mission dew

[dedicated to Sudarshan for making sure I didn't miss this]

Remember a Rajiv Rai dud called Asambhav: The Impossible? Lifting Loser Apoorva Lakhia (Ek Ajnabee, Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost) has decided to follow up on the shocking success of Shootout At Lokhandwala (In Which Big B Gives It Those Ones) with what must be a tribute to the inanity of Rai's cinematic dreck. The flick's called Mission Istanbul and is an example of Waiting List Bollycool.

How much can a motley crew comprising Vivek "I knocked off the unlucky vowel" Oberoi, Zayed "Is it Mirinda or Melinda" Khan and Suniel "Too bad to wait tables" Shetty promise? If the trailer's offered as People's Exhibit A, lots. After all, a film that integrates the slogan (डर के आगे जीत है) of a soft drink whose marketing campaign exploited extreme sports and video games can't be that bad, can it? After a relatively quiet 2007, Anu Malik has returned with nothing exciting so far (Anamika), but this title track might buy back some of the lost glory of nashaa nashaa (Aan: Men At Work). Or perhaps, as the title of the TV show and movie franchise that share the initials of this movie suggest, this might not be his day.

Consider now, the lyrics of the title track (imagining the energy of the utterances is left as an exercise to the listener/reader):

it's impossible
bull! it's possible

it's impossible
bull! it's possible

it's impossible
bull! it's possible

it's impossible

BULLSH*T!

miishaan miishaan miishaan
istaa.nbuul

miishaan miishaan miishaan
can you handle it?

ye miishaan nehii.n aasaa.N
ye miishaan iistaanabuul

jaayegii isame.n to jaa.N
ye mishaan istaa.nbul

Don't you just love that play on (istan)bul?

The video features the four leading men beefed up from hours in the gym oozing machismo to back the rocksy pump-it-up throb of the track, dressed in black vests and black pants; they switch between looking like pimps feeling up foreign lissome lassies clad in uniform (or unclad in black lingerie) and swinging in the rain in the aforementioned black outfits (along with, needless to say, more phaarin phlesh).

Lest we forget what the film is really about: Zayed Khan plays a promising journalist, Suniel Shetty, the head of a Turkish news channel, Vivek Oberoi, a Turkish commando and Shabbir Ahluwahlia ... oh! who cares.

This transgressive mix of Zalman King, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Snoop Dogg and Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS would've been promising had the rest of the film promised any of the sleaze that the trailer tantalisingly offered. Alas, this is but one more in the long line of films that rely on such tropes that toss all character development, plot and sanity into the nearest exhaust fan to lure Bollywood's faithful ticket-buying audience that is only out for a good time. One wonders why they bother with story or even the ruse of substance. Here's hoping that Apoorva Lakhia draws inspiration from Steven Seagal and Krista Allen and breaks new ground in Bollywood filmmaking.

update [june 11, 2008]: The complete song (written and sung by Hamza Faruqui -- last heard on the soundtrack of Super Star -- and composed by Chirantan Bhatt) features another (rare) example of the F-word on a Bollywood soundtrack: Now it's getting deep with all the secrets that I keep, I'm outta luck ... what the f**k! (a line repeated with carefully placed engineering just so that you don't miss it). The last time I found that colourful kernel of profanity on a song was in Rock Dancer (music by Bappi Lahiri) where Bali Brahmabhatt got to rap I'm like Mickey Mouse / I've come to take down the house / I'm like Donald Duck / I don't give a f**k (Kamal Sadanah does the on-screen honours for the song). Looks like this film's all set to make a mark for itself with one of the oldest tricks in the book -- baiting controversy. Is anyone from the Sena or the BJP tuning in to these songs?

obits: the victorious, the saint and the financier

The world lost Vijay Tendulkar on Monday, May 19, 2008. There are notes of tribute from Santosh Ayachit (director of the documentary Aankahi Tendulkar), Amol Palekar and Ramu Ramanathan over at PFC.

