Indian George Clooney

Under severe pressure to post an entry, I couldn't do any better :)
This is what a certain lady said I looked like, "under the light" (and "influence", if I may add..:)), an Indian George Clooney.

Of late, have become a fan of the guy (no, not because I am supposed to look like him) - I like how he mixes his commercial flicks (Ocean's XI, XII, etc.) with his more creative, challenging, meaningful ventures (Traffic, Good Night and Good Luck, most recently Syriana, etc.)

Good Night and Good Luck was very nicely done - I didn't know much about McCarthy-ism before the movie and was insightful. His latest, Syriana - in one word, demanding! Full of plots, sub-plots, multiple stories in multiple threads (like Traffic, Crash), linked together by what they call, the earth's greatest natural resource, OIL. I was very keen to watch the movie as soon as it released because of its relevance in today's world - the middle-east and oil is at the center of the 'developed world's' foreign policy. There were 4 major threads - Clooney as a CIA agent who gets screwed over by his bosses, Matt Damon as an analyst working with a Saudi prince, Jeffrey Wright as a merger advisor, and 2 naive, simple, decent pakistani kids. Of them all, the merger story was the one that really drove the point home for me - only can only imagine the kind of corruption ("Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why we win" screams a character in the movie) and under-the-table nonsense that goes in some of these major mergers and acquisitions. Mergers are not always a good thing - competition keeps people honest, with mergers and monopoly can sometimes come a slackness in standards and ethics.

A similar movie that I saw about the dirty collusion of corporation and government was Constant Gardener (it had Rachel Weisz in it - to me, one of the most beautiful women - the looks, accent..) - this one was about the other big corporation that people find easy to hate, the pharmaceuticals. It deals with the issue of pharmaceuticals using Africa to test out their meds on. The "justification" is that these people don't have any meds anyway, how does it matter if pharmaceuticals dump their past-expiry-date meds to write off tax benefits or *test* a new cure for TB on these people. Am not in a position to comment on the legitimacy of these claims, but the movie offers a great view of Africa - cinematography was excellent - great shots of the continent. On another level, it also made me realize (and revisit) the futility of trying to completely understand someone, a significant other, or a closed one. Ironically, all this *testing* that these Western pharamceuticals supposedly do and we still have to put through boring medicine ads on tv that finish in a flurry with, "Side-effects may include drowsiness, dizziness, nausea, loss of appetite, loss of sleep, constipation...and anything that we have not yet tested for on African kids"