Happy New Year

In ancient times, March was the first month of the year. It was the beginning of autumn season. The word march is derived from Roman God Mars. September, October and November became third, fourth and fifth respectively. Later January and February added as eleventh and twelfth respectively.  The word February means ‘purgation’. This word was derived from Latin. February was added as last thus it added for purification of evil and this purification helped to welcome fresh autumn season. From 153B.C January have been changed as first month. This word was derived from God Janus. Still I am searching for why it is changed. I will post the reason after I got needed information.

Happy New Year to all….. Thank you for your kind support and this blog is entering into second year. Thank you for your kind support and continuous  encouragement.

Reaching Nirvana

Having spent light years 
in meditating
on the meaning of life
I'm now able
eventually
to be free
from pain and worry
However
at the thought
of your sweet smile
and the bittersweet memory
you left
along the road
of my journey
I can't help
but fall
all on a sudden
back to the delusive world

-Lewis Jain
https://www.facebook.com/lewis.jian?fref=nf

Believe things which is not possible

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.
 - Elbert Hubbard

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
 - Rabindranath Tagore


 We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.
 - Stephen Hawking

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
 - John Lennon


Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
 - Eleanor Roosevelt


Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.
 - John Adams


I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.
 - Stephen Hawking


A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
 - Benjamin Franklin


It takes a long time to become young.
 - Pablo Picasso

Cool Rider

Four days before myself and my friends were decided to move for adventurous hill ride with their two wheelers. Four girls and two boys plus a faculty member were departed at 5 p.m. It was a small hill  (Not like selfish giant). The sides were covered with selfless plants, trees and chill winds too. It was not a such big adventure but riding on the hills with boys and girls were thrilled us. They were shouting in a happy way for every bend and enjoyed a lot. Of course I too. Every hairpin bend thrilled us. There was no words to describe my happy horror. We had teared the cool breeze and climbed on hill road in a  slow and steady way. I learned few things from this experience.

If we were started to enjoy the nature, we lost all the depression and became child. Sometimes we lost ourselves in the nature too. It became relaxation and selfless plants gave fresh chilly air to our nostrils and helps to fade our evil things. Isolation from others is the major reason for devil thinking.
If we share our happiness it would became doubled. If we share our sorrows it would became half. Thus sharing and caring is paved way for real happiness and it shapes man's character.

Love Story of an Indian Engineer

I was in Higher Secondary
She was the same;

I got B.Tech
She got BBA;

I was doing B.Tech
She got MBA;

I was preparing for Gate emtrance exam
She got married;

I am doing M.Tech
She s the mother of two children;

I got P.hd
Her daughters is in First Grade;

I became Doctrate
Her daughter passed SSLC;

I have joined job
Her daughter joined college;


The Irony is
I am going to be married....
Her daughter is my New BRIDE......

credit goes to anonymous person.. taken from a FB page called ENTERTAINER

Greatness is a guilt

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
- Oscar Wilde

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
- Bruce Lee

Success is finding satisfaction in giving a little more than you take.
- Christopher Reeve

People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.
- Stephen Hawking

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
- John Adams

We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful.
- Taylor Swift

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.
- George Washington Carver

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.
- Michael Jackson

It's been a while by JEWIS JIAN

It's been a while
since the last time 
it drizzled 
Walking 
on the misty campus path
on the way home
suddenly

I feel extremely 
blissful
on this peaceful morning
because 

I think to myself
I'm not running a race 
against the clock
or the whole world

Maybe 
There're still 
numerous diligent people
somewhere
making every effort
simply to keep up 

with the Joneses
while I'm strolling
at my own pace
ignoring
the hustle and bustle 
around me

and taking my tim

by LEWIS JIAN

Home - Feminism through Indian marriage

In the last post I was dealt with marriage as a trade through the novel HOME by Manju Kapur. As far as I said this novel is a saga of Indian culture. Most of feminist perspectives are from Nisha's point of view. Not only Nisha's view. Feminist aspects are also from Nisha's mother and minor characters too. My primary focus is on Nisha because she is the victim of male chavinism.

1. As a human she has rights to choose his partner but Indian tradition doesn't allow.

2. Even though she is suffered from skin disease she is not neglect from her family but isolated.

3. Because of her love, she is suffered by needle of words from family and society.

4. In some aspects her love on him seems to be a kind of lust. To err is human. Parents duty is to correct her mistakes but to blame and hurt her.

