If a $2.5 billion loss is progress (even if it’s half the $5.1b loss of Q1), then our greedy desi butcher and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit uses a different dictionary from the rest of us.

This morning struggling financial services giant Citigroup announced a loss of $2.5 billion for its second quarter ended June 30, 2008.

And how does our desi butcher see it:

We continue to demonstrate strength in our core franchise. We cut our second quarter losses in half compared to the first quarter….While there is still much to do, we are encouraged by our progress (emphasis added) in delivering on our commitment to the re-engineering efforts.

 
Vikram Pandit
CEO, Citigroup

Since taking over as CEO, Vikram Pandit has been butchering Citi jobs even as he feeds pig-like at the trough.

And yes, Citi has closed the Old Lane hedge fund that got Vikram Pandit his job at Citi following the fund’s mediocre performance.

The New York Times reports that Citi has shed 14,000 jobs this year.

Citi has acknowledged sending home 11,000 employees in the first half of this year in so-called reengineering efforts.

If Heath Ledger were not already dead, we’d have surely killed him with our bare hands for being careless with the prescription drugs that took the life of this amazing actor prematurely in January.

To watch Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight is to rejoice in a performer who had reached the ne plu ultra, the summit of his short film career.

Heath Ledger was just Vanilla good in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, the story of two gay young cowboys that won Lee an Oscar and Ledger a deserved nomination for Best Actor. But in The Dark Knight, Ledger is bloody good, literally and figuratively.

With a hideously disfigured white face, a red slit of a mouth and a knife in his hand, Ledger is a gorgeous blood-dripping sundae, lip-smackingly good.

Ledger cuts a more terrifying figure than Jack Nicholson after his fall in that vat of green chemicals in Batman (1989).

Sadly, The Dark Knight movie itself doesn’t live up to the hype and heightened expectation.

All the razzmatazz and special effects in Dark Knight cannot mask the absence of a strong, gripping story. The futuristic cars or the snazzy motorbike (in the case of Dark Knight), the jumps from towering buildings, the quiet flapping of the bat’s wings are no substitutes for an interesting, novel storyline. If you have watched Batman Begins,  then it’s hard to shake off the deja vu feeling that creep by in Dark Knight, filmed mostly in low-light or semidarkness.

The violence sometimes seems gratuitous and senseless, even if it’s perpetrated by an unhinged character and the fast chases soon induce ennui.

Director Christopher Nolan (who also directed Batman Begins) needs a long holiday away from the bats.

It’s only Heath Ledger’s jaw-dropping performance as the Joker Continue Reading…