Musings of an Idiot

Food and more movies

Hyderabad is famous for various things but in terms of eating the first thing that comes to everyone's mind is Hyderabadi Biryani. Biryani from Paradise Restaurant is supposed to be really good but I tried it last year and I was pretty disappointed as it was nothing special and this time I decided to try some from Four Seasons Restaurant {they have a branch in Kondapur} and the biryani was amazing. I'd rate it 9/10 in terms of taste, texture and value for money and definitely a must try if you are in Hyderabad. The other restaurants I've tried are Blue Fox, Blue, Ginger Court & Angeethi - and of those I'd recommend Angeethi as the food tasted nice and the ambience was nice as well. Planning on trying out Khansama later this evening and will update this post to reflect on that experience. All in all the food the Hyderabadi food is amazing but the city needs to open up it's palate a bit more to give international cuisine like japanese, thai, vietnamese, indonesian etc a chance to titilate the taste buds.

Dad arranged for a driver to drive me around yesterday, as I am now completely useless at driving anything in India because of the chaotic traffic and lack of regard for any kind of road rules. The idea was to take a few snaps at Charminar and Hussain Sagar Lake before finishing off the rest of my shopping. I finally managed to take a few snaps that gives some inkling about life in Hyderabad. It was a saturday morning, so it's not crowded much which explains the empty space in the photos. Incidentally - this is the only city where I can use all the 3 languages I know while conversing with anyone and I do like that.


Since mum and dad's old DVD player wouldn't play a bunch of DVDs i decided to shop around for a new one and at the electronics store I was switching between all the 3 languages without realizing it since the salesman was doing the same. After purchasing the DVD, I went ahead and purchased a bunch of DVDs so that the DVD player wasn't sitting there in the house just as a show piece. Once I got home I ripped into a bunch of movies. The best of the lot was a telugu movie called 'Gammyam'.

'Gammyam' flowed naturally and it was well acted {without overacting for most part}, well edited and well directed. It was a pleasant surprise as compared to 'Ajab Prem Ki Gajab Kahani' that I watched a couple of days back at IMAX. The other movies I finished watching were 'Sarkar' and 'Shootout at Lokhandwala' - I had started watching those movies when they were screening on TV but had given up on them because of the 15 minute commercial breaks. 'Sarkar' was well shot and well acted but the editing was off because the pace was dead slow because of excessive use of looks and glances. The movie was short as it is at 2 hour run length but if it was paced right it would've been 1.5 hours only. 'Shootout at Lokhandwala' was again well shot but it was an action flick and the shoot out does get pretty mind numbing after a while. Another movie I watched was 'Welcome' - it was a comedy and half the movie was funny and good while the other half just dragged on and on and on. It's almost like the script writers spent most of the time writing the first half of the movie and just mashed together the ending to complete the script.

A thing which throws me off in all Bollywood movies is the dubbed audio. The film makers don't use synch sound while making a movie for obvious reasons - India is too noisy and there is no way that they can get clean sound without a massive production budget. The only movie I know in most recent times that used synch sound is 'Lagaan' and they had budget over runs because of that decision. I am dreading doing ADR for just one of the scenes in 'The Moments In Between' because it is so tedious and hard to capture the same essence and inflictions and meaning to the words recorded in ADR, even though the words are the same as those on location. So I do admire the fact that all the movies here are dubbed over from start to end and for most part the performers and the directors and the sound editors pull off this impossible task with remarkable results. It does get distracting when the words don't match the lip movement and that's something that can't be avoided when dubbing over dialogue and that's the price that bollywood movies pay for having crisp audio.

Anyway, that's me for now.
Later,
Amit

Labels: Hyderabad, Travel

posted by Amit @ 8:10 AM