wiki"leakes" breif

While Wikileaks criminal, Julian Assange, obviously didn’t get enough attention from his parents as a child, he may have, in his treachery, done the United States a favor.
After reviewing some of the ‘bombshells’ Assange illegally obtained and published in order to fill his gaping need for recognition, I actually come away from the disclosures feeling somewhat comforted that the our State Department has an awfully good grip on what is happening in virtually every corner of the world.
Surely, there will be some embarrassment. And to the extent that the Wikileaks exposures hurt people around the world or make American foreign policy more difficult to execute, Assange – and soldier Bradley Manning, Assange’s accomplice working inside the Pentagon-  should be strung up by the toes.
But the nefarious plan carried out by these people has exposed some nasty weaknesses in our government’s systems – weaknesses that would permit a lowly intelligence officer  to get his hands on millions of classified diplomatic cables and make them available to press outlets more interested in selling papers than protecting national security.

robo vs 175 crs!!!! who will win

Bollywood in the last couple of years has been obsessed with figures (of the numerical kind). Trumpets have been blared and headlines sought over escalating film acquisition prices and exorbitant star remunerations . But even though the Indian motion picture business has seen some really outrageous acquisitions like Raavan (Rs 125 crore reportedly ) and Kites (rumoured to be Rs 120 crore), the production budgets have so far remained modest.




Now, however, a new figure has emerged: a mindboggling Rs 150 crore, which is said to be the budget for the Rajinikanth-Aishwarya Rai Bachchan bilingual Endhiran (Tamil) and The Robot (Hindi). Produced by Kalanidhi Maran, the film is touted as India’s most expensive film to date.



In the making for over two years, The Robot has been shot on hitherto-unseen locations that include the world heritage site Machu Picchu (Peru) besides Brazil and the US, with a foreign crew that includes costume designer E Vogt and stunt coordinator Yuen Woo Ping.



Trade insiders say the production budget is more than double the previously most expensive Bollywood action adventure Blue (pegged at Rs 75 crore) because 40% of the cost has gone into special effects.



This science fiction entertainer with a sweeping canvas has animatronics, used before in Hollywood magnum opuses like Jurassic Park, Terminator and Avatar, carried out at the Stan Winston Studios . The grapevine says that Tamil Nadu demigod Rajinikanth’s price could reportedly be Rs 45 crore (or a share in the profits coming to the same amount) and his heroine has reportedly been paid Rs 6 crore.



A trade insider said: ‘‘ Robot is the first film with such a huge production cost. This is not an acquisition figure like in the case of Kites or Raavan but the actual landing cost, including the remuneration of the two lead actors.’’ Director S Shankar justified the budget, saying: ‘‘ It’s a complete entertainer with the best special effects seen so far on the Indian screen. We realise that we have made the costliest Indian film but when it’s Rajinikanth and Aishwarya, it is justified.’’



Though Robot might well have, few Indian films can justify their humongous cost of production. ‘‘ Bollywood has rarely made films on a huge canvas,’’ says trade analyst Taran Adarsh. ‘‘ In most cases film budgets have gone through the roof because actors in India take away nearly 70% of the budget as their remuneration.’’ A case in point is Blue, the previously most expensive film before The Robot, where Akshay Kumar reportedly got Rs 27 crore as his price, Sanjay Dutt got Rs 9 crore and even actors like Lara Dutta and Zayed Khan took home eightfigure salaries.



But there have been films where the cost has shot up because of other factors. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002) budget came to Rs 50 crore because, as an industry insider said, ‘‘ Devdas was shot for nearly 250 shifts; it cost the producer so much because they had erected six sets, each costing anywhere between Rs 3 crore and Rs 12 crore. And the sets stood at Film City for a period of two and a half years. Paro’s glass room__ made from more than 1 lakh pieces of stained glass__ became a talking point in Bollywood.’’



Some other producers who genuinely spent money on production as opposed to paying their actors ridiculous fees were K Asif (his evergreen historical love story , Mughal-e-Azam , took nine years and cost Rs 12 crore in 1960), Kamal Amrohi , whose Razia Sultan cost around Rs 23 crore in 1983 and Yash Chopra, whose action thriller Dhoom-2 was made for Rs 55 crore.

a "conman" love story

From the director of entertaining films Main Hoon Na and Om Shanti Om comes another entertainer Tees Maar Khan with the hit pair of Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif. The first look of this Farah Khan film is out.




Slated for a December release Tees Maar Khan has Akshay playing a stylish international conman and Katrina will be seen as a glamorous item girl. Both the actors have gone for an image makeover for the film. Katrina has toned herself to flaunt her sexy waist and will sizzle on screen dancing in ghagra cholis.



Though the actual story of the film has not been revealed, according to Farah it is a hardcore commercial caper like her two previous ventures. The idea of the film came from her husband Shirish Kunder, who is also producing the film. Farah got interested in the subject because it suited her taste and style.

do u know how "inception" movie started....?

