poetasteless: case study of yet another movie review from rediff

The review of Bheja Fry 2 hosted at rediff is written by Ankur Pathak, who, one fears may have studied English from some institution dedicated to imparting some training in the language to IT professionals in India. One suspects that the writer may also have some interest (or -- shudder! -- credentials) in some school of business. How else does one explain something like this:

And a host of mortifying mishaps follow, where a deserted emotion called humour is expected.

Alas, it never boarded the ship at first.

mortifying mishaps is the fruit of an adventurous foray into alliteration. The review is loaded with many such phrases that could serve well as rejected names for flavours of ice creams abound: overall evolution, bustling firecracker, sensual proximity, massive puncture, stressfully written, fittingly lifted, forcefully enacted, romantic inclination, brainless bummers.

flounders drearily swimming away into unending boredom works as an unintentional nod to the lyrics of Pink Floyd. falls horizontal lacking any kind of variations is the stuff of lyrics of yore, as is breathe the ocean-air easy (excuse the inappropriate hyphen), but mostly couriers his angst without any aggression and asks for an[sic] urgent medical help reflecting mental disability are just some of several signs of incompetent writing (another being It is exclusively separate what a rock star of an actor Vinay Pathak is). I am not sure I understand (aside from the misplaced hyphen) the point of a fragment like he is drafted scenes like showing his radium-watch to a freaking Talwar. Is a freaking Talwar a f*cking sword? What the dagger!

Was the editorial board (should it exist and be competent enough) at Rediff.com was on vacation or asleep when this article was submitted for review? Perhaps the editors wanted to let Mr. Pathak go ahead and make a fool of himself. There seems to be no other explanation for misplaced commas, the random use of double hyphens (when one or none would have sufficed), the incorrect use of hyphens (radium-watch, two-three), the incorrect use of apostrophes in plurals and the use of inappropriate verbs (how does one land a film? how does one over-stress on anything?)

In closing, one cannot help using a line from the article to describe the efforts of the writer of this inconsequential, boeotian, gaumless, insulse review: His intentions often unclear, his actions are misleading.

PS: Unless astrological malaise has affected him, Mr. Amole Gupte spells his first name as Amole and not Amol.

devil in disguise

(the title was not meant to be a pun on the moview reviewed or the name of the reviewer, but it seems to work rather well as such)

It's Rediff time again. Our target is a review of Devil, a film written and co-produced by M. Night Shyamalan (he has the same initials as a certain political party, but that has no bearing here). Let's start with the simple typographical problems.

These days it might serve a movie well to keep that idea as far off the promotional frontline as possible: Try far away from instead of creating your own phrases.

Hell it might make for a fantastic twist ending to a film someday: consider adding an exclamation mark after Hell and capitalising i in it. It would be a better idea to refrain from imitating conversational speech heared in some American film.

Neither run time nor runtime works as a substitute for the more familiar running time.

It's clichéd note and not cliche note.

We conclude with a look at a comparison implied in the review between Devil and Phone Booth.

Plus, the plot -- five strangers are stuck in an elevator, one of them might actually be the Devil -- had severe potential to be as difficult to stay awake through as Phone Booth, that other movie that promised chills and thrills and served up neither during its short but long-seeming run time.

The "short but long-seeming run[sic] time" of Phone Booth was, according to IMDB, 81 minutes.

The reviewer then writes about Devil: The film has a short and sweet runtime. The running time of Devil is, according to IMDB, 80 minutes.

1 minute was all it took.

unnecessary and laced with errors

Where have you heard these songs before? is a recent addition to Rediff's ever-growing bucket of fatuous fluff. Karthik's simple and more informative portal eye-too-eff-ess makes such articles unnecessary, since they offer neither new information nor critical insight. Having established its ineligibility for a place in the sun, the article proceeds to hammer some fine nails in its coffin by tossing one error after another at the intelligent reader (are there any that read such pieces without their tongue lodged firmly in their cheek?). Here are some samples with my unsolicited editorial comments:

The chartbuster song Jab Koi Baat Bigad Jaye from the 1980 film Jurm (starring Vinod Khanna and Meenakshi Sheshadri) was directly copied from the English number 500 Miles. The Hindi song was composed by Anand-Milind.

