Dhoom 2 review

OK, so this other day there was a company outing for the movie Dhoom-2 !! After watching the movie I realized that "Times of India" had given it a biased review, 4 stars, by a large scale. I would have given it 2.
The story has numerous loose ends. The action is not out of this world (these days I despise stunts with cables. I mean c'mon, people don't somersault and land on their feet after getting punched on their chins.). Ash and Bipasha look good but I felt like slapping them when they opened their mouths. You feel like slapping Uday Chopra when you look at him, but is quite funny when he opens his mouth. Abhishek Bacchan is pissed off during the entire movie. Hrithik Roshan is "sophisticated" .. I mean you have to be if you are the "perfect thief" of the world and want to write an "A" on the whole world. But above all, the movie doesn't have the amount of bike stunts which I would have liked to have. And yes.. the whole movie is filled with scenes where the actors/actresses walk ... and oh how they walk.. in style.
In normal life, when you walk you can hardly do it in style. There are various things which you need to be aware of. The bird which likes to bomb you with its morning payload. The paan chewing auto-rickshaw wala who will invariably spit when you walk past. The sweepers directing the dust of the streets in to your face. Due to all these things, you have to walk fast, dodge, duck and sometimes shout.
But in movies, you walk in slow motion. You have your soundtrack playing in the background. You may even have dancers doing somersaults in the background. Balloons going up in the air. Fireworks all around.
But apart from all that the only good thing which I found about the whole movie was the make up. Now that is really good and maybe.. just maybe for that it is worth watching once.

Ehh.. 3 more

Two movies and one gaming console. Here goes:

Pyar Ke Side Effects
Pros: Witty dialogs, Mallika Sherawat's acting.
Cons: The movie drags on a bit too much, Mallik Sherawat's acting.
Verdict: Average

Dor
Pros: Shreyas Talpade stands out! His mimicry is a refreshing change. Everything else.
Cons: None
Verdict: Damn good!

XBox-360

Ok this one won't be like the above two, because its not a movie and because I'm a computer guy.

The XBox-360 is Microsoft's attempt to get the gaming console into the Indian houses. If you take a look the Sony Playstation has been here in India since quite some time, but Sony never marketed it like Microsoft is doing (I hope you have seen the Akshay Kumar/Yuvray Singh ad). I had the opportunity of using the X-Box 360 recently in one of the many shops they were being demo-ed. So what is it like?
Not good!
I think the console is over-hyped. People come in already believing that the graphics are mind-blowing. For example the guys who were before me on the demo-stall were already like "Wow! Look how cool the graphics are!!" when the initial game video was playing!! Before I go on, I would like to point out that those guys were satisfied by the video alone, because they couldn't navigate the menu to actually play the game :D
I, of course, could.
The demo consisted of the X-Box 360 console (which comes in a slim gray cabinet a la the Dell cabinet) , the X-Box 360 controller and an exquisite 27" Samsung plasma monitor. The game on demo was some racing game whose name I forget.
So after navigating the main menu and starting a new game, what do I see? Jaggies!! A whole bunch of them. The anti-aliasing was rather bad. Now I don't know whether the X-Box 360 or the game was running on a low-performance setting, but that is what I saw and if they are going to show me something like that in a demo I won't take their side >:) and will assume that it was running on full steam.
I finished the race coming 2nd, but not liking what I saw.
The only good thing is the controller. It fits in my hands nicely and gives a nice force-feedback, but again I will be frank and say that this is the first controller which I have laid my hands on (which has force-feedback) so I'm bound to like it.
X-Box 360 is priced at 24K (including the controller). The one which comes with the wireless controller is priced at 27K (which includes a 20gig hard drive) and as Rahul pointed out: "You won't be playing on a 27" plasma, but on a 21" CRT (!!), so the quality is bound to decrease further from the demo." Other than that each game title costs around 2.5 K.
So what should you do if you have already saved a bit of cash for the 360? Well... assuming you already have a PC, an AGP slot (if not a PCI-X), and some green goodies: buy a massive Nvidia graphics or ATi card and live life in peace.