George Pronunciation: 'jorj
"farmer" from Greek georgos "earthworker", which was derived from the elements ge "earth" and ergon "work". Saint George was the legendary slayer of a dragon in Palestine. He is the patron saint of England, Portugal and Catalonia. This name has been borne by six kings of England, two kings of Greece, and the first president of the United States, George Washington. Other famous bearers include authors George Eliot and George Orwell (both pen names; real names Mary Anne Evans and Eric Arthur Blair respectively), composer George Frideric Handel, and Pacific explorer George Vancouver. And me, of course.
{courtesy: BehindTheName}
Is it Kamine or is it Kaminay? Shahid Kapur has reportedly been signed on by Vishal B for this film to play a double role. Priyanka Chopra's been roped in for this "romantic musical," that she describes as "being more of a romantic-comedy [that] also has lots of action." Shooting begins in August 2008. As the days go by, one awaits more tidbits on what might well be Vishal's first film that has nothing to do either with children or the Bard.
{thanks to S for the seed that this post sprouted from}
It all started with Rowdy Alludu. The title stuck in my head from the moment I heard about the film boasting a cast of Chiranjeevi (in a double role!), Shobhana and the late Divya Bharati and the tunes of Bappi Lahiri (oh yeah; he's got his paws in Telugu cinema). I then noticed a pattern -- there were other movies that had these words in their titles; mischief and sons-in-law are apparently a big deal in Tollywood; just as love is in Kollywood -- all those kaadal movies. After the holy union of these two words, we now had some more templates: Rowdy W, X Rowdy, Y Alludu and Alluda Z (the conjugation breaks the symmetry). W has taken values like Jamindar, Inspector and MLA; X has been more lucrative with values like State, Veedhi, Political and Assembly; Y's been a cash cow too with values like Naa, Allari, Chinna, America and Mechanic; Z's got just one hit, apparently with Majaka (a controversial situational comedy featuring a man, his wife, his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law). It's time we shuffled the options and got some interesting titles (W and Y, for example).
The kaadal counterpart is Prema, which yields its own rich pot.
Victory Venkatesh had special preference for titles that beckoned you; his knapsack contained Prematho Raa, Jayam Manade Raa, Kalisundam Raa and Preminchukondam Raa.
For our coda, we must risk offending some of you, dear readers, as well also note a variant of the welcoming title that uses a word that in Telugu means "please come in," but is unfortunately a homophone of a coarse piece of Hindi slang; the English synonym has been exploited for humour both in film and in puns. Such unfortunate coincidences can also make things tricky for this gentleman. It might also be an interesting addition to the options for W.
The US economy is sagging and the price of gasoline has nudged the $4-for-a-gallon mark (and even passed it by in some cases). A rise in the use of public transit (link courtesy: Amogh) is the kind of thing you'd read about. Paramnesia is justified -- when the prices had nudged the $3 mark in an economy that wasn't doing so badly, similar articles had made their way to readers. You have to discount transit-friendly places like New York City and Boston and think of sprawls like Atlanta, where the commute still sucks, where MARTA has failed to be the saviour to consolidate transit initiatives across counties (and CCT continues to have no service on Sundays) and doesn't look like it doesn't want to shake off the "goes from nowhere to nowhere" label. The Atlanta regional transit plan didn't get much of a boost when SR 845failed to find support for funding. The crusaders have moved on. Yet another survey indicates that residents were warm to the idea of the 1 percent tax. But the man who had boarded the train to solicit votes opposed the idea, arguing that a new sales tax would be unwise in a slowing economy and would unfairly burden rural residents who shop in urban areas. In addition, he said it would be a mistake to pump more money into a state Department of Transportation in need of a major overhaul.
Meanwhile, a ranting rider on the train isn't helping MARTA's image at all [uncensored video here].
