a diffused screenful of news

A desi take on "Gulliver's Travels" serves as a showcase for the state-of-the-art in Indian SFX (which, apparently, is still not up to snuff!), besides the return of Javed Jaffri | With Bhoot hitting theatres this week, a brief Ram Gopal Varma retrospective is quite appropriate | and we are not allowed to forget what a big splash "Indian" cinema made at Cannes, while Nedumudi Venu reminisces on a different, more personal, note | a little report on new strategies to pump some life into the loss-ridden Bollywood music business ... it is unfortunate to note the failure of the effort represented by Bhoot of creating a soundtrack album based on the movie (something not unheard of in the US of A), with music and songs not featured in the film. As a sidenote, there's mention of another pointless (and futile) attempt by music sellers to curb the incessant illegal download of music: [Madonna] had put songs from her new album, American Life on the net. But when surfers tried to download them they were stopped by her voice authoritatively demanding to know "what the f*** you think you're doing?" If the singer thought she could stop hackers by playing a four-letter word sprouting Hitler she was wrong. One of them broke into her official website and declaring "this is what the f** I think I'm doing", posted an MP3 file containing all the tracks from the just-out album. By the time Madonna moved into action, 1,000 of her fans had downloaded the tracks and had her album for free. | Rajiv Vijaykar remembers Laxmikant as he tries to answer the question: What was so special about Laxmikant and Pyarelal and LP as a duo? (despite an interesting article, the question still pops up in my mind, partly fuelled by my preference for R D Burman) | Bollywood's version of the Full Monty (ironically titled Oops) marks Deepak Tijori's directorial début | Ravi Patil revisits duets | Rauchy songstress Sapna Awasthi is all set to hit the stage under the auspices of the family drama company, Awadh Theatre Group | Vipul Shah's Aankhen is going to be remade in Hollywood!! (while Shah works on his second film Waqt: The Race Against Time with the Big B and Akshay Kumar as father and son | a murder of models prepare to testing their acting abilities[sic] (give me a break! all you really have to do is look good, wear skimpy outfits, sashay about and deliver some clichéd sentiment) in Bollywood | and Bravo! for Adoor Gopalakrishnan who was recently conferred the French Commandeur of the Order of Arts and Letters Award, France's highest honour in the arts.

While on the subject of Bhoot, it's interesting how this Rediff interview with Subhash K Jha is a poorly disguised version of an interview with Subhash K Jha in the TOI that I had posted about previously.

And on the subject of Ram Gopal Varma, this is a good place to join e-forces with JR and applaud the interesting promos for his RGV's next venture, Darna Mana Hai, a collection of 6 vignettes of horror (including one about a lady scared of apples! -- I thought 'pomophobia' would have been a good name for this, but surprisingly it seems to refer to the 'fear of post-modernism'. Gah!).