Sydney Pollack succumbed to cancer on Monday, May 27, 2008. David Hudson's page at GreenCine Daily collects the notes and tributes.

Producer/financier Jhamu Sughand passed away on Monday, May 27, 2008. The name that accompanied movies as diverse as Rangeela, Lagaan, 1947/Earth, Kalpurush and Black Friday was also associated with Johnny Gaddaar (which was eventually taken up by Adlabs), Tanvir Ahmed's forthcoming Ada, Abbas Tyrewala's forthcoming directorial début Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na (now taken up under Aamir Khan's producing umbrella) and Anurag Kashyap's soon-to-be-finished Gulaal. Anurag Kashyap pays eloquent tribute as do Abbas Tyrewala, the Big B, Sriram Raghavan and Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

O Guru where is thy point?

raahii huu.N mai.n kahaa.N merii ma.nzil (Bappi Lahiri, Wanted, 1984)

This should probably be the theme for Mani Ratnam after the confused cinematic mess that is Guru. Or perhaps for the film as it seems to search for a reason for its existence. This disguised take on the life of is a horrifyingly bad film. Beautiful frames laid out in trains do not a good film make (Black was the colour of Death By Picture Postcards). Trying to stay optimistic about the effort out of sheer respect for the filmmaker's ouevre is Sisyphean ordeal when your confronted with footage that boasts sheen and gloss and neither the beating of a heart nor the drive of a narrative.

The descent begins with a pointless item number (another first for Mani saar) in Turkey. We then swing to a village in India, where Mani Ratnam begins to recycle samples from his past. Roja's chinna chinna aasai gets the remix treatment and is transformed into a vigorous aerobics routine featuring Bollywood's emaciated answer to Jane Fonda, Ms. Aishwarya Rai-now-Bachchan (does one dare to hazard a guess that her presence here harks back to Iruvar?). The fingers are already itching to hit the FF button. One's patience, however, gets no rewards. When tere binaa shows up, it does with an anachronistic incongruous, rude jolt that puts paid to most of the respect you had for the director. Does one need to mention that it owes a lot to kaNNaalane in Bombay? Bappi Lahiri's ek lo ek muft works well as long as you don't see it on screen. It was strange enough when he sang for Daddy B in Geraftaar, but it's surreal to see his warbling come from Sonny B (apparently, Sonny was the original choice to sing this song; go figure).

Sub-plots (the Shyam/Meenakshi tale) and interesting characters (Mithun's Manik Dasgupta) get short shrift as Bollywood's leading couple get to hog the frame and flail about; she flubs her accent (who even bothers to notice such silly details as accent and being in character anyway?) and relies on those sad looks (the late Mukesh would've been pleased to find such visual representation for his sadly happy and happily sad songs); he channels his father (the confrontation with Shyam Saxena just before he realises that Shyam has married Meenakshi is straight out of Agneepath) and even gets to filch from Kamal Haasan's performance and looks in Nayagan.

Perhaps the intent was be from the point of view of the protagonist and thus cast all crusaders and do-gooders in a bad light. This still doesn't explain the motivation and angst of Manik Dasgupta, despite all the effort that Mithun puts in. It's a shame to see the actor get a part to sink his teeth in, only to have quite a few of scenes land up on the cutting floor, leaving him with a part that makes his B-movie work look more rewarding. The climactic court room goings-on not only find Mani Ratnam unable to define the intent of his narrative but also find him paying his respects to the numerous bad court room scenes that litter the Bollywood canon.