500 Miles is sung by American folk singer-trio Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, popularly known as Peter, Paul and Mary. This song was part of their first album, recorded in 1962.

The music director for Jurm was Rajesh Roshan and not the pilfering sons of Chitragupt. is sung is grammatically incorrect and there should probably be a note that the PPM version of the song is a popular cover. Has the writer (or any of the staff) heard of Wikipedia?

Munni Badnaamwas not the first song that Jatin-Lalit copied. The hit song Koi Mil Gaya from 1998's Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was also a copy.

Evidently, the "known fact" (to use a phrase from the opening of the article) that the Pandit brothers have split and only Lalit Pandit (aka one of the brothers) was credited or responsible for Dabangg's big hit. If the writer of the Rediff article is trying to make a case for Brother Lalit being the instigator of all the Pandit-ian plagiarism, the writer is advised to try again and in a separate article devoted to the subject.

The glamorous Zeenat Aman sizzled in this song alongside Vijay Arora in Yaadon Ki Baraat (1973). The music was composed by R D Burman, and the lyrics are penned by Majrooh Sultanpuri.
The song, however, is copied from the title track of the film If It's
Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969). It was sung by folk singer Donovan.

The song was written by Donovan, but was sung by J. P. Rags.

There are also some common grammatical errors: writing comprising of instead of comprising (if you like of consider using the passive voice with is/was comprised of).

The band's name is Wham! and not the acronymous WHAM.

Yet another Anu Malik composition, Raja Ko Rani Se Pyar Hogaya was a copy of Speak Softly Love theme from The Godfather (1972).

The writer is clearly getting lazy and bored, given that this "slide" of the article does not mention the original composer Nino Rota and indulges in sloppiness with "Speak Softly Love theme" instead of something a little more articulate like "The Godfather theme, whose vocal version is known as Speak Softly Love." It would be too much to expect the writer to have informed us that Nino Rota had reused a cue he had composed for a 1958 film called Fortunella (obligatory Youtube link).

The Laawaris music was composed by Rajesh Roshan.

This is either more evidence of sloppy laziness (lazy sloppiness, if you please) or an attempt at making a joke.

RED: the rediff english dictionary

red(iff)undant nounery: the habit of adding extra nouns without adding any meaning (usually to reveal either the writer's lack of familiarity with English writing or the writer's desire to add to the long list of India's contributions to the English language)

Her filmography lists include Om Shanti Om, I Hate Love Storys and now Sonam Kapoor's Aisha.

retardiffusion

Rediff gets away with inventing garbage just for the sake of silly features once again. This time it's a waste of Internet space called The hottest Bollywood exports. The first slide is dedicated to Freida Pinto. Anyone reasonably familiar with this lass knows that her first feature was Danny Boyle's smash hit Slumdog Millionaire and some song-and-dance gobble of guano produced by Dharma/Chopra/Taurani/Tito/Kohli/Rao/Ghai.

Next up is Ayesha Dharker. There's nothing in her filmography that qualifies as Bollywood, except, perhaps, Saaz and that was not her first film.

Despite making a Bollysplash with Kasoor, Lisa Ray had already tested the waters with a Tamil film. The same holds true for Aishwarya Rai.

The rest of the entrants in the feature appear to qualify for the was first seen in a Bollyflick before she tried her luck elsewhere.

rediff reviews: all words, no matter

Rediff.com should consider hiring a competent editor for its movie reviews. It should also consider hiring some professional writers instead of bloggers. One of the many new additions over the weekend has been Pavithra Srinivasan's review of Raavanan. This review, as with several on the portal, doesn't offer much in content. It also does this with a strange choice of punctuation and the use of incomplete sentences -- a style more appropriate for amateur blogs -- and clichés. Here are a few examples of lazy writing that could have been fixed had there been a useful editorial presence involved. The original text is presented in italics.