5. Pinpoint on her is the reason for mental torture. She hates her life and she does n't want anyone. She often tries to isolate herself from others.

6. In marriage trade she acquired second wife stage for forty year fat person. Initially she allowed to do her own business but later because of male chauvinism she was forced to abort.

Thus the novel HOME by MANJU KAPUR is a picture of domestic survival but not commercial.

The Good Dinosaur Review

Every new Pixar film bears the weight of great expectations. In the context of classics such as "Finding Nemo," "WALL-E" and this year's"Inside Out," "The Good Dinosaur" is a mild disappointment. It's a heartwarmer, no doubt, and an exemplary display of animation-as-art. But the story works in service of the visuals, when the opposite should be true.

The film is conceptually clever: it's set in a prehistoric Earth era, on an alternate timeline where the asteroid that caused the dinosaurs' extinction was a near miss instead of a direct hit. In the wake of the non-event, evolution directed life into different biological avenues, and director/co-writer Peter Sohn uses the concept as an implied explanation for the development of language and intelligence in dinosaurs – as well as the co-existence of the giant lizards with human forms.

So, in Sohn's world, herbivorous dinosaurs work the land on farms, and carnivores drive cattle across the planes. The protagonist, Arlo (voice of Raymond Ochoa), is the former, an apatosaur cultivating corn with his family: Poppa (Jeffrey Wright), Momma (Frances McDormand), and siblings Buck (Marcus Scribner) and Libby (Maleah Nipay-Padilla). Arlo is the runt, all gangly limbs and awkwardly oversized feet. He's afraid of the farm's chickens, understandably so, because they're comically ugly. (Although why a family of plant-eaters needs chickens remains unexplained.)

The farm's corn silo is regularly raided by, as Poppa calls it, a "wilderness critter." It's a feral human boy, mostly running around on all fours, howling at the moon, panting and sniffing things. Yes, like a dog. Arlo will eventually name him Spot (Jack Bright), and later will learn, although the boy's language is primitive at best, his brain has evolved enough to comprehend symbolism. But first, Arlo attempts to trap the boy, and what with one thing and another, is knocked unconscious and washed far downriver, and must summon the uncharacteristic courage and strength to find his way back home.

The boilerplate journey narrative allows Sohn to indulge a remarkably photo-realistic visual palette. The one exception is Arlo and his kin, textured like rubber bendy toys. The young dino travels through gorgeous travelogue-worthy landscapes – pine forests, cloud-capped mountaintops, burnt orange desert plains. A swoosh of a tail in a field sends up a flurry of fireflies, their lights merging with the bounty of stars in the sky. A fearsome lightning storm ravages the forest, scorching the earth and bleaching it white. A river shimmers like glass when it's calm; a dry canyon quickly becomes the path for a raging flash flood. The imagery is a reminder of the great beauty and danger of the natural world, which can dwarf even the most towering beast.

Arlo forges an unusual friendship with Spot, and they help each other through a series of episodic events held loosely together by the overarching adventure. Some episodes are better than others: an uproarious encounter with an eccentric, cross-eyed Styracosaurus, his crown of horns adorned with a variety of bizarre creatures. Spot teaches him to puff air into the dens of prairie dog-like mammals, and watch the fluffy animals pop out the holes. They unwittingly munch on fermenting fruit, experience weird hallucinations and wake up with headaches.

Other encounters are less whimsical, more commonplace. The duo comes across three T-rexes with stereotypical yee-haw Texas accents – one voiced with the booming twang of Sam Elliott – who are more wearisome than endearing. A group of Pterodactyls provide swooping predatory terror, led by Thunderclap (Steve Zahn), who speaks in the fanatical tones of a crazed cult leader.

It's a cliché to say every shot is a work of art, but here, it's absolutely true. Each frame is rendered with masterful visual strokes. The eye candy quickly overshadows the film's conceptual novelty and familiar theme; the idea that you must face and accept your fears in order to overcome them is barely worthy of Pixar's Big Book of Philosophies. But one of the reasons we trek to movie theaters is to see something wondrous on the big screen, and "The Good Dinosaur" offers a marvelous and immersive world. Every time I proclaim an animation as beautiful as it can possibly get, another one comes along and makes the statement false, and this is one of those films. Just don't see it in 3-D, which significantly dims its vibrancy. You wouldn't wear sunglasses into a museum, would you?

http://www.mlive.com/movies/index.ssf/2015/11/the_good_dinosaur_review_new_p.html