I thought of Citizen Kane quite a few times as I endured this revolting reelfest and that doesn't bode well at all for this film. Cinematic greatness aside, had Mani Ratnam even attempted to imbue his narrative with half the substance of the Orson Welles classic, he'd have ended up with a more bearable film. He's lost almost all the footing he'd gained with Yuva.

paagal paagal tuune mujhe kar diyaa as Bappi sang in that other Guru, which starred Mithun in the title role and had more to offer in its own space than this shuffle of a dyspeptic deck does in its slot. I wish I could scream Show me the Mani, but Baradwaj already snagged that for the title of his kinder more eloquent take on the film.

notes on State and Main

Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment

State and Main is loaded with Mamet-speak and populated with familiars from the Mamet gang (William H. Macy, Ricky Jay, Rebecca Pidgeon). Banished from New Hampshire, a filmmaking crew ends up in Waterford, Vermont and has to come to terms with its own as well as the residents of this small town. Offering perfect irony to all this is the fact that not one bit of this film was made in Waterford, Vermont. I was reminded of Truffaut's classic exposé on and ode to filmmaking La Nuit Américaine; Truffaut's take was affectionate and enlightening, while Mamet's first comedy is laced with his smart, lethal, clipped dialogue embellished with his poetic blend of profanity (English and Yiddish). Truffaut's film was loaded with detail on the filmmaking process; aside from the opening credits (intercut with footage from film reel transition) bounding away in tandem with Theodore Shapiro's score, Mamet's film chooses to focus on the people and what they say and do. We see the pains of the crew and hear about the mechanics of their work, but, it's only in the closing scene that we get down to the business of making the film (The Old Mill).

If we stripped the film of its set pieces and stayed just with the people, we'd end up with something like Noises Off. But then Mamet's a playright, so this isn't very surprising.

There's an occasional shard of uncanny prescience in Mamet's work: Wag The Dog, which he co-wrote, prefigured the Clinton sex scandal. In State and Main, there's an exchange between Joe White (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Ann Black (Rebecca Pidgeon):

Joseph Turner White: You believe that?
Ann Black: I do if you do.
Joseph Turner White: But it's absurd.
Ann Black: So is our electoral process. But we still vote.

The film was released in 2000 (filming was completed in 1999), the year when the electoral college system floundered.

There's a crucial detail in the film that seems like a gaffe. Walt Price (William H. Macy) receives an invitation to a dinner at the Mayor's residence on Tuesday the 12th. He jots this down on his calendar on the whiteboard on his office using a red marker. His assistant accidentally wipes off most of the appointment and Walt asks her to restore it. She cleans out the leftover scribble and writes the appointment in the same cell using a green marker. Given the way this sequence is shot (the camera draws our attention to this appointment), we can expect that Walt will miss his appointment, because the date is wrong. Yet, so far, the date is correct. Later in the film, as the moment draws nigh, we see that the appointment in green has shifted into the cell for Wednesday the 13th and -- lo and behold! -- we find a shadow of the original appointment in the cell for Tuesday the 13th in red. It's conceivable that the assistant was prone to accidentally erase the appointment frequently and ended up eventually writing it in the wrong cell. Since the handwriting in the two cells in the final shot look alike (and neither looks like Walt's handwriting), this explanation holds water.

strange things to say and genesis

Sagar Ballary's been riding the carpet of success ever since Bheja Fry became a hit at the box office. The niggling detail that it's based quite generously on and without attribution to Francis Veber's play keeps coming up in interviews and the answers aren't always pleasant.

Why was Bheja Fry the scene by scene copy of a French film?

It was not. There are minor changes that a common man will not notice.

This is the common man who had no small part to play in the success of the film.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, thanks to a pointer from Aditya, we find out more about the birth of the Nose.

