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Kalki 2898 AD blends Star Wars with Hindu myth, plus a dash of RRR

Posted on June 29, 2024 by faz_business

Actor Amitabh Bachchan is a metaphorical giant of Indian cinema, a superstar of proportions that dwarf even A-list American celebrities. In the Indian sci-fi epic Kalki 2898 AD, his stature becomes literal: In his role as the 7-foot-tall immortal warrior Ashwatthama, the 81-year-old towers over his younger co-stars, all of whom are draws in their own right. (A handy way for the uninitiated to measure the relative fame of an Indian actor is to note the length of their introduction in a movie — the bigger the name, the more elaborate the entrance.) The sheer amount of star power in this film is overwhelming, but that isn’t even the most ambitious thing about it.

Writer-director Nag Ashwin means for Kalki 2898 AD to be nothing less than the ultimate sci-fi epic. Its scope is huge, covering 6,000 years of mythological history. Its run time is long, telling the first part of a two-part story over three jam-packed hours. (To be fair, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies aren’t much shorter.) And its production was expensive — reportedly around $72 million, one of the biggest budgets ever for an Indian movie. The filmmakers hope it will be a crossover event akin to S.S. Rajamouli’s record-breaking hit RRR, not only within India’s disparate film industries (Bachchan is known as a Bollywood actor, while co-stars Prabhas and Kamal Haasan work in Telugu and Tamil films, respectively) but internationally as well.

The film’s look, rendered almost entirely through CGI, will certainly feel familiar to Western audiences, with elements that recall the beloved sci-fi franchises Blade Runner, Star Wars, The Matrix, Dune, and especially Mad Max: Fury Road. The story is more specifically Indian, taking the Hindu myth of Kalki — the 10th and final incarnation of the god Vishnu, who will come to lead humanity into a new era of peace and justice — and transporting it to a dystopian sci-fi setting. But while references to magical weapons and folkloric heroes may go over the heads of all but the best-informed foreign viewers, the story’s arc follows the familiar beats of a Chosen One narrative.

A promo image for the Indian sci-fi blockbuster Kalki 2989 AD composites a young man and woman facing away from each other, with an older, white-bearded man in robes and holding a staff superimposed over both of them. In the background behind the man is a desert wasteland full of shattered, rusty wreckage. In the background behind the woman is a verdant mountain and lake, dotted with buildings.

This first chapter of the Kalki 2898 AD saga spends much of its run time setting up its characters and world, beginning with a caravan of refugees arriving in the futuristic city of Kasi, the last outpost of civilization after droughts and pollution have rendered most of the planet uninhabitable. Life is cheap in Kasi, where a single chicken egg fetches the same price as a human being on the black market. The one exception is fertile women, who have become extremely valuable in this dystopian future world: Whenever one is discovered, she’s sold and shipped off to the Complex, a floating pyramid above the city, where a wealthy minority hoard the few natural resources that are left.

SUM-80 (Deepika Padukone) is one of these women, and one of hundreds who live as lab rats at the pleasure of Supreme Yaskin (Haasan), a 200-year-old tyrant who extends his life by extracting a serum from the wombs of impregnated female captives. The women die in the process, but no matter; their corpses are thrown into an incinerator, and new girls take their place. SUM-80, understandably, wants to live, so she’s hiding her pregnancy from everyone around her. But it’s been five months, and the sadistic doctors who run this so-called Project K will notice soon.

Things are grim in a different way outside of the Complex, though affable bounty hunter Bhairava (Prabhas) does his best to keep the mood light. Indian films typically blend genres, and although Kalki 2898 AD is more serious-minded than most Bollywood fare — there are no true musical numbers, sadly, though characters do lip-sync to Santhosh Narayanan’s original songs — Bhairava and his wisecracking AI companion Bujji (Keerthy Suresh) bring much-needed, Star Wars-esque comedic banter to the film. Bhairava is a Han Solo type, motivated by self-interest and the pursuit of cash, or “units.” Like Han, he’s also a ladykiller, as we learn when the similarly roguish Roxie (Disha Patani) enters the narrative.

