If you’re not reading Abstruse Goose, you should be. This comic is pure genius wrapped in delicious deep fried awesome.

(Click on the pic for the entire strip.)

You’d think a comedy about five Muslims bent on attaining martyrdom during a London marathon would be a an exercise in bad taste but Chris Morris’s Four Lions is one of the funniest films I’ve seen all year. The only other film I can compare to this sometimes uncomfortable but mostly hilarious farce is last year’s brilliant (and profane) comedy of errors, In the Loop. Both have somewhat unintelligent protagonists with vague notions of right and wrong.

Four Lions is centered on five squabbling young Muslims, their idiosyncrasies and their complete lack of self awareness. Throughout the film, they contradict themselves and cherry pick the Koran for what they think is the ‘will of god’. Surprisingly, the film is nowhere near as offensive as you’d expect, probably because the story is told from an outsider’s perspective. You feel as sorry for the bombers as you do for their intended victims. Also, did you know that the Jews invented spark plugs to control global traffic?

Highly recommended.

Not that The Daily Show isn’t hilarious, but it gets a lot funnier when Aasif Mandvi shows up.  Here he is gloating about how India got tech support from NASA and the USGS on the Chandrayaan mission.

For every Bobby Jindal, there’s one Aasif Mandvi.

Where would we be without self-deprecation?

Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart‘s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.

The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?

…

I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?

(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)

“Volatility frequently occurs when everyone suddenly realizes that the stock market’s just a consensual mass delusion based on fictitious valuing of abstract assets. It’s like finding out Santa Claus is real because you catch him robbing your house.”

- Wyatt Cenac on The Daily Show

Once in a while, you read a book that is an entirely intimate and personal experience. It’s extremely gratifying but unnerving to read about a protagonist who shares your traits, quirks and personal philosophy. This was one such book for me.

This Book Will Save Your Life is a satire of affluence and it’s pitfalls. Richard Novak is a self made man who is obsessed with health food, art, culture and pretty much nothing else. A fit of unexplained chest pain forces him to reevaluate his life, loves and family. This is a story about a man who attempts opening up to a world and is surprised in the strangest of ways.

Richard reconnects with his brother and son and opens himself to the idea of intimacy. In the meantime he makes friends with a movie star, a reclusive screenwriter and all the while, his house is slowly being devoured by a sinkhole. This is more of a dark comedy where you inadvertently laugh at a person’s misfortunes than at his sense of humor. What’s amazing is that A M Homes is a woman; and for a woman she shows an in depth knowledge about the inner workings of men.

On the surface, this seems like light reading but at the end of it you will be left with a surge of hope and maybe, just maybe, it’ll save your life.

An exhaustive review here.

http://www.amhomesbooks.com/

I constantly keep track of my site stats, mostly just to feed my bloated ego but there are times I’m curious to find what people actually read here. Somehow my post on 300 shows up whenever people search for naked men. I will not comment on that but today someone searched for ”malayalee moron” and ended up here! Says a lot about the author eh?

Who exactly at Google do I thank?

I can’t contain myself. I’m giggling like a 10 year old. I haven’t been this excited in a while.

For a handful of us back in college, Harold and Kumar go to White Castle was a defining moment in our four years at that godforsaken place. It sort of gained a cult status back then and a few lines from the film gradually went on to be part of our daily diatribe.

Kumar in many ways was the smart and funny slacker we all wanted to be. Add a socially awkward Korean, raunchy jokes, girls, Neil Patric Harris, weed, burgers, bullies and not so subtle social commentary and you had an amazingly funny comedy.

The sequel comes out next year…watch the hilarious trailer here!

I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.

I was watching Annie Hall for the umpteenth time and that’s when I was hit by a strong desire (yes, yet again) to be more like Woody Allen‘s character, Alvy Singer. Agreed he’s not exactly the epitome of male perfection but there’s something about him in spite of his neurotic mannerisms and sometimes unnecessarily lengthy expositions that make him something of a role model.

There is this scene where he expresses his wariness of God men and religion when he exclaims to Diane Keaton’s character,

Look! There’s God coming out of the men’s room!

Setting aside his witty yet profound musings on every aspect of culture, he is also an embodiment of childish hopefulness in a sea of cynicism. His character always maintains the middle ground, not too much of an intellectual yet has more going on upstairs than the average person.

Now if only I could find a girl more like Diane Keaton…

After years (!) of careful thinking and research (and mind numbing monotony), the list of probable candidates for  the honor of being The Prestidigitator’s Idea of the Perfect Woman has come down to three beautiful and not to mention intelligent individuals…er…women.

1. Cate Blanchett:  She blew my mind away with her performances in Elizabeth and even films like The Life Aquatic but what clinched it was an interview of hers I saw last week on Aussie TV. Not only does she seem to be intelligent and well read but  also showed a great deal of depth whilst deliberating on topics ranging from death to philosophy. Most other actresses are (face it) vain and um…not that intellectually stimulating but Cate Blanchett comes across as the very antithesis.

2. Natalie Portman: Well…no surprise here. She has that unique characteristic what many (not me) would call ‘twinkle in the eye‘. She has a certain sense of intelligence and ‘bubbliness’ that you would be hard pressed to find in actresses of her generation. To boot, she also has a degree in psychology from Harvard (proving she is as smart as she looks) and she actually submitted a paper titled “Frontal Lobe Activation During Object Permanence“! Beat that!

3. Marge Simpson: Proving that the perfect woman need not be three dimensional, Marge Simpson is the everyday woman with a tinge of attitude. Yes, she is patient, a great painter, has high morals etc.. But she also has that unpredictability that you just wouldn’t find in any other woman in suburbia. And…she has blue hair.

Congratulations, Ladies!