riddled @ the Oscars

In keeping with the fine tradition established over the last several years, the FFI (Film Federation of India) has chosen yet another stumper as the Indian entry for the Foreign Film Oscar. The film is Amol Palekar's Paheli [elsewhere: yours truly didn't care much for it]. Did they choose the film simply because its title would make good copy when reactions poured in later? Predictably some people have applauded the selection, some people have wished the film well, some people have begun to find cans of split (yeah, you read that right) milk to cry over, some people have chosen to be stoic (and let everyone know so). The usual mix and match. No matter what they had chosen, you would have had a sample set of each reaction to deal with.

The chaos that has ensued since only confirms the strangeness of the selection. Rediff's "Is Paheli the right choice?" page boldly includes a shot from Sarkar, which wasn't even in the competition. And the reasons proffered only afforded more chuckles. Vinod Pande, acting chairman of the FFI said, "Paheli has represented the Indian ethos. It is a film based on the Indian language." In fact, his bowdacious answers to a set of stupid questions make me postpone my next Mithun movie appointment. As for that little business about originality: even Paheli doesn't stand up a firm footing of originality. The source material was adapted by Mani Kaul in Duvidha (and I might be willing to wager on that being a much much more rewarding effort than this box office suck-fest).

Anyone following the Oscars closely every year will know that what separates their auto-fellatio from ours (remember the Filmfare Awards?) is that they pull off a much slicker show and also have movies that, all things considered, score over our pieces of dog dung in several departments. After all, the Filmfare Awards never claimed to be about rewarding the craft of filmmaking. They're all about feting moneymakers and people who churn out mind-numbing popcorn product in droves and providing absolutely no room for the hope that we have a discerning audience who will request no more insults to its intelligence.

Our recent selections have indicated that every year the FFI chooses flouting milksops who are woefully incompetent in matters of understanding what it takes to be a strong entry in the Foreign Film category. Despite the sucky nature of the Oscars, this category has seen some great submissions from other countries; submissions that have been more sober than our gifts of eloquent superfluity. And what have we been doing? We have been sending movies like Indian, Jeans, Henna and Lagaan. The first two were massive (correct me if I'm wrong) brain-dead hits from Shankar (and the second in that list greatly benefited from an evident conflict of interest). The third probably got a breather thanks to exploited themes of Indo-Pak friendship and blah blah. There is no excuse for choosing the last one. Lagaan worked at the box office (although still less a success than Gadar) thanks to its mix of things dear to mainstream Hindi film viewers: songs, dances, cricket. And must one also note another implementation of the "satisy everyone" principle at work -- Page 3 was awarded the Best Film award at the National Awards earlier this year and yet another film was chosen for the Oscars. Double standards? What's good for us ain't good for them?

We have interesting films made every year that compete and win laurels at other international film festivals that host some of the greatest current foreign cinema. Yet, our selectors seem to prefer the local pirated video store as their font for candidates for nomination. Clearly, the selection process for FFI membership ensures the selection of balbutient loggerheads with butyraceous brains jectigating in the reniform hallways of mediocrity.

The FFI (an organisation that is as secretive as the KKK in terms of membership, official procedures and the like) seems to have a membership roster that rolls in fresh[sic] blood every year. This guarantees us some entertainment as far as nominees and the eventual pick are concerned; The National Awards have offered some competition of late, but that's fodder for a separate post. This years picks (link courtesy: Amit Varma) include Harmesh Malhotra, Vinod Pande and Jagdish Sharma.

Vinod Pande is perhaps the least harmful of 'em all. His films have dealt with man/woman relationships challenging the norms of society (his last film was the bare-back sex fest called Sins). He also gave us the opportunity to relish two Raghunath Seth soundtracks (Ek Baar Phir, Yeh Nazdeekiyan), gave us a cult box office tank called Star (dil bole ##boom boom##), directed the TV show Reporter (which featured one of the longest series of shots dedicated to a telephone ringing and a man's eventual act of lifting the receiver). Still, he doesn't quite inspire confidence.

Next up we have Jagdish Sharma. This guy has a more exciting filmography as far as B-flicks are concerned. There's Shiv Raam featuring a cop with a bullet lodged in his head in such a fashion that removing it would result in his death; two Arman Kohli vehicles Dushman Zamana and Juaari; the Mithun starrer Bhishma (Bourne Identity anyone?), Sapoot (the song: kaajal kaajal terii aa.Nkho.n kaa ye kaajal) and Judge Mujrim (featuring the ostentatiously funny Jolly Mukherjee song lailaa o lailaa).

Which brings us to Harmesh Malhotra. Harmesh Malhotra actually directed a film in 1982 starring Shatrughan Sinha titled Mangal Pandey (perhaps that's why Ketan Mehta's film figured in the list...). He was also responsible for one of the rare instances of a movie and sequel with Nagina and Nigahen. He directed Phansi ke Baad, which had Lata singing for Anu Malik (then sporting a different spelling) for the first time. He also gave us Mithun's Cheetah. Then there was Sridevi as the village-belle-turned-dacoit Sherni; the standard Jeetendra 90s movie Amiri Garibi (drama, pathos, conflict, shrieking music); the Anil Kapoor/Sridevi version of Heer Ranjha, Paapi Devata with Madhuri dancing to usakaa naam hai piyaa; the sad sad Kismat with Govinda and Mamta Kulkarni; and the increasingly aggravating Govinda romps Dulhe Raja, Ankhiyon Se Goli Maare and Khullam Khulla Pyaar Karen.


All this makes these guys perfect candidates to judge the eligibility of a film given their fine understanding of cinema of all kinds. I think it's time we dug up some Ramsay productions and sent them instead. At least we'd get some press for sh(l)ock value.


Faux Coda: The other nominees: Mangal Pandey, Veer-Zaara, Iqbal, Swades, Parineeta, Page 3, Black, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Sachein (Tamil), Anniyan (Telugu), Uttarayan (Marathi), Achuvante Amma (Malayalam), Graham (Telugu), and Kadal (Tamil). Of the ones I haven't seen I have no doubts about rejecting Mangal Pandey, Veer-Zaara. Of the ones I have seen Parineeta, Page 3 , and Black [thoughts] cannot hope to hold even a lit match to HKA [thoughts]. And HKA would have been my choice for a nomination were I forced at gunpoint to utter a title. Can you believe that our list of previous submissions includes Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam, Ankur, Manthan and Saraansh??


Coda: The stupidity continues as Rediff hosts a paean to Black. An extract:

You might have been less threatening had you not achieved self-actualisation; had you not been a masterpiece wrenched out from the depths of your director's being; had you not soared above conventional cinematic norms.
Maybe your passionate creator erred in exhausting his energy to rejuvenate us with soul-stirring melodies. He erred in burning his insides to extract the madness seated deep within your actors. He erred in believing us deserving of his creation.

eii! abbey! [link and update provided by: Sudarshan]

So, like, there's this Goan singer called Abbey Fizardo. And you know, like, he was apparently on-screen singing khallaas in RGV's Company. But, I'm, like, not going down the RGV path here, you know. What I'm trying to tell you about, you know, is his new remix album called Tarana Pyaar Ka. His first album, Josh had this song called ai sanam. The video for the song, you know, was this big hit. And then he had this second album called Fidaa. Now that was a dud, ya. So, well, the point is, I'm not trying to bring him down. Yet. Since all this pop-shop stuff gets so much coverage, you know, he also got this interview. And then he gets asked all these smart questions, ya. Like "what's the album gonna be like?" and "Did you always know you wanted to be a Musician, or are you self taught?" You know Sudarshan said this was like asking "Does the sun rise in the east, or is the moon white?" Which means that, you know, they managed to find an interviewer who was totally tuned into Abbey's psyche. Totally psychotic, no?

The other answers are also very thought-provoking ya. When he talks about the video for the song taraanaa pyaar kaa he says: It's a story about a school girl and boy who are doing fun stuff in the video. I make a cameo appearance doing what I always I wanted to do-a video where I get to play my Strand guitar. So naughty he is no?

And he even lets you into the key to succeeding in Indi-pop: You just have to have a London passport and they're willing to listen to your music even if it's not Indi-pop.