Of late, a strange phenomenon has been steadily creeping into the Bollysphere and it threatens to define a new genre (or sub-genre, if you will) of Bollywood filmmaking. It's a composite of genres (the multi-starrer, for one) and familiar tropes blended with post-modernism (or post-post-modernism, if you will) -- song and dance routines become self-conscious and auto-referential, emotional sequences get their gravitas from decades of dross, napkin fodder and cheap dense vacuous blather. What we have now is an army of roustabouts (some seasoned, others green) rustling up recrement (some call it a script others call it vapourware) fuelled by an imagination tempered by a stack of foreign DVDs and a creative imagination as dead as the object of a necromaniac's amorous attentions. The recipe, when broken down into the essentials is simple: take a few several stars (with reasonably high guarantees of box office draw, competent to deadly sigh and oomph factors boosted by luscious vital statistics and Bowflex blandishments), convince the gents to gambol in muscular glee, convince one or more of the ladies to experiment with a state of undress that challenges the line between PG and PG-13, elicit the services of one of the many successful plagiarising paladins of song and swing to conjure booty-friendly poetic overtures to familiar objects of attention as well as to a canon of song and dance numbers over the ages and capture all the goings-on on film. What we get as a result of all this, are reels of "entertainment" laced with eye candy (PG-13 only, we are Indians saar) promising more (yeah right! when the GDP hits the ceiling and pigs truly fly) and reels and reels of mind-numbing buffoonery.
Not-so-recent "classics" in this mould include Dhoom (in which Esha Deol stepped out of the gym and into a swimsuit) and its sequel Dhoom 2 (featuring basketball, cricket references, the missing link named Aditya Chopra, Bipasha Basu in a double role -- playing semi-clad lassies in different states of undress to titillate different areas of the male imagination and Aishwarya Rai attempting to go down the road of ephemeral epidermal embellishments while trying to look like a character out of Masters Of The Universe).
A fresh piping hot sample is Abbas-Mustan's Race that features combinatorial coitus, multi-layered betrayal, eye candy (duh!) -- 3 women (all three known for being the cynosure of drooling gents than for making Lee Strasberg proud). Only a patient viewing will reveal more gems therein.
Vijay Krishna Acharya, the pensmith behind the two D-busters described above, made his directorial début with Tashan, a potential candidate for selection, although there is but one lassie and she has gone to great lengths to be able to shimmy into a two-piece and cavort about hoping that no one notices that she could do naught to fix the unyielding horror of her visage. Moreover, there seem to be hints that this film might have been more of a failed attempt at cinemeta-cinema (something that Shaad Ali pulled off well with Jhoom Barabar Jhoom) than at Bollycool. As always, only a screening will offer more insight. Meanwhile, one awaits the next blitz of the muscular and the mammiferous, the strong and the steatomammate, the brawn and the booty. Long live Bollycool.
A recent release marking the directorial début of Raj Kumar Santoshi's assistant Rajaatesh Nayar boasts a title that not only presents an example of the Hindi:English Bollywood movie naming scheme but also offers cud for the cow to chew: Sirf: Life Looks Greener On The Other Side. It's a sad moniker to use, if one values one's work of art; it's perfect, if one's taking a shot at the Bollytrash big time. Honestly ... how many people would take titles like Fun ... Can Be Dangerous Sometimes or Haseena: Smart, Sexy, Dangerous or Chetna: The Excitement?
The Tabloid Of India needs editors and better reporters. Then again, the dulcifluous detritus that the online portal spews out might represent another inevitable stage in the devolution of the once-heralded daily. Case in point: a recent article on the Chinese cyber-war on India. We start with There are three main weapons in use against Indian networks — BOTS, key loggers and mapping of networks. This is all fine and dandy until you stumble at BOTS. What's BOTS? Bovine Occipital Technical Stream? Bellicose Ornamental Triangulation System? Bring On The Shinto? BOTS up Doc? A question of inappropriate punctuation, since the hapless entity is a bot. But it gets worse, dear reader, when the author of this piece decides to define thie BOT:
A BOT is a parasite program embedded in a network, which hijacks the network and makes other computers act according to its wishes, which, in turn, are controlled by "external" forces.
The crime of capitalisation rears its ugly head once again with BOTNETS. This is followed by another claim of motion:
Simply put, the danger is that at the appointed time, these "external" controllers of BOTNETS will command the networks, through the zombies, to move them at will.
