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Google Zeitgeist 2010 Vs Google Trends

Dec 15th, 2010
by cinecynic.
1 comment

This year’s Google Zeitgeist carried its own surprises like it does every year. I digged a little deeper and found that Google Trends paints a very different picture of 2010. I could see the differences in the global page itself, but here I focus on India.

The “fastest rising” are debatable because they are not well-defined, but if “most popular” is more or less proportional to the volume of searches then I’m very suspicious. I am not sure what Google means when it says, “Our Year-End Zeitgeist is just a small sampling of the queries and search trends that we found interesting this year.” It will be interesting to know why Google found something interesting and something else not interesting.

In the below four tables, note that the Google Trends rankings I gave are mostly true to their order, but not universally accurate given my unscientific approach (random queries and sizing up as against Google’s access to its databases). I will let the data do the rest of the talking.

Most popular

Rank Google Zeitgeist 2010 Google Trends
1 songs download
2 facebook free
3 google sex
4 youtube songs
5 yahoomail facebook
6 gmail youtube
7 yahoo games
8 nokia google
9 orkut videos
10 irctc hot

Next 10: mobile, movies, yahoomail, gmail, yahoo, nokia, software, news, cricket, porn

Most popular movies

Rank Google Zeitgeist 2010 Google Trends
1 kites kites
2 endhiran endhiran
3 dabangg 3 idiots
4 3 idiots avatar
5 harry potter harry potter
6 raavan my name is khan
7 veer veer
8 my name is khan inception
9 twilight raavan
10 rajneeti twilight

Next 10: rajneeti, dabangg

Most popular brands

Rank Google Zeitgeist 2010 Google Trends
1 nokia facebook
2 samsung google
3 airtel yahoo
4 micromax nokia
5 dell windows
6 maruti samsung
7 vodafone tata
8 apple airtel
9 sony ericsson sony
10 hp hp

Next 10: reliance, wikipedia, microsoft, vodafone, dell, honda, twitter, lg, maruti, micromax

Most popular how to

Rank Google Zeitgeist 2010 Google Trends
1 get pregnant download
2 kiss change
3 impress (a girl) get pregnant
4 improve spoken english hack
5 reduce weight learn
6 gain weight love
7 tie a tie copy
8 create a website impress
9 make money kiss
10 meditate print

Next 10: win, buy, reduce weight, earn, lose weight, prevent, clean, make love, maintain, dance

Posted in: Indian, Media, Ramblings.

Simhadri and a Thousand Other Superheroes

Nov 9th, 2010
by cinecynic.
3 comments

I recently caught a few scenes from SS Rajamouli’s Simhadri on TV. Some showed the hero hacking bad people. Some others showed the savior promising more bloodshed. Some scenes had crowds in them cheering the violence. All may have been cheered by the crowds involved in making and watching them.

A day before that I had watched part of an interview of SS Rajamouli (the initials stand for Super Successful, I am told). Thoroughly discussing his craft and influences, of course. He explained how all his characters are rarely seen in a real society and are larger than life, but how they are all realistic. I can’t comment on their being larger or smaller than life, but I notice that most of them do not value life.

I disapprove. My snobbery and indifference are sufficient reasons, but for once I feel eager to offer an explanation.

The setting is easy enough to grasp. There lives a superhero who minds his own business. Unbeknownst to him exists a most bestial villain enslaving the society with his thousand goons. The superhero accidentally saves a stranger or the villain accidentally mutilates a member of the superhero’s kith and kin, and inadvertently the two cross paths. The righteous superhero rises, becomes the guardian, massacres the thousand and one miscreants, and sets the society free. (I fully acknowledge the injustice done to the story by not explaining the roles of the heroines, the comedians and the items.)

The protagonist succinctly summarizes his principle as, “padimandini kApADaTamkOsam champaDAnikainA siddhamE chAvaDAnikainA siddhamE.” I am ready to kill or die to save ten people. I dare say that this is shared by many of the protagonists played by today’s “mass heroes”. Apparently simple and adjudged by a majority as valid, it is a war-mongering violence-hungry non-principle that is useless, inefficient and incomplete.

Neither killing nor dying is the first solution. They are rarely a solution at all, and at best temporary suppressants rich with side-effects. It is the reason why societies hire Police (hire, yes). It is the reason why societies debate the validity of capital punishment, and many have abolished it. It is the reason why the United Nations was and is considered an important idea and institution, however dysfunctional it may seem. That, life has value. If this sounds too preachy: killing is not a solution because it is not reversible yet (our medicine isn’t even advanced enough to heal fractures perfectly), and dying is not a solution because if one is willing to die for people he or she is likely to be more useful alive in the future. (I am doubtful about this justification for people certified to be dying.)

Superheroes are relatively unknown. I sometimes wonder whether the hope may be an implication of the importance given to Hindu mythology in Indian culture. Sri Sri wrote, “evarO vastArani EdO chEstArani eduruchUsi mOsapOkumA”, and another poet I can’t recall wrote, “evarO vacchuvAralani mIkElA vRdhA bhrAnti?” Why this useless delusion that some savior will come? Useless. Even the most courageous of people who bring change in the modern society, real heroes that are largely ignored by Indian filmmakers, are rarely blood-thirsty.