Thanks to John Serba

My Favourite lines from novels

Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you are not really losing it. You are just passing it on to someone else. - Mitch Albom ( Five People Meet You In Heaven)

_________________________________________________________________________________

There are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you separate a breeze from wind. - Mitch Albom ( Five People Meet You In Heaven)

_________________________________________________________________________________

Man likes to run from God. - Mitch Albom (Have a Little Faith)

_________________________________________________________________________________

One had to accept what was given and the faster one did that, the less one suffered.
- Manju Kapur (Home)

_________________________________________________________________________________

Even God will fail at our (India) government offices. - Anonymous book

_________________________________________________________________________________

When you want to achieve something, the whole universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
- Paulo Coelho ((Alchemist)

_________________________________________________________________________________

A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainly - Rudyard Kipling

_________________________________________________________________________________

Foggy Day

It's foggy 
and gloomy today
Needless to say
it's giving me
a feeling
of profound melancholy
Where it not for
the cheerful smiles
of little daisies
that I run across
in the park
nothing else
I suppose
would save me
from all the blues
What's more beautiful
I'm able
to go near them
smell them
and linger among them
without feeling shy
or speechless

by LEWIS JIAN
https://www.facebook.com/lewis.jian

Hit the Jackpot

It's Saturday again
and another week's gone by
I've been dreaming
dreaming one day
of hitting the jackpot
but my dream's always flying
flying in the air
and turning itself
into a wisp of smoke

Perhaps
I should learn
to be more practical
stop writing
and start buying
lottery tickets

On the other hand
if wordsmiths are destined
to lead a humble life
like a forest
offering abundant fresh air
and infinite beauty
to this mundane world
without asking
for anything
in return
then I'm willing
to be one of the trees

by LEWIS JIAN

https://www.facebook.com/lewis.jian 

Blind is Love

          Love is a sweet feeling. It is origin from sharing and caring between relationship. The terms SHARING and CARING perfectly suits to the mother. No body can replace her. Apr from those holy love, there is some perverted thing called' love' which is happened between young people in this materialistic world.

          It is like a epidemic.  The people between 13-21 is severely affecting. In this modern world we cannot conclude the definite meaning for those love.

          It is a shocking survey that today's love leads to bed pleasure. It is bed based but not heart based. They are loving each other until their relationship becomes boared. For one more step they are loving each other until physical satisfaction is there. They can manage to tolerate and adjust for the sake of his/her selfish motive.

          Is this the love portrayed by SHAKESPEARE? DRYDEN?

I am throwing a question..... what will happen if there is a true person in a pair?? The question is upto you ...

THIS ARTICLE IS DEDICATED TO MY PRIDE AND PREJUDICE SOCIETY.

Words may fail but Music will speak

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
- John F. Kennedy

That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
- Jhumpa Lahiri

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
- Henry Ford

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
- Jean de La Fontaine

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.
- William Arthur Ward

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
-Andre Gide

Where words fail, music speaks. - Hans Christian Andersen

Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity. - Thor Heyerdahl

Spectre 007 - Review

“Spectre” is the James Bond movie that fans have been waiting for ever since “Casino Royale” and Daniel Craig rebooted and rejuvenated the series nine years ago. The two films in between were fine, and yet something was missing: “Quantum of Solace” had lots of action, but no introspection; and “Skyfall” was a moody entry, without much in the way of glamour. But “Spectre” has everything anyone could possibly want in a James Bond movie.

It has virtuoso action sequences, imaginatively crafted and meticulously filmed. It has two beautiful Bond women — ever sinceEva Green, there are no Bond girls. It has an international conspiracy that taps into the current paranoia just as the Cold War Bond movies did in the 1960s. And it has a villain who immediately enters the pantheon, both for the way the role is written and for the way it’s played — in the latter case, by the remarkable Christoph Waltz.

The movie’s first sequence puts the audience on notice that Bond is back. In a continuous shot, Bond meets a woman at the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City, where everyone is wearing grotesque masks. She invites him up to her room, where she lies on the bed, and he excuses himself for just a minute. He steps out of her window, walks briskly across a ledge — it really does look as if Craig is up there — and arrives at the corner of a rooftop just in time to assassinate three people and blow up a building.

He’s just getting started. I haven’t even mentioned the escape from a collapsing building or the fight he has on a helicopter, trying to kill the pilot without causing a crash. In the course of a year, there are hundreds of movies and countless action sequences. Each one makes it harder to raise an audience’s pulse. But within five minutes, “Spectre” has everyone sitting with their eyes wide and their mouths half open.