You know what really gets me, ya? It's when he gives us more information about the title song of the album: The title Tarana Pyar Ka, is from the Anil Kapoor starer, Andar Bhar. I don't know if he's talking about some dirty movie that we weren't supposed to watch as kids, you know, or if he's talking about that copy of 48 Hours. That movie was called Andar Bahar and had RD Burman's music and I know this song was not there ya. Sudarshan agrees with me, and you know, he actually pointed me to a page that had more details and even lyrics. Turns out, you know, it's a song called gu.nche lage hai.n from this Rajshri production named Tarana. The film also has this song called sultaanaa sultaanaa meraa naam hai sultaanaa, which you might remember. No? And you know it stars Mithunda. So cool no? Now I'm really ticked off about his knowledge, ya. Even that lithe-and-light Anamika ripped off some oldie (that RD Burman-composed Mukesh song from Phir Kab Milogi) and even changed the gender of the singer ... And most of those people who bought her album didn't even know. And they didn't even care. Damn sad, ya.


Meanwhile, Juddha is doing wonderful box office business ...

raj kamal is no more aka the gross injustice of modern times

It all started with a post on RMIM. The subject "Rajkamal is no more." "Ridiculous!" is my first reaction. And then I realise I know nothing about the entity responsible for wonderful soundtracks like Chashm-e-Baddoor, Saawan ko Aane Do, Katha and Payal ki Jhankar (straight from memory, so it's possible that I missed a famous release). Then there was the contribution to Saaz (although Yashwant Deo and Zakir Hussain scored more points with their contributions). Googling got me no news items, no articles. Zilch! That was two days ago. Today, a small blurb on the Filmfare online portal showed up. He was 67! RIP.

Which allows me to segue to introducing a blog on interesting movies (thanks to some visitor stats): Parallel Cinema. The reason for the sequitur: a post on Chashm-e-Baddoor. Extra points for an entry on Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro.

more babble and some useful information

After recently covering everything about "empowerment", SRK is back with some more notes on Indian (read: Bollywood) cinema. First, his take on getting offers from Hollywood:

"I am going to be completely honest about this one. It isn't like Spielberg is waiting at Mannat with offers. But that's perfectly okay with me, neither am I dying to play a butler in a Bond film"

Then his take on Indian (clearly he means only Bollywood) cinema:

"I think we shouldn't change our song-and-dance, because that is unique to us and we shouldn't let go off that. Our emotional content is pretty strong too, so that stays. But it's high time that we tell better stories, the pattern has to change. Also the technology has great scope for improvement"

He continues talking about the content of these films (watch the narrative thread and the logical flow):

"We have got to change the way we dress. By which I mean, our films have got to get shorter. A global audiences easily tires of a 3 hour saga. Besides, we shouldn't shut our eye to the fact that Hollywood has screenplays which are scientifically very sound; we on our side have a few loose ends there. Having said that; I believe that our Aamir's and Ash's are no less that them. And this is something I strongly I strongly believe," he states.

He then proceeds to pee on everything he's said so far (and even gets to crack a schoolkid's joke):

"But you also got to understand that we live in a yuppie world. It's a business world, so you got to change your garb. It's like, if you want to go to a world party, you got to wear a tuxedo, Gandhi's dhoti won't do!"

I think it's time for an SRK vs Sidhu showdown ...

---

Then there's Salman Khan proudly noting that "playing a crazy guy is easy!" while talking about Kyon Ki (the existence of which we recently noted).

It's about a guy who's crazy," he said of his character, Anand. "For me, that's very easy to play. This guy, who killed his wife, which is not true. That part was not so easy."

He even goes on to add:

"When people find roles challenging, it means somewhere they're incompetent ... They don't know their job really well. I didn't think there was anything challenging. What I found difficult with this film was to wake up at 5:30 every morning. Shooting until 8 in the evening. That was challenging."

On an unrelated note, let me point you to more information on how you can disappear in America without a trace.

the lady vanishes? ... and so does a sense of language

BVHK spikes my morning cup of coffee with a pointer to an article about the mysterious disappearance of Chitrangda (for those still in the soggy caves of mainstream cinema, she featured in the wonderful Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and the recently silently released Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow. There's also a related TOI article. The essence of the problem: she appears to have become inaccessible. And the reasons cited include (a) a possessive husband (golfer Jyoti Randhawa) (b) an ultimatum from her in-laws (c) a general lack of "good" offers. Who knows what the truth is? Should she never return, we might lose a rarity in these days: a good and beautiful actress.

Non sequitur: Time to take the Subhash K Jha article apart. They compared her with Smita Patil, and she didn't mind. You must mean "compared to" Mr Jha, since they were, I believe, trying to bring out the similarities and not the differences. And when you go on to note Chitrangda has disappeared from the face of Hollywood, I must ask shouldn't you be present at a place before vanishing from there?. Granted, this was probably a typo. But the earlier example?

But then, who cares?

[update: september 28, 2005] It seems even more official, now that posters of Kal focus only on Chitrangda ... {more}

an IDE wanes?

Is Eclipse (Greek verb: ecleipo = 'cease to exist') {source: Wikipedia} all set to go the bloated way of the Mozilla/XPCOM/you_name_it nightmare that rose from the initial offering of Netscape's source code? Version 3.1 has been an improvement in some respects over the horrendously under-performing 3.0 series (which I experienced vicariously thanks to reports from friends and colleagues while enjoying the simple pleasures of 2.1.7)...

Begin Flashback

When I first encountered and used Eclipse I was impressed and pleased. And I wasn't clamouring for IDE snap-ins and wizards for J2EE and UI development (frankly, I'd like to use such one-click tools only after learning what happens under the covers). And Eclipse offered great support for coding with the Java API and conventions. Especially if you were using good old vim for electronic archaeology -- didn't quite scale well given impossible deadlines when you were talking about several source branches inundated with millions of variously commented often intuitively named source files of various genera.

End Flashback

My sweet moments of development quickly went to KDE-on-a-386 hell shortly after I installed release 0.7.0 of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform. This represented an initial offering from the IDE's fold to all those developers who had been consumed by the dark side of commercial IDEs thanks to the allure of wizards, tools and mouse-friendly snap-ins that eased J2EE development (of course, if you didn't have too much of an idea about what went on in this distributed environment, you were competing with the average Visual Basic programmer for mental regression). While the tools contained in the WTP held promise (it was nice to see a lot of the Eclipse features like code assist extended to ugly pasta like JSPs). Soon, though, the White-Screen-Of-Death syndrome (see also: the White Toolbar of Death) became a regular phenomenon. You see, this thing didn't quite scale well when you had a classpath that had as many entries as people in the Indian subcontinent (allow me the hyperbole please). The "cool" feature of automatically recompiling projects soon became an annoyance that took your workstation down every time you changed a couple of characters in the scriplet space. Soon I found myself poring posts on fora and blogs for options to control and optimise Eclipse's memory consumption and garbage collection. ProcessExplorer from SysInternals now became a messenger of bad news as I watched the javaw process iterate through each JAR file in the project classpath. There was nothing I could do. To make matters worse, the WTP subsystem did not have its own vista for configuration. So if I had to turn off the "as-you-type" assistance, I'd have to turn it off for the whole IDE. Nice! For a while, I was stuck with hitting the period ('.') and becoming a man who paused (weak pun there, tinged with some "inquizitive" nostalgia).

This was getting to me. A deadline starting slipping away faster than the eye could see (aah the original figures of speech!). I began monitoring the ".log" file. Entries like the following were rather common:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui 4 4 2005-09-20 10:24:13.68
!MESSAGE problem with as-you-type validation
!STACK 0
org.eclipse.core.runtime.OperationCanceledException
        at org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.internal.reconcile.DirtyRegionProcessor.run(DirtyRegionProcessor.java:411)
        at org.eclipse.core.internal.jobs.Worker.run(Worker.java:76)

!ENTRY org.eclipse.jst.jsp.core 4 4 2005-09-20 15:50:46.402
!MESSAGE JavaPosition was null!10780

A bug report had been filed about JSP validation and the OperationCanceledException. And another one that seemed to be related to the linear issues with the WTP. What was I to do? Wait? Hell, no!

I reevaluated my situation. Clearly, with the way development worked, all I really really (truly madly deeply) needed was some syntax highlighting for these long tedious convoluted servings of spaghetti and tremulous tofu. So, I didn't really need the WTP. I could wait till they got their act together. All I wanted was good old simple fast Eclipse.