old notes on Grindhouse

It's been over a year since the special experience of a double bill that Rodriguez/Tarantino served up to a mainstream audience while paying their dues to a genre that was anything but mainstream. The risk is laudable, but the Weinsteins have been funding QT's fanboy obsession with counter-cultural pop trash with abandon. There's a lot to savour, but the final product is not without elements that challenge one's patience.
The first film is the work of a craftsman and the second that of an artist; with a craftsman you get a quality product, but little to nothing of the texture of the incomplete or the unfinished or the rough that you can get from an artist; QT's the critical darling and it didn't take much to predict that Death Proof would get more attention and mileage than Planet Terror (among friends, I've found few that even remembered the title of Rodriguez's film -- some even -- shudder!! -- transferred the name of the package to it). Saying that Death Proof is packed with a lot of interesting dialogue, characters, a wonderful mix-tape of a soundtrack and a clever reworking of genre elements (a slasher flick with a car as the weapon) is tantamount to saying that QT delivers his bag of familiar tropes. Although there's a sense of Jackie Brown in the flourishes of dialogue, Death Proof serves as a showcase of the excess a filmmaker can wallow in as he indulges in his gift -- QT has a ear and pen for dialogue; the racist cussing that peppered True Romance and Pulp Fiction is superseded by a rich swathe of pop cultural references and tributes to genre pieces. The problem seems to have germinated in the second Kill Bill film. The comical blood baths and violence that fuelled the roller coaster of the first edition were replaced in a film that spent its time cooling down to a talky finale. The shadow of the first may have saved the series, but there's nothing to cushion the drop here. All the glee in his imitations and homages takes a severe beating when we are presented with the ladies riffing around the table in a single revolving shot lasting over 8 minutes. That breathtaking flourish of bravura damages the intent of the package.

While Rodriguez came out tops with a faithful reworking of splatter and zombie flicks, QT cheated and took off from his assignment on a creative flight that sought another kind of audience. Although Miramax denied home theatre viewers the chance to experience the 191 minute monster by issuing them separately on DVD, the brothers Weinstein may have offered each film its own space. One hopes that it does not diminish the power and success of Planet Terror, however -- with that lovely motif (Rodriguez echoes John Carpenter as he does his own score yet again), the ingenious machine-gun-leg device, the delcious bloody exploding goop, Naveen Andrews lending glee and British relish to his lines, the artificial aging of the film and the cameos truly deserve their due.

another vishal flick in the works: kamine

Is it Kamine or is it Kaminay? Shahid Kapur has reportedly been signed on by Vishal B for this film to play a double role. Priyanka Chopra's been roped in for this "romantic musical," that she describes as "being more of a romantic-comedy [that] also has lots of action." Shooting begins in August 2008. As the days go by, one awaits more tidbits on what might well be Vishal's first film that has nothing to do either with children or the Bard.

[Cross-posted on the Vishal Bhardwaj blog]

telugu movie name templates

{thanks to S for the seed that this post sprouted from}

It all started with Rowdy Alludu. The title stuck in my head from the moment I heard about the film boasting a cast of Chiranjeevi (in a double role!), Shobhana and the late Divya Bharati and the tunes of Bappi Lahiri (oh yeah; he's got his paws in Telugu cinema). I then noticed a pattern -- there were other movies that had these words in their titles; mischief and sons-in-law are apparently a big deal in Tollywood; just as love is in Kollywood -- all those kaadal movies. After the holy union of these two words, we now had some more templates: Rowdy W, X Rowdy, Y Alludu and Alluda Z (the conjugation breaks the symmetry). W has taken values like Jamindar, Inspector and MLA; X has been more lucrative with values like State, Veedhi, Political and Assembly; Y's been a cash cow too with values like Naa, Allari, Chinna, America and Mechanic; Z's got just one hit, apparently with Majaka (a controversial situational comedy featuring a man, his wife, his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law). It's time we shuffled the options and got some interesting titles (W and Y, for example).

The kaadal counterpart is Prema, which yields its own rich pot.

Victory Venkatesh had special preference for titles that beckoned you; his knapsack contained Prematho Raa, Jayam Manade Raa, Kalisundam Raa and Preminchukondam Raa.

