Bookmyweekend for a booked weekend

Finally, my backlog of movies is coming to an end. Watched Age of Ultron and Boyhood over the weekend. Both were amazing yet widely contrasting movies. And most importantly I watched a Metallica show live, a big check off my ever changing bucket list. To share my thoughts on those movies and to give a final conclusion to the build-up for the Metallica show I guess I will devote separate posts for them later. For this post, however, I am going to share my experiences on a new online ticketing platform that I used this time, "bookevents.com".

What separates it from those other popular platforms is that its got this awesome, super convenient feature called "Bookmyweekend". What it really does is that it allows you add movie bookings and other events to a weekend selection list, kind of like adding items to a cart on an e-commerce site. So when you are selecting seats for a movie, instead of clicking on "Proceed To Checkout", click on "Add to Weekend". And to access your selections just click on "Bookmyweekend" link on the top bar.

As simple a layout as it looks, it makes the job that much easier when you want to undo some bookings or undo that last booking, or keep doing it until everyone is in loop and agreeable for the dates(as is always the case :-))
An even bigger kick-ass feature was the coupons we got for Dominos and Gyani's. I seriously recommend this site and especially this feature if you are one who wants to book a couple of events for the weekend and don't want to go through the checkout process for each individual event. 

My Movie Compilation Video

It’s the end of the first month of the two month winter break or the two month internship and I have almost completed watching the movies under the “Movies I should have seen by now” category, last being The Motorcycle Diaries. As usual with these 2 month breaks I tend to dawdle away the first month in movies and sitcoms and I have pretty much carried forward the tradition with my lassitude at an all-time high. While maintaining the status quo, I decided to complete the compilation video I started during the end sems. With my intended below par performance in CAT and FMS, courtesy RBS placement, the end sems seemed to lack the requisite drive to score marks. And during that time I just happened to download the Windows Live package, which consisted of the Windows Movie Makers software. Much similar and better software were available on the net but my indolence let me to endure the Movie Maker. During the end sems everything seeming insipid before is enjoyable and fun and in this case the fun part was inherent throughout.

Making a compilation of anything, be it music or movies, is a very subtle art. You can add tracks or movie scenes which seem awesome at the moment, but you might end up regretting why the hell they were even included in the first place. Coming back to my video, the music unequivocally is the sine qua non of any compilation video and I just couldn’t find any one song relevant to each of the eclectic movies I find memorable and worthy enough to be included in my compilation. There were songs relating to the anomic state of Rober De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver or the gallivanting jaunts in Into The Wild, but with me getting otiose time and again and the necessity of me passing the end sems,

I eventually settled for a song ‘Platform Moon’ from an unknown band Jupiter One. I heard it the first time in Fifa 2009 game from EA sports, and it just connected with some of the movies with tinges of trance effect, and the part just after 4 minutes had me contemplating the placing of various movie scenes and that’s when I realized how awesome this was going to be. Although it did become an enjoyable red herring from Compilers but it did tend to be cumbersome at times, mainly because of the lyrics in the song, making me ponder over why I didn’t chose a song with no lyrics. Finally when I managed to connect all the lyrics, it felt incomplete. With me getting capricious and insouciant, dithering over deleting the entire project I decided to explore more movies ensuing with the final completed version.

The final result is what a maladroit person like can create or collate in this case. I did miss out the glowering Kubrick gaze but there are loads of similar panaches from different directors and in the end it’s just a personal choice. And I had to include LOST too. There are glitches in editing at points (it sounds great when you say stuff like that) but it was satisfactory to me. The provenance of my movie craze dates back to December 2007 when broadband was installed at my home and in came torrents and IMDB. The biased views on IMDB, nevertheless, it offers a very easy to use interface with a fairly good managed recommendation section. It all contributed to making movies a passion for me and I was mesmerized by the lugubrious miasma of the city presented in Collateral, the surreal effect of Lost in Translation, the stygian circumstances and the subsequent escape in Shawshank Redemption, the trenchant outlook of disgruntled people in Fight Club, the disdainful demeanor in American History X, the circuitous presentations in most of Christopher Nolan’s movies including the enthralling oneirc world of Inception, the elegiac fecundity of 21 grams, the incessant shocking sequences from Requiem for a Dream, the heart rending and action packed Saving Private Ryan, so on….and of course the Dark Night and the Matrix Trilogy(their names are enough).