So I began uninstalling the packages. The new "Product Configuration" management console in Eclipse was neat. You could manage plugin and feature installations and updates from here. No more shutdown-delete_files-restart. Think RPM with a nice GUI. The only downside was that some folders and JARs got left behind. Did I say "only"?? Still, it was better than going in blindly all guns blazing. Goodbye WST. Goodbye JST. Goodbye EMF. Goodbye GEF. About 218 folders (and contained files) and JARs later (and after a "-clean" run), I snagged Colorer Take-5, set up some "File Associations", and was merrily editing JSPs at regular speed. Sure, there was no code completion, opening brace/closing brace matching, no way of knowing if the code was fine until deployment. Potentially more round trips. But at least I would be doing something instead of staring at purple morphing into white bands and looking about with embarassment making sure no one was walking about -- can't have people stop and laugh at you for your conviction in a tool that clearly didn't seem to be doing the job right.

lies, damn lies and statistics

This thing's been doing the rounds for a while: Go to Google's main page and type in either the word failure or miserable failure and then click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. You will be transported to the White House's official biographical page for GWB. As a quick Google Blog post noted, this is merely a bad day for statistics and another example of googlebombing (Yet, such acceptable results *nudge, nudge, wink wink*). Yet, thanks to Google's impressive track record of cool and interesting humour, the "these guys really have a cool sense of humour" comment is not uncommon. Pity. This time the human contribution happened at the wrong end.

The good old combination of the phrase mass destruction and "I'm Feeling Lucky" still works, though. And the regular search gets you the same place as the first result.

unicode encoding woes

Firefox has issues with rendering devanaagarii (case in point: check out how the i-ligature gets displaced on pages). The fix (as documented on another useful page on Wikipedia) for Windows is simple:go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options; on the Language tab, check the "install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including Thai)" option; be prepared to insert your Windows XP installer CD-ROM and then restart after the file copy was done. I've tried it. It works.

I still haven't applied the fix on my current machine. And an email to my Yahoo! acount containing devanaagarii text showed up as garbage. The fix took me a few minutes to find: View->Character Encoding->UTF-8 [the default was "Western [ISO-8859-1]". I am told that setting this as the default for pages that don't specify their encoding (bad page, bad page!) should cause no issues in general.

My bugbear Rediff (Movies) proved me wrong. I went to a report on the Toronto Film Festival by Arthur J Pais and I kept seeing the article punctuated randomly by black diamonds with a white question mark in each of them. Changing the Character Encoding to the default made them go away. But curious (pun intended) one that I am, I checked the source of the page and what I saw blows my mind. These old pages rely heavily on <FONT> tags. But that's not really as bad as seeing strange tags that seem to be the cause of the problem: <SPAN style="mso-fareast-language: JA">. Predictably, this page was created in every idiot's favourite XML-junk-spewing HTML editor Microsoft Word. Proof: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />. What have they done? Outsourced page edits and design to Japan? Or is everyone in the department using pirated copies of Microsoft Word that came from there?

the Indian village belle of the new millennium?

In an interview with the Indian Express, one-film-down-one-to-go (and LIFO too!) ex-Miss-India (bleargh!) Tanushree Dutta responds to tired questions in often-interesting ways. Deep in the middle is the description of her character in Chocolate [notes on the soundtrack]. It's also the path-breaking description of the new Indian village girl. The saltant saturnalian silage-hewing siren of the season?

My role is that of a ruthlessly ambitious girl. She probably belongs to a small town in India and has gone abroad to make a living. She is determined to make it big. Basically she is a temptress, having a dubious past. She's smart, suave, stylish and also very manipulative. At the same time, there is an innocent look about her which is so deceptive. It's got a lot of shades.

Thanks to a typo(?) we know that bhiigaa bhiigaa saa is one of her "favourite dongs[sic] from the movie" (her other favourites are most likely the rest of the songs on the album).

And finally, here's another sample fragment to whet your appetite (or kill it?):

Which is your favorite ringtone? What's playing on your cell phone right now?

My ringtone currently is in a confused state. For 15 days in a month it is the title track of Aashiq Banaya Aapne and for the other 15 days it is Halka Halka Sa Nasha from Chocolate. I am torn apart between loyalties! If I play the ringtone of one movie, the other movie unit thinks I'm not loyal and vice versa!

Tell the readers why they should watch Chocolate.
We all love eating chocolate. Now you get to see Chocolate. It's mysterious. There is a lot more to it than what you can see and what we have done. To find out what is the mystery in Chocolate and what is Chocolate, you must go and see the film.

Incidentally the interview takes a leaf from Rediff (Movies)'s patent-pending salacious algorithm for marketing interviews by going with a title of No doubt, Emran the best kisser ever: Tanushree.

two things blog-worthy

The first is an ode to the greatness/divinity of Mithun Chakraborty that came contained in an innocuous email from JR. Includes a mention of the classic Gunda as well as some other less-sung movies along with notes on the pioneering aspects of a few. 'Nuff said.

Finally, after several releases that reflected great laudable care in design and implementation, Google comes up with something that I can be excited about in the long run (although how rewarding this would be versus the usual straight-to-Google searches is something that can be gauged over time). I give you Google Blog Search.

paapii priyadarshan paratalaa

The last time we saw what P was up to he was (predictably) planning some more remakes. As if he hadn't had enough. There he talked about his ambitious plans to remake Thalavattan, his remake of One flew over a cuckoo's nest. With Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya no less. The interview we had referenced in our last exploration of all things plagiariyadarshan included an update on this front. SRK was out (a sequence of bad timing and then a difference of creative[sic] opinion) and Salman was in. The film's Kyon Ki. A title that tells you nothing and might seem tantalising to some members of the audience, chiefly Salman lovers. Meanwhile, we can only continue to monitor Priyadarshan's Progress on the Path of Personal Plagiarism.

oops! I did it again[September 10, 2005] {the thread thus far}

So I just made yet another (déjà vu; yawn; all that) haul at the library. Small sources of random joy.

* Thanks to sufficient mention on Mount Helicon, I now have the task of reading Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and I thought it had something to do with Sherlock Holmes in a post-modern way)

* You Can Do the Math ("overcome your math phobia and make better financial decisions") seemed interesting enough as a pick off the shelf (and there's hopefully more trivia about the multitude of named capitalist demons haunting us in the US of A)

* The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki has been on the list for a while, and it helped to have it sitting on the shelf (waiting for me)

* Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden moved up the list in order to furnish preparations for Dansh (looking forward to Kay Kay Menon) and Siskiyaan (after installing the see-through impact-proof wall before the TV screen to facilitate a release of anger and frustration while still keeping the TV alive for future viewings) [more on why]

* And finally on the language front we have The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher (a casual flipping of pages seems to make me wish I dropped acid), The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations ("the complete opinionated guide for the careful speaker") by Charles Harrington Elster (which boasts a note of praise from William Safire: ek-STROR-di-ner-ee), and The New Well-Tempered Sentence ("a punctuation handbook for the innocent, the eager, and the doomed") by Karen Elizabeth Gordon (a book that mixes wordy poetic discussions on matters of usage as far as the suite of punctuation is concerned along with panels detailing the adventures of the cover girl Loona, a duke and duchess, and two people called Rosie and Nimrod).

WHY?

An IM from Sudarshan and an impassioned email from JR gave me enough warning before I hit the Rediff page announcing a casting update for Vishal Bhardwaj's forthcoming Mr. Mehta and Mrs. Singh. Notes about Aamir's casting were doing the rounds were doing the rounds. But the choice of Kareena Kapoor, despite offering a unique combination, fills me with dread as well. Not really for the choice, but more for the usual press-friendly Big B-style diplomatic statements applauding her acting[sic] abilities[really sic]. Had RGV announced such a casting decision, he would have probably let the magic of the announcement work its own charm. Makes me dread a transformation like Amol Palekar's with Paheli. JR wonders if Vishal's going the Sudhir Mishra way (ref: Chameli). I think the tradeoff there (in terms of statements lauding acting abilities [sic again]) was a bit more acceptable, since we got Kareena playing true-to-life.