Network movement through remote control. A fascinating idea. Victor Frankenstein would be proud; George Romero might find this a lucrative idea for another edition in his Dead canon (unless some Italian filmmaker's already beaten him -- and the author of this TOI piece -- to it).
We pause to contemplate of those little things that don't matter much anymore -- editorial lapses:
Key loggers is software that scans computers and their processes and data the moment you hit a key on the keyboard.
The article continues to betray its origins in cut-up theory by refusing to tell us what MEA stands for (not the Museum of European Art, puTTan, but the Ministry of External Affairs) and indulging in another fling of poetic poop: MEA has a three-layered system of computer and network usage — only the most open communication is sent on something called "e-grams". I have no idea what an e-gram is. Electronic weights? A poor cousin to that late distiller? Only MEA and the author of this piece have the answer. Or maybe I should ask the Chinese.
Ehsaan Noorani, the man responsible for those delicious riffs adorning the best of the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy songs, has been extremely generous to the community; he's been posting responses and chords on Indian Guitar Tabs for a while now. He's also been moderating a forum dedicated to interest in the work of this composer trio. As if all this wasn't enough, he's now got a channel on YouTube. There's only a handful of clips up there, but these include riffs from a couple of the trio's songs (bol na halake halake, rock 'n' roll soNiye) but also a few samples of the man showing off his chops (those in attendance for any of their concerts are probably not too surprised).
the heart was a neighbour but it was the robe after all
A little less than two years ago, I happened to catch a recording of this TV programme from the day that R. D. Burman (aka Pancham) passed away. A point came when Gulzar spoke about his late friend. The feature cut to a rehearsal with Pancham on the harmonium, Asha to his right with a lyrics sheet, and Gulzar to his left. Pancham was guiding Asha along the tune for a couple of lines. I could make out a few fragments (jab bhii aa.Nkhon, aa.Nsuu bhar, log kuchh). A Google search yielded a song from Visaal, the 2001 collaboration between Gulzar and Ghulam Ali, jab bhii aa.Nkho.n me.n. For the Pancham version, the first two lines seemed to have been:
Reuse of lyrics isn't uncommon: Javed Akhtar reused a song (mai.n aur merii aawaaragii) from Duniya (1984) in Sangam, his 1996 collaboration with the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Gulzar himself visited shaam se aa.Nkh me.n) several times (something that deserves a post of its own) including the famous collaboration with Pancham and Asha, Dil Padosi Hai.
Dil Padosi Hai was my first guess as I wondered what album the three might have been working on. Or perhaps (and the eyes of the Pancham fan within widened) it was another collaboration that never came to fruition. An email went out soliciting more insight. The timing was bad and there were no responses.
A year later, another email went out to more perceived fonts of information. The well of luck was dry on arrival.
In February 2008, the video fragment showed up on Youtube and a post went out on the Pancham Yahoo! Group. Hopes were rekindled and this time around luck didn't strike out. Pavan Jha, who owns and maintains the Gulzar portal, managed to dig up more: it turns out that the song was meant for Libaas. This interesting note comes shortly after rumours of that film finally making it out of the cans. Would the Lata-dominated soundtrack (with space for a duet each with Suresh Wadkar and the late music director himself) have featured just this sole Asha song or, perhaps, was the soundtrack destined, at some early stage in the development of the project, to be, as Ijaazat was, another solo Asha vehicle? The wordsmith must know more. One awaits more insight. Meanwhile, it's time to discover the sa.ngiit of the sultan of song yet again. ta ra ta ra ta ra ta ra ...
film festival of india at the high museum in atlanta: the 2008 edition
The lineup for the 2008 edition of the Film Festival Of India at the High Museum in Atlanta is up. Brownie points are due for not featuring Bollytrash. The festival opens with Buddhadeb Dasgupta's latest film Ami, Yasin Ar Amar Madhubala/The Voyeurs; this one, just as his last film Kalpurush (which snagged the National Award for Best Film, and also figured in the High's lineup for 2006) features Sameera Reddy. It can't really compete with the range of the recently concluded Indian Film Festival Of Los Angeles (IFFLA) or even boast entries like Brahmanand Singh's documentary Pancham Unmixed: An Unending Journey (which had its world premiere at IFFLA) or something like Mumbai Cutting, but comparisons would be quite unfair; LA is LA, Atlanta is Atlanta and it'll be a long while before the Sprawl of the South generates as much interest in such a film festival.
