Aabra Ka Daabra

My friends mundeemo and bitpig came over tonight and we watched Aabra Ka Daabra: The School of Magic, the Harry Potter-inspired Bollywood film I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

I'd forgotten that the review I read mentions a passing similarity to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at one part, and indeed the movie stops dead after our protagonist, Shanu, gets to the school and goes into flashback where he wins two contests. The similarity is not so much passing as utter, and we burst into "I've got a Golden Ticket Diamond Wrapping" after he won one of the contests.

Probably not-so-coincidentally, the bits that are the closest to Harry Potter and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are the most coherent. Which isn't saying much - the DVD I've got had some problem in two spots and I ended up jumping to the next chapter, and it's not like we missed huge chunks of plot by doing that.

There is also a small badly-CGed ghost or spirit of some kind named TuTu, which combines the most annoying qualities of Tinkerbell and ChuChu, and a flying head with wings.

The two things that are absolutely worth the $5.99 price tag are the way several of the main actors are credited during the opening sequence, and all-out singing, dancing, costumes praise to Shiva that's shoehorned into the middle of the film, "Shiv Om."

We didn't watch the cut scenes, which apparently include a few more musical numbers.

I'm going to have to figure out how to do some screencapping from this DVD, for a reason which I'll explain after I manage to do so, because it really has to be seen to be believed.

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Ha! I have found a demo version of a DVD player that will allow me to take screenshots of the menu of Aabra Ka Daabra, my report on which is in the previous post.

( Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! No, really, despair. I'm not kidding. 20 years total of education and it all ends up with me doing this sort of thing. )

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Spamming you ONCE AGAIN because I can't be bothered to edit my previous posts: for munchies during the movie I served prosciutto with melon: seedless watermelon and sprite melon, to be exact.*

Sprite melon - bought on a whim because they had samples out and I tried and liked it. It's claimed to be a mix of pear, honeydew, and watermelon flavors but in practice was simply a lighter honeydew, with a firm flesh. But it was good.

And in other news, over the course of the evening my neck has started to hurt and seize up like I slept on it funny. Arg. Plan: take drugs, go to sleep.

* Melon chopped into irregular chunks, with prosciutto roughly cut into bits and wadded up on the melon in clumps, with crushed pink peppercorns and salt dumped on the side, because I also can't be bothered about presentation. We are all class-with-a-capital-K around here.

quick sketch

Had to spend a little bit of time working up a quick digital sektch of Mello from Death Note based on one of those photos I took with my phone last November, because the idea was hammering at my head and wouldn't leave. I can't get back to it for a while, but that's OK because I have no idea what's in the *rest* of the picture. Ideas encouraged, although if I'm true to form I'll reject all of them out of hand - but they're still quite useful because knowing what I don't want in a picture helps me figure out what I do want in there.

( Cut to save your friendslists )

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Survey takers are starting to realize that what people really want is little graphics they can post in their journal.

( Like this one )