But whether the movie satisfies the enormous hype it's generated story-wise, is something else, altogether
Had I edited this piece, I would have replaced it's with it has, simply because although the contraction it's is used for both it is and it has, I am more likely to read this as it is first, before figuring out that the writer meant it has. Note the adventurous use of the comma in a most inappropriate place.

The scene: The forested areas in the vicinity of Ambasamudram, or Megamalai, as it's so eloquently expressed in the local papers. Areas that are inaccessible to outsiders; only the local residents know the place; even then, its treacherous.
Note the use of incomplete sentences and the strange use of semi-colons. The incorrect use of its appears along with the correct it's (which now stands for it is). The last two fragments also seem to be predicated on the unproveable assertion that if the residents of a town or village know an area well, it no longer remains treacherous.

Intensely loyal to his people, his background is supposed to be a gory one.
As constructed, the sentence implies that his background was loyal to his people. The writer surely meant to convey two separate ideas and was driven by deadlines or laziness (or both) to combine them into a single senseless sentence.

There's a hurried song, "Kalvare", that shows her love for her husband and she does exhibit her loyalty to him throughout the film but it's does secondhand, in the way she resists Veera's attempts to subdue her.
One of the two uses of "does" in this extract is incorrect. I leave it to the erudite reader to determine which one that is.

Her dialogues are corny, artificially arrogant; one of her first lines is to taunt Veera with a recital that's so jarring you can barely believe it.
This fragment employs the word recital in a curious way. There is nothing in the review that helps you understand what recital the reviewer is referring to: a recital of music? a recital of verse? a narration of some other kind?

He's in character, sympathetic as the situation demands it, and comes across as realistic, despite the caricature-like portrayal.
This is another confusing line. If the actor is in character, how can the portrayal be caricature-like? Perhaps the reviewer means to suggest that this part is poorly written and the actor playing it improves things with his interpretation.

There are no twists and turns, nothing in the narration that shows intelligence leaving the viewer detached, with nothing to relate to.
This is a fragment that works better when spoken aloud with the appropriate pauses. The commas are misplaced and more than one sentence would have helped matters greatly.

they said it

This Rediff article is one of the few going gaga about Ashutosh Gowariker signing on Karl Walter Lindenlaub (हा कोण?) for Buddha (hopefully the conclusion of what will, several years later, be known as his Period Trilogy). After formally noting what a joy (what a joy) it was to work with Lindenlaub, Gowariker goes on to justify the choice of English as the language of the film:

The first important decision that Dr Modi (producer) took was to make Buddha in English and that got me immediately interested because I have always felt that when it comes to religion, you must cater to an international audience, especially so in the case of Buddha.

The hunt for a "new face" to play सिद्धार्थ गौतम is on. Once they find him, expect an article titled Buddha मिल गया.

they said it

Bipasha Basu in an interview for rediff.com after topping the Maxim annual hot 100 list several months ago:

We have to ask: In your opinion, who is the hottest of them all? Minus you, of course!

The industry today has so many beautiful women, each one of them with their own brand of sex appeal. It's hard for me to peg one down, especially as they are all hot in their own way. Besides, I never really look at women, I'm an all-man woman.

Celina Jaitley introducing something she wrote for the TOI:

Being a public personality I feel it's my duty to let my fans know what I think about 'love'. Love, I feel, is what makes everything in this world go round and mind you, it could be 'love' or merely the 'absence of love' which can change a person's life forever.

rubies from rediff

Ever-so-busy Amogh points me to the recent edition in Rediff's chats. This one features Malaysrilankan beauty queen Jacqueline Fernandez (of course she's part of Bollywood!). The most common thing in the chat is a greeting from every Shyam, Kamala and Tukaram who logs on. Thanks to how the slide show is now implemented, it's hard to give you absolute URLs, dear reader. Thus I must ask you to click "Next" on the first page to get to the second page. The gem arrives at the end of the page:

abdulwahab asked, Hi, Which is your favourite Hindi filim?
Jacqueline answers, I love Dev D and Devdas! Both types of cinema interest me a lot.

honest to vitriol

Suparn Verma's refreshingly candid when answering a question on plagiarism/influences in Rediff's new slide show on his next film Acid Factory, his first film with Sanjay Gupta (An old post hereabouts portended this collaboration):

Are your films mostly inspired by some movie or the other?