On March 18, 2008, Barack Obama spoke at the Constitution Centre in Philadelphia, PA. Three days later, the Abbas-Mustan thriller Race hit the marquee. The connection? Race is on my mind.
The cheiloproclitic serial kisser returns to scorch the screen with his notorious exosculation in Jannat. The plappering recipient of the amorous attentions of the crinigerous cretin is Sonal Chauhan who was reportedly the first Indian winner of the Miss Tourism International title (she claims to have been crowned Miss India in 2005, although the only title she actually snagged was Miss Provogue 8888). The kissee has this to say about the smoocheroo:
He was not forced to kiss me. The scene required it. It was not hot and steamy. I was not comfortable kissing; neither was Emraan. But the scene demanded it.
Meanwhile, the kisser waxes eloquent as he addresses the issue yet again:
You said you were forced to kiss in the film. If you had it your way would Jannat have been 'smooch-free'?
My director got greedy, I think. He wanted something that young couples could identify with. So one thing led to the other and that probably explains the kissing spree in Jannat.
So, yes, in a way, I was forced to kiss.
Are you comfortable with your 'serial kisser' image?
I don't know why it gathers so much news when I kiss. It becomes a topic of national interest. There are so many others kissing onscreen. I don't give it much thought. It's not even there at the back of my mind. I just want to do good, substantial roles. I am not vying for an image makeover.
I aspire to do films that are different. I don't wish to be a part of stereotypical love stories. I don't see myself duplicating an image or living up to an image. I just do films that I find interesting. For instance, I didn't ask Kunal Deshkmuh if there was a kissing scene in Jannat. I did it because I loved the character. I loved the concept of match fixing and the bookies angle.
As CAPTCHA continues to march towards Internet ubiquity, it has also started becoming a challenge even to human readers. Here's one example.
update: [April 29, 2008]: Here's more about the feline fecundity unvealed by the footle RapidShare. And then there's the rather interesting step in the evolution of the CAPTCHA. [courtesy: digital inspiration]
The receding Zs fresh in our minds are merely a portent. The ever successful music producer/director/singer/and-now-actor was only getting started.
There's Pooja Bhatt's Kajra Re, scripted by Mahesh long-resigned-to-filching-for-kicks Bhatt and Bhatt camp regular Shagufta Rafique (who did a Sanjay Gupta with the Korean film A Bittersweet Life and churned out Awarapan on her word processor); the film is rumoured to be a remake of Sadak (which in turn took Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and tried to do a "Computational Complexity for Chimps" with it); Ashutosh Rana does the honours of stepping into Sadashiv Amrapurkar's skirt and sandals.
After sinking to the depths with Shikhar, John Matthew Matthan is hoping to give his marquee worth a shot in the arm by signing the repository of talent for A Love Issshtory, whose title must clearly be a tribute to S4H3.
After unveiling his locks for a brief moment and threatening to parade 'em for more screen time, the man who owes his celluloid beginnings to Salman "The Shirtless" Khan has decided to take a leaf out of the beefcake's book and build up a six-pack to go topless. This masterstroke designed to cause his fans to collapse in joy and the sales of smelling salts to soar was called Chemistry, before creative bankruptcy set in. The new title is Mudh Mudh Ke Na Dekkh Mudh Mudh Ke (that's 4 Ks ... krazzy isn't it?). Also referred to by the heptagrammaton M2KNDM2K (pronounced: emaTuuke aur emaTuuke), the film finds H flanked by Jennifer Kotwal (a model from Bombay who struck gold as a looker in Kannada cinema) and Niharika Singh (Miss India Earth 2005), who, incidentally also shows up in Matthan's paean to scandalous spelling. H's father is reported to have contributed a song to the soundtrack -- a contemporary number that he had composed 30 years ago (euphemistically referred to as "timeless" music). Lest we miss the record, this is H's first triangular love story. Other emotions and geometrical shapes are likely to get their due as time goes by. A nose is just a nose. uu.N!
