Some Bollywood movies hit the big screen more dead than alive.

Like the scarily mediocre Bhoothnath, for instance.

There were all of 11 people for the 6:30PM show on Friday at the Regal Cinemas in New Jersey. Yes, less than a dozen people for the 6:30PM show on opening night.

And you know what? In retrospect, all those who failed to turn up for Bhoothnath were infinitely smarter than the handful of people who did. They knew what us dumb folk didn’t - Bhoothnath is a movie to stay away from.

Be warned at the outset, the Bhoothnath name is very deceptive Continue Reading…

Every age, it seems, must have its Nero.

The indifferent figure callously fiddling while Rome is burning all around him.

We see one such Nero-esque figure in the ponytailed Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of the struggling IT company Sun Microsystems.

Sun’s fortunes have taken a massive beating after the dot com bust. Wave after wave of layoffs has roiled the company, revenues have fallen, profits have collapsed and the share price has sunk deep into the sewer.

And our ponytailed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, protege of former CEO Scott McNealy, is blogging - yes, wasting his highly paid CEO time blogging - as the Sun ship slowly sinks into a quagmire.

Sun’s stock is now trading near its 52-week low. And Ponytail is blogging.

Sun’s server revenues are declining (for Q4, 2007, according to IDC). And Ponytail Continue Reading…

Sameer Gandhi of Sequoia Capital has joined Accel Partners as partner in their Palo Alto office.

At Accel, Sameer will help develop companies in the consumer Internet and software segments.

At Sequoia Capital, Sameer had been a partner leading several investments including Barracuda Networks, eHarmony, Gracenote (acquired by Sony), Marketlive and Sourcefire (FIRE) among others during his decade-long stint at the firm.

Sameer previously worked as a technology banker at Broadview and a sales engineer at Oracle.

Sameer holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BSEE and MSEE from MIT.

Yash Raj Films ugly disaster Tashan has collapsed at the U.S. box office in its second week (Please click here for Tashan opening weekend gross collection data.)

For the May 2-4 weekend, gross collections for Tashan fell nearly 81% to $58,190.

In the overall ranking at the U.S. box office, Tashan slipped to #40 for the second weekend from #24 for the opening weekend. Total gross for Tashan amounted to a measly $428,923.

Overall, Tashan has fared miserably at the U.S. box office compared to some recent Bollywood films.

In its review of Tashan, SearchIndia.com wrote:

Utterly bereft of anything worthwhile and an ugly amalgam of bad logic, rotten story, pitiful acting, ordinary photography and ear-damaging music, Tashan is a complete horror show, the likes of which have not been seen in Bollywood in a long, long time.

Take a look at how some recent Bollywood films fared in the second weekend Continue Reading…

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi’s grandson Udhayanidhi Stalin has delivered a Sakkada Panni (dirty pig) of a movie in his maiden production Kuruvi.

Vijay and bathroom video fame starlet Trisha assisted by Ashish Vidyarthi and Suman come together in this horrendous nightmare called Kuruvi to deliver nonstop nonsense from the first frame to the last.

Kuruvi has much going against it - the story is not remotely credible, music is intolerable, the acting is unbearable, action scenes unendurable and overall the movie is just insufferable.

Kuruvi’s story - if you dare call this garbage a story - is an act of breathtaking inanity.

A venal politician Konda Reddy (Ashish Vidyarthi) has found diamonds beneath government land in Cuddapah and seeks to exploit that for personal gain with a bunch of poor laborers that he has forced into virtual slavery and beats and kills brutally with an ugly posse of henchmen led by a cartoon called Cuddapah Raja who stubs his cigarettes on the palms of young boys.

Hello, will someone please tell Kuruvi’s director Dharani that this is the 21st century. Involuntary servitude and slavery in movies are so 20th centuryish and went out of fashion decades ago. Che, che.

Konda Reddy’s partner in crime is his friend Kocha (Suman), an Indian gangster based in Malaysia and the elder brother of a young girl Devi (Trisha), who is not keen on getting married to a comical mini-thug called Suri with a chronic inability to shoot straight.

And Vijay is Vel, son of a contractor Singamuthu (Manivannan), who is one of the many men that the villain Konda Reddy has kept under his unyielding yoke in a quarry.

Tamil movie directors - and presumably fans too - do not consider a film complete without either Vivek or Vadivelu to provide some cheap, vulgar laughs.  So you have Vivek in Kuruvi, playing Vijay’s sidekick. But Vivek fails to provide much joy or even those cheap laughs in Kuruvi because much of the dialogs here are so bizarrely banal.

Dharani, who directed Vijay’s successful 2004 film Ghilli, is the architect of the badly-made Kuruvi.

Kuruvi is such an idiotic movie that in one scene Continue Reading…

The U.S. Justice Department has fined IT consulting services company iGate Mastech Inc $45,000 to settle charges that iGate discriminated against American citizens and Green Card holders in hiring employees.

iGate is a Pittsburgh-based company originally founded by a bunch of Indians.