Not actually. Ek Khiladi is inspired by 14 con films -- Confidence and House of Game are among them. Chhal was not inspired. Qayamat was inspired by The Rock. Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai was marketed as American Pie but it wasn't inspired by American Pie; not one gag of it was from American Pie. Zameen and Karam were not remakes.

PS: Rediff's new layout looks cleaner and nicer, but there's a problem with their slide shows -- you can't get a URL for a specific slide. The whole thing is implemented using JavaScript and the content of each slide is a string array and your clicks on Next and Prev are nothing but indexes for the array. The code's goop and that's the price you pay for the pleasant look.

another melange of malapropisms marches in

Malicious and inappropriate is the patentably Indian abuse of would in places where will was the only choice (and hence, there was no choice at all, really). If someone can tell me how and why this abusage was born, I would (right usage!) be much obliged. Here's a page that opens with a storm of examples. Replace every would you see with a will and you will (not would!) see the correct form of the paragraph.

Next up is a common nugget that enjoyed a short life when we were all in school, because the English teacher was constantly telling you about positive, comparative and superlative forms of adjectives (If your English teacher did not do this, please stop reading at this point and find something else to do, preferably something that does not involve reading or writing). I like to call this the reinforced comparative. You can't blame the users (or abusers, if you will) for trying to take a simple rule for creating comparative forms and choosing to ignore the other rules (after all, it seems inconsistent to have more than one way to do the same thing ... unless you're writing Perl). These hapless souls decide to use more as the prefix for comparative forms. This in itself would not have been so bad if we had people saying "this is more good than that" or "things are more clear now"; a little advice can usually help in such matters. What seems incurable is the replacement of the positive form with the correct comparative form after having exercised the simple rule. This unfortunately gives us egregious exhibits like "this is more better than that" or "things are more clearer now." Want an example? Try Sukanya Verma's notes on a slide in an old Rediff special (ironically about English in Bollywood).

We return to the land of mustard fields, IT stables and cinemalls for our next exhibit, another example of achieving symmetry in conjugation for database actions. If the noun for the verb select is selection, for delete deletion and for insert insertion, shouldn't it be updation for update? Given the host of inconsistencies of the English language, this is the kind of intelligence one might expect in a discarded prototype of an android learning English; this is the kind of linguistic competence people seem to (often incorrectly) assume that they possess. The lessons in English and English grammar in school do not, unfortunately, include a special session to warn the students that all languages evolve and there's enough going on already without them contributing something like this to the melting pot. It's interesting to see that people seem to forget the basic rules of grammar (which, all deities of sanity be praised, have survived the vagaries of time) and indulge, instead, in neological pursuits.

We end this rant into the darkness of despair with another example of the dreaded on a/an X basis. Our sample comes from a warning note on a prominent money transfer portal about currency exchange rates. The authors of the paragraph warn you that the rates change on a dynamic basis. It's nice to know that the rates are not the only vulnerable things around -- the foundation they stand on is also equally shaky. Unless they meant to use dynamic like corporate crapspeakers do, suggesting some sort of executive vitality that is lost on everyone else.

the tashan of the Christ

Rajnikanth, Kamal to attempt a Ben Hur! screams the hyperbolic headline of a blurb at Rediff.com. What follows is a note that the recently ravan-ous Kamal Haasan and the raato.n kaa raajaa (not to be confused with that Dheeraj Kumar "classic") aka the CAD (Computer-Assisted Do-gooder) are all set to appear together in a film based on the life of St Thomas, the apostle of Jesus Christ. The report notes that the film's going to derive its approach from films like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur (hence, dear reader, the big leap of faith to the headline).