As we soon find out, Bond has gone rogue. The Mexico adventure was the result of an order from M (Judi Dench), delivered by way of a video that arrived after her death. Like the hard, unsentimental Mommy figure she is/was, she appears onscreen and gives him the name of some Italian assassin. “Kill him!” she says. Talk about tough. She’s so unworried about the afterlife that she’s ordering hits from the grave.

At the start of “Spectre,” two pressures are converging. The government is considering eliminating the Double-0 spy program, just as Bond has a lead on something really dire, as in really big, as in a threat to life as we know it. After a brief romantic interlude with an Italian widow (Monica Bellucci), he infiltrates a secret meeting in Rome, where we see just who is running the world.

It’s the stuff of everyone’s most paranoid fantasy. At an enormous table in an ornate, church-like hall, the evil, powerful people sit, hearing reports on things like the 160,000 women they’ve forcibly recruited into the “leisure sector” — in other words, sexual slavery. At the head of the table, in the shadows, is the boss, the secret author of untold human misery. Then he turns his head to the light, and we see that the polite yet menacing voice belongs to Christoph Waltz.

Any charismatic, flamboyant actor can play a memorable villain, but Waltz is in a category beyond that. He is fascinating to watch, because his surface is appealing, almost endearing, and yet his character’s inner life, of which we’re never in doubt, is horrible and sick. Everything he says, even when the character is loquacious (as his usually are), seems like just an external manifestation of some vast inner turbulence. At one point, Bond asks him a question, and he answers, “No.” And just that one word is invested with unknowable and unsettling meaning.

As for Craig, he can wear a white tuxedo as well as Roger Moore, and he can fall off a building without ever unbuttoning his suit jacket, and it’s good that we see that side of him here — the imperturbable, self-satisfied Bond. But with Craig, there’s always something serious going on, too, something pained inside that’s in search of remedy. This is why there are no Bond girls, only Bond women, in the Craig installments, because this Bond, despite the suave facade, is not just out for fun. He is actually — though no one would ever quite put it this way — looking for a girlfriend.

Examination Experience

There is no limit in putting effort. The limitation of trying definitely ends in a success point. I finished my third semester successfully. I used my previous writing experience to shape my answer papers. I get some ideas how to present my answers and how to organize my texts.

First type in my life to hats off my respected teachers . She is the best one who motivated me to read , write and practice. My hearty thanks to all my respected teachers and my fellow friends. Apart from these person my pride wishes to the feet of my parents.

From my exam experience I understand a point. I realized a kind of happiness in teaching my syllabus to my classmates. It helps to revise/recall what I read before examination. Scholars thought that we have to study from beginning. I will definitely say before two days from exam sincere preparation is enough. But it is not a smooth way. This type of last minute preparations leads to unnecessary tension.

Every semester I am deciding myself to learn from beginning. I am saying,"this time I won't give up. I will read from beginning." This is the ironical part in my life. Of course in all student's life. What i am going to say is neglect all my points and do whatever according to your wish. You have to involve with specific interest and concentrate on what you are doing. Otherwise you won't success. So don't do it for the sake of reading this article.

Credits for first two paragraphs goes to MANIMARAN, Coimbatore

Hunger Games - Mocking Jay part 2

I think it would be fair to deduce that this whole Hunger Games thing could’ve been a super drag without the presence of one Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. There are moments in this film, and throughout the saga, that suffer a bit from subpar writing, yet Lawrence makes any dialogue, no matter how mundane, sparkle. She’s an actress who just slices through the screen and smacks your face with her every gaze and word.

This one picks up exactly where the last one left off, with Katniss getting her neck tended to after a brainwashed Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) tried to choke her out. Peeta is in a really bad place thanks to evildoer President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and he’s as reliable as a friend who dropped some really bad acid. He’s prone to spells where he wants to kill Katniss, which makes things all the more difficult as she leads Peeta and a squad of rebels on a mission to wipe out Snow for good.

Peeta is on the mission despite his altered state thanks to Rebellion President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), who wants the squad to film him and Katniss for propaganda purposes. Katniss is instructed not to engage the enemy and simply film videos to inspire the rebel troops, but we all know circumstances will call for her to raise the bow and arrow and be anything but Cupid-like.