In a promo image for the Indian sci-fi blockbuster Kalki 2989 AD, a man in black clothing and a long black cape stands in a dark, V-shaped object that looks like a single-person spaceship with a crimson-lined interior and closing crimson highlights. Behind him in the darkness, a group of similar-looking ships glow against dark mountains.

At first, it isn’t clear how SUM-80, Bhairava, and 6,000-year-old badass Ashwatthama, who spends much of the movie hiding out in a cave, are connected. It’s never in doubt that they’ll meet up eventually, though, or that each of them will play their role in fulfilling the prophecy preached by a rebel group living in a hidden utopia known as Shambhala. Eventually, the action moves to the rebels’ sacred retreat. But first, SUM-80 must race across the wastelands, pursued by both Supreme Yaskin’s flunkies and Bhairava, who plans to exchange this precious hostage for admission to the Complex.

Some of the digital backgrounds VFX supervisor Praveen Kilaru and his team created for Kalki 2898 AD are absolutely stunning, and sci-fi fans who like nerding out on cool ships and badass vehicles will find a lot to get into here. (The design for Bujji, who can transform from a cool car to a cooler battle robot, is especially compelling.)

But the fact that this is just the first part of a two-part story creates some serious structural issues. The first two hours of the film pass at a lively but unhurried clip, but the final hour tries to cram too much into an already overstimulating epic battle scene. It feels panicky and confused as it rushes through crucial plot developments and exposition.

in a promo still for the Indian sci-fi blockbuster Kalki 2898 AD, a humanoid figure in metal armor and mask sits in a dark space, surrounded by metal spars

Comparisons between Kalki and RRR are inevitable, if only because the former is nakedly trying to replicate the success of the latter. But Nag Ashwin’s film is missing a few of the elements that made RRR so charming: There’s no central bromance, no exhilarating dance sequences, and no sense of surprise. There is comedy, but it’s isolated in certain sections of the film, and there’s much less romance and music than audiences might expect. It’s still an entertaining ride, with some cool imagery and exciting chase scenes. But by channeling the gravitas of Western sci-fi movies, Kalki 2898 AD loses some of the range that makes Indian movies special. Its ambition is to be applauded. Its self-seriousness, not so much.

Kalki 2898 AD is in theaters worldwide now.

Tropf-Blumat Watering System Review: Key to My Gardening Success

Posted on June 25, 2024 by faz_business

A couple summers ago, I started to have a plant problem on my roof deck. Specifically, I had no reliable way to water my herb garden for an extended period of time. Yes, I could ask my neighbors to do it once in a while, but I’m gone a lot and didn’t want to blow all of my goodwill credit in one place.

My setup posed problems, too. It’s a garden in pots, troughs, and planters—known as a container garden—that follows the periphery of my 10- by 17-foot deck. A sprinkler on a timer wouldn’t work, because I didn’t want to soak my entire deck and waste water, and watering spikes or globes wouldn’t last long enough. Plus, I had a variety of sizes of pots and planters, ranging from four 20-liter galvanized tubs to a pair of 100-gallon troughs, along with a 1-cubic-foot ceramic pot that isolates my mint, and a mini trough for my sage.

Altogether, it’s a nice little setup, but everything has different watering needs. Talking to people in garden centers confirmed there weren’t many options for the kind of automated watering I wanted to do.

Drip Drop

Ludicrous amounts of research later, I zeroed in on a solution. An Austrian company named Blumat has a system that uses a spike-shaped sensor (called a “carrot,” more colloquially) that has a ceramic cone under a sealed water chamber. The whole thing is capped with a diaphragm that’s connected to a tiny valve at the very top, making it like an autonomous, fancy, sealed, freestanding valve that controls flow through a 3-millimeter drip tube. When the soil around the cone becomes dry, osmosis through the ceramic pulls down a diaphragm at the top, gradually opening the valve and allowing water to flow through the tube. When the soil is moist, the diaphragm rises and the valve closes.

There are lots of specialized Blumat kits and parts, and figuring out exactly what I needed was daunting, so I called Sustainable Village, a Blumat dealer in Colorado, for help. It’s possible to wing it, but you will likely benefit from doing the same.

