Kites Movie Review : "Made in USA"

There are times when you don't feel like doing very much - I had just dropped my pa at the airport and had nothing else planned so I decided to step into a movie theatre and upon checking my ticket stub was about to watch "Kites". For a Rakesh Roshan extravaganza, it turned out to be zara "hat ke". From the very begining "Kites" stuns you as a technically superb film - the cinematography is a class above typical Hollywood action films. Wide angle visuals of (is that Nevada ?) in eastman color with captivating detail are the films' strongest point. Mish mashed hollowood action, noir and QT would make good watching as well. But other than that Kites is pretty much is up in the air. Hrithik, who plays a part time dance instructor, being wooed by a wealthy hieress whom he does not like much and his subsequent passionate rendezvous with her brother's fiance are remniscent of Match Point. Her father though is not a jewish business man but a gangster punjabi casino owner Mr Grover (Kabir Bedi). I first thought, funnily, this indian interpretation of Woody Allen is not more cerebral and "Indian" than London prodigals and almost the reverse. Visualize a desi software manager Rajesh Sethi's daughter Gina Sethi wooing her reluctant computer graphics professor Mr Saran who instead lusts Gina's sister in law to be - Barabara Molina, a floater and occassional travel photographer. But that is not what this film wishes it were. It quickly jumps the gun into an on the run road movie and action thriller. Much of bollywood is Masala - being cerebral or culturally informed is straying from the objective. With senior Roshan in a position of responsibility, it is not surprising that the script retains the paisa wasool flavors of old bollywood. Jay (Roshan) and Linda/Natasha (played by latin actress Barbara Mori) end up accidentally hurting junior gangster Grover, and are passionately speeding across the Nevada highway contemplating similarities between Latinos and Indians, teaching each other spanish and hindi, and if it comes as a surprise, falling in love. Some of the shots in this wild and spicy mix remind you of Tarantino - for example the ear chopping torture scene and the bank robbery scene in which the two debate whether to ask for add a few million dollars to the 200$ they are stealing. But the film does not imitate Tarantino's trademark over the top humor and much of the intention behind imitating actual QT scenes is misplaced. The film ends with a lengthy and neatly underscored suicidal jump. It is metaphorical but not a long shot unlike the ending in Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise. All in all this is an absolutely awesome watch if you have time and want to see an Indian cinematographer get an A+ on his film institute exam, aided by the excellently resourceful Mr Roshan. But do not watch if for any other reason.

The great dSLR revolution

When they first made themselves obvious, I owned a Powershot A70. Although curious to switch, I was a little too much in love with Powershot's light compact aluminium frame, bright LCD and soft whirring servos. I took it everywhere. Sometimes I did not need to take pictures but still toyed with the LCD viewfinder and the servo zoom. Whirr..whirr. It was very pleasing. The pictures I took seldom failed my expectations. Maybe I needed to blow them up larger than my desktop to feel dissatisfied. This I never did. Very recently, I became interested in making the move, with a view to getting serious publication quality pictures and with a view to learning more about video cameragraphy. This was past my 7th year of casual digital photography. The transition was not smooth. Actually very frustrating with a Canon 500D kit lens and a wide angle apater. I was quite impressed by the added resolution of the 500D's indoor shots but the outdoor results were nothing short of disastrous. I first blamed it on myself. Maybe I did not know enough about the manual exposure settings or maybe I snapped at the wrong time of the day. Maybe the lens shipped with the camera was super bad. But something seemed sorely out of whack. When I zoomed into my old 3.1 MP powershot images, I could go very deep and not see a single red or white spot standing out. Here, despite the 5x improvement in resolution, the landscapes were quite bad when magnified. After a brief pause in my experimentation, I bought a relatively inexpensive zoom lens, a 70-300 canon telephoto. I could get some rather good bird images impromptu with the same minimal photography knowledge. All else equal, I could blame the bad wide angle shots on the default plastic lens and rushed to buy a superior Canon 15-85 lens. This improved the images but the depth of field was not impressive even at high f stops. I concluded something might be special about the small digital cameras in outdoor wide angle situations and embarked on a google search, eventually to conclude that it was very likely the case. The smaller cheaper compacts had a depth of field advantage. They used much wider lenses, 5-7 mm at the widest, and use only a small, in fact very small, about 1/36'th of the image that focal length would create on a DSLR sensor. This small focal length translates into a much higher light intensity and needs a proportionately smaller actual aperture to give the same signal. That meant that the same actual aperture size or DOF would correspond to a fast F/2.8 instead of a rather slow F/15 on DSLR. Besides it is also possible to get large F stops at this wide focal length. Wow, the small format has a lower resolution, higher noise but here is a big and bright silver lining, you can get the same DOF with F/2.8 as you might with F/15 on a DSLR and F/30 on a large format. If this argument holds you probably never really need to go beyond the widest aperture which is a disappointment when you feel like fidgeting with that dial. Obviously magnifying a small image is not always without errors. Besides wide angle lenses can be more error prone. Besides, ISO compensation is probably a big problem with the compacts. At the moment, it is hard to dump dSLRs. Especially if you need to blow your images beyond a 32 inch LCD screen or frequently need high zoom or do indoor or macro photography. Though, I would look into the bridge prosumer range of cameras (Powershot G, Lumix FZ, Finepix Fujifilm ) since they use rather good lens systems, small sensors and allow some manual fiddling. Maybe in future, they will let you swap lenses. I would not think it worth buying a DSLR without a repertoire of fine lenses and filters. The question in my mind is what professional photographers think of small sensor optics. Why exactly are they trying to make a full frame DSLR. Sure, you get much better sensitivity on each pixel but unless you use a tripod, you are likely to get much lower shutter speed distortion in a smaller sensor. What is not clear is what exactly is the trade off - or rather how large would an image have to be for the compact sensor to be a handicap.