Divisional Round Picks

If you have to rank top 8 teams ignoring the division, ranking would be some what as follows:

Seahawks
Broncos
49ers
Patriots
Panthers
Saints
Chargers
Colts

According to this, we should see Seahawks vs Broncos in the Super Bowl, but then funny things have happened in the past and favorites have not always won or make it to the super bowl. Irrespective of that, Patriots and Broncos are comparatively safer picks to go through their matches this weekend. If there is a remote chance of a upset that would be Colts, considering the momentum that they are carrying from last game. Chargers are lucky to be in playoff and Broncos should be an easy pick out of all 4 games.

NFC is tough to pick. Although, they say Seahawks is the best team in the league and they are playing at home, which is the best place for them to play Football, Saints are perfectly capable of causing an upset. Saints have very good offense, which means, they will always be in the game going into the fourth quarter, now, how much lead is enough? As long as Saints keep the game close enough with 2 possession to win, they got a chance, a very remote chance but still a chance.

Game of the Week is going to be 49ers vs Panthers. 49ers have amazing defense and Panthers got very good offense. It will be decided in the fourth quarter with few up and downs. Considering 49ers had experience of reaching to the super bowl last year with same team strength, they might be just able to pull this off on the road.

So, Final Four will be: Seahawks, Broncos, 49ers and Patriots as predicted by the betting websites.

Rate Movies Here

2013 was a very remarkable year, particularly for www.ratemovieshere.com; It has grown from having 50 visitors a day on Jan 1st 2013 to 750+ visitors a day on December 31st, 2013. It was ranked somewhere around 3 Million in global rank of all websites across the world and based on Alexa Ranking, it is now ranked 68,792. As far as its rank is concerned in India, it is ranked in Top 25,000 websites. Based on calculation from www.worthofweb.com; www.ratemovieshere.com is worth $83,078. Based on StatsCrop.com; (http://www.statscrop.com/www/ratemovieshere.com), it has got 3.5 stars out of 5. Ratemovieshere's official facebook page has over 65,000 Likes, with tweets of over 2700 on twitter page and over 485 Google Plus fans.

These were the outside numbers; we have grown in terms of content, look and feel, speed etc within website. Quick statistics guideline on home page gives a break up of over 1500 Bollywood movie reviewed and total user ratings of 329,788. We have close to 1000 registered users. We had 263,000 unique visitors visited our home page in the year of 2013.

We have database of over 2,500 Bollywood movies and over 1400 Hollywood movies with details of each and every cast members including Directors, Producers listed on the movie page. Our writers present their views on daily news, gossips, blogs, articles, reviews, box office collections etc every day. Our website administrators keep the website up to date with new videos of songs, trailers, interviews etc. We have arranged WebPages for better viewing of upcoming movies with their trailers and top ranking based on each year, decade and all time. We have now collection of hot and sizzling wallpapers of over 500 celebrities across bollywood and hollywood. Our news calendar updates with each and every movie release on Fridays and Birthday events of celebrities. Our newsletter helps users to get up to date information on every day's news in their email. What's more? We also have launched a wizard to rate movies quickly and meaningfully via Rate Movies wizard, where movies get displayed to users based on their top ranking.

All these achievements could not have been done without the help of our great ratemovieshere.com team members. I would like to thank our movie reviewers: Ashish Gupta, Sheetal Sharma, Nupur Barua, Deepti Kanojia, Shiraj Dakshay, Sheetal Taneja, Abhishek Bhardwaj, Namta Gupta, Mohammed Farooq, Dinesh Prakash and Aditya Tibrewala. I would also like to thank our website administrators without whom, it might be impossible to keep website and our social networking pages up to date starting with Suneesh, Pranab Kalita, Tushar Kavitkar, Subeer Dubey, Kamal Khera, Shweta Gahlyan, Kanika Mehdiratta. Updating website with news and daily views is a tough job and our writers are doing thankless job of updating website every day with new contents starting with Sidharth Banerjee, Baljinder Kaur, Gautam Batra, Nidhi Misra, Ruchi Singh, Amey Dandawate, Ankit Kandoi, Priya Shankar, Sonakshi Khandelwal and others.

