusting the volume dial while you’re performing. Even if you were to do that, the tonal quality of the notes would remain static from that point on, when it would further continue to dull or brighten on an acoustic piano.

Another problem of digital devices is the matter of intervals. In photography, for example, pixels are the intervals. With a traditional film camera, the amount of detail you are able to capture is theoretically unlimited because film is a single and continuous malleable body. The “film” of a digital camera is not single or continuous but is a multitude of pixels, each of which is only able to record a solid block of color. The amount of detail a digital camera is able to capture will depend on the how small the pixels are and how tightly they’re packed together. If the pixels, or intervals, are small enough and packed tight enough, the amalgam of the blocks of color they record will appear to be smooth curves and gradients to the human eye.

There is a similar issue of intervals with digital pianos, which is mainly the issue of touch sensitivity. Digital pianos have a finite number of intervals when it comes to key pressure. The more intervals there are and the closer they are to each other, the more realistically the piano will respond to your dynamics. High end digital pianos will have quite a lot of them. But digital pianos within the means of average shoppers may not have sufficient sensitivity. This means that while the vast difference between piano and forte may be noticeable, the most intricate variances of touch pressure may be disregarded. This will be quite a nuisance to pianists seeking a highly responsive instrument, particularly when it comes to meticulous classical music.

It also manifests in pedaling. Piano pedals are ranged. Between simple on and off, or up and down, there are degrees. Half-pedaling and quarter-pedaling are crude terms describing the manner of pedaling in which the pedal is only pressed partially down in order to create an intermediate effect. For instance, rather than completely depressing the pedal so that the full brilliance of a note is sustained, you may wish to depress it only half way to dampen about half of the note and let only the remainder of it sustain for a subtler, suppressed quality. Certainly a scrupulous pianist will wish to employ the complete range of pedaling available to him, which may not be represented entirely accurately in a digital piano.

Aside from sound, as mentioned previously, key touch is also an important issue. Digital piano makers these days have gone to great lengths to reproduce the feel of acoustic pianos. For the most part, they’ve done a good job. They’ve even gone as far as implementing graded hammer action, which is in line with the hammers of acoustic pianos gradually becoming lighter from left to right. As a matter of fact, if you could take a look at the inner workings of a digital piano, you would be quite surprised and impressed with the complexity of the hammer mechanics. However, as long as digital pianos look the way they do, being the shape and size they are, there is going to be a limit as to how authentically the key feel can be made.

The hammers on a digital piano are simply extensions of the pianist’s fingers. When the pianist presses a key down, it will raise the opposing lever, which touches the electronic pad inside the piano that serves as the string. The hammers on an acoustic piano do not behave this way. Instead of being extensions of the pianist’s fingers, they are rather like projectiles that are sprung toward the strings high above them. Imagine the carnival game where you must hit a pad on the ground with a mallet, which flings a projectile up the meter towards the bell at the very top. The finger is the mallet, the visible piano key is the pad, the hammer inside the piano is the projectile, and the string is the bell. First of all, this means if you press a key all the way down but not with the minimum amount of force needed, the projectile hammer will never leave its seating and the string will actually never be struck. Secondly, this launch-pad-like action feels quite different than the seesaw-like action of digital piano hammers.

The only way this can truly be reproduced in a digital piano is by the use of bona-fide acoustic hammers. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. But the problem is there isn’t enough room for them inside the compact size of most of the digital pianos today. That’s why as long as they look the way they do, the action of digital pianos will not feel completely akin to that of acoustic pianos. Larger, higher end models do integrate the acoustic hammer action simply to recreate the key feel. Even higher end models, which are called “silent pianos,” integrate strings as well and are bona-fide acoustic pianos with the added ability to remove the strings from the action and toggle on digital mode in order to provide volume control! But these tend to be even more expensive than acoustic pianos.

These are the basic points to think about when shopping for your piano. To restate what I said at the beginning of the article, it really boils down to the authenticity versus everything else. And the authenticity is usually going to cost you more to get. What you should think about is how important it is to you that the piano truly resembles an acoustic. Are you a classical piano student looking at a long road of perfection and possibly a career as a concert performer? Then a digital piano is probably not what you want to be practicing on, even as a temporary substitution. I would suggest taking financing an acoustic and using your relatively small budget of cash as the down payment. If this is not necessarily what you’re going for, then perhaps a digital reduction is all you really need. For most people, it is.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Bollywood Movie Review - Lage Raho Munnabhai

Okay fingers up, how many of you have seen this movie? May not be a blockbuster or a box office hit hindi movie but it is definitely worth a watch. Perhaps more than once. Why? Just imagine, Sanjay Dutt tackling his enemy by following the principles of Mahatma Gandhi. For the uninitiated, he is a beefcaked bollywood actor with a really mean mafia look who looks like a former Brisbane Lions regular player. I was refering to the former of course.

This is definitely one of my favourite movies as the story, screenplay and entertainment factors are brought up very well. This movie goes down as one of the most meaningful movies in Indian film industry. The essence of the movie is about applying the teachings of Gandhi in today's world and downright hilariousness is ensured from the pairing of Arshad Warsi and Sanjay Dutt. Hahaha... watch it. No seriously... watch it.

Story:

This is the second installment to the Munnabhai MBBS movie series. The kind hearted don, Munnabhai (played by Sanjay Dutt), researches day and night on Mahatma Gandhi in order to impress the lady of his dreams and that is when Gandhi appears in front of him either as a soul or a figment of Munnabhai’s hallucination. An adventure then starts in a meaningful way for him where he learns how to deal with people and their problems by applying Gandhi’s principles.

Screenplay:

Perhaps the sole challenge of the movie is the application of Gandhi’s philosophy to solve today’s people related problems and it is carried out so well in the movie. The comic timing of Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi is flawless. Boman Irani, in his typical fashion of doing something different in each movie, contributes further to the comedy by portraying a very stereotypical image of a Sardar. Even though the comedy does justice to the entertainment factor on a high scale, it does not deviate from the central theme and is able to deliver all the messages beautifully.

Cinematography:

Cinematography is done fairly well according to a typical Indian movie standard.

Video Editing:

There is not much video editing for the movie since there is no need for it. It is mainly focused in songs, especially in the Pal Pal song sang by Bollywood melody queen, Shreya Ghoshal.