Then again, perhaps Ms K has some latent abilities that both Mishra and Vishal saw a spark of. Who knows, to be fair, they might actually provide evidence that some star kids can act.

gas [that's US::gasoline] blues

If you wanna run cool
Yes if you wanna run cool, you got to run
On heavy, heavy fuel
-- [Heavy Fuel/Dire Straits]

So after Hurricane Katrina was done, the ill-fated situation of gasoline in the United States of America got worse. The disruption caused by the hurricane propelled rising gas prices to the $4-$5 mark. The South-East was most affected thanks to problems with incoming gas pipelines (let's not talk about Iraq now, shall we?) causing some gas stations to go dry, others to gouge their prices like bellies at McDonald's. All this causes panic. Inevitable, perhaps. And what about the frustration? The futility of being reminded yet again of the stupidity of car-fuelled (no pun intended) suburbia that has ramped up (to borrow an Americanism) over the years. The gasoline situation is just a hint of the inevitable. People are going to pay for contending that although public transportation is a good idea, they would prefer to spend $$ on gasoline, and sit burning it off waiting in dead lines on clogged expressways (while doing the needful to the environment in the process). People are going to pay for encouraging the development of pedestrian-unfriendly accessibility-challenged city[sic] development[sic] projects. People are going to pay for letting this complacent fatalistic attitude bubble up to their representatives in power, who continue to turn a blind eye to everything except personal gain through political means. Politicians will continue to make the best of the situation. The common person, however, will slide down the tube into an empty tank of gasoline. What country should we attack next to remedy this situation? How about Peru's Chincha Islands? There's a great supply of guano there.

a sample elsewhere: Atlanta Gas Insanity

Even the library system seems to have gone into panic mode ...

On an unrelated note: Could someone let me know if any of the bus services running in Sprawlopolis (aka Altanta) has an extension to the automatic all-in-one machine (swipe passes; submit cash, get ticket; get transfers) that gives you change in case you are unable to furnish it? Currently, the MARTA and CCT buses have machines that are more than willing to take your money, no questions asked. Which means the buses have a steady thin stream of accessory income. Of course, commuters are usually annoyed (or they just shrug and bear it), but who cares? This could be regarded as an incentive to purchase passes (which, I have to agree, are really really convenient if you use the buses for more than simple 1-leg clean trips). But sometimes, basic mathematics will tell you that a pass doesn't give you a decent profit margin for simple 1-leg trips.

home stale; greener abroad

Rediff presents a list of movies hitting the marquee back home (and in selected theatres here in the US -- chiefly in areas inundated with numbskulls ready with $$$ to throw away). We have Ramji Londonwaley (bad for iTrans), dead-weight adaptation of a KH-penned Tamil flick with strong Bawarchi vibes and guaranteed to lack people gifted with comic timing. I haven't had a chance to sample Vishal Bhardwaj's songs for the film. But I ain't jumping in anticipation of this flick. Madhavan should stick to the South. Then there's Pyaar Mein Twist, which, as is evident from the Rishi/Dimple pairing, is ready to hit the nostalgia jugular. If you need more reason to stay away, how about "this is the same guy who made Plan" ? Then there's the first of two forthcoming Tanushree Dutta [yet another pouts-equal-talent dame; surprise me!] releases bearing a clearly numerologically influenced moniker Ashiq Banaya Aapne. Finally, there's the low-key Kay Kay Menon/Sonali Kulkarni starrer Dansh, one of two adaptations/lifts of Death and the Maiden (the other one being the Neha Dhupia infestation called Siskiyaan). A Polanski lift competing against a fresh Polanski movie. Aah, the irony. Oh well, if only to watch another performance from Kay Kay Menon (and hopefully Sonali Kulkarni's painfully hard accent won't be in evidence in the dialogue ...).

On the other hand, their list of forthcoming US releases (trying hard to ignore the text by the garrulously inconsistent faux-pompous Raja Sen) is much more interesting. There's Cronenberg's A History of Violence. I've been waiting for this one, 'cause any Cronenberg makes for interesting viewing IMHO. Then there's the Nicolas Cage starrer Lord of War, which, although a likely candidate for wait-for-DVD, manages to offer some elements of interest. There's a new Roman Polanski film, Oliver Twist. It's an adaptation , the story's well-known, but it'll still be interesting to see Sir Ben Kingsley exercise his acting chops. And Edward "Watson" Hardwicke's on the roster too. There's a play adaptation in Proof with Gwyneth Paltrow reprising her role from the stage. I don't care much for Miss Paltry (refuse to accept that frail delicate veneer which passes off as acting -- see also: Aishwarya Rai). Yet, there are reasons to try and get a look at the original play's script, and watch the film to study the trade-offs made for adaptation. There's another Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration called Corpse Bride, which boasts some interesting technical details on the production front. Despite the strange vibes that prevented me from watching their last collaboration yet, I'm still willing to accept that they can still work the magic.

the random article summary HOWTO [from rediff.com]


1. Take a famous actor (usually to coincide with a new/forthcoming release starring said actor)

2. Ask the usual interesting and perceptive questions (when will you turn to direction? [if you want to, of course]; tell us about this new film of yours, which looks as fresh as used earbuds; tell us about your next film; how did you prepare for this role? [if at all])

3. Ask a random question and use it to derive (with a lot of help from the hyperbolic postulate and differential geometry) a eye-catching title for the interview.

4. Pepper interview with photographs that serve the context (if any)

Bingo! You get An actor who researches on the Net.

Meanwhile, Puneites can rejoice in ticklish glee at another expansion of the good old TLA PMT. 'Tis Pyaar Mein Twist featuring the numerologically challenged Sammir Dattani, old screen pair Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia (for all you nostalgia freaks abroad) and (reportedly) a soundtrack with an RDB hangover.

facts boo-boo

We've read about the objections to a reference in RGV's Sarkar to a gold medal-winning "shooter" hired as an assassin. {more and more}. Essentially, Shaikh Ahmad Mohammad Hasher Al Maktoum became UAE's national hero after he won for the country its first gold medal in the men's double trap shooting event at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. All this is commendable. But how do you take this and a stray reference in a work of fiction (limited to just words, it lasts less than 10 seconds -- and perhaps a few more in the later reference by Selvar Mani) and decide to get offended? We've had a long history of people choosing to get offended by things that were not intended as offensive. It's probably richer than the history of people who were offended by things that were meant to offend them. We've got people screaming It's outrageous. How can they depict a UAE gold medallist as a hitman? The movie should be scrapped immediately. Dude! Give yourself a break.

The latest salvo has a quote from Moraad Ali Khan, who won the double-trap team gold at the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002: "He (Al Maktoum) feels that this reference should immediately be removed so that it does not insult him and any other achievers who have excelled in the Olympics for their country." So they have more than one "gold medallist." I have to go watch RGV's film again, but I don't think the dialogues were particular about which real-life person they were referring to (and unconsciously offended). However, we have two people who might choose to be offended (and they've chosen the more famous of the two). Moreoever, the article gets its facts wrong about the reference:"In Sarkar, the character played by Amitabh Bachchan hires an Olympic gold medallist shooter from Dubai for contract killing." Dudes. Please watch the movie again, carefully.

The article concludes with another quote from Moraad: "Sheikh Ahmed was very direct on this issue. Although his name has not been mentioned in the movie, he took it as a direct insult as there is no other gold medallist in shooting in Dubai and the whole of UAE." Could someone tell me whom Moraad represented when he won his gold? We have two candidates here and we need to resolve this first, help them get their facts straight, and then give them a cold shower to focus on more important things.

music playing on the overhead speakers at Octane [august 27, 2005]

What is Octane? A coffee bar and lounge on Howell Mill Rd near Marietta St. {more} Great place. Lots of space. Minimalist in tone. No frills. No chain-and-franchise-inflicted cool. Free WiFi hotspot. My favourite beverage: a large mocha coolant.