Part 1 was a more laid-back affair, while this chapter amps the action up, especially in the second half. There’s an underground sequence where Katniss and friends must battle mutants that look a little like the cave creatures from The Descent. It’s during this sequence that returning director Francis Lawrence really lets us know that Part 2 will easily be the darkest and nastiest in the whole franchise. It actually pushes the PG-13 rating to its very limit.

In addition to the surprisingly high body count, Part 2 hits hard with its “don’t trust the government!” message. While we already knew President Snow is quite the scumbag, this film adds another surprising villain to the mix. Yes, all of you readers of the book knew what was going to happen, but my ignorant, non-HG-reading ass got taken by surprise when I saw which way things were going.

This is the last screen performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who didn’t quite finish his role as Plutarch Heavensbee, but did enough for editors to put something convincing together. Plutarch actually takes his exit via a letter to Katniss in a surprisingly poignant move. Hoffman, even in his few scenes, commands the screen like no other. It’s such a lousy thing that he isn’t with us anymore.

The most improved Hunger Games franchise performance award goes to Sutherland, who took Snow from a preening goofball in the first chapter to something deliciously villainous by the last film. Like Hoffman, Sutherland only has a few scenes, but they’re powerful ones. Snow’s last two encounters with Katniss are bone-chilling.

Hutcherson does good work as twitchy Peeta, but Liam Hemsworth is bit humdrum as Gale Hawthorne, the other man after Katniss’s affections. The Hawthorne character winds up being more or less useless and disposable by the final chapter. I question whether or not the character was at all necessary.

Jena Malone has a couple of good scenes as crotchety Johanna Mason, one of them with an impressive baldhead courtesy of special effects. (She apparently used a stunt head.) Her character’s hair seems to grow back awfully fast, though.

So that’s it for now with The Hunger Games, although I’m sure somebody’s working hard to come up with a way to continue the franchise, just as they did with the Harry Potter universe for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. You can’t keep a multi-billion dollar franchise down.

I ultimately wound up liking this Hunger Games phenomenon after a crap start, but I am happy to see Lawrence totally free to do other things, like David O’Russell’s soon-to-be-released Joy. She’s only 25, and she’s just getting started.

Credit goes to BOB GRIM

https://www.newsreview.com/reno/games-over/content?oid=19145891

Hotel Transylvania 2 3D - THE GUARDIAN review

There’s irony in the fact that animation, a medium where literally anything is possible, is so frequently stale and predictable. Animation in mainstream Hollywood features, that is. Recent financial successes such as Minions, Home and Big Hero 6 are frequently cute, but they set up their aesthetic in the first scene and usually stay enslaved to it. Even Pixar’s Inside Out, certainly a notch above the competition, is more about colour and design than movement and unpredictability.

Hotel Transylvania (2012) showed what can happen when a fairly typical “what if?” script got in the hands of an animation director with a more inspired vision, in this case Genndy Tartakovsky. No better or worse an animation script than Megamind, Penguins of Madagascar or Rio, Hotel Transylvania was the first cartoon movie to hit theatres in ages that captured the antic, frantic sugar rush of Woody Woodpecker, Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny.

More than that, the simple story of a crusty father (Adam Sandler voicing Dracula) running a resort with his classic monster pals (a mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, a wolfman, etc) took the macabre but not really scary environment, stretched it out like a rubber band and snapped it off the walls. It was computer generated, but owed more to the exaggerated, simple drawings of Gerald McBoing-Boing than the now dated look of, say, A Bug’s Life. (In its not-quite use of the Universal Monsters, it was also a masterclass for intrepid entertainment lawyers.)

Hotel Transylvania’s refreshing visual aspect could run from blobby to zippy in the same chase sequence. Add in the “spooktacular” setting, with round dinner tables transforming into cute, flying ghosts, and there was more than enough for it to rise above its standard plotting and not infrequent flatulence jokes. Unfortunately, what squeaked across the finish line last time falls short here. We’re left with flat, annoying characters and a rote storyline that’s too high of a hurdle even for Tartakovsky’s visual dynamism.

The bulk of the picture is mired in typical sitcom-dad antics. With Dracula’s daughter Mavis (voiced by Selena Gomez) now a young mother with her dummkopf human husband Johnny (Andy Samberg), she’s worried about raising her child in Transylvania. Dracula and his band of buddies (voiced by Steve Buscemi, Kevin James, David Spade and others) conspire in a series of elaborate tricks to convince her not to move to California. It ends in a messy chase and Mel Brooks doing his 2000-year-old-man voice as Dracula’s father.