An April 16, 2008 interview with Arshad Warsi beats about the Krazzy 4 bush for the most part and ends with an interesting note: Up next are Golmaal Returns, Shortcut, Munnabhai Chale Amreeca and a film with Vishal Bhardwaj. Now what film is he doing with Vishal? update: [May 03, 2008]: An April 20, 2008 TOI scrap has another tidbit: The Vishal Bhardwaj film that I'm a part of is a bit strange in terms of language and behaviour.. The only film that seems to match right now is Ishqiya and that has VB as a producer with his long-time associate Abhishek Chaubey making his directorial début.
Sanjay Gupta looks across the seas, but as long as the Malayalam film industry continues to thrive, the patriotic furacious filmophagous purloining P continues to be faithful to God's own country; if he had to remake a foreign flick he'd try and find a Malayalam remake of that flick (either his own doing or someone else's) and thus continue to remain faithful to the frond. Malamaal Weekly proved to be an exception only because the responsibility of remaking it in Malayalam seemed to have fallen on his trusty shoulders and our Arabian sea-facing Atlas shrugged and decided to do the Hindi remake first.
He makes no mistake this time. He chooses last year's hit Kadha Parayumbol, ropes in Irrfan to replace Sreenivasan (who also wrote the original) and HamStar Khan himself to substitute for Mammootty. The name's Billo Barber and it promises lots of laughter. kisii ke waade pe kyo.n aitabaar ham ne kiyaa, wrote Sahir. I agree. I hope he ropes in Pritam for the music. The highest-paid (in all likelihood) user of torrents in South Asia has been churning out unexciting homogeneous product of late. Being associated with a lift won't hurt in any way -- Anu Malik did that with Akele Hum Akele Tum (with some of the most rewarding stratified stealing on display), Sanjeev-Darshan did it with Mann ... heck! Pritam been doing this with the big P for a while now (Bhool Bhulaiya, Dhol, Bhaagam Bhaag, Garam Masala). One hopes that Priyadarshan will learn from the turmoil surrounding Bhool Bhulaiya and include credit for Sreenivasan.
The Rediff article includes a nice little note (my emphasis): Since the film is made in Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan will romance three girls -- Kareena Kapoor, Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra. Juhi Chawla will play Billo's wife. And one thought that having multiple heroines was something right down the alley of the likes of Pawan Kalyan, who, in his last release Jalsa managed to spend screen time with Ileana D'Cruz (born to a Muslim mother and a Christian father), Parvati Melton (born to a German father and a Punjabi mother) and Kamalinee Mukherji (from Calcutta; last seen by YT as Kamal Haasan's wife in Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu).
One cannot end without noting another Priyadarshan/Pritam collaboration that packs so much belly-aching irony that it deserves to be made (or remade, if you will). It's a film about a music band fighting piracy. And the film's called Pirate. ##black pearl## ke baare me.n kyaa jaanate ho?. And apparently Pritam's been roped in for the music to Golmaal Unlimited, Rohit Shetty's sequel to his comedy Golmaal [notes on the music], a film that echoes, only in the title, the wonderful middle-class classic of identity creation and theft directed by the late Hrishikesh Mukherjee, which included a reference to Pele and it all comes back to Jack's ship and the mind is now buzzing with references and connections. Oh Möbius!
update [April 17, 2008]: The clouds have sprung a leak. There's another offering in the pipeline from the Raja of Refurbished Reels. It's calledMere Baap Pehle Aap (kindly ignore the grammatical liberties here -- one can always blame Guru Dutt for convincing Majrooh to go with sun sun sun sun zaalimaa pyaar hamako tumase ho gayaa and starting it all). He raids the cellar of Sibi Malayil this time (having done it before with Gardish) and comes up with Ishtam.