This meant I needed several different parts of what they call the Tropf-Blumat system (“tropf” is German for “drip”), including the sensors; stuff called “drip tape,” which is like a soaker hose; and little strings of “drippers” that connect to the sensor and distribute water around medium-size pots. There was also a “flow reducer” that connects to the spigot and regulates the pressure, a pencil-thick rubber feeder tube, and a roll of 3-millimeter drip tubing that connected the feeder line to the sensor in each pot.

The Blumat site recommends the Tropf setup for “plants on balconies, patios, in greenhouses, and raised beds.” The representative guided me toward a pair of kits and a couple of individual items.

Two boxes and accessories for a plant watering system including tubing and valves

Some Assembly Required

When everything arrived, there were enough bits and bobs that it reminded me of an adult Lego set, complicated enough that I cleared the table and chairs out of my dining room, made cardboard cutouts of my pots and troughs, and laid out all of my new material. This was extra work, but it allowed me to get organized, since every installation is essentially custom. My 20-liter tubs and sage trough would each have one sensor to control the flow to a string of drippers to distribute water evenly. The hundred-gallon troughs each got an extra-large sensor that controlled flow to the drip tape that zigzagged across the surface of the soil.

After a couple of hours setting up, I turned on the spigot and held my breath. Some of the drippers began dripping very slowly, and some did not. Nothing visible happened in the big troughs for a while, as it took some time for the drip tape to start sweating out drops of water. Soon it became clear that by having one sensor per container, the flow to each could be customized. A plant that was particularly thirsty or sun-drenched got more water, while a slow-sippin’ succulent in the shade got less. Over the next few days, I checked the soil in each pot and used the valve on top of each sensor to adjust the flow.

Olive Union Olive Max Hearing Aids: For Mild Hearing Loss

Posted on April 21, 2024 by faz_business

You don’t have to be nearly deaf to use a hearing aid. Many doctors urge patients to get started with the devices early, before hearing loss becomes critical. Olive Union’s Olive Max is the first hearing aid I’ve encountered designed for this specific purpose, built for users with “mild to moderate” hearing loss, which the company defines as 26 to 55 decibels of loss. That’s right in line with my diagnosis, so I figured I’d be a perfect candidate for these new devices.

Out of the box, you’re likely to say what I—and everyone I’ve been around—immediately said when I first laid eyes on the Olive Max: They sure are big. Like, really big. Each looks like a Bluetooth headset from the early 2000s, except you have to wear two. At least the units, in a two-tone white and gray design, look sporty, including a wrap-around ear hook that helps keep them in place. They also carry an IPX7 water-resistance rating. But at more than 12 grams each, they’re a solid four or five times the weight of a typical over-the-counter hearing aid. A total of eight different ear tips, in three different styles, are included in the kit to ensure you get a good fit.

Two white and black overtheear hearing aids floating side by side

As hearing aids, the Olive Max units work roughly as advertised, and casual users can pop them out of the box and into their ears to get started with minimal fuss, though getting them hooked over your ear properly can be tricky, especially if you wear glasses. Controls on the back of each aid handle volume (independently for each ear) and let you select one of four environmental modes (TV, Meeting Room, Outdoor, or Restaurant). You can also use the buttons to toggle “Hear-Thru mode,” which lets you turn off environmental audio processing altogether if you simply want to use the Olive Max as Bluetooth earbuds.

You can fine-tune your listening experience in the My Olive app—though, bizarrely, the hearing aid manual does not mention that an app exists, or even that you can use the hearing aids as Bluetooth earbuds. (You want the My Olive app (Android, iOS), not the incompatible Olive Smart Ear app.) The app allows you to make the same adjustments as the physical controls, but it also offers a noise-reduction and feedback-cancellation feature (pro tip: max out both of these), and it includes a more detailed graphic equalizer that lets you fine-tune frequency response further.

You can’t test your hearing directly within the app, although a short questionnaire will hook you up with various “AI-recommended presets” based on your age and a few other basic inputs. If you want anything more refined, you’ll need to delve into the equalizer by hand, but this is mostly a trial-and-error situation. It’s also worth noting that the My Olive app includes an audio therapy system designed to help people with tinnitus. I don’t suffer from tinnitus so I wasn’t qualified to test this feature.

2 overtheear hearing aids floating beside a mobile device with a screen showing adjustment settings for the hearing aids