And now on with some selections from the massively variegated shuffle:

* Bungalow Bill / The Beatles

* Drive / The Cars

* We Like the cars / Le Tigre (no idea; looked it up online)

* I Am the Walrus / The Beatles

* You got it / Roy Orbison

* All the day and all of the night / The Kinks (rumour has it that Jimmy Page made a contribution on the record; the Doors stole the riff for Hello, I love you)

* Boogie Shoes / KC and the Sunshine Band

* One Way or Another / Blondie

* Video killed the radio star / the Buggles (ko_ii yahaa.N aahaa naache naache)

Also looking forward to Eric Clapton's new album Back Home, a laidback upbeat effort that seems to be in the Reptile vein. {review, sample track/video}

a handful of old viewings

[august 06/07, 2005]

So I finally managed to catch Schindler's List. Flashback: when the film hit the theatres in Pune, I was in Kerala on vacation. This was a brief trip, but all I remember was that the film played in the cinema halls for exactly one week. Terrible, really, because, for all its worth, the film deserved more than that. The editing and cinematography (aah the wonderful quality of the black-and-white stock) are strongly in opposition to Spielberg's conventional style[sic] of filmmaking. After combining these two elements with the cross-fading dialogue across scenes, the film became much better than I thought it would be. Not for the narrative or the contents, really. More for the technique. Overall, I wouldn't pan it as much as I had (partly out of my fear for everything that Spielberg has made, except Duel and Jaws). What worried me about the film was its length and the treatment of Oskar Schindler. Clearly, this man was not a duudh-me.n-dhulaa saviour. He had his vices and his shortcomings and the film (to be fair) brings these to our attention. But the film seems to suffer from this desire not to allow us to dwell on the rough edges of this strange diamond. And all the atrocities inflicted on the Jews seem to relish in the lack of colour on the stock (what's with that random dose of colour for that little girl?). Eventually it all sank into the miasma I associate with Spielberg -- emotional pandering. The man cannot get rid of his fetish for mushy mawkish excess. Given Ben Kingsley's stellar turn as Itzhak Stern and Ralph Fiennes' interpretation of Amon Goeth, I'd have preferred a character study instead of a sweeping tale of redemption and rescue. I should watch The Pianist again and see if these observations might hold for that film as well -- the first time I saw it, I liked what I saw, but I fear that time may have altered my views on films in this genre.

This was somehow followed up with Be Cool (based on the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name), the sequel to Get Shorty (based on the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name). The film begins like a self-conscious sequel. So there are lots of digs at sequels and even an internal reference Get Leo to the first film. The mechanics involve record label owner Tommy Athens (James Woods) who is pitching himself to Chili (Travolta) as the subject of a movie. The problem with having Travolta doing his little jig in a movie that seems to enjoy referencing itself is that we've seen him do it before, and perhaps in a more subtle way (see Swordfish for that nice take on Hollywood and the semantics of Groundhog Day Dog Day Afternoon). This means the loss of value for nice moments like the one when Chili mentions how a film needs to only use the "F" word more than once in order to get an R rating. He then uses the "F" word - the only use of it in the film - and thus, this film gets a PG-13 rating. As soon as Tommy is bumped off shortly thereafter by a Russian hitman with a problematic wig, the film begins to go to sleep. The references (trying to be both fond and smart) are not interesting, and after a while the best graphic representation of the goings-on is a flat line. Dead. Time for the morgue.

After having sympathised with and laughed at friends who had been unfortunate victims (note: I do not even want to talk about people who decided to watch the movie on their own volition) of the Will Smith sick-chick-flick Hitch I ended up drowning in the soup myself. The ugly (IMO) Eva Mendes (see also: Training Day, Out of Time) joins the festivities where a lot of the dialogue seems written as a mainstream attempt to sound intellectual. I can't think of a real-world experience that can serve as a parallel for the experience of watching this movie. It's a mix of anguish and anxiety, the FUD of having to wait for something that your life depends on in a room that's completely ill-fashioned for the occupant, accompanied by sick feelings in your gut, sautéed with foul smells, your most hated cellphone ring-tones, idle party conversation, re-runs of Friends without the studio laughter (which means you have no hints on when to laugh), and a wet skunk in your lap. This damage deserves some serious remedial action. Or as Roger Ebert puts it, "it just doesn't seem entirely necessary."

Why is it that other less (or hardly) important films have made it through the VHS years successfully and have managed to get a reasonably decent version of themselves onto DVD while classics like Bimal Roy's last film as a director, Bandini seem doomed to death through slow degradation? Why can't the people who have the power and ability to create a record of India's great movies understand the cinematic vocabulary and grammar so evident in this film? It's not the obvious aspects like the performances and the songs. It's not the sometimes-tiresome comic interludes and the occasionally stilted lines of dialogue. It's about the sheer open-endedness of the story, the influences of expressionism, the wonderful use of chiaroscuro. Please. Someone save this film before it's too late.

As a coda, I'd like to offer my sympathies to anyone who missed watching Sarkar in the cinema hall. I don't do this because I'm getting a kick of superiority out of being able to watch it in a cinema hall. I do it after having seen a videotape sourced from the DVD recently. The audio-visual quality of the film that was so evident on the big screen has been sullied, processed with a mud filter and reduced to something that resembles a TV serial shot with a complete lack of understanding of lights and sound. That, IMHO, severely affects the impact of the film. Sure, it doesn't mark a new milestone in Indian cinema (although it has its place), but this butchered print doesn't give you any ammunition to argue for the movie's merits.

three films

Mujhse Shaadi Karogi should have been a warning for me as I sat down to watch Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya [Kyun kyo.n???]. How people continue to choose forms of life (aka "actors") who lack comic timing, or even basic kindergarten annual day-level acting smarts for comedies is something I have failed to comprehend. Priyadarshan (rant elsewhere) managed to convince a multitude of viewers that AxeHay Kumar and SwooKneel Sh*tty (among other termite-infested pieces of wood) could (a) act (b) be capable of comic timing. Kamal Haasan (despite the general lukewarm clamped quality of his Hindi releases) managed to score better by picking people, who had the gift and could deliver a crackling performance given a conducive milieu (Vijay Raaz, Saurabh Shukla). David Dhawan's rising star owed a lot to Govinda (and Kader Khan). But later he attempted to try and convince us that certifiable pieces of driftwood (and pioneers of the "socially acceptable menace to society" genre) like Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt were also capable of comedy. Loud were they. Very loud. And yet, the cash registers didn't stop ringing. Despite their inability to let go while indulging in the comic business (something Govinda managed with consummate ease), these planks managed to make great strides. Dhawan snagged an ebb and then returned with Mujhse Shaadi Karogi, which, despite being a welcome hit for him, was a so-so affair that you laughed at only perhaps out of pity. The emotion extends to this Sohail Khan co-production. Anything with Sohail Khan in it is usually a stink bomb (except, perhaps, for DMH). This one's no exception. There are lots of really really bad jokes, which basically require someone competent at comedy to deliver them. Arshad Warsi, Sushmita Sen, and the inconsistent Rajpal Yadav can't make it work though. They're relegated to the deadly competition of limited screen time and paltry dialogue. Instead the camera and film stock choose to focus on three items that belong in a furniture store: the aforementioned Salman Khan, the illustrious skunk Sohail Khan and the dumb airhead Katrina Kaif. Kaif is yet another classic example of the misguided soul, who has been chosen to be on screen solely because of her looks and not for any acting smarts (which she lacks). The problem with such souls is that they "believe" that they are on screen for their acting smarts (for other such lost souls see: Aishwarya Rai, Payal Rohatgi, Neha Dhupia, Isha Koppikar, Eesha Deol, Mallika Sherwat, Lara Dutta, Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor [yeah, yeah, I know, no looks either] usw.). Sorry. I couldn't take this movie. It wasn't good; and it wasn't bad enough to be funny.

Next up, Amol Palekar's commercial-fest Paheli. Beautiful production values. A simple tale told with a reasonably high coefficient of languidness to put anyone to sleep. There just didn't seem to be any spark of verve in the narrative. It was a folk tale without the magic. An interesting conundrum without the interesting elements. Songs that didn't impress me on the audio release and, in the film, only encourage the use of the FF button. And enough reason to try and find Mani Kaul's Duvidha.
[August 29, 2005] Some follow-up notes thanks to being privy to a marathon of viewings by friends (all still in parts; I can't bear to sit down and watch the whole flick). Noted husband/wife Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak-Shah as the voices of the puppets. Noted the potential of the puppet dance (seen during the previews -- also the reason I decided to stay away from the film) during the end credits -- IMHO it fails to live up to its full potential as a motific device of counterpoint. Noted the presence of Mohan Bhandari and Ravi Jhankal. Noted the obligatory Amitabh Bachchan appearance. Noted that the ominously egregious presence of Suniel Shetty. Noted that SRK the actor has potential, but this is not the movie to tap into it. Convinced that Amol Palekar has gone commercial. Didn't know fairy tales could be so boring.

Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle provided the required catharsis. I had caught fragments of this film *before* it hit the marquee here (see also: Hero). I haven't seen the much-mentioned twice-butchered Shaolin Soccer yet, but this movie rocks! Quit complaining with whines like "oh! this is clearly wire-work/CGI/impossible." You're missing the point of the film. Chow knows that you know this is fake. Sit back and grin and let your jaw drop. Everything here is overtly stylised and extremely wonderfully choreographed with breath-taking attention to detail. This is crazy mix of Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan, Quentin Tarantino, the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner cartoons, spiced with some more spoofing of The Matrix (no surprise to see the name of stunt choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, who also contributed to Kill Bill I and II). The most interesting thing for me in the film was the sense of dislocated time. There's so much that the frames imbue from the "present" and other referenced times (the Shaw Brothers films of the 60s and 70s). There's that lovely shot framing Chow and Sheng Yi Huang in a pose that echoes the poster of the Astaire/Rogers starrer from the 30s, Top Hat). And if you want more Top Hat references take a closer look at the Axe Gang. The exotic background score is another complex goulash of times and periods that also features Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance" and selections from Sarasate's "Zigeunerweisen". The cast roster features several icons that I am only marginally familiar with (time to get onto the martial arts wagon), but a little googling should assist the curious reader. The finesse and high production values make me hang my head in shame as I think about the state of Bollywood filmmakers on the other hand -- everyone else seems to be making more interesting mainstream cinema, but all the Bombay folks can do is import the motion-capture machines used in The Matrix and instead of doing something interesting with them, use them to produce a stupid 4-minute sequence in ... [in true Finnegans Wake tradition, let's go back to the beginning of this post]

scattered notes

on David Mamet's Make-Believe Town

Make-believe town is a collection of short pieces covering a wide range of topics that are dear to award-winning playwright David Mamet: his early days, everyday life, the arts (the theatre, moviemaking, acting), politics, relationships and Judaism. This seems contrary to the idea that the title would give you. Well, me. A title like make-believe town seems to convey the idea of Hollywood, California. The world of film. The world of make-believe (duh!). The title comes from one of the contained essays, by the way. Yet, the idea of make-believe is an undercurrent in all the essays.

While each essay showcases Mamet's love for and craft in the rhythm and cadences of words, Eight Kings is the only essay dedicated to some aspect of language. Herein he pens his observations on the lingo of craftsmen, carnival folk and people of different trades and walks of life. The theme: jargon provides a make-believe mechanism for identification in the trade that uses it.

The thematic significance in Gems from a Gambler's Bookshelf, which describes different aspects of Poker, is hinted at in the third paragraph. Poker defines a "circumscribed arena", a make-believe replica of the Game that goes on around us all the time, with its own "artificial constrictions".

There's the too-good-to-be-true angle in Sex Camp is about a New England college that did away with the traditional education process -- no grades; all the courses of study were designed by students with their advisors and pursued at their own speed.

In addressing different aspects of writing, Mamet devotes a few articles (Memoirs of Off Broadway, Greg Mosher, Delsomma's) to the milieu of and beyond the stage. The Diner is all about writing the good old-fashioned way (without the diversions of a computer) and great places to do so. The Northern Novel contends that the novel of the North-West as the Frontier represented the Great American Novel (while the novel of the East is a "second-class European experience"). Harsh. And he seems to prefer "the boredom of much of Sinclair Lewis to [...] the triviality of much of Henry James." Then there's the delightful little piece called The Screenplay, which serves up a couple of subtle lessons in the craft. It's Necessary for the Scene disputes the importance of the obligatory sex scene to a film. Girl Copy describes an odd vocation/occupation -- staring at "blues" (blue-and-grey 1st runs of to-be glorious colour spreads ... of naked women) and writing fantasies. Therein is a description of people writing letters to the editor using names and neighbourhoods (but making sure that there are more than three of the kind in order to avoid legal issues).

I didn't care much for the detail of Deer Hunting, perhaps because it has nothing to pique my interest. Homespun Fop talks about the conventions of dress and style. Between Men and Women is a general note about relationships.

The Recrudescence (lovely word that) of the Swimming Pool Joke shows us how a classic joke is attenuated by refurbished retelling that dispenses with any delicious ambiguity.

Cleansed by Death features a reference to the Hindu practice of "suttee" and notes that in the West "we clothe our primordial observances with nicety" and then everything segues into a diatribe about Nixon. There's a nice phrase there too ("the impotent dead").

Veiled attacks at hyperactive beliefs come from Demagoguery and Self-Help.

Art as a Helping Profession presents the strata of vocations and notes the trend of leisure that is now validated by society -- pseudo-art, as it were (video-art replaces filmmaking and installations supplant sculpture). It's about how the mob endorses the meaningless and how the audience "performs enjoyment rather than expressing it." There's a useful thought to take away from the article: Art is ennobling only as and to the extent that joy may ennoble.

And then we have a Semitic overdose. There are interesting ideas presented in a bag of vicious retorts: Minority Rights presents the subtle arguments to the "Church vs. State" debate while talking about Jewish kids in a Christian community; the holocaust and memories thereof get new perspectives in The Jew for Export (wherein Mamet also expresses his distaste for Schindler's List for its "emotional pornography" [there's more about Spielberg here]), In Every Generation, the essay that gives the collection its title and Memory.

The greatest thing about the collection regardless of what your preferred topics are are the language and Mamet's dexterity in plying words like a prestidigitator. If you like his movies and writing, there's more to relish in the subject matter of some of the essays. The overdose of all rants Jewish might get to some readers, but it's still a POV, and for that alone it's worth reading.

pieces...

A Nagesh Kukunoor interview (ignore the case of duplicated text please) with Screen about his forthcoming film Iqbal features the following bit of indirect association (my emphasis added):

Are you acquainted with the life of bodyline bowler Harold Larwood?
Yes, I am. Why?

One of Larwood's tricks was putting a coin on the track and using it as a target.
And Iqbal does it too! It's just a coincidence. I have seen the Bodyline series but have no recollection of that particular incident. Thanks for reminding me. Henceforth I can say in my interviews that Jardine was my inspiration.

give 'em power

Not long after the latest bit of spatchcocking from SRK, we have soon-to-be-Ambar Preity Zinta voicing her thoughts about her recent 'Operation Clean-up' in an Indiatimes Movies [Filmfare being the print avataar] interview. The interview is presented rather irritatingly (whaddya expect? these guys share the same intellect as the people responsible for hosting and posting to the Tabloid of India) as a set of pages with lots of ugly links all around and a small section in the upper-top dedicated to some ugly text and a large ogleworthy photograph of Ms Zinta (it's a different one on each page). Talk about screwing up your perception of the purpose of the article. Oh well. The gems (should you be patient enough to tear your eyes off that eye candy and wade through those teensy-weensy links at the bottom) are not as rewarding as SurReal Khan, but enough to revive the titters:

Its 2005, why are the other countries in the world not so dirty? Why is India so full of filth?

The importance of garbage removal is not to take it out of Bandra and put it in Deonar, in the dumping grounds. They will expire the grounds there, too. They need to set up a recycling factory, and if the government is incapable of handling the garbage they should privatize it. Look at the airline industry, at one time it was monopolized by one airline, today we have so many. It's so much better for the consumer; we have the best airlines in the world.

I think Mumbai is turning like America; psychos are coming out and killing people.

Our judicial system is so slow and weak that we actors have now become victims of yellow journalism. (incidentally, the photograph accompanying the fragment containing this gem features PZ in a dress that contains the colour mentioned!)

{via uma}. Could someone tell them to stop using Microsoft Word with the default language setting of "English (US)" to type and publish pages on an Indian film rag? It's "travelling" back home and not "traveling" (unless you've in-sourced the damn thing).

There's more Bombay/Mumbai idiocy from Raj Thackeray [should be Thakre?] with Bombay/Mumbai Godfather ... It's Deepak Balraj Vij. I mean, who cares?

Elsewhere, Kay Kay Menon gets some more newsarticle time thanks to the success of Sarkar. Yo! it's time to give Black Friday {music review} and Paanch some breathing space. Release them. NOW!

Elsewhere, a long post by yours truly about a Harlan Ellison compilation sees the light on Mount Helicon. And --- BlAm! --- it's already getting it's share of comment spam. Can it now!

empower this!

