Sunday, May 31, 2015

The sublime awesomeness of Mad Max

I have always been aware of the Mel  Gibson Mad Max movies, but I have never seen them. Nevertheless, tiny bits and pieces of trivia keep crossing my sights. For instance, I was aware through, of all things, a letter to the editor of an Indian newspaper, possibly The Statesman, that an Indian association of Mad Max aficionados wanted the national TV channel to show all the films, Bear in mind, that we are talking early nineties India, before the Internet and just barely after the advent of cable TV. So this was a group of fans who got together via snail-mail?? Fanatics indeed!

Then my friends are Cracked.com  pointed out that Lord Humungous from Mad Max 2 seemed to have a startlingly elaborate backstory for a movie character who didn't appear to need one. See, stuff like this - I tend to find interesting. Mostly because cinematic world-building is fascinating stuff. Some of it can be the elaborate, perpetually rain drizzled gloom-verse that Deckerd inhabits in Blade Runner. Sometimes it can be the bright, neon-lit sensory overload that Leeloo and mooltipass call home. And sometimes, it can be the title sequence of Seven. Yes, go look it up. But the thing is, is something like this world -building always intentional or is it just a gofer and an intern gone wild? That is, not part of the script, totally divorced from the main plot? Who knows?

And finally, we get to the car. A Ford XB Falcon Coupe. Aussie cars apparently like having nostrils(such as the Holden Commodore, aka the Pontiac G8). We can get behind that. My other friends at Jalopnik have had a lot to say about the vehicles in the entire Mad Max series. But all of that aside. The reasons you should go see Mad Max Fury Road are many:
  • The loving care, and the "throw-the-pills-into-the-slipstream" insanity with which the cars have been built.
  • The gleeful CGI-less abandon with which they have been thrown together, blown apart, tossed into the sky and generally mistreated.
  • The world building. The detail. The costumes. The set.
  • Tom Hardy is adequate. 
  • Nicky Hoult is bloody amazing in his hyper-oxygenated vim. At the risk of meme-like repetition, "a lovely day, indeed"
  • Theron, C. This immensely talented lady is the furiously beating heart and tortured soul of the film. Her character arc does not evolve, but it doesn't need to. She is the anchor on which this 'verse revolves. She seeks redemption, sublimely unaware that she is redemption herself. She is Mother to all other mothers, guardian and protector to the weak, the naive and the foolish - because even they have a place and deserve to be saved from themselves. 

Friday, May 29, 2015

Old friends, old lab

I found the opportunity to go visit some old friends and co-workers at Rutgers while on my recent trip to the east. Pictures below
We had lunch at this joint called Hoysala, somewhere in Somerset. On my way from Newark, I realized that I had forgotten the following things:
  • US1 is an evil roadway which will eat away at the precious minutes of your life without remorse and replace your calm, Zenlike state of mind with something approaching fury.
  • New Jersians drive like they live in a crossover universe from World War Z and Mad Max. This is not unlike New Jersey in reality. Please note.
  • I haven't seen such a high geographical concentrations of desis in a while. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Then there was some more hanging out with old compadres on Busch campus. Where I found that during my time, I had never seen this statue of Hippocratus
Anyhoo, so we had some coffee,
 And then went to take a look at their double helix structure sculpture which adorns the space outside their new Proteomics building.
 This Proteomics building, also houses the famed Protein DataBank, one of the most important biomedical depositories there exists. These are artist's renderings of some of the early structures solved.




 And finally, I took a look at their magnet room, which now also houses their 800 MHz unit. Very impressive, and extremely pretty - quite a far cry from the dimly lit dungeon which I remember.



And, as I was flying through Midway airport again

So I realized that the best way to test out the new pheun's camera is to go snap pictures of the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber they have hanging from the ceiling. Is a piece of work, it is.



And then there was a BBQ



I never realized that the best part about having a Chromecast is that you can be inexcusably rude to all your friends and acquaintances by bumping their chosen music off the queue and insisting that they all listen to your choice and then drunkenly explaining why. Thank you, Johnny old man.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Superhero time

There is something off with the Marvel Universe. I don't like the idea of superheroes in general - I much prefer the idea that people can work towards attaining abilities (under certain constraints). You know, like the real world. But far, far beyond all of the glam and drama, the thing that superhero movies always get wrong is the terrifying moral certitude. No checks and balances. No equals, no peers. Just judgement. Gawd help us all the day when the Hulk has diarrhoea. The world will end because some super is in a bad mood.

So with that baggage in mind, I went to see the Avengers with half the Biochem department. A nice time was had by all. The entire film, of course was completely superfluous - with the most fucken tenuous of plots. Tony Stark continues to fly around in his WMD of a costume, while ignoring the fact that he can singlehandedly remove the reason for half the world's conflicts at once by agreeing to license his arc-reacter tech. There is some mumbo-jumbo with Loki's sceptre containing an AI- which naturally gets unleashed, since Mister-I-Am-So-Clever-Stark couldn't conceive of the idea of testing the damn AI out with a standalone cluster - no pipes going to the internet. Seriously, Stark, a few nodes in a bombproof vault and ten MIT/Caltech grad students working on it. Would it have hurt to try that? Arsehole.

All the problems in the Marvel-verse are because someone couldn't keep his shit out of other people's business. Also Banner has a boner for Natty Romanov. And she sings him to human-ness when the Hulk needs to stand down. Also she is infertile, and in her own eyes, a monster. There is some strange, borderline Oedipal shite going on here. Anyway, to sum up - meh.

But there was the other highly anticipated movie of the summer - the 7th instalment in the F&F franchise.  I love the unselfconscious happiness of these movies. For all of the pretentious, wannabe Nolanesque, dark and gritty half billion dollar crapfests that Hollywood is churning out - I am glad they still make movies like this one. I can go elsewhere for my navel-gazing indie fix. People have accused the F&F franchise of not having a brain, but nobody - and I mean nobody can accuse it of not having a heart.




Is it weird enough yet?

1. Take  a mini baguette.
2. Slice 2 cm cross sections perpendicular to the principal axis.
3. Sprinkle olive oil on the alfoil (correction: sprinkle canola oil because you are cheap and DGAF).
4. Preheat oven @ 400F (sorry, this shoulda been #1).
5. Slice the first cheese (a Comte Gruyere) into 1cm X 4 cm X 3 mm slices. We need them thin. Layer on bread.
5. Dust on soul seasoning. Yes, I know. Shut up.
6. Swiss chard, that is Laal Shaak - you have this already cooked. Layer a spoonful on the bread. Let the jhol soak in. No worries, this is all good.
7. Now comes the fun part. You have crumbled blue cheese set aside. Place an olive on each bread platform. Sprinkle blue cheese, aah, who am I kidding - put gobs and gobs of blue cheese on. You cannot really go wrong with this.
8. Bake for 10 minutes. Serve hot, eat before it cools.
9. Sides include artichoke hearts, blueberries, grape tomatoes and other strange things. Just be happy that I am not serving them with a side of jalapeno chips.

This stuff is awesome.