Kamal Haasan's barbigerous claim to playing the Saviour is backed by the possibility that Rajnikanth can play the doubting disciple and say tum ##Jesus## nahii.n ho sakate!. To which Kamal saar could respond with his patent-pending grimace (the resigned acceptance of yet another familiar calamitous happening -- one could imagine Atlas when presented with another world to shoulder right after having famously shrugged).

Then again, perhaps it is best for the superstar to sport the stigmata, don the flowing robes, grow a silvery beard, convert familiar Tamil-Fu moves into divine gestures (minus the juggling acts with the cigarette -- no smoking please, we're saints). He's already played the title role in Bhagwan Dada. He could also offer an interesting interpretation of the infamous Einstein/Bohr exchange (Einstein: God does not play dice; Bohr: Don't tell God what to do!). Besides, if Rajnikanth, who can?

what acting really means

One of the slides in a Rediff special on Ms Rai-soon-to-be-Bachchan's pirouetting projects offers insight into what is widely regarded as acting in mainstream cinema:

Nimbooda (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam)

One of the most breathtaking features of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's opulent love triangle were its song and dance sequences.

Aishwarya's animated thumkas, particularly, stood out in the fast-paced Nimbooda.

Reportedly, all the rigorous dancing steps gave Ash a bad case of sore feet. But the professional refused to take any breaks.

Her efforts were suitably rewarded with a Best Actress Filmfare award.

In summary, rigorous dancing constitutes acting. That has to explain (to such extent) why she snagged a Filmfare nomination for Best Actress for Dhoom 2 [a sample of whose writing was explored hereabouts]. Truly crazy kiyaa re.

rediff scores an ace


Rediff has truly outdone itself with an over-the-phone interview with the emunctory chartbusting sensation Himesh "Don't Phunk With My Nose" Reshammiya. The outpourings of this he "low profile guy" who also happens to be shy guarantee spills galore. An extract (that cannot do justice to the whole) follows (PS: click the image on the left to see the larger version):

[...]People ought to know a few things about my singing in the films…

And what would it be?

My father gave me the training in singing, and I have taken my classical singing education seriously. It is not that I became a singer overnight. Though some of songs such as Zarra jhoom jhoom (in Tom Dick & Harry) have become phenomenally successful, I always obey the person who has total control over me as a singer.

And who would that be?

It is Himesh Reshammiya, the composer. I am foremost a composer.

How do you decide on singing a song of your own in a film?

Himesh Reshammiya the composer had to give permission to Himesh Reshammiya, the singer. It is like picking a card from the deck. I think deeply before I let the singer in me get the permission.

Long live the man who, with ek baar aajaa aajaa aajaa aajaa gave the 21st century its impassioned retort to Sanjay Kapoor's aatii nahii.n.

{image courtesy: Param Param Param !!! Wakaw !!!!}

update: Coming soon to a third-rate desii theatre in the US near you, a crowded overpriced multiplex near you, a badly mastered DVD with special features at your favourite Indian grocery store in the US/UK, a heavily reused cheap VHS copy of the said DVD at your favourite Indian grocery store in the US (and the UK?): The nose that has set your ears on fire will be seen in sundry glory and is brought to you by Prashant Chaddha, the man responsible for the vying-for-world-relief-funds look that has besmirched TV screens, billboards, and the like.

the nadir of bollywood plotting

Even Zero's keyed up about the new poll on Rediff. They're asking their loyal readers to Predict Fanaa's climax. Seems like official sanction of the lack of originality in the excerebrose wlatsome oligophrenial mephitic quilian frass that Bollywood continues to dish out. The weak soundtrack's out; a big banner's backing the film. An initial return is guaranteed at the box office (especially the overseas market that thrives on the economic principles of appealing to the multitudinous bourgeoisie. Here're a few contributions to the guess pot (who cares about the premise anyway? We've shamed Eisenstein and Kuleshov with our unmatched ability to splice and dice our sources into a patent-pending incoherent blend of ketchup).