After the wayward wafts on the cigarette smoking ban, Shah Rukh Khan returns with a fresh blast of surreal, post-modern, priapic paragraphs as he writes in the Indian Express about making people wear a smile. This article merits multiple reads, each revealing more facets into a text so rich as to deserve a Joycean plaudit. A few excerpts (which fail to do justice to the source text):

As I see it, our grass is as green as anyone else's. That's why I won't ever do a Hollywood film. Rather I'd like to do a Hindi film that does the business of a Hollywood film

Be it malls in Gurgaon, irrigation in Punjab or computer advancement in Hyderabad: greatness is happening every day. We're unaware of it but we're definitely not worse than what we were 50 years ago.

Disinvestment and the removal of Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) show that all this is an educated process. And we aren't just following any monkey business. We're empowered in thought and that's crucial.

It's very simple: if I want to make a TV film for children, I will do something like PlayStation.

Make no mistake, I stand for empowerment of escapism

And while you're there, take a look at the comments, which provide another alternative reality that seems like home for verbiage like this [thanks to AD for pointing me to the Read comment[s] link down at the bottom past the Google ads)

Interviews that didn't measure up on the DaliDevice include an imaginatively titled blurb in the Indian Express called Watch this man (SRK and Tag Heuer) and Suderman's collection of fragments that made it to the Hindu. An excerpt from the latter:

Q: You've been working mostly with people who are your friends...

A: That's not true. Everyone asks me. But I've worked with first time director Nikhil Advani.

Q: That was written and produced by Karan Johar.

A: Farah had never directed a film. Even Karan and Adi were first time directors when I did their films.

Oh yeah! Hey, people who write HTML for The Indian Express and The Tabloid of India: Get some brains and smarts and stop using MSFT/WYSIWYG bloated editors and pasting text abundant in rich quotes and special characters that look like your dog's behind on a lot of browsers. Get off your lazy butt and give us some lightweight pages instead of treating us to XML Schema dumps from MSFT Word.

preoccupied with superheroes ... again

But first, a smaller entry in the chain of library haul reports: Fodder for linguistic glee with Kate Burridge's Blooming English (whaddya know? Yesterday was National Punctuation Day in the USA). Two chips off the old Bloch with Last Rites, Volume III in the trilogy called The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch (the publishers Underwood-Miller were also responsible for the 5-pack The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick) and Midnight Pleasures.

And now, dear reader, we come to Jonathan Lethem's new collection of stories Men and Cartoons [more elsewhere here-wise]. The book features some of the motifs I've seen in Lethem's other books (some directly as a reader, some vicariously while browsing articles and reviews). Super Goat Man makes no bones about Lethem's taste for comic books and comic book lore. It's an interesting bent to have for story-telling, and I hope to see more examples of such influenced work (perhaps less overt the next time?). The collection opens with a Carver/Hempel-esque (there might be more direct influences, but these notes are based on what I've read) story called The Vision. The story exploits both a mundane setting and the adoration of comic books in a better way than the more overt Super Goat Man. Access Fantasy mixes social satire (complete with a dystopian view of the future) and an amateur detective to good measure. What stayed with me were the parameters that defined the society: a combination of trailer parks, barriers, and in-your-face advertising with a vengeance. Then there's the O Henry-esque-but-not-quite domestic tale called The Spray, which mixes another element of fantasy into a slice-of-life tale of love and past infidelities. Vivian Relf is a story with an interesting premise: a man meets a woman at a party and both of them are sure that they have met before. Yet they haven't. Repeated encounters only serve to punctuate the man's life. Planet Big Zero tells the tale of two childhood friends who seem to have drifted apart as time went by: one of them is now a writer of a comic strip and the other doesn't seem to have done much with his life. It marks an ebb in the collection, but The Glasses (which begins with the delicious Rows of frames sat on glass shelves, clear lenses reflecting gray light from the Brooklyn avenue. Outside, rain fell. At the door a cardboard box waited for umbrellas.), a delightfully strange tale of a black customer who complains about smudges on his glasses to two duelling arguing opticians. The last story The National Anthem didn't do much for me. A disappointing coda to an otherwise interesting collection.

But wait, the most rewarding story is this oddball nugget called The Dystopianist, Thinking of his Rival, is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door. A very Borges-ian opening The Dystopianist destroyed the world again that morning, before making any phone calls or checking his mail, before even breakfast. He destroyed it by cabbages introduces us to the tale of the Dystopianist, who, in true comic book fashion, finds a rival in a childhood acquaintance, who is now the Dire Utopianist, who has rendered him and his work ineffectual; and then his visions begin to come true. It's a delight that should have closed the book; or perhaps move closer to the end. Such quibbles aside, this is another display of an intriguing imagination fuelled by science fiction, fantasy, and comics.

scraps

via JR's post: Kapeesh's post on the nominal undertones of Double Cross: Ek Dhokha. Come to think of it, Ketan Mehta's fat flick is called Mangal Pandey: The Rising and not the other way around. Without the colon, that might well have been a movie about (a) a zombie (b) the undead [see (a)] (c) medical problems [nahii.n laurena!] (d) ma.ngal as an apotheosis of a renewed attempt by the opressed class to rid themselves of the yoke of domination [oh wait, that's what the movie's about, isn't it?]


Bob Moog is no more.

Pool efforts on Internet Advertiser Wakeup Day [November 13] {courtesy: the kind folks at BugMeNot}

eye candy

Noticed while catching up on my Yahoo! Groups: They changed the CSS stylesheets so that the message body now shows up in what looks like Lucida Sans Typewriter (superseding the original choice of Courier New). It's a common font for code samples in technical books, and it looks nice (because it's new, it looks nicer than Courier New, but the magic of novelty will fade away soon). Viewers on Un*x boxes will probably still see Courier New text, unless they've been adventurous with font system configuration.

Would you call Mac OS X on Intel "Ten Little Endian?" (Michael Swaine in his Programming Paradigms column titled "Freon in the Styx" in Dr. Dobb's Journal September 2005)

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self (Cyril Connolly, quoted in Harlan Ellison's introduction to Slippage [déjà vu?])

[this post from memory]

So, I managed to overwrite the contents of this post and found out over a week later, but no online cache/archive seems to have a copy. All I know was that herein lay notes for a new link in the chain of library visit logs. I know I picked up Lethem's Men and Cartoons, Ellison's Angry Candy, American Psycho by Brett Eaton Ellis, thanks to a note from Sudarshan and David Morrell's First Blood. {For a moment, thanks to that faux pas, this post referenced itself. Something to cherish?}

hello ... goodbye

salaam namaste boasts a Wikipedia entry thanks to either the marketing department of YashRaj Films (what? net-savvy??) or some over-enthusiastic fan (dude/dudette! Spoiler warning??? are you frigging kidding me?). The only plus so far is that the title is already iTrans-friendly. It's another entry in the burgeoning genre of the chick flick of and for South Bombay/NRI yuppies. Lotsa oh-so-cool and blah. There's the legacy of Hum Tum (the foreign locales, the cool edge to the love dredge, the hate-and-uncertainty-turning-to-love, the old bits and pieces of the ages recycled) as well as Kal Ho Naa Ho (take this all to a foreign land, preferrably one that offers a friendly market). If you're keen on more story details, try these character sketches.

The soundtrack is the first offering. Obviously, the label's Yash Raj Music. Although the website notes that the price of the CD is $4.99, they also note that shipping costs are extra. If you are even thinking of purchasing a copy for yourself (or for your grandchildren to remember you by), this might still be a good place to grab it. Desi grocery stores are likely to hike the price up close to $10.

On with the mu[sic] itself. A trend to note in the arrangements is the collection of North Indian oye-dance-baby elements, since this is after a Yash Raj product. It has to appeal to the North belt. Vishal Shekhar are roped in this time to produce another peppy soundtrack (based on their recent work, that is). The obligatory club mixes exist (mastered by the usual culprits DJ Aqeel and Nikhil Chinnappa; and there's also Naved -- brother of Javed?). Backgroundsmen Salim and Sulaiman Merchant, who went live with mainstream music composition with Kaal are around for the arrangements. This, IMHO, is a big failing. The title song starts off with a strong hangover from those days. The samples also sound suspiciously like picks off a Kunal Kohli wishlist. Jaideep Sahni (who already has quite a few screenplay, dialogue and lyric credits under his belt) seems to have submitted all his lyrical drafts over email in one evening. Do not (I repeat Do not (I repeat Do not)) expect lyrical depth of any kind beyond the thickness of an earthworm's cuticle. Kunal Ganjawala and Vasundhara Das are the officially named voices on this mix of aahaa-chorus, Dhol samples, and enough lures for specious minds. The Shaan song that comes up next runs on a riff that sounds like a time-sampled leftover of the first song. And when he gets to the chorus (##my## dil goes ##mmm##), you have to go and find your copy of the Crash Test Dummies song. At least that one was entertaining. Gayatri Iyer does it by the numbers. Lyrical snippets include haa.N ##picture## me.n rotaa hai; haa.N khulle[sic]mu.Nh sotaa hai. And the patentable spoon-and-glass effect courtesy the late R D Burman and appropriated by Jatin-Lalit shows up. If you want something challenging to do while listening to these songs, try exercising your ability to complete each line. And just when you thought it was over, there's a scale change at the end, which doesn't quite work. Ugly. Go listen to one of those unending Rolling Stones songs instead. Aah, a whistle at the end against a soundscape that owes a lot to Vishal Bhardwaj.