For our coda, we must risk offending some of you, dear readers, as well also note a variant of the welcoming title that uses a word that in Telugu means "please come in," but is unfortunately a homophone of a coarse piece of Hindi slang; the English synonym has been exploited for humour both in film and in puns. Such unfortunate coincidences can also make things tricky for this gentleman. It might also be an interesting addition to the options for W.

rises and correlations

The US economy is sagging and the price of gasoline has nudged the $4-for-a-gallon mark (and even passed it by in some cases). A rise in the use of public transit (link courtesy: Amogh) is the kind of thing you'd read about. Paramnesia is justified -- when the prices had nudged the $3 mark in an economy that wasn't doing so badly, similar articles had made their way to readers. You have to discount transit-friendly places like New York City and Boston and think of sprawls like Atlanta, where the commute still sucks, where MARTA has failed to be the saviour to consolidate transit initiatives across counties (and CCT continues to have no service on Sundays) and doesn't look like it doesn't want to shake off the "goes from nowhere to nowhere" label. The Atlanta regional transit plan didn't get much of a boost when SR 845 failed to find support for funding. The crusaders have moved on. Yet another survey indicates that residents were warm to the idea of the 1 percent tax. But the man who had boarded the train to solicit votes opposed the idea, arguing that a new sales tax would be unwise in a slowing economy and would unfairly burden rural residents who shop in urban areas. In addition, he said it would be a mistake to pump more money into a state Department of Transportation in need of a major overhaul.

Meanwhile, a ranting rider on the train isn't helping MARTA's image at all [uncensored video here].

update [May 18, 2008]: Soulja Girl has been arrested.

Bollycool: Bollywood's new weapon

Of late, a strange phenomenon has been steadily creeping into the Bollysphere and it threatens to define a new genre (or sub-genre, if you will) of Bollywood filmmaking. It's a composite of genres (the multi-starrer, for one) and familiar tropes blended with post-modernism (or post-post-modernism, if you will) -- song and dance routines become self-conscious and auto-referential, emotional sequences get their gravitas from decades of dross, napkin fodder and cheap dense vacuous blather. What we have now is an army of roustabouts (some seasoned, others green) rustling up recrement (some call it a script others call it vapourware) fuelled by an imagination tempered by a stack of foreign DVDs and a creative imagination as dead as the object of a necromaniac's amorous attentions. The recipe, when broken down into the essentials is simple: take a few several stars (with reasonably high guarantees of box office draw, competent to deadly sigh and oomph factors boosted by luscious vital statistics and Bowflex blandishments), convince the gents to gambol in muscular glee, convince one or more of the ladies to experiment with a state of undress that challenges the line between PG and PG-13, elicit the services of one of the many successful plagiarising paladins of song and swing to conjure booty-friendly poetic overtures to familiar objects of attention as well as to a canon of song and dance numbers over the ages and capture all the goings-on on film. What we get as a result of all this, are reels of "entertainment" laced with eye candy (PG-13 only, we are Indians saar) promising more (yeah right! when the GDP hits the ceiling and pigs truly fly) and reels and reels of mind-numbing buffoonery.

Not-so-recent "classics" in this mould include Dhoom (in which Esha Deol stepped out of the gym and into a swimsuit) and its sequel Dhoom 2 (featuring basketball, cricket references, the missing link named Aditya Chopra, Bipasha Basu in a double role -- playing semi-clad lassies in different states of undress to titillate different areas of the male imagination and Aishwarya Rai attempting to go down the road of ephemeral epidermal embellishments while trying to look like a character out of Masters Of The Universe).

A fresh piping hot sample is Abbas-Mustan's Race that features combinatorial coitus, multi-layered betrayal, eye candy (duh!) -- 3 women (all three known for being the cynosure of drooling gents than for making Lee Strasberg proud). Only a patient viewing will reveal more gems therein.

Vijay Krishna Acharya, the pensmith behind the two D-busters described above, made his directorial début with Tashan, a potential candidate for selection, although there is but one lassie and she has gone to great lengths to be able to shimmy into a two-piece and cavort about hoping that no one notices that she could do naught to fix the unyielding horror of her visage. Moreover, there seem to be hints that this film might have been more of a failed attempt at cinemeta-cinema (something that Shaad Ali pulled off well with Jhoom Barabar Jhoom) than at Bollycool. As always, only a screening will offer more insight. Meanwhile, one awaits the next blitz of the muscular and the mammiferous, the strong and the steatomammate, the brawn and the booty. Long live Bollycool.