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There are a few amusing gags about “mixed marriages” in Hotel Transylvania 2, but the script by Sandler and Robert Smigel (the genius behind Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog) is surprisingly tame, with lots of selfie jokes that won’t be funny in a few years. Actually, they aren’t funny now. Every beat is predictable and even the most dazzled kids might wonder why father and daughter won’t just talk about their obvious feelings. Compared to the nuanced story of Inside Out, it’s absolutely infuriating.

By the end of this 89-minute film, I was absolutely on the edge of my seat. Not due to suspense, but due to my utter disdain for the infantile plotting.
Tartakovsky, whose earlier work includes the shows Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars (not the visually inferior Star Wars: TheClone Wars) and the gorgeous, practically Bakshi-esque 10-minute prologue to the not-so-hot Paul Bettany film Priest, is currently developing an original property called Can You Imagine? for the same studio that’s releasing Hotel Transylvania 2. If you are catching a whiff of one for them, one for me mixed in with this sequel’s wolfsbane, you aren’t alone.

thanks to THEGUARDIAN

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/24/hotel-transylvania-2-review-flat-annoying-and-lacking-in-bite

Goosebumps 3D - video Review

Imagination is the sign of Intelligence

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.
 - Frederick Douglass

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
 - James Joyce

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
 - Albert Einstein

Hope is a waking dream.
 - Aristotle

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
 - Plato

The opinion which other people have of you is their problem, not yours.
 - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
 - Edwin Land

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
 - Albert Einstein

English Literature in Cinemas - A Small Sample

Who am I?

Who am I?
   I don't want to find
Where do I go?
   I don't want to come
How do I live?
   I don't want to exist
How do I die?
    I don't want to lost
How do I get peace?
    I don't want to be calm
How do I get hunger?
    I don't want food
How do I get love?
     I don't want you
How do I get you?
    I don't want to move along with you....


B.Sangavi, Coimbatore

GOOSEBUMPS - A MOCKING HORROR

I suppose you could consider the Goosebumps movie as a piece of metafiction. It speculates what might happen if every monster ever invented by the American children’s author R.L. Stine in his popularGoosebumps series came to life at the same time. Crack open the book covers and the abominable snowman, a giant preying mantis, a posse of murderous ceramic gnomes and many, many zombies are all let loose. Literally. Well, perhaps not literally, but at least physically thanks to the animators at Sony.

In truth, the concept – and the story woven by screenwriters Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski and Darren Lemke to justify it – is more interesting than the rather predictable attack-of-the-killer-monsters that follows, but with its strong premise, an interesting third-act twist and the inimitable Jack Black in the role of Stine, Goosebumps has some satisfying entertainment on offer.

The story begins when our pleasant teenage hero Zach (Dylan Minnette) arrives in Madison, Del., from New York accompanied by his recently widowed mother who is taking up a new job as vice-principal at the local high school. He soon meets the girl next door, Hannah (Odeya Rush), who seems nice and takes him on a little stroll around an abandoned amusement park in the woods, but her suspiciously secretive father catches them talking and warns Zach off the property.

When Zach hears an ensuing father-daughter shouting match terminated by Hannah’s screams, he calls the cops, who arrive at the house to find the noise only came from the movie that a very annoyed and apparently solitary Mr. Stine was watching. Convinced that he really did meet Hannah and that she is hidden in the house somewhere, Zach and his new pal, the nerdy Champ (Ryan Lee), break in, setting in motion the events that will lead to opening up Mr. Stine’s locked manuscripts.
One-on-one, the monsters are engaging – one of the early sequences features an amusing brawl in the kitchen with the garden gnomes – but things become much less clever once Slappy, the eerily independent ventriloquist’s dummy, shows up and corrals all the other monsters into a lynch mob in a bid to get vengeance on their creator for keeping them locked up. Mr. Stine, Hannah, the boys and the monsters all eventually converge at the school dance where there are many scenes of stampeding crowds making it through doors just in time to slam them in the faces of various pursuing monsters.

Still, director Rob Letterman and the screenwriters have another trick or two up their sleeves plus a few romantic subplots including the not entirely predictable hook-up between Zach and Hannah while Black’s reliable presence as the increasingly less grumpy Mr. Stine anchors the film. This is horror intended for the prepubescent set; it gently mocks the traditions of the genre – giant preying mantis rips roof off high school – while never getting too frightening.

THANKS TO ROTTENTOMMOTOES.COM