Break time. Go find a tissue or a number to call back and try and get a CD exchange ... or kill that roach running around on the floor ...

Silly riff on the next number, with a deep voice intoning Cool. There's a mrida.ngam sample. And then after a perfunctory happy chorus Kunal Ganjawala steps up to the mike with the lyrical winner paune baarah baje dono.n ghar se chale ... ##what's goin' on##. Sunidhi Chauhan joins him on the quest for something to do. Quit already. Despite a nice job from both of them (although they've done all this a million times before), there ain't much about this dud (except a nice complementary progression on the turnaround to the chorus). Clap away near the end and hit FF.

Up next is the most bearable number on the album, and also the slowest. Sonu Nigam and Mahalaxmi Iyer share honours on a simple melody and mild arrangements and decent guitar fills with tuu jahaa.N mai.n vahaa.N.

The mixes begin. The "English Club Mix" of ##my## dil goes ##mmm## features Shaan and Carlisa Monteiro returning from Dance Masti Again's o merii soNii; Shaan lays the accent and style a bit too thick, but the arrangements and dance-o-drown ambience are more appropriate for the pointless lyrics (and also assist in drawing your attention away from them). There's the predictable "Dhol mix" of the already-laden-with-enough-Dhol title song. Same singers. Hardly much to remix, and yet they add something that I'm sure they'll call "subtle". Go listen to the title song of Kaal to get over the déjà vu. DJ Aqeel dispenses with the singers for the final track on this offering, an instrumental (sorry, have to break for some intense laughter) version [read: in addition to the existing samples and pounding beat, add a trippy sample to play the melody] of ##my## dil goes ##mmm##. This is the final stage in the normalisation of a song that began with badly balanced and egregiously obviously bad lyrics. Now that we've taken the lyrics out of the picture, we're left with a harmless piece of club ambience (that recurring chorus reminds me of the chorus on Wah Wah from No Quarter. This ladies and gentlemen, is when we must say Goodbye. You say yes, I say No. All that fun stuff.

Despite the lifts and the worse lyrics I preferred Chocolate and James. Predictably someone who didn't care much for James would find Salaam Namaste the greatest thing since a triple schezwan (read: "Spirited, fresh, young and trendy")

post crypt: That wiki page offers the translation of the title as Goodbye Greetings or Goodbye Hello. Am I the only one who seems to disagree with both? I doubt that pun-laden irony or stretching meanings was part of the agenda for the person posting that entry.

independence ... from what? [being a completely inappropriate title for what is to follow]


which isn't much besides me going gaga over a wonderful collection at Not Coming to a Theater Near You called Titles Designed by Saul Bass comprised of title sequences designed by Saul Bass (duh!) along with accompanying notes and comments {courtesy: Greencine Daily}

May I also proffer the most lucid and outrageously entertaining review of The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey (the semi-colon represents my addition to avoid ambiguity) aka Mangal Pandey: The Rising. {That's Arun Simha's blog BTW, for quizzing afficionados/Quiznet regulars/)

Elsewhere is a nice little feature on the unsung composers of RGV's Factory.

Oh yes, and Sholay turns 30 today; and Raakhee Gulzar notches up another year.

two bookstores on a saturday [august 13, 2005]

A visit to Borders and then to Barnes & Noble bridged by my first visit to a Chipotle. The first visit gave me a chance to sample Robert Plant's latest album Mighty Rearranger [more here], which features a rewarding song in 9/8 called Freedom Fries (Incidentally, Plant mentions India in an interview for NPR that was broadcast around the time this album was released). The shelves were dismal as far as stocking Harlan Ellison works was concerned. The second visit was worse -- only Strange Wine showed up. Weird. You would think that Ellison would have more presence in the stores. Oh well. Other music samplings included Mark Knopfler's One Take Radio Sessions.

the strange things that bring people here

Thanks to having installed a StatCounter tracker I've found out how many different combinations of Google searches can bring someone to this place. There are innocuous ones like "maqbool montage", "kumar sanu blog" (the horror! the horror!), "background frightening music of darna mana hai for download". Then there are the usual salacious searches like "c grade soft porn movies heroine", "peeya rai choudhuri naked", "diya mirza naked", and the impressive "archana puran singh's hot pictures". The usual leer-friendly stuff that's also topical: "which film actress played manoj bajpai's sister in pinjar" and "sandali sinha prostitution" (most probably in connection with this, except that I'm not sure if the news article got the part wrong about "Manoj Bajpai's sister" (Sandali Sinha played Sanjay Suri's sister; not sure if Bajpai's character's sister had too much screen time, if at all)). And we end with the bizarre "mohan lal gay" and "bappi lahiri destroyed in flood" (oh how dare you think such things!!).

the bibliophile's bash III

[and then there was II and then there was I]

Yours Truly was back at the library. Having deposited a few returns, YT proceeded to the shelves browsing. YT knew there were holds. But this was the second part of the visit: Impulse shopping, without the purchase. YT spots Joe Queenan's The Unkindest Cut, wherein he chronicles his attempts to write and make a movie (12 Steps To Death) for less than $7000. Since YT has enjoyed reading other Queenan works. The cynical take on populist mush and pandering tripe has been a comfort on many an occasion.
YT then spots the golden pick of the evening. Innocently sitting on the shelf above is Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around The World by Peter Tombs. YT knows that Peter Tombs is also behind the site of the same name. What makes this wonderfully delightfully catalogue of bizarre movies is the set of two chapters dedicated to Bollywood (with a special emphasis on the Ramsay/Bhakri horrors that YT has always relished).

This book also features the Dariya Dil LP cover (take a look to your right) from Niall Richardson's LP cover collection (the actual page for the record is here) that made it to a BoingBoing post as well. Needless to say, YT is interested in the soundtrack.

YT now performs some complicated mental computations involving addition and subtraction and estimates that YT will not tip the scales on the maximum number of items one may have issued out from the library. YT proceeds to the checkout counter. The weary lady smiles knowingly (unless YT is imagining it). She has trucked stuff off the holds for YT; it's unlikely that someone would forget that.

After scanning the card, she informs YT that there are 8 holds waiting. YT has to perform some quick calculations, but shock at the upward blip in the number between the last time YT checked the list online and now results in a clerical error. YT is prepared to sacrifice a book.

YT's eyes now follow the lady to the holds shelf. YT realizes how eerie it is to see your name staring back at you. Several times. Hand-written. Man! That book is huge. Turns out to be one of several Harlan Ellison books that have arrived. It's called Medea: Ellison's world (probably owes its name to Medea), a document of the process of creation of Sci-Fi: from world to character-driven tales. Should prove interesting. Next up is a collection titled Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation in Science Fiction. Nice cover. Then there's Edgeworks I. Although the reports on content have been slightly negative, there's another entertaining bogus author bio, and it's the packaging that makes having a good old printed book worth it.
The same applies to Slippage. Aside from a lot of typographical excursions (placement of phrases and words in keeping with the title), there's also the mass-market appearance of the long short story (yeah you read that right) Mefisto in Onyx, which YT just finished and liked for the theme, and the language, as well as the cover art and introduction by Frank Miller (words and phrases to remember: "jaunting into someone's landscape" and "shrike").

With enough Ellison to drool over for the next few weeks, YT now moves to the next few items. There's Nabokov's postmodern undersung Pale Fire, which ends up on the list thanks to a vigorous month-long recommendation from Sudarshan, who also posted a review on Mount Helicon.

And finally, since YT is a film buff, there's Sam Peckinpah's West : new perspectives.

A splendid time is guaranteed for YT.