Corruption is relatively universal as a manifestation of greed and need in every opportune society. The superhero’s act does not involve empowering the society (whatever that means). It remains opportune for another at a later point to take over. Inefficient. The superhero’s style is more inefficient because it is at most an act of transferring fear from the society to the leadership, a temporary transfer. The superhero’s act of toppling itself is a form of monarchy (multi-starrers perhaps cater to aristocracies), a form of government that many societies have long ago recognized as ineffectual and less desirable than a democracy.

The incompleteness is best explained by Thomas Barnett about how it is not enough to change status quo (winning a war here) without reestablishing a stable self-governable system.

I wonder why the filmmakers continues to successfully retry the experiment numerous times, as if expecting different results.d

Posted in: Characters, Stars, Telugu.

The Unreadable American

Oct 12th, 2010
by cinecynic.
1 comment

Interval. The director being a big Sergio Leone fan chose to include a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, the shocking scene where Frank draws his pistol and slowly takes aim at a child. (The scene that may have inspired a similar scene in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay.) As fun as the homage may be, the particular scene was a bad choice here. It would have made a lot more sense to choose the opening scene at the railway station where three trigger-happy men wait patiently for Harmonica. That particular scene truly captures the pace of The American.

The main reason why Anton Corbijn’s The American is not doing well is that it has unfortunately been mis-marketed as an action thriller. Another reason is that it is not a movie for everybody. I often hear that one has to be in a certain mood to watch some movies, which I often disagree, but had I not been ruminating about solitude recently I wouldn’t have liked The American. After playing Michael Clayton it is easy to imagine why George Clooney may have been drawn to playing Jack the American. The movie is not so much a story as is a character study. It should have retained the novel’s title of A Very Private Gentleman.

Jack is a veteran in the profession of making custom weapons for professional assassins. Naturally his head is filled with doubts about what his dangerous customers, or any strangers for that matter, might be up to. In the opening scene, he is ambushed by Swedish gunmen for a reason that he doesn’t know. Perhaps he had built a weapon that was used to kill the enemies’ leader. As much as it is improbable it is also not impossible for his beautiful companion to be one of the Swedish enemies, so he shoots her in the back of the head.

We see three women in the short period of his life. He suspects all three. Two of them gravely.

As a skillful craftsman he is well-adjusted to a very long life of solitude, as may be best in his profession, but it is occasionally clear that he enjoys certain company. His solitude is at least partly a compromise. He must have trained himself to make his face unreadable. He rarely talks to anybody, never about his feelings, and he doesn’t show them on his face even when alone. Jack is alone on the screen for almost half the duration of the movie, may be more, and George Clooney made it an enjoyable experience for me. It is non-trivial because most of the scenes are not exactly what we consider “action”. But at no point does his mind seem blank. Unreadable sometimes, but never blank. There are moments when it is clear what he may be thinking, and moments when one can only guess. We see a man who is gradually getting tired of his life, who is getting desperate by the doubts eating his insides, who has allowed himself to feel guilt. There may be awards.

I have several complaints about the movie, much unlike what I heard from most of the audience in the theatre last night. Primarily the movie is not long enough. After the interval the second half of the movie seems rushed, abandoning the deliberate pace of the first half. (The righteous CBFC India made it worse by chopping several minutes of a crucial character’s role, presumably because she works as a prostitute in a bordello.) It is also possible that a cruel studio executive, no not the producer George Clooney, might have demanded some quick action before the movie ends. I hope to one day see the director’s cut, though it is unlikely to be much better.

It is only right that the movie is set in Abruzzo. The slow movement originated in Italy. Another irrelevant note that I can’t resist: Violenta Placido is one of the most beautiful names ever, as beautiful as the actress.

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Posted in: Characters, Hollywood, Reviews.

In the Wild Strawberry Patch

Oct 5th, 2010
by cinecynic.
4 comments

Few movies ever get made with old people as protagonists, for old age is an unpleasant and boring subject that we do not like to dwell on. “Happily ever after” is a delusion that obscures the loneliness following the death of a loved one in the arms of the other. “Old age is not a battle. It is a massacre,” wrote Philip Roth in Everyman. It is an aspect of life that I am curious about without looking forward to. Decades of mundane life, gradual withdrawal of old friends and family (themselves old), a heavy nostalgia leading to pessimism, all make old people difficult to cope. The importance that an old person has appears to diminish along with the frame of the body, at least in the old person’s mind. Neither loneliness nor debility are formidable, but together they become.

Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) is a movie that looks beyond the “happily ever after” (an unhappy marriage). It does so with occasional warmth and joy, and despite the gloomy subject it is optimistic unlike the Silence Trilogy. Dr Isak Borg is its protagonist, a septuagenarian (never used the creepy word before). I read somewhere and verified on Google Translate that his name in Swedish loosely means “castle of ice”. Isak is old, like castles even in 1950s were, and beneath his self-irony and charm is a cold unforgiving nature which he hasn’t leashed out on to the world but let grow and implode within.