Last but not the least, our back bone of website, Ratheesh, who has single handedly developed this website into a major entertainment portal.

I sincerely, thank all my friends and family members, who have been constantly advising me and supporting me to make ratemovieshere.com, better every day. 2014 promises to be a bigger and better. We are going to kick off a new section of Box Office update, followed by new Award Page somewhere in January. First quarter will show remarkable improvement in our newsletters, speed of the website, Android Application, Celebrity Pages and so on. There are more features to be developed and released over the year of 2014. We will have more focus on improving the content of the website as well as marketing of the website to reach out to more and more people.

Apart from ratemovieshere.com; we are also planning to upgrade our cricket based blogging page of www.drivecricket.com and launch 21 card rummy game application on Facebook and on www.playrummyhere.com

Thank you all and Have a great happy new year, 2014.

BJP Triumphant, AAP Dazzling and Congress Omitted

Assembly elections prior to the Loksabha elections are always important. It gives a trailer of how general elections are going to look like. It does not just show the picture of those states but also gives an overview of the mood country is in. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Delhi gave a clear mandate that they prefer Bhartiya Janata Party over Congress (I).  70% seats are won by BJP and congress got only 20% seats. This is a clear victory by BJP. BJP is going to form a govt in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh with clear majority. 

Delhi’s result showed an excellent debut by AAP (Aam Aadmi Party). A party which is just few months old, took on two national parties and came out with more than 30% of votes and is second largest party.  Many ridicule them by saying, “char aadmi ki party”, but people have voted them with hips and bounce. This is a historical moment, not only in Indian Politics but also in World’s Politics. It showed that there is nothing impossible and people can bring the change if they want it. 

Congress though has clearly lost in all states. However positive point for congress is that they have lost only few % of overall votes. Although results are showing major decline, if percentage of votes are considered, congress still got huge amount of votes. Swing in all states is somewhere around 2 to 3%. Chattisgarh, they lost few seats with a margin of less than 5% of votes. So there is a still hope for congress to do better if they listen to the people’s voice. One of the major mistake that Congress did was not announcing their chief minister candidature in Madhya Pradesh. Sonia Gandhi have realized that mistake and indicated that for general election, they must declare their Prime Minister candidate.

BJP must have found relief for hanging on to Chattisgarh which at one point seemed like going to Congress way due to sympathy vote. BJP must be happy seeing Rajasthan result but now comes a very critical stage, where they must not make any mistake in 3-4 months in Rajasthan. They desparately need 20+ seats from Rajasthan as they do not have much presence in Southern part of India. Also, BJP must realize that how Vasundara Raje and Narenra Modi campaiging in Rajasthan has worked. They must bring back Yedurappa if they want major votes in Karnataka. Couple of days back, Namo met Udhav Thackrey to make sure, all is well in Maharashtra for BJP-Shiv Sena alliance. NAMO’s focus for next few months will be around Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and hence he needs to quickly wrap up Maharashtra-Karanataka with U.Thackrey and Yedurappa. 

Madhya Pradesh’s result were expected for BJP due to excellence governance by chief minister Shivraj Chauhan. Also the fact that Uma Bharati joined back BJP in Madhya Pradesh, assured increase of 20-30 seats. Victory in MP also means that if NAMO card back fires from BJP in 2014 general elections than BJP already have the second string ready for 2019. Shivraj Chauhan has shown great capability to be a national leader and he will be the big name to recon with in coming years.

Delhi is going to be the hot spot for few days. Since BJP needs only 4 seats to form the govt some sort of horse trading will take place. Although Dr.Harshwardan (BJP’s chief minister candidate) has indicated that BJP would not like to do such things and are happy to sit in opposition, but general logic says, there will be few attempts. AAP has already indicated that there are folks from BJP calling for it but it will interesting to see what actually happens in few days. Both BJP and AAP’s credibility will go down if such things do happen and both parties will be aware of it. If re-elections takes place, both BJP and AAP will have an advantage and voters will consider either of them more compare to Congress or other candidates. 

Questions though remain on how AAP will be able to handle many scenarios in politics. Do they have experience to handle capital city’s problems from all corners? Can they successfully deliver major events such as Commonwealth? Considering their in-experience will they be able to remain united for 5 long years? It is one thing to get the votes and it is another thing to actually run the government. Yes, it is a brilliant start from them, but can they hang on and actually deliver what they promise? There are question marks for them, but at this moment, they must celebrate because this has changed the Politics of India and probably World.

Crazy College Football Rivalry

Rivalry between Alabama Crimson Tide and Auburn Tigers is as good as New York Yankees vs Boston Red Sox in college football. They play each year in Iron Ball and games are generally very competitive.  In 2012 game between Auburn and Alabama, score was 49-0 in favor of Alabama. Alabama shut down auburn tigers completely in front of 100,000 fans. Alabama was 13-1 in 2012 season and 7 wins and only 1 loss in SEC (conference) compare to Auburn which was 0-8. (0 wins in 8 conference games in 2012).

Now comes 2013. Alabama has gone to BCS Conference games two consecutive times and are ranked number 1 team in pre-season. Alabama maintained their number 1 position throughout the season. Alabama did not lost a single game and just 1 second before the season ends, they were scheduled to play in BCS Final. Auburn on the other hand, with 0-8 in previous season was not ranked team till 7^th Week of 2013. Week 7, they were ranked 24, Week 8 they were ranked number 11, and then week after week they kept improving by winning every game.  Before going to Alabama’s game, they were ranked number 4 and after that last crazy second, they are now favorite to be at number 2 positions and if they beat Missouri in next week’s game, will play in BCS Finals. What a turn around!!! 

Truly, from Zero to Hero and as their coach describe, it is a team of Destiny!!! Entire game against Alabama was a roller coaster ride. 7-7, 14-7, 14-14, 21-21 and then finally 28-28 just before the 1 second left on the game clock. Alabama was fighting to get that 1 second, which was a dramatic moment of the game. Very little Alabama knew that one second will ruin their chance to be it in the BCS Finals and probably winning it. Destiny had written a different fate for Auburn and as radio broadcaster described it, it was a  Holy Cow moment. 

Auburn-Alabama was not the only game which went to the wire this week though. Oregon vs Oregon State, another rivalry game ended very similarly with score line as 35-36 in favor of Oregon. Duke also won with a last minute field goal 27-25 against North Carolina.  Baylor vs TCU was also decided with a difference of one field goal (41-38) and another big rivalry, Michigan vs Ohio State Buck Eyes ended with a 1 point difference. There were too many good games and what a way to end College Football regular season game week!!!

India Australia 2nd Test Preview

Australia needs few thinking to do and perhaps use some of its bench after 1^st Test. Australia must fancy their chances at Mohali to win the test match. Bounce at Mohali is going to be good for not only Pace Bowlers of Australia but also their batsman, who like ball to come on to their bat at decent height. However before Mohali comes Hyderabad. 

Although Australia would love to go to Mohali with series level at 1-1, but winning a test match at Deccan is going to be impossible dream. However, Australia must look to bat better and hope for at least a draw, so series remains still alive when they reach Mohali. 

Australia must make few changes in order to survive or do better at Hyderabad. Even if they do not change playing XI, surely, they must consider having Michael Clarke bat at number 4 and Moises Henriques to bat at number 5. Both of these batsmen looked in supreme form and have the technique to survive against Spin Bowling and score big runs.  

Out of top 3 left handed batsman, Only Cowan looked in control. It would be difficult to drop Warner after he scored a half century in first inning. P.Hughes after failing and looking totally lost must make a way to someone else. Ideally, Khwaja looks technically sound to replace Hughes and can bat at number 6, but considering Smith can bowl little leg spin and his experience of playing in IPL and knowing conditions better, might not be a bad option.

Starc looked little lost and may be Mitchell Johnson might be better choice, considering he can bat as well, down the order. If the pitch is offering a turn like Chennai, then Australia might consider having Doherty in the side as well. 