The plot thickens and Bollywood sickens. Continually. Unfailingly. The Malayalam film referenced earlier here as being the source for FilmKraft's Krazzy 4, has, it turns out, a parent across the seas in the land where such parents abound -- a film called The Dream Team, a film I only remember by name and star (Michael Keaton). This merely serves as the cake whose icing hit the fan when Ram Sampath (Khakee, Tanha Dil, you know the drill) decided to drag the Roshan butts to court for Bollywood's original sin, plagiarism. In a stunning display of finesse and speed rivalling that of Bollywood producers churning out desii-ised ghosts of foreign flicks, the High Court tossed the cherry to Ram Sampath. The murky aspects on display included SMSs from Hrithik Roshan to Ram Sampath that strengthened the case for the plaintiff asserting that they had gone ahead with using bits from the Sony Ericsson jingle only after receiving a No Objection Certificate from Sony Ericsson. This seemed like Plan B after the affidavit from Rajesh "Vangelis" Roshan stating that the music was his own (bhole o bhole). A sorry state of affairs. A Rs. 2 crore (1,77,34,600 after tax) out-of-court settlement seems to assuaged Ram Sampath and ensured that the comic filch will hit the marquee as planned with the songs intact (imagine the risk of releasing it without the Hrithik and SRK items designed to reel in the crowds). There's this irksome bit from Rakesh Roshan that lingers (note that another article has the date of the letter as December 13, 2007 -- but this is Bollywood; why bother about such small details?):
When I saw Hrithik's 'Thump' ad for Sony Ericsson mobile, I thought I could use some portion of the theme in my film Krazzy 4. In fact, I had requested Sony Ericsson for the same and they wrote to me on December 18, 2007, granting me permission to use the 'Thump' tune. Accordingly, with certain modifications, we recorded the 5.5-minute song.
A careful examination of the covers and sleeves of the CD of the soundtrack fails to reveal any note of acknowledgement for this permission (but this is Bollywood, the crowd screamed again). The case of the uncredited Pyarelal on Om Shanti Om comes to mind.
There's a victory somewhere in this, but one wonders how many more victories will result in a formidable defence against tidal waves such as Pritam Chakraborty.
Do it anyway, just put the K. Krafty Kriminals. Kalm Kchors.
update: [april 20, 2008]: In an interview that covers this and more, Rakesh Roshan notes There should be a novelty in everything you do, every time. I see to it that I don't fall into the trap of making something that has already been explored. That must explain why Khoon Bhari Maang exists even though Return to Eden was around and why Khel exists despite Dirty Rotten Scoundrels having come first.
update: [may 05, 2008]: More pearls from the pilfering pasha himself in a feature dedicated to the making of the video for Break Free: [...] jo ##hip-hop song## hai ... ##I have made a song on that beat for the very first time##. Right!
We were in the middle of a discussion about a little donkey as commonly found in restaurants in the US being probably different from the real deal, when a sliver of memory flashed by the mind: a unique burrito place on Howell Mill Road and its vindaloo burrito. And yet the mind refused to yield its name. Ths cold knife bearing the drips of recollection probed further: the place didn't last long and was soon replaced by an Italian restaurant, which I remember having visited at least once (Figo Pasta and Osteria de Figo continued to dominate as favourites). Once again, the name escaped me. It was only a Google search later that yielded something more substantial than the sign for the burrito place (which boasted the sketch of a little donkey). The magic words: Burrito Art. It's Italian successor (in 2003) was Misto. The original Emory location for Burrito Art closed in October 2005 and the phoenix was another Italian restaurant called Saba. Some say that the ba in the name is a reference to the now-a-thing-of-the-past home of the vindaloo burrito.
Buried near the end of a Subhash K Jha exploration of the Shabana Azmi/Smita Patil relationship with tidbits about Shabana Azmi taking the late Smita Patil's sun under her wings[sic] and her noting how much Chitrangda Singh echoes the late Smita Patil is a nugget about Gulzar's Libaas that, despite an impressive soundtrack by the late R. D. Burman and a strong cast, has languished in the cans for years:
Strangely, there's news that Gulzar's long-delayed film Libaas, which was made 20 years ago with Shabana and Smita's husband Raj Babbar, is finally going to be released. Libaas was one of the films Smita had accused Shabana of stealing from her.
Beware of the Blog
