Home For The Weekend

Posted on by Roshan 2 Comments

Well, I’m back home with the folks for the weekend. And since I will be in Kakkanad InfoPark on Monday, I’ll only be going back to Chalakudy on Tuesday evening. The moment I stepped into the apartment it was as if a great burden was lifted off my shoulders. And that worries me! It confirms the fact that I made a big blunder in selecting the place that I have rented.

Anyways, to more pleasant things, I took a bus from the office to Angamaly and waited for a bus to Ernakulam. After a while I took the low floor Volvo that goes from Angamaly to Aroor and thought that I’ll get down at HMT Junction and see if I could meet up with some of my former team members in FirstSource, my previous company. I sent them an SMS and soon enough 3 of them would be there at the time that I would also be at HMT and we met for coffee. As I got down I saw Roopa & Rekha crossing the street and in 2 minutes Wasim also joined us and we went into a small juice & coffee joint for some coffee and snacks. We spent about 45 minutes talking about stuff that has been happening at FirstSource and then said good bye.

I went to Cafe Coffee Day on Shenoys Junction as I needed more coffee and I also was supposed to meet up a friend there. He however called me just as I was stepping into the cafe calling the meeting off as he was stuck in Fort Kochi on business. Well, I put my bags next to a table and had a cold Mochachillo while browsing on my laptop. I was there for a good 40 minutes and then left to go home. Then it’s catching up with mom & dad and chicken tikka with cuboos for dinner. It feels so good to be back home. Sigh!

Battle: Los Angeles

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Battle: Los Angeles is a American military movie disguised as an alien invasion film. It’s a means of glorifying the bravery, sacrifice and honour of being in the US Military and such should be watched with that in mind. Infact, even though there is the factor of alien ships devastating the cities of Earth and carrying away our water and aliens fighting with humans, it could just as easily be an army of another country fighting/invading the US or a band of terrorists attacking US soil.

That’s not to say that this is a bad film or that I didn’t like it. However I wanted to watch it, just like I wanted to watch Skyline, mainly due to the alien invasion angle. However the current trend is to de-personalize the aliens, make them as (forgive this word) Alien as possible and not show anything like language or emotion from them. This gives the whole war angle a more human centric angle and glorifies the humans fighting against an almost unseen & relentlessly brutal enemy, much like emotional less machines.

Now onto the movie, here is what I like about it – it is a great war movie! It’s realistic in the fighting and interactions between the soldiers. People do die and in this case, a character I expected to die lives and one I expected to live dies! There’s even a scene that made me look for Will Smith to arrive – the unit finds a wounded alien  and they find they weak point in the torso, which gives them a target. Had it been Will Smith, he would have pounded the alien, wrapped it in his parachute and dragged it across the desert.

Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, and starring Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Peña, Ne-Yo, Ramon Rodriguez, and Bridget Moynahan, the movie is fast paced and there is never a dull moment. I’m gonna say this, Eckhart is brilliant in this movie and that is saying a lot as he usually does a bang up job in all of his films. After a lot of destruction, deaths and the unit being shrunk down to just a handful, the soldiers led by Eckhart’s character find a strategy to beat the aliens – blow up their command center while leaves their unmanned drones out of power and useless. Ofcourse once the victorious team is rescued this bit if information is shared with all cities under attack as a way to defeat the enemy and get them running. Or flying back in the ships back to which ever shit-hole planet they came from.

8 outta 10. Watch it!