Woo hoo! This post got a nod at DesiPundit.

return of the verbose movie title

A recent release marking the directorial début of Raj Kumar Santoshi's assistant Rajaatesh Nayar boasts a title that not only presents an example of the Hindi:English Bollywood movie naming scheme but also offers cud for the cow to chew: Sirf: Life Looks Greener On The Other Side. It's a sad moniker to use, if one values one's work of art; it's perfect, if one's taking a shot at the Bollytrash big time. Honestly ... how many people would take titles like Fun ... Can Be Dangerous Sometimes or Haseena: Smart, Sexy, Dangerous or Chetna: The Excitement?

the unchanging times: mv eth0

The Tabloid Of India needs editors and better reporters. Then again, the dulcifluous detritus that the online portal spews out might represent another inevitable stage in the devolution of the once-heralded daily. Case in point: a recent article on the Chinese cyber-war on India. We start with There are three main weapons in use against Indian networks — BOTS, key loggers and mapping of networks. This is all fine and dandy until you stumble at BOTS. What's BOTS? Bovine Occipital Technical Stream? Bellicose Ornamental Triangulation System? Bring On The Shinto? BOTS up Doc? A question of inappropriate punctuation, since the hapless entity is a bot. But it gets worse, dear reader, when the author of this piece decides to define thie BOT:

A BOT is a parasite program embedded in a network, which hijacks the network and makes other computers act according to its wishes, which, in turn, are controlled by "external" forces.

Why does this sound so similar to Newton's First Law of Motion?

Trust people to generalise so egregiously.

The crime of capitalisation rears its ugly head once again with BOTNETS. This is followed by another claim of motion:

Simply put, the danger is that at the appointed time, these "external" controllers of BOTNETS will command the networks, through the zombies, to move them at will.

Network movement through remote control. A fascinating idea. Victor Frankenstein would be proud; George Romero might find this a lucrative idea for another edition in his Dead canon (unless some Italian filmmaker's already beaten him -- and the author of this TOI piece -- to it).

We pause to contemplate of those little things that don't matter much anymore -- editorial lapses:

Key loggers is software that scans computers and their processes and data the moment you hit a key on the keyboard.

The article continues to betray its origins in cut-up theory by refusing to tell us what MEA stands for (not the Museum of European Art, puTTan, but the Ministry of External Affairs) and indulging in another fling of poetic poop: MEA has a three-layered system of computer and network usage — only the most open communication is sent on something called "e-grams". I have no idea what an e-gram is. Electronic weights? A poor cousin to that late distiller? Only MEA and the author of this piece have the answer. Or maybe I should ask the Chinese.

ehsaan noorani on youtube

Ehsaan Noorani, the man responsible for those delicious riffs adorning the best of the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy songs, has been extremely generous to the community; he's been posting responses and chords on Indian Guitar Tabs for a while now. He's also been moderating a forum dedicated to interest in the work of this composer trio. As if all this wasn't enough, he's now got a channel on YouTube. There's only a handful of clips up there, but these include riffs from a couple of the trio's songs (bol na halake halake, rock 'n' roll soNiye) but also a few samples of the man showing off his chops (those in attendance for any of their concerts are probably not too surprised).

the heart was a neighbour but it was the robe after all

A little less than two years ago, I happened to catch a recording of this TV programme from the day that R. D. Burman (aka Pancham) passed away. A point came when Gulzar spoke about his late friend. The feature cut to a rehearsal with Pancham on the harmonium, Asha to his right with a lyrics sheet, and Gulzar to his left. Pancham was guiding Asha along the tune for a couple of lines. I could make out a few fragments (jab bhii aa.Nkhon, aa.Nsuu bhar, log kuchh). A Google search yielded a song from Visaal, the 2001 collaboration between Gulzar and Ghulam Ali, jab bhii aa.Nkho.n me.n. For the Pancham version, the first two lines seemed to have been:

jab bhii aa.Nkho.n me.n aa.Nsuu bhar aaye
log kuchh Duubate nazar aaye

Reuse of lyrics isn't uncommon: Javed Akhtar reused a song (mai.n aur merii aawaaragii) from Duniya (1984) in Sangam, his 1996 collaboration with the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Gulzar himself visited shaam se aa.Nkh me.n) several times (something that deserves a post of its own) including the famous collaboration with Pancham and Asha, Dil Padosi Hai.

Dil Padosi Hai was my first guess as I wondered what album the three might have been working on. Or perhaps (and the eyes of the Pancham fan within widened) it was another collaboration that never came to fruition. An email went out soliciting more insight. The timing was bad and there were no responses.

A year later, another email went out to more perceived fonts of information. The well of luck was dry on arrival.

In February 2008, the video fragment showed up on Youtube and a post went out on the Pancham Yahoo! Group. Hopes were rekindled and this time around luck didn't strike out. Pavan Jha, who owns and maintains the Gulzar portal, managed to dig up more: it turns out that the song was meant for Libaas. This interesting note comes shortly after rumours of that film finally making it out of the cans. Would the Lata-dominated soundtrack (with space for a duet each with Suresh Wadkar and the late music director himself) have featured just this sole Asha song or, perhaps, was the soundtrack destined, at some early stage in the development of the project, to be, as Ijaazat was, another solo Asha vehicle? The wordsmith must know more. One awaits more insight. Meanwhile, it's time to discover the sa.ngiit of the sultan of song yet again. ta ra ta ra ta ra ta ra ...

update [May 23, 2008]: The smoke clears further. A recent post on the Pancham Yahoo! Group offers more chocolate flakes on this cake, courtesy Gulzar himself. Apparently, during a recording session for Libaas, the "camera people" had arrived to shoot RDB composing a song. To humour them, the late great man asked the big G for a line and he obliged. A composition was born and he began guiding Asha along the melody. This means that the tune was never really for this film or for any another planned non-film collaboration. Now, who's got the rest of that footage?

film festival of india at the high museum in atlanta: the 2008 edition

The lineup for the 2008 edition of the Film Festival Of India at the High Museum in Atlanta is up. Brownie points are due for not featuring Bollytrash. The festival opens with Buddhadeb Dasgupta's latest film Ami, Yasin Ar Amar Madhubala/The Voyeurs; this one, just as his last film Kalpurush (which snagged the National Award for Best Film, and also figured in the High's lineup for 2006) features Sameera Reddy. It can't really compete with the range of the recently concluded Indian Film Festival Of Los Angeles (IFFLA) or even boast entries like Brahmanand Singh's documentary Pancham Unmixed: An Unending Journey (which had its world premiere at IFFLA) or something like Mumbai Cutting, but comparisons would be quite unfair; LA is LA, Atlanta is Atlanta and it'll be a long while before the Sprawl of the South generates as much interest in such a film festival.

pritam's blessing

On March 18, 2008, Barack Obama spoke at the Constitution Centre in Philadelphia, PA. Three days later, the Abbas-Mustan thriller Race hit the marquee. The connection? Race is on my mind.

LipLock Lallu returns

The cheiloproclitic serial kisser returns to scorch the screen with his notorious exosculation in Jannat. The plappering recipient of the amorous attentions of the crinigerous cretin is Sonal Chauhan who was reportedly the first Indian winner of the Miss Tourism International title (she claims to have been crowned Miss India in 2005, although the only title she actually snagged was Miss Provogue 8888). The kissee has this to say about the smoocheroo:

He was not forced to kiss me. The scene required it. It was not hot and steamy. I was not comfortable kissing; neither was Emraan. But the scene demanded it.

Meanwhile, the kisser waxes eloquent as he addresses the issue yet again:

You said you were forced to kiss in the film. If you had it your way would Jannat have been 'smooch-free'?

My director got greedy, I think. He wanted something that young couples could identify with. So one thing led to the other and that probably explains the kissing spree in Jannat.

So, yes, in a way, I was forced to kiss.

Are you comfortable with your 'serial kisser' image?

I don't know why it gathers so much news when I kiss. It becomes a topic of national interest. There are so many others kissing onscreen. I don't give it much thought. It's not even there at the back of my mind. I just want to do good, substantial roles. I am not vying for an image makeover.

I aspire to do films that are different. I don't wish to be a part of stereotypical love stories. I don't see myself duplicating an image or living up to an image. I just do films that I find interesting. For instance, I didn't ask Kunal Deshkmuh if there was a kissing scene in Jannat. I did it because I loved the character. I loved the concept of match fixing and the bookies angle.

Kissing spree?? K for Kiss Sore, anyone?

a pair of pointers

A Slurry Tale is what happens when the Bard takes over from Quentin Tarantino. [courtesy: GreenCine Daily]

As CAPTCHA continues to march towards Internet ubiquity, it has also started becoming a challenge even to human readers. Here's one example.

update: [April 29, 2008]: Here's more about the feline fecundity unvealed by the footle RapidShare. And then there's the rather interesting step in the evolution of the CAPTCHA. [courtesy: digital inspiration]

alphabet snot

The receding Zs fresh in our minds are merely a portent. The ever successful music producer/director/singer/and-now-actor was only getting started.

There's Pooja Bhatt's Kajra Re, scripted by Mahesh long-resigned-to-filching-for-kicks Bhatt and Bhatt camp regular Shagufta Rafique (who did a Sanjay Gupta with the Korean film A Bittersweet Life and churned out Awarapan on her word processor); the film is rumoured to be a remake of Sadak (which in turn took Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and tried to do a "Computational Complexity for Chimps" with it); Ashutosh Rana does the honours of stepping into Sadashiv Amrapurkar's skirt and sandals.

After sinking to the depths with Shikhar, John Matthew Matthan is hoping to give his marquee worth a shot in the arm by signing the repository of talent for A Love Issshtory, whose title must clearly be a tribute to S4H3.

After unveiling his locks for a brief moment and threatening to parade 'em for more screen time, the man who owes his celluloid beginnings to Salman "The Shirtless" Khan has decided to take a leaf out of the beefcake's book and build up a six-pack to go topless. This masterstroke designed to cause his fans to collapse in joy and the sales of smelling salts to soar was called Chemistry, before creative bankruptcy set in. The new title is Mudh Mudh Ke Na Dekkh Mudh Mudh Ke (that's 4 Ks ... krazzy isn't it?). Also referred to by the heptagrammaton M2KNDM2K (pronounced: emaTuuke aur emaTuuke), the film finds H flanked by Jennifer Kotwal (a model from Bombay who struck gold as a looker in Kannada cinema) and Niharika Singh (Miss India Earth 2005), who, incidentally also shows up in Matthan's paean to scandalous spelling. H's father is reported to have contributed a song to the soundtrack -- a contemporary number that he had composed 30 years ago (euphemistically referred to as "timeless" music). Lest we miss the record, this is H's first triangular love story. Other emotions and geometrical shapes are likely to get their due as time goes by. A nose is just a nose. uu.N!

another whiff of vishal

[This also fuels my maiden post on the Vishal Bhardwaj blog]

An April 16, 2008 interview with Arshad Warsi beats about the Krazzy 4 bush for the most part and ends with an interesting note: Up next are Golmaal Returns, Shortcut, Munnabhai Chale Amreeca and a film with Vishal Bhardwaj. Now what film is he doing with Vishal?
update: [May 03, 2008]: An April 20, 2008 TOI scrap has another tidbit: The Vishal Bhardwaj film that I'm a part of is a bit strange in terms of language and behaviour.. The only film that seems to match right now is Ishqiya and that has VB as a producer with his long-time associate Abhishek Chaubey making his directorial début.

pilferaaj pigeon snips again

Sanjay Gupta looks across the seas, but as long as the Malayalam film industry continues to thrive, the patriotic furacious filmophagous purