{balki Blog}
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I am a great fan of the Final Destination movie series. We recently rented the 3rd part on DVD and I was so motivated by the movie that I decided to do the following things in order to live a long and healthy life:

1. Never take a shower again
2. Never ride a roller-coaster
3. Never drive or travel in a car
4. Never ride any kind of a train
5. Never fly anywhere
6. Never cook or enter the kitchen (I am so glad I have been doing this for the past 10 years anyway!)
7. Never enter a tanning salon again (seriously, I was planning get toned before our upcoming Chicago trip)
8. Never go shopping in any kind of a store again
9. Never work-out in a gym (or use any kind of gym equipment)
10. Never go near a barbecue grill
11. Never feed the pigeons again
12. Never enter an elevator again
13. Never enter the garage
14. Never order from a drive-thru window again
15. Never go to a county fair (or any other public place)

And based on some past events in my own real-life, the following:

16. Never play softball (or any other form of ball game) again
17. Never criticize my wife again
18. Never admire another woman (in front of my wife) again
19. Never question any sort of illogical arguments and conclusions made by my wife again
20. Never operate the vacuum cleaner again (this is more of a convenience rather than a life-extending action)

Be sure to watch the three movies to come up with your own list of items and also review your own life to come up with eve more.

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Last night some friends came over for dinner and stayed back to watch a movie. I heard a lot about “March of the Penguins” so I suggested we watch it. This is one of the most incredible movies we watched in the recent past. While the saga of making the documentary itself makes it worthwhile to watch it, the underlying message is a great eye-opener as well. While we humans tend to live our lives with no higher purpose, always scheming, fighting, complaining, the penguins go through such remarkable hardship with one single purpose. I will give anything to operate with just 10% of focus that these penguins have. Throughout the movie we exclaimed using phrases like “Amazing”, “Incredible”, “Wow” etc very generously and believe me that is very rare! There is a great underlying message (whether the makers intended for it or not) and it is certainly delivered in a grand fashion!

NOTE: Some of you might ask why I write movie reviews 6 months or more after they are originally released in theaters. There is a simple reason - We are crazy about movies (watch 4-6 movies week!) and obviously it is not very cost-effective to watch them in the theaters (I used this same logic and came up with complicated calculations to convince my wife six years ago why the Bose Surround System System and the Onkyo Receiver were such great investments. I used the same methodology again and scored a Panasonic 50″ plasma TV!) Anyways, we rent movies from Hollywood Video using their MVP pass and we cannot rent movies using this special program for about 6 weeks after a movie comes on DVD. I review the movies this late anyways because a lot of friends ask for English movie recommendations and I like to point them to a resource rather than trying to recollect movie names on the fly. For the same reason, I maintain a running list of all my favorite English movies on this blog site.

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Watched the movie The Final Cut over the weekend (actually on a weekend over 6 months ago; this blog has been posted with an incorrect date). This was one of the better English movies we watched in the last couple months or so. There are so many movies coming on DVD but not many are worth even reviewing here.

Watched the movie over the weekend. This was one of the better English movies we watched in the last couple months or so. There are so many movies coming on DVD but not many are worth even reviewing here.

Anyways, we liked the movie for the following reasons:

• Great futuristic concept
• Clever storyline
• Good direction
• Got us nervous about the future and provided enough fodder for a very lively debate!

Watched the movie over the weekend. This was one of the better English movies we watched in the last couple months or so. There are so many movies coming on DVD but not many are worth even reviewing here.
The negatives:

• Robin Williams
• Not enough of Mira
• Abrupt, not so much fun ending

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I finally budged to my wife’s incessant grumbling and paid through my nose to watch the movie “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” in the theater.

It was not a fantastic movie but it was not crappy either. It seems like so many movies fall in this category these days. The movies are good enough but not awesome. In this movie, you will find all the predictable characteristics that you come to expect from epic movie: a good cast, the most advanced technology and a good enough screen adaptation. However, the movie failed to inspire me and kept me from recommending it to everybody I know. Somehow there is not enough “wow” factor to the movie. Maybe it’s because we watch 4 movies a week on average or maybe because the quality is coming down?? I cannot say for sure.

Anyways, I rate the movie a 5.5 on a scale of 10 (don’t tell my wife but I slept for 20-30 minutes during the first half of the movie, so my rating is based on the remaining 94 minutes)

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Terrorist, terrorize this!
This is one of the many powerful dialogues in this greatest comedy of the year! I was laughing all the way through the Team America: World Police movie, especially the extended version of the very vulgar analogy Gary uses at the end of the movie. I don’t how they did it but the puppets seemed very real. I loved the character of Kim Jong Il and his accent.
I watched a few of the special features and was awed by the open hatred of the young director/producer duo, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Trey kept saying how they hated every single actor in Hollywood and the movie was an outlet to take revenge on the actors (you’ll know what he is talking about when you watch the movie).
All in all, this DVD is definitely going into my list of all-time favorites.

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