Preferred Australian Eleven: Cohan, Warner, Watson, Clarke, Khwaja, Henriques, Wade, Doherty, Siddle, Pattinson, Lyon. 

Australia lost the test match by just one session. If Australia could have played in either of their inning for one more session, Test Match might have gone draw. So, after making one replacement to out of form Hughes, may allow the new batsman to play for minimum of 2 hours in 2 innings and that could help them at least draw the game if not win it. Australia must aim to score 800 runs in a Test Match combining both the innings, ideally, 450+ in First Inning. 

India on the other hand, depending upon pitch may consider getting Ojha back in the squad. If the Pitch offered is same as Chennai then B.Kumar will be of very minimum use and hence Ojha might be better choice. Considering R.Jadeja got few wickets in the game, he is probably going to be still preferred over A.Rahane. As far as Opening the batting is concerned, M.Vijay’s spot at the top of the order must be under Radar. 

Preferred Indian Eleven: V.Sehwag, A.Rahane, C.Pujara, S.Tendulkar, V.Kohli, M S Dhoni, R.Jadeja, R.Ashwin, H.Singh, P.Ojha, I.Sharma.

Oscar 2013

Seth MacFarlane made Tommy Lee Jones laugh, but rest of them cry.
It was a long musical (read boring) show. Daniel Day Lewis Speech was simply awesome.
Jennifer Lawrence was looking hot. Anne Hathaway looked miserable.
Oscar will make it into top news when Maryl Streep or George Clooney does not attend the ceremony.
Tarantino should do what he does best , that is to make movies, rather than showing up.
Adele was fantastic but James Bond 5 minute presentation was not.
Halle Berry, Charlize Theron and Sandra Bullock need to consult with their make up artists as they were looking 50 year old.

Here are some of the funny quotes from Seth MacFarlane:

1. The quest for Tommy Lee Jones laugh begins now.
2. As we all know, winning an Oscar guarantees a long successful career in the industry. Look at last year: Jean Dujardin won Best Actor for "The Artist," and now, he's everywhere. I am kidding everyone. His is actually a tragic, age-old Hollywood story. He couldn't make it in the talkies.

3. [On Roman Coppola's "Moonrise Kingdom" nomination]. He is the sixth member of the Coppola family to receive a nomination. That's got to be a fun house to grow up in. "Mom, I got an A in Spanish." "Really? Literally everyone you're related to has an Oscar."
 "Nutty Professor" movies.
& The Oscar Goes To:

Best Picture : Argo (Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, George Clooney)

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln

Best Director: Ang Lee for Life of Pi

Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook

Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained

Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway for Les Misérables

Best Original Screenplay: Django Unchained: Quentin Tarantino

Best Foreign Language Film: Amour (Austria)

Best Short Film, Animated: Paperman: John Kahrs

Best Achievement in Cinematography: Life of Pi: Claudio Miranda

Best Animated Feature Film: Brave: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

Best Adapted Screenplay: Argo: Chris Terrio

Best Original Song: Skyfall: Adele, Paul Epworth ("Skyfall")

Best Short Film, Live Action: Curfew: Shawn Christensen

Best Achievement in Visual Effects: Life of Pi: Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik De Boer, Donald Elliott

Second winner in Best Achievement in Sound Editing goes to Skyfall: Per Hallberg, Karen M. Baker

Best Achievement in Costume Design: Anna Karenina: Jacqueline Durran

First winner for Sound Editing is Zero Dark Thirty: Paul N.J. Ottosson

Best Achievement in Production Design: Lincoln: Rick Carter, Jim Erickson

Best Original Score: Life of Pi : Mychael Danna

Best Achievement in Editing: Argo: William Goldenberg

Best Achievement in Sound Mixing: Les Misérables: Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson, Simon Hayes

Best Documentary, Feature: Searching for Sugar Man: Malik Bendjelloul, Simon Chinn

Best Documentary, Short Subject: Inocente: Sean Fine, Andrea Nix

Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling: Les Misérables: Lisa Westcott, Julie Dartnell