Aamir takes the blind Kajol to watch Amar Akbar Anthony and the divine SFX blast that restores Nirupa Roy's eyesight extends to restore Kajol's eyesight; Stupefied by the power of Bollywood, Aamir renounces terrorism and embraces Kajol; Tabu, in a cameo as a kamikaze projectionist, smiles at the two from the projection booth, before pulling the pin and blowing the whole place up; The word Fanaa rises out of the bad CGI explosion as you hear Lata plaintively wail kabhii Kushii kabhii Gam

Kajol isn't blind at all, but a member of the same mathematically and cryptographically challenged anti-terrorist squad seen in Dus; she confronts Aamir just as he's lumbering up to his target with a body bomb, and after a long emotional scene complete with bullet vision, a nasal riff of anguish on the background by Kumar Sanu (in a special vocal appearance), and some slow motion tricks involving a monkey, a lemon and a pomeranian high on tharraa, they embrace; however, the bomb doesn't go off; Furious, Aamir claws at the packaging, finds a support number, fishes out his cellphone (insert suitable brand here for product placement revenue) and dials the number; it goes all the way around the world and then down to Bangalore; a desii voice identifies itself as Chris and offers assistance; in keeping with official protocol he butchers Aamir's name, sputters in broken English, and drives Aamir into an insane rage; He discovers that his power animal is a 3D parrot named Raja, and then launches Project Mayhem to blow up all the call centres in Bangalore under the name of Dhanraj Tandon. The end credits roll against an original CGI sequence travelling through Aamir's brain.

Aamir and Kajol discover that they're siblings, as revealed by a dying Tabu, who, despite a bad CGI job with the makeup, plays their mother; Shattered and disgusted with what they've been up to during the course of the film, Aamir and Kajol decide to do a tribute to Dil Se, but spontaneously combust milliseconds before the pivotal blast

The climax of the film is presented in 3D and features an item song (not on the soundtrack) by Payal Rohatgi; while the audience gets a lesson in geography and contours, Aamir trips and falls off the edge of a cliff, just as he is preparing a bomb to blow up Kunal Kohli's office; after his death Kajol gets his eyes and begins to develop a strange affection for Juhi Chawla

Aamir has a double role: the good brother is a struggling writer, and the bad brother is an anarchist; the former indulges in familiar arboreal amorous pursuits (transplanted to boats and such in keeping with the location) with the blind Kajol while the latter pursues a hot steamy intellectual relationship with Tabu who knits sweaters by day and fights grime by night (she heads a local mom-and-pop outfit for crop and forest sprays); the former is facing writer's block trying to work out a screenplay for Sanjay Gupta based on the lost rare complete cut of Stroheim's Greed, Eastwood's The Bridges of Madison County, Café Flesh and two videos by Vikas Bhalla; the latter is writing a screenplay that looks like the screenplay of Fanaa; before the climax unfolds, every reel in every projection room across the world catches fire and disintegrates; at this point, Aamir wakes up from what has been a bad dream, rides pillion on the way to the defence minister's residence, shoots him dead during his morning walk, etc. etc; he then takes over a radio station and plays Himesh Reshammiya songs while attempting to justify his actions; Kajol, who is listening attentively, cannot stand the aural assault of the mu[sic] and dies of an acoustic neuroma that mutates into a fatal variant of itself. The end credits include acknowledgements to Gems[sic] Joyce and Luis Panvel[sic].

Thanks to a series of unfortunate events, Aamir's last job, before he gives it all up for his blind lady love Kajol, goes horribly wrong at a concert venue and the performer is killed; the accidental death of burgeoning nasal talent Himesh Reshammiya makes Aamir a star and saviour of millions, whose senses have been wrecked asunder; Aamir manages to get Kajol's eyesight restored, and then they go to a multiplex to watch a new film called Fanaa. The end credits do not include any acknowledgements although the uncredited music comes from Howard Shore's score for The Lord of the Rings