From the beginning Isak is haunted by strange dreams, and as a man of science he chases them for significance. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was perhaps still a best-seller back then. The first dream, the most-discussed one, shows him alone and lost in a desolate street with the clock ticking in the background (sound) but a pocket-watch and a wall-clock both without hands. The wall-clock has large ominous eyes underneath, which I hadn’t noticed the first time. The dream perhaps resonates the loneliness Isak feels, and the uncertain but short time that he has left in the world. Then a horse-carriage pulls over and accidentally drops a coffin from which another Isak tries to wake up and grab the first Isak. This I think foreshadows the deadness he himself feels because of his cold nature, and a guilt-ridden attempt to wake up from it and make amends.

Strangely, this is a road trip movie. Isak and his daughter-in-law Marianne (Bergman’s regular Ingrid Thulin) decide to travel by their car instead of the plane to receive another honorary doctorate (of idiots, as he says). They warmly confess to each other their mutual hatred, and meet a few characters on the way who prompt further dreams in Isak. The dreams are about his first love Sara, who had married his brother; his dead wife and the coldness of their marriage; and his mother whose frosty nature he partly inherited (a little of which he passes on to his son).

The dreams are all fantastical, but they are firmly rooted in memories that Isak cherishes or can’t let go, and are triggered by recent events. Each of them individually is not without sense, the what and why, but towards the end Isak narrates that he saw an extraordinary logic in all the dreams together and they carry a strong message for him. I was lost in that desolate street. One reviewer on IMDB wrote that the movie is like a puzzle without any sort of urgency to solve it. I think it is the best description of the dreams that I could partially interpret and the relaxed pace of the movie that Bergman must have chosen so meticulously.

It is said that travel movies should be more than a series of events, that those events should change the protagonist. Some that I watched possessed that quality: growing up, remorse, discovering their ability to love, self-realization. Smultronstället was different in that the change in Isak is imperceptible. And who knows if the old man will still remember these events and the message the next morning or the one after that. Is that why he started writing them down and narrating?

The one other movie on oldage that I have wished to see for a long time is Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

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Posted in: Foreign, Reviews.

Shutter Island Inception

Jul 20th, 2010
by cinecynic.
1 comment

The last two movies of Leonardo DiCaprio center around two classic philosophical views of reality. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on Dennis Lehane’s eponymous novel) uses Kantian a posteriori, that what we know about the world is subject to our perceptions and thus not entirely objective. Christopher Nolan’s Inception builds on Cartesian dream argument, about the limited means of distinguishing illusion from reality.

I watched Shutter Island on its last show in town, and lost the chance to rewatch. Inception, I watched its first show in town and then again five days later. I am likely to have missed and misunderstood several things in both the movies but as enjoyably ambiguous as both tried to remain I found the former more interesting.

The Kantian philosophy of subjective reality is not new to cinema. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary Baby and to some extent Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix are among the most celebrated and classic examples. I also recall Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road, Joseph Ruben’s Forgotten and Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan, all of which have parents fighting desperately against some universal perceptions in order to save their sons or daughters. Shutter Island takes a very different approach than all these. By setting it on an island filled with certified mad men and untrustworthy authorities Scorsese directly brings forth the classroom discussion about the justification of a mad man’s perception of the world. The reason I find this interesting is because it is only an exaggeration of the mild differences between the perceptions of two uncertified individuals (sane or otherwise), something that is most exceptionally handled in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.

I have never seen the Cartesian dream argument in cinema before. Inception uses another classroom discussion, about reality possibly being a part of an infinite dream sequence. Christopher Nolan’s biggest nod to the philosophy comes in the form of Mal/Cobb’s totem, a top which is to spin indefinitely within dreams but stop spinning in the real world. In a world following the laws of physics — dream or real — every top is to stop spinning at some point according to the second law laws of thermodynamics and thus Cobb’s totem will stop spinning in a dream just as in reality. There are things like seamless sharing of the dream environment (how?), gravity transcending dreams and the subconscious (what’s with that?), and a single global limbo (like 4chan is on the Internet?) which I found hard to digest. Even after willing to overlook these and some others I didn’t find the movie memorable beyond a level because Nolan — unlike Scorsese — himself overlooked a quote that Cobb makes, something about emotions being the vehicle of ideas. His investment in the emotions wasn’t sufficient to make me care about the motivations of any of the characters, including that of Cobb’s desire to meet his children. Even though I was thoroughly entertained by the plot, the subtle hints, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s lithe manouevres through the zero-gravity dream scenes, and even though I wouldn’t mind watching the movie again.

The reason why I care more about the Kantian philosophy than the Cartesian one is because of the significance of perceptions whether the world is real or not and because there is nothing much I can do about the latter. Not that I could or would about the former. Philosophy is one of my weak subjects, mainly because I never went through a GRE word list. I find the need to reach for the dictionary twice to read any given sentence tedious. I go round and round, looking for the same word again and again as much for the same argument. I haven’t yet the leisure in life to deeply think of such matters while chewing air.

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Posted in: Hollywood, Ramblings, Reviews.

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