I guess I have a thing for movies with plots based on fantasy or magic. It never hurts to add some action scenes and a princess or two, either.

That’s a round-about way of saying I watched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in the theater today.

Movies based on video games gener­ally tend to miss expec­ta­tions, but happily, I have never played the video game that this movie is based on. If you haven’t either, then here’s the gist: a magic dagger turns back time and uses some magic sand to fuel its time-circuits (okay, I was just kidding about the time-circuits). You can figure out the rest.

Here’s the impor­tant thing to note about movies that involve time-travel: no matter what happens, you can’t take it at face value because sooner or later some bloke will come along and undo all of it. And when the only thing stopping you is some lame threat involving sand-storms across the world, no one really gives a second thought to changing time as they please. Now if someone had said the entire space-time fabric would come unrav­elled causing the Universe to implode, that would have made them sit up and pay attention…

In case you were wondering, the hero’s uncle — the King’s brother — is the bad guy. And in case you don’t want to read the spoilers, skip the previous sentence. With that out of the way, here are the top four reasons why he’s the bad guy:

1. He is the prince’s uncle. Uncles seldom end up on the good side.
2. The prince claims that he is the only one he can trust. Er…yeah, right.
3. He has a pointy beard.
4. He has a name like “Nizam”.

Moving on, there’s the question of how long the movie really lasted, after all of the time-travel, I mean. Here’s what happens: the Persian army camps outside the city, attacks at dawn, after which the prince accuses the uncle of treachery. In a bizarre reaction, the uncle gives himself away by attacking the prince (why?) and gets himself killed in the resulting scuffle. The prince gets the girl. The end.

Finally, the action sequences seemed a little far-fetched, but enter­taining. Now if you weren’t satis­fied with this movie, there’s always the sequel. Any movie that has a colon in it and sounds like “X: blah blah” has a sequel coming in the near future.

With a little luck, I managed to get hold of tickets for a prelim­i­nary screening of Bolt, the movie about a dog who sincerely believes that his make-believe Holly­wood life is real. It takes a while for him to learn that he doesn’t really have super-powers, but don’t worry, life’s not too dull even after he catches on.

Inter­est­ingly, the movie is completely in 3D, which means the audience needs to wear those special goggles that make things stand out (notice the pun?) The effects are pretty impres­sive, I must say.

Bolt rates high on the cute-o-meter, just as you would expect of a movie with a dog, a cat and a hamster in it. Add to that a little girl (voiced by Miley Cyrus) who loves her dog very much indeed, and you have the perfect recipe for a lovable Thursday-night-movie.

Today, I watched Chak De! India, the movie, thanks to the efforts of the Cornell India Associ­a­tion. In brief, this is the story of the captain of the Indian hockey team who is forced to give up the game due to certain baseless allega­tions, but returns seven years later to coach the women’s national hockey team and lead them to victory in the World Cup.

My opinion about the movie: definitely worth watching. The script and direc­tion combine a passion for the game with light touches of comedy and drama to conjure up a couple of hours of sheer excite­ment. There are also elements pointing to the personal lives of some of the charac­ters, adding a measure of reality to the story.

Dreams are, perhaps, the best form of enter­tain­ment. The brain comes up with a story and narrates it to you, and in most cases, you can actually partic­i­pate as a key character in the story. The plot is never boring — the brain would change the plot if it were. Pray, where else could you get access to a three-dimensional movie of this kind?

I had a dream last night. Perhaps it had something to do with my recent purchase of a laptop, because this was precisely what I was doing in my dream. Not an actual purchase, but I had a large box with the notebook in it, and I was lugging it around, presum­ably to get it home.

The twist was that in my forget­ful­ness, I kept leaving it behind at different locations — a class­room, on the road and so on — and each time, I walked back anxiously looking for it. When I left it behind somewhere on the road and then went back to hunt for it, it was returned to me by a passerby — but now the laptop was no longer packaged, and my name was printed (not written, printed) on it.

The good news is that I did get it “home” finally, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a house in real life.