Aamir is a super-terrorist who has retired from duty and conducts coaching classes for an outsourced wing of a feared international terrorist group headed by a mysterious figure in the shadows named Colonel X; He works as a tourist guide and watches reruns of Guide for tips; he runs into Kajol (or, to be precise, she walks straight into him, since she's blind) -- and the consequences of the impact inspire the title of the film; Aamir is called back into action to annihilate (another reference to the title) a burgeoning rival terrorist organisation led by Baba Jalandar, who sounds suspiciously like a mix between Om Shivpuri and Shreeram Lagoo; Aamir assembles a crack team comprising an old friend, a transportation expert a background operative (respectively small-to-medium roles for Abhishek Bachchan, Riteish Deshmukh and Lara Dutta) and embarks on a mission (initially named Asambhav, but, fearing a backlash from Rajiv Rai, renamed Impossible) that primarily involves rescuing Kajol from the chu.ngal of Baba Jalandar (who, in a remarkably original tour de force filched from movies like Manmohan Desai's Kismat) is revealed to be Kajol's father (Rishi Kapoor); his vamp, played by Tabu, takes a bullet shortly after revealing, through a flashy CGI-assisted miserable montage of sepia and filters, that Rishi Kapoor was the person responsible for the accident that robbed Kajol of her eyesight; the climactic shootout results in the loss of several pieces of set furniture, 3 graphic artists, several toys from Leo Mattel (subtle product placement), and a poster of Mithun Chakraborty's Sanyasi Mera Naam; in a splendid example of the use of deus ex machina, Shekhar Kapur guest-directs the post-climax wherein a ripple in time suddenly appears and envelopes Aamir and Kajol, whose eyesight has been miraculously restored thanks to a combination of sulphurous fumes and emotional trauma (thanks to the revelation of her father's identity and past deeds); they are whisked to another time and place (that looks like stolen footage from What Dreams May Come) where they resume their adoration and circumlocution of the family of Ficus benghalensis.

TARFU. Time for some floccinaucinihilipilification folks.

mass mediocrity IV: the final chapter [and this is how you get here] {this is for JR, who kept reminding me about this message board with tantalising extracts}

There's another edition of Rediff's end game show called "Which film endings did you not like?" The results induce as much déjà vu as the trite structure of the majority of Bollywood flicks (and they're just worried about the ending??).

A lot of drivel is devoted to Rang De Basanti and some old favourites like the Karan Johar oeuvre, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (wonder if it's time to make the sequel Ab Aur Kya Chaahiye ...), Sadma. Some people complain about movies with cliché endings, wishing for some sequitur; and others complain about movies with downbeat endings, wishing for more clichéd endings. A few samples:

Parineeta

The movie should have been three minutes more. There is no change of heart of Shekar's father, where he should have been in the last scene showing a father's apology towards Shekar and Lolita whom he had hurt immensely.
How can a man who calls a young girl a "whore" welcome her in turn as his daughter-in law? This part still lingers in the minds of the viewers where a more certain clarity of relationships would have made the ending more perfect and much more meaningful.

can u imagine what would have been the state of SaratChandra, the actual writer of the novel, to see his hero breaking a 8 ft rock solid brick wall with another giantic stone and everybody around was not actually helping physically but inspiring by shouting \\\'tod de\\\'......and ultimately he succeeded...

All we want from Bollywood is clichéd entertainment[sic]. Turning deaths of Big B's characters in Sholay and Deewar and Muqaddar ka Sikandar into endings involving happy marriages, and rewriting the death of Satya seem mild when you consider this:

Sholay

Veeru should embrace ISLAM and marry both Basanti and Jaya Bhaduri.
Thalur should get Jay's hands implanted.
This makes all the more reason that Jaya Bhaduri(Radha) should leave thakurs home.
Kalia should got the pachas hazaar inaam on gabbar.
Helen should present item no. on veeru's wedding.
Suurma bhopali should provide all the Lakdis for cremation of Gabbar & Jay
Hope to see all the same in sequal [sic].

Someone even wished that Teesri Aankh had ended with Amisha Patel regaining her power of speech and tied the knot with Sunny "Dhupia-less" Deol.

