My “city” is becoming big – there is even a movie with its name.. yay!
http://www.indiaglitz.com/channels/tamil/article/52623.html

The 142-year[2] old municipality was crowned as largest Corporation (area wise)[3] in Tamil Nadu on August 1, 2008. whatever that means! If there is some place worse than Detroit, it is Vellore.. or maybe not..

SearchIndia.com Responds:

1. Poorna from your link looks

2. Can’t remember the name of the Vellore restaurant now.

3. You write: If there is some place worse than Detroit, it is Vellore.. or maybe not..

Detroit has nearly 50% unemployment. Bet even Vellore isn’t that bad.

The good news is that you can get a house in Detroit for $14,000 to $18,000 or maybe even lesser. Bet even Vellore Mavattam can’t match those prices.

The “King Kong” they have mentioned is from 1933.. not the new one, just in case you missed the year.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

1. We liked Diehard too when we first watched it.

2. You write: I am from a town near Chittoor

Hope it’s not Sholingur (one of our buddies hails from Sholingur).

SearchIndia.com Responds:

12 Angry Men was a nice film too.

However,it’s good that nearly 70 of the movies they’ve listed are real Classics and even included some Commercial failures like Casablanca, Blade Runner, Shawshank Redemption.

I would’ve been happy if Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets and Casino too deserved to be in the list.) and Akira (Yojimbo,RAN,Ikiru,Red Beard,Hidden Fortress) had more movies represented there.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Casablanca a commercial failure?

What are you smoking today.

Here’s what Wiki has to say on the subject:

Casablanca…went into general release on January 23, 1943, to take advantage of the Casablanca conference, a high-level meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in the city. It was a substantial but not spectacular box-office success, taking $3.7 million on its initial U.S. release (making it the seventh best-selling film of 1943).

A substantial success is not the same as a commercial failure, kiddo. At least, not in our lexicon.

Vandatanga pa comedy pasanga (here come the clowns).

Never mind. I thought you said it in a complimentary tone though i knew yours was just a response to a comment

By the way, i wonder what the hell the folks at yahoo meant by ‘historical importance’ and ‘cultural impact’.

The only history Spielberg ever shot was his boring look-how-heroic-Americans-were or look-how-jews-suffered second world war-II movies (‘Saving Private Ryan’ and ‘Schindlers List’).

These movies are hardly educative and only tell us what we already know i.e. Hitler and his thugs were really really bad and they persecuted Jews. If only he had ever attempted to present a big picture, if only he had tried to get to the roots of a society that bred a monster like Hitler, we might as well call his films ‘historically important’ and had some ‘impact’, whatever that impact is. But Spielberg wasn’t up to it.

All his historical movies are simply a cheap celebration of American heroism (or some other heroism) and the suffering of the Jews (like they harp about 9/11 these days. Real nuisance, isn’t it?). Spielberg’s unbearable propensity to celebrate human psyche’s elementary sense of love, hate and tragedy spills well over into his non-historical films as well. His ET and Closed Encounters of the Third Kind are plain unwatchable.

Some of his films are really recreative though. I really liked his Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was a kid. But I am pretty sure I am not going to watch it again.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

1. We think the Spielberg era is over.

Of his recent movies, Munich was definitely watchable because of the story line related to the real-life events but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a waste of time and money.

2. You write: like they harp about 9/11 these days

We are going off on a tangent here.

For the average Joe in the U.S., 9/11 is a distant memory. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might well be happening in another galaxy, even though many of the poor souls return in body bags or minus one or more limbs or horribly maimed.

During the Vietnam war in the 1960s, there were a lot of protests on the streets. Because of the draft that existed then, the war affected most families.

The Draft disappeared and the powers that be (clowns like George W.Bush, Dick Cheney et al) became casual about sending soldiers into harm’s way.

Unless the draft is brought back, people will not realize the immense suffering that war imposes on the few (mostly the poor) who now join the military because there are few alternatives.

Obama wants to ensure that everyone has access to health-care in this country (45 million Americans don’t have health insurance and another 30 million are underinsured) and yesterday several thousand protesters in Washington marched with Obama posters painted with a Hitler mustache, compared our President to the Nazi butcher, held signs about impeaching the Muslim Marxist, shouted slogans about Socialism and generally made an ass of themselves.

Who says all the weirdos exist only in India…God, we have quite a few here.

Sorry for spoiling your party. But Spielberg influenced what? did he influence the art of film making like Picasso did painting or Freud did psychology. I think not. Far from it, at the risk of sounding elitist, I consider most of his films childish and if i were the one who prepared the above list, I would remove all his films from the list without any compunction (not surprisingly, the one Spielberg film I liked most is the one of his least successful- War of the Worlds, where he looked considerably liberated from his obnoxious obsession with ‘good aliens’ and ‘good humans’).

SearchIndia.com Responds:

You write: Sorry for spoiling your party. But Spielberg influenced what?

No comprende here.

If you read our response again regarding Spielberg, you’ll realize it was merely a factual compilation from the 100-list in response to a comment from another reader who wrote: Really interesting also to notice how several directors had multiple films like Billy Wilder, David Lean, and Steven Spielberg.

Influential to the creators of the list (in this case Yahoo because they felt Spielberg deserved to have of his five films in the 100). The use of the word influential should be read in the context of response to a comment and does not reflect our viewpoint on the director.

BTW, the folks at Yahoo say they considered factors like historical importance, cultural impact, most thrilling, most dramatic, scariest, and funniest movies of all time in putting together the list.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

You write: I THINK U LIKE ONLY ACTION FILS,VFX MOVIE AND GRAPHICS MOVIE

This is not our list.

Right in the first sentence, we wrote: Yahoo has put out a list of 100 movies that all ye movie buffs must watch before y’all die.

Use lower case in future (no capital letters).

http://www.screenhead.com/reviews/oscar-swindler-the-10-worst-academy-award-decisions/

SearchIndia.com Responds:

We’ll try to watch Once Upon a Time in the West on Thursday or Saturday.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Source link, please.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

We liked Fight Club too but it’s not on the Yahoo list.

Shawshank Redemption is lovely. We have seen it several times.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Why not Villu, Azhagiya Tamil Magan, Kuruvi…

Weren’t they masterpieces too?

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Looks interesting.

when are you posting the review of usual suspects? may i recommend a movie called capote. dont know whether you have seen it?

thanks

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Soon (hopefully). Yes, as we indicated elsewhere recently, we have seen it.

Sorry for the delay.