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Monday, March 16, 2009

The original coolest dude - Clint

Man I wanna watch 'Gran Torino', I have read some great reviews and all the people I who watching have been raving about it. I have been a fan of Client Eastwood for a long time now, he is coolness personified!!! And what a terrific career he has had and still going strong at 78. It would be very difficult for me to pick my alltime favorite Clint movie but I can try some of my favorites (in no particuklar order):
1. Dirty Harry
2. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
3. Escape from Alcatrez
4. Unforgiven
5. In the line of fire
6. True Crime
7. Absolute Power
8. Mystic River (only dir)
9. Million dollar baby
10. The bridges of madison county

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Success - We all want it, but what is it?

We all crave for success, it is by far the most driving factor in our lives. So, what is success? Could it be described as the desirable outcome of the efforts? If this is so then the success is very well defined even before we start our efforts in that direction. When I think about it there seems to be more to it, would we still call it a success if we suffered all the way to it? Success is also in the process that we follow to achieve the outcome so that we are happy doing it, and simply meeting that outcome is not enough. Makes sense to me, so it is both the outcome and the process that we choose to follow to achieve it, are important aspect of the success then. What about the people who we come across during our process to achieve success and their happiness? I presume they are also equally important, as barring few tasks that we can achieve solo, most of what we want to achieve is dependent upon others. So, we also need to take care of the people aspect of our journey or process to reach success.

So, let's see, we have the our desires, our efforts, the journey and people that constitute our success. What if our goal shifts during the process? it can very well happen, as there are so many factor that can affect us and the predefined outcome does not excite us anymore after a while on the journey. We evolve as grow and our desires to go through changes, our priorities change. So, our predefined outcome may not be written in stone, it can evolve and change.

As it is turning out now and I spoke through all this, that success could be defined as a continuous journey where we aspire to fulfill our desires while being happy and keeping fellow travelers happy and progressively evolve the collective goals that we want to achieve.

Try to put this in context of your life at work, home, project or team work and see if this fits in.

Calling for some action - Judgement Night and Running Scared

I was craving for some fast paced action movie as it was really long I watched any but I was also not in a mood of "one-man-army destroys evil empire" kind of movie either so it was tough to find any good movies in this genre. After sifting through racks of movies I picked two as the premise looked promising- Judgment Night (1993) and Running Scared (2006).

Judgment Night (1993): I was apprehensive about picking up this one as I belonged to early nineties and action movies in this era had hang-over from the eighties action movies typical of Stallon, Schwargnegger (sp.?), Van-Damme kind of action. But I still picked this as the cast had names Cuba Gooding Jr., Denis Leary and Emilio Estevez and this one is story of bunch of fast friends with diverse personalities running and hiding from a gangster to save their lives. The story unfolds in one night and is very fast paced and has thrilling moments. Some part could have been more intelligently shot but overall it is a good gripping thriller. (7/10)

Running Scared (2006): I wasn't expecting much from this as I am not a big Paul Walker fan I liked what I read on the synopsis. This one again is story of one night full of action and drug deal gone wrong, dirty cops, domestic violence, violence against women and kids. Some of the scenes could be very disturbing, definitely not a movie to take your date or kids. It was fast paced and the action is non-stop, has the underbelly of New Jersey as backdrop. Paul Walker, Chazz Palminteri( The Usual Suspects, Diabolique and Vera Farmiga (The Departed) acted very well and lived upto the characters they were playing. The cinematography is grainy and dark and very effective for the mood of the movie. I don't know why this one is not more popular, may be because lack of big league actors, but it sure is a must watch. (8/10)