When the owners of the Friday the 13th railway train named the fourth edition The Final Chapter, they were kidding (they went all the way up to part X, before springing the cross-franchise Freddy vs Jason). Something tells me the mass mediocrity train's just getting started ...

more linguish {last post in thread}

The either ... or construct accomodates exactly two entities. Nothing more, nothing less. It's either two or none. Get it? So sentences leaking with dangling appendages to this construct are shameful: you can have either apples or oranges or mangoes. A Rediff ode to the musical[sic] talents[sic] of chhoTaa B contains another example of the crime: t is unlikely that the new rap will fit into either of these three, so let's wait for more news of Bollywood's coolest rapper.. I wonder if they've got programmers as proof-readers; after all, writing switch-case blocks can get to you ...

Joginder Tuteja should file a for patent on the most egregious abuse of the word capitulate. Consider the review of the soundtrack for the #me starrer Jawani Diwani (which qualifies for titular abuse, but that's another post). We have the fragment Though the singing is fine, the song lacks the fire that could capitulate it to the top of the charts. And if you thought that was just a freak occurrence, try the reviews of the soundtracks of 99.9 FM: Nothing is 100% (nice compilation; what happened to the movie?) and Chanda ki Doli. To capitulate has nothing to do with elevating something to the height of a cap ... so cap it!

Rediff Seriously Sucks

Rediff iLand has been Rediff's big step forward in the world of blogging. It goes beyond Rediff Blogs. In fact, it goes beyond blogs. According to a help page "Rediff iLand is your very own space on the internet where you can put up your thoughts, photos, ideas and memories. It's also a good place to meet like-minded people, express your opinions and most of all, expand your horizons to encompass the entire world!" If that doesn't help try this even more obtuse comparison with Rediff Blogs: "Rediffblogs, great as it is, has limited capacity. It allows you to express yourself through one medium� writing. Meanwhile, at Rediff iLand, blogging is just one of the many things you can do besides Photos, Avatars, Dreamspaces and many mnay[sic] more things.

Thus, Rediff iLand is a wider, more comprehensive platform for your expressions."

Yeah, I get the picture. I think I'll submit my talent profile for the Clueless auditions.

Take one look at their template and spending the night listening to Lata Mangeshkar's covers of Iron Maiden might seem like a walk in the park. Egregious waste of real estate and overcrowding even in the limited space consumed. Very Indian really.

The less said about their RSS feed the better. I've never seen such escapism (poor pun here, please excuse). If you subscribe to any of them through some popular portal like Bloglines, you'll know what the china shop looked like after the bull was done with it. And a few samples I saw even included the generous crud produced by MSFT's streamlined word-processor-cum-dehumidifier-cum-HTML-editor-cum-white-noise-generator-cum-you-get-the-idea tool called Word. The demographic is stunning. iLand is not. It's mind-numbing. Get your HTML encoding straight first guys. The basics. The details.

ups and downs [tip nod: sudarshan]

Resident Rediff film critic Raja Sen garners some brownie points with the specious superficial (but still useful, if only for visibility) special on Vishal's Ruskin Bond adaptation The Blue Umbrella (Wow! This is only the second RB adaptation, the first being Benegal's Junoon). He also loses points for letting cognitive interference get to him when he notes that Federico Fellini made The Godfather. If you can't enough of RS, try the second chat in two months.

and now, rediff's entertainment[sic] editor [previous thread in the Rediff-chat-coverage department]

answers questions from avid Rediff readers.

Q : Why are there no good children's movie[sic]?
Ronjita Kulkarni : Children's films in India are poor-quality films. Special effects is one area Bollywood hasnt been able to master yet.

Implications: a movie with SFX is a children's film; children's films need to have SFX.

Interestingly:

Q: which is your fave hindi film forever?
Ronjita Kulkarni : I loved Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi. My all-time fave.

Horrifying:

Q: it would be great if Amir khan would make an epic gangster film with sanjay leela bhansali shot somthing like maqbool or the godfather but different with shakespeare type u know it would be great for slb to try a different genre
Ronjita Kulkarni : Yes, it would be nice to see Bhansali doing a gangster movie!

This transcript is intuitively titled Filmi fundas from the horse's mouth