Inception was first developed by Christopher Nolan, based on the notion of "exploring the idea of people sharing a dream space — entering a dream space and sharing a dream. That gives you the ability to access somebody’s unconscious mind. What would that be used and abused for?" Furthermore, he thought "being able to extract information from somebody’s brain would be the obvious use of that because obviously any other system where it’s computers or physical media, whatever — things that exist outside the mind — they can all be stolen ... up until this point, or up until this movie I should say, the idea that you could actually steal something from somebody’s head was impossible. So that, to me, seemed a fascinating abuse or misuse of that kind of technology." Nolan admits that Inception shares some basic ideas with short stories by Jorge Luis Borges such as The Circular Ruins and The Secret Miracle.




Nolan had thought about these ideas on and off since he was 16 years old, intrigued by how he would wake up and then, while falling back into a lighter sleep, hold on to the awareness that he was dreaming, a lucid dream. He also became aware of the feeling that he could study the place and alter the events of the dream. He said, "I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else." Harvard University dream researcher Deirdre Barrett points out that Nolan did not get every detail accurate regarding dreams, but that films which really do that "... tend to have illogical, rambling, disjointed plots which wouldn’t make for a great thriller. But he did get many aspects right," she said, citing the scene in which a sleeping DiCaprio is shoved into a full bath and water starts gushing into the windows of the building he is dreaming, waking him up. "That's very much how real stimuli get incorporated, and you very often wake up right after that intrusion."

golden age of hollywood

politics in hollywood

In the 1930s the Democrats and the Republicans saw money in Hollywood. President Franklin Roosevelt saw a huge partnership with Hollywood. He used the first real potential of Hollywood’s stars in a national campaign. Melvyn Douglas toured Washington in 1939 and met the key New Dealers. Endorsements letters from leading actors were signed, radio appearances and printed advertising were made. The use of a star was to draw a large audience into the political view of the party. By the 1960s John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra had a strong friendship in this glamour era when young Kennedy was a new face for Washington. The last moguls of Hollywood were gone and young new executives and producers began generating more liberal ideas. The celebrity and the money attracted the politicians into the high-class glittering Hollywood life-style. As Ronald Brownstein wrote in his book “The Power and the Glitter”, television in the 1970s and 1980s was an enormously important new media in politics and Hollywood helped in that media with actors making speeches on their political beliefs, like Jane Fonda against the Vietnam War.[10] In this era we saw former actor Ronald Reagan became Governor of California and then President of the United States. It continued with Arnold Schwarzenegger as California’s Governor in 2003. Today Washington’s interest is in Hollywood donations. On February 20, 2007, for example, Barack Obama had a $2300-a-plate Hollywood gala, being hosted by David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg at the Beverly Hilton.[11] Hollywood is a huge donator for presidential campaigns and this money attracts politicians. Not only is Hollywood influencing Washington with its glamour and money but Washington also influences Hollywood. See Jean-Michel Valantin's analysis in “Hollywood, le Pentagone et Washington” [12]

rise of hollywood

In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troupe, consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company decided to explore new territories, traveling several miles north to Hollywood, a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about California in the 1800s, while it belonged to Mexico. Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about Biograph's success in Hollywood, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. In Los Angeles, California, the studios and Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were made in several U.S. cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the industry developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors year-round, and by the varied scenery that was available. There are several starting points for cinema (particularly American cinema), but it was Griffith's controversial 1915 epic Birth of a Nation that pioneered the worldwide filming vocabulary that still dominates celluloid to this day.




In the early 1900s, when the medium was new, many Jewish immigrants found employment in the U.S. film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the movie studio. (It is worth noting that the US had at least one female director, producer and studio head in these early years, Alice Guy-Blaché.) They also set the stage for the industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-centric provincialism.



Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir; and actors like Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of actors — lured west from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films — to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week [1].



Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920s [2]. After The Jazz Singer, the first film with synchronized voices, was successfully released as a Vitaphone talkie in 1927, Hollywood film companies would respond to Warner Bros. and begin to use Vitaphone sound — which Warner Bros. owned until 1928 - in future films. By May 1928, Electrical Research Product Incorporated (ERPI), a subsidiary of the Western Electric company, gained a monopoly over film sound distribution [3]. A side effect of the "talkies" was that many actors who had made their careers in silent films suddenly found themselves out of work, as they often had bad voices or could not remember their lines. Meanwhile, in 1922, US politician Will H. Hays left politics and formed the movie studio boss organization known as the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of America (MPDAA) [4]. The organization became the Motion Picture Association of America after Hays retired in 1945.



In the early times of talkies, American studios found that their sound productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and even among speakers of other dialects of English. The synchronization technology was still too primitive for dubbing. One of the solutions was creating parallel foreign-language versions of Hollywood films. Around 1930, the American companies opened a studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights and winners of photogenia contests were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of the English-language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language. The Spanish-language crews included people like Luis Buñuel, Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Xavier Cugat and Edgar Neville. The productions were not very successful in their intended markets, due to the following reasons:



The lower budgets were apparent.

Many theater actors had no previous experience in cinema.

The original movies were often second-rate themselves, since studios expected that the top productions would sell by themselves.

The mix of foreign accents (Castilian, Mexican, and Chilean for example in the Spanish case) was odd for the audiences.

Some markets lacked sound-equipped theaters.