Watching Instantly

By Vijay Kumar

September 23, 2010

Hmmm, I wonder if we should buy a PC.

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Astro Boy

My first impression with Astro Boy was that it could have been quite effective in a live action setup. After The Last Airbender debacle, I feel that it had better chance of becoming a mangled manga, Adapting famous cartoons or other literary works requires a peculiar blend of vision and loyalty. One cannot go entirely by the letter of the original. The first installment of Harry Potter (The Chamber of Secrets), for example, is too faithful and comes across as bland. At the other end of the spectrum is the aforementioned and decried Last Airbender, which lost the essence of a popular animation series.

As a story of origins, Astro Boy is as good as it gets. In my opinion, it is the anime and robotic version (or at least derives major influence) from the tale of Pinocchio, with super powers thrown in to suit growing demands of the global audience. When he loses his beloved son to a demonstration gone wrong, Dr. Tenema (Nicolas Cage) first creates a robot in his son’s image but quickly disowns it. The robot, Astro Boy, with the body and memories of the dead boy, struggles to come to terms with his powers and his emotions. He is bumped out of the hanging paradise of Metro city to the far more barbaric wasteland of robots. There, he finds both friendship and betrayal. As a good robot, he adapts to both, gaining the name Astro Boy in the process. He eventually returns to Metro City to defeat a more powerful enemy and regain his rightful place in his father’s heart.

The voice talents are of the highest order. Cage, Donald Sutherland, Fred Highmore and Kristen Bell find roles for their distinctive voices. It is with the Nathan Lane voiced Ham Egg character that I found immediate correlation between the animated version and the actor.

Astro Boy struggled to a box office revenue total of $20 million against a production budget of $40 million.

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Ended up with…



Whilst checking out the above movies, I invariably end up fattening my instant watch queue with some new additions. These go into my “Ended up with…” list and the plan is to watch them during the week ahead. NetFlix keeps tempting me to move each one of them to the top of the queue but I resist. These are movies that I plan to check out in the days ahead.

Dead Man Walking

It looks like I do not have great regard for personal safety. I have delayed watching Dead Man Walking by a week. I had amused myself with the thought that Sean Penn will get upset over the fact that I am yet to watch one of his movies on Instant Watch. The more I entertained the thought, the more nervous I became.

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

I watched the trailer for The Goods before a screening of The Hangover. I am quite keen to follow the antics of the bunch of comedians who have gotten together to tell this story of a car dealership’s last days.



The previous two weeks have found me in the august company of Mike Myers in The Love Guru and Eddie Murphy in Imagine That. It is to nobody’s surprise (least of all mine) that I’ve added Steve Martin’s The Pink panther 2 to my list.


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