Tag Archives: India

Movie Review – Hotel Mumbai

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TL;DR – This is an incredible, violent, and emotionally visceral film that will grab you in the first frame and not let go  

Score – I honestly don’t know how to score this.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Hotel Mumbai. Image Credit: Screen Australia.

Review –

In a now previous life, I taught international relations to university students. This is a large discipline and one of the areas we looked at was terrorism, which happens to be one of the most pressing security issues in the modern world, or not, it’s complicated. All of this meant that when I walked into the theatre to review this film I thought I had a pretty good handle on what I was about to see, as I was quite familiar with the 2008 Mumbai Attacks, and well I could not have been more wrong.

So to set the scene, we open with a boat slowly making its way into one of the many harbours on the Mumbai shoreline. On the boat are eight well-dressed young men who could be there for work in the financial capital of India, but immediately you know that is not the case. Each of them carries a large duffel bag and they are listing to someone give them instructions, directing them to different landmarks across the city. Meanwhile, across the city everyone else is just going through their day as normal, Arjun (Dev Patel) is trying to get his dastaar perfect as he gets ready for work at the Taj Hotel, Zahara (Nazanin Boniadi), her husband David (Armie Hammer), and their nanny Sally (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) are arriving at the hotel after a long flight and everyone is racing to get the room ready for her as her mother is a VIP, and the hotel head chef Hemant (Anupam Kher) is just trying to work out how to get everything done in such a short time. None of them knows the hell that is heading for them.

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Movie Review – Gully Boy

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TL;DR – A story about finding your voice through rap in the slums of Mumbai hits just about every beat perfectly.    

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a scene over the first part of the credits

Gully Boy. Image Credit: Excel Entertainment.

Review –

It has been a while since I have watched a movie about becoming a music superstar that had any kind of weight and substance behind it. Usually, they are content just to ride on the fact that people know the music very well, and as long as you drop those classic songs every now and again people will lap it up. Today we get to look at a film that doesn’t just rest on its laurels and call it a day, it instead focuses deeply on what it is to come from nothing and try to make it in a very competitive world.  

So to set the scene, we open in Mumbai, India, specifically the Dharavi slums on the outskirts of the city, and we start immediately in a moment of tension when Aftab (Vijay Raaz) brings home a second younger wife, much to the annoyance of both Murad (Ranveer Singh) and his mother Razia (Amruta Subhash). Murad is working hard at school, working hard on keeping his relationship with Safeena (Alia Bhatt) on the quiet, but he has a real passion for rap. In his quiet time, he watches videos on YouTube and works on his own lyrics. However, he doesn’t have the confidence to take it to the next level, which is when MC Sher (Siddhant Chaturvedi) gives him the push he needs.

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TV Review – Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab

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TL;DR – In the battle between love and hate, on which side would you be on? This is the question today’s episode asks before emotionally punching you in the gut.

Score – 5 out of 5 stars

 

Doctor Who: Demons Of The Punjab. Image Credit: BBC

 

Review –

When I heard Doctor Who was going to set an episode in colonial India, you can bet I was deeply concerned. A British TV Show doing an episode on the British occupation of another country, it is a recipe for disaster if handled wrongly, and the title Demons of the Punjab didn’t exactly fill me with confidence either. However, then we got to see Rosa (see review) earlier this season all about Rosa Parks and her struggles, they showed a real understanding of exploring deeply complex historical events, so I had a hope that they would be able to here as well, and I honestly think they pulled it off.

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Map-It Civilization VI: Rise and Fall Cities 

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TL;DR – Today we chart out the Civilization VI City List in Map from the Rise and Fall Expansion

Rise and Fall banner

Article –

We continue our tradition of looking at Firaxis Games Civilization VI by charting the cities of their new expansion Rise and Fall.  If you would like to see our original map looking at the base game you can Click Here, our mapping of the expansion Click Here, and if you would like to see the cities for each civ in the base game Click Here. Now before we start, I just want to point out that these city locations are not meant to be pinpoint accurate, the groupings and questionable locations of some cities make that impossible. Just think of this more of a general guide to where they are located.  Also for our mobile guests, there will be a lot of images incoming, so even though I have tried to keep them small, now would be a good time to check that you are using wi-fi and not data.

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Video Game Review – Civilization VI: Rise and Fall Expansion  

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TL;DR – It takes the formula of Civilization VI and adds to it in very different and unexpected ways boosting the core game and adding some new flavour to the experience

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Rise and Fall

 

Review –
If there is one thing that you can almost reliably count on is that a Civilization game is going to get an expansion at some point (and hopefully more than one). It is one of those gaming truisms, like there will be a controversy with each Grand Theft Auto game release, or Nintendo is going to Mario up every console it makes, the things that help make life that little bit more predictable in a world of chaos. So today we are going to explore Civilization VI’s (see review) first expansion pack Rise and Fall, which both describes some of the mechanics in the game but is also a homage to the popular mod Rhye’s and Fall.

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Map-It: Civilization VI: Rise and Fall Expansion

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TL;DR – We continue to chart Civilization VI as we dive into the new expansion pack and map out all the new civilizations.

Rise and Fall banner

 

Map-It –

For today’s map, we looking at the new Rise and Fall expansion for Civilization VI. So we are including everything in the base game of Civilization VI, as well as what was included in the Poland, Viking, Australia, Persia/Macedonia, Nubia, and South East Asia DLC packs, and today we are adding upon that the Rise and Fall expansion pack. If you would like to see our original map looking at the base game you can Click Here, if you would like to see the cities for each civ in the base game Click Here. A big thanks to everyone over at Civfanatics who helped by collate all this information in their Features Thread. Now there are going to be a number of large images after the page break, so if you are on a mobile device and need to watch your data, now is the time to jump onto Wifi.

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Movie Review – Padmaavat (Padmavati, पद्मावती)

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TL;DR – A fascinating but also a quite difficult film, great acting, but only one-dimensional characters, with a very mixed ending

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – No

Padmaavat

Review –

So back in 2017, I pushed myself to go see more non-western films and while it was a laudable goal, it didn’t pan out as much as I would have liked. Well, 2018 is a new year, and so let’s take another stab at this, and well there was no better place to start than with one of the most controversial films I have seen since maybe The Interview (see review). A leading politician in India demanded people assault the director, sets have been burnt down, death threats have been made, even riots at screenings and well some people have really got to understand what the Streisand Effect is. Now before we get into the film review proper I did want to preface this review with a couple of provisos, for better or worse I am approaching this film as an outsider, as I am a white guy who is not a practitioner of any of the religions depicted nor a decedent of any of the ethnic groups in this film. Now this means that I am likely missing a lot of the historical and cultural contexts that the film is using as shorthand. But also, I have no particular want to see one side viewed in a certain way, so impartial external observer and what not. So let’s dive into probably one of the more interesting films I have seen recently, for good and bad reasons.

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TV Review – Ultimate Beastmaster: Season 2 (No Surrender)

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TL;DR – The second outing is a much more streamlined production, learning from the mistakes from the first season, but falls a bit in its casting.

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

Ultimate Beastmaster Season 2

Review –

So at the start of the year a small little gem dropped on Netflix called Ultimate Beastmaster, a show clearly inspired by Ninja Warrior but with a big twist. This time around it was a multi-national competition with competitors and hosts from six different countries, with each country getting a different final cut. Some hailed it as the beginning for a new age of global television, I wouldn’t go that far, but it was a nifty concept. Well, it is the end of the year and Netflix has given us a little end of year surprise with Season 2 dropping much earlier than I expected it to. So today we are going to take a look at the highs and lows of Season 2 of Ultimate Beastmaster.

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Map-It: Civilization VI Cities (Base Game up to the South East Asia DLC)

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TL;DR – Today we chart out the Civilization VI City List in Map form

Civ banner

Article –

So today I continue with my Map-It series by following up on our Civilization Map-It project by this time looking at the city lists of each civ.  It was originally my aim to have all the cities on the big map, but after trying that out with just America it quickly became apparent that it would be hard to read and would clutter an already full map, and this is not taking into account the same city might appear on many different city lists. However, after a while I continued to want to see how the city lists come together and how they play out in geographical space so I decided you didn’t need to put them all on the one map, I could create an individual map for each civilization. Now naïvely I just assumed that I could just cut out the civilization maps from my big map, do a little touch up in places and go for it. Well … that was not the case, with most maps needing to be recreated from the ground up. Now pf course past me was a real pain for present me, but the lure of maps was too strong so here we are with every civilization’s city lists mapped out. Now before we start, I just want to point out that these city locations are not meant to be pinpoint accurate, the groupings and questionable locations of some cities make that impossible. Just think of this more of a general guide of where they are located.  Also for our mobile guests, there will be a lot of images incoming, so even though I have tried to keep them small, now would be a good time to check that you are using wi-fi and not data

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Map-It: Civilization VI (Base Game up to the South East Asia DLC)

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TL;DR – Today we chart out Civilization VI in Map form the base game all the way up to the South East Asia DLC

Civ 6 banner

Map-It –

So today we continue with our Map-It series by looking at one of my favourite video games Civilization VI. Given the amount of content that Civilization VI has that you can map, and since I do love maps I decided to create two maps, the first map has all the civilizations currently released, and the second shows the locations of all the World Wonders, Natural Wonders, and the City States. So for today’s maps, we are including everything in the base game of Civilization VI, as well as what was include in the Poland, Viking, Australia, Persia/Macedonia & Nubia DLC packs
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