This is what the U.S. Justice Department had to say about the fine Continue Reading…

Among the many mismanaged IT companies in America, Sun Microsystems is perhaps the worst.

Since the dot com bust, this clueless company (co-founded by Vinod Khosla in 1982) has been tottering its way to losses and more losses and significant erosion of shareholder value.

Scott McNealy, he of the Microsoft-baiting fame, just couldn’t fix the company’s woes and had to make way for his pony-tailed successor Jonathan Schwartz.

Now Schwartz finds himself in the same boat. On Thursday, the company reported a loss ($34 million) and fall in revenue (down 0.5% to $3.266 billion) for its fiscal third quarter.

Even as other IT companies like IBM, Continue Reading…

(Read the Kuruvi Review here)

Vijay’s new movie Kuruvi is releasing on May 2 in the U.S.

Directed by Dharani and produced by Udhayanidhi Stalin and LSS Sathyan, Kuruvi also features Trisha Krishnan, Suman and Vivek.

Vijay’s last movie Azhagiya Tamil Magan was a horrendous piece of trash. Let’s hope Kuruvi is better.

Here are the showtimes for Kuruvi in the U.S.:

Bay Area - San Jose

Century Berryessa 10
1171 North Capitol Ave
San Jose, CA 95132

May 08 |  4:00 PM | 8:00 PM
May 09 |  6:00 PM | 9:30 PM
May 10 | 11:30 AM | 3:00 PM | 6:30 PM | 10:00 PM
May 11 | 11:30 AM | 3:00 PM | 6:30 PM | 10:00 PM
May 12 |  4:00 PM | 8:00 PM
May 13 |  4:00 PM | 8:00 PM
May 14 |  4:00 PM | 8:00 PM
May 15 |  4:00 PM | 8:00 PM

****************************
Falls Church - Virginia

Loehmann Twin Cinemas
7291 Arlington Blvd
Falls Church, VA 22042

May 09 | 9:15 PM
May 10 | 3:15 PM | 6:15 PM | 9:15 PM
May 11 | 3:15 PM | 6:15 PM | 9:15 PM
May 12 | 7:30 PM
May 13 | 7:30 PM

**************************** Continue Reading…

Tashan has fared badly at the U.S. box office with one of the poorest openings for a Bollywood movie in recent months.

Starring Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, Tashan comes from Yash Raj Films.

For the opening weekend (April 25-27, 2008), Tashan came in at No-24 with a gross of $301,226.

Average gross per theater for Tashan, which opened in 75 theaters, was $4,016.

Tashan did better than Aaja Nachle in opening gross but worse than Continue Reading…

Having conquered the world’s markets, China’s countless millions have now embarked on a new mission - to master the English language, the global language of art and commerce.

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the Chinese’ obsession with English in the latest issue:

China has been in the grip of “English fever,” as the phenomenon is known in Chinese, for more than a decade. A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English. Every college freshman must meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it’s the only foreign language tested. English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village. Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States. English private schools, study gadgets, and high-priced tutors vie for pieces of that market. The largest English school system, New Oriental, is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Having watched the relentless determination of the Chinese Continue Reading…

For the sake of the honor of Tamil Nadu and 77 million Tamils worldwide, we hope that the reports of Ajith’s Billa being screened on May 10 at the Cannes Film Festival turn out to be false.

Featuring the two non-actors Ajith and Nayantara, Ajith’s Billa (the remake of the old Billa starring Rajinikanth) is one of the ugliest Tamil movies we’ve seen in several decades.

As if watching Ajith’s Billa was not bad enough, now comes the horrifying news that this horror show is going to be showcased at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.

All these years, we thought the Cannes Film Festival was the occasion to showcase high-art not serve as a bastion of low-fart.

Upon hearing of the Ajith’s Billa-for-Cannes report, we were reminded of what the British author Theodore Dalrymple wrote in the book Our Culture, What’s Left of It:

To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism.

When there are far better movies like Mozhi and Sathum Podaathay, it’s an affront to all notions of fair play to send garbage like Billa to an international film festival. It’s like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to monsters like Continue Reading…

(Tashan Fares Miserably at U.S. Box Office) 

Even the inmates in the asylum or a tramp on the Mumbai streets would have made a better movie than this Friday’s Bollywood release Tashan.

What in the heck were the bozos at Yash Raj thinking when they unleashed a trashy movie like Tashan!

Utterly bereft of anything worthwhile and an ugly amalgam of bad logic, rotten story, pitiful acting, ordinary photography and ear-damaging music, Tashan is a complete horror show, the likes of which have not been seen in Bollywood in a long, long time.

And the architect of this monumental disaster is Vijay Krishna Acharya, who takes credit (it should really be discredit) for Tashan’s story, screenplay, dialogs and direction.

Even after making movies for over eight decades, the cavalcade of Bollywood idiots has yet to realize that story, screenplay, dialogs and direction are separate departments requiring the full-time attention of separate people. 

This clown Vijay Krishna Acharya has penned a story so bizarrely bad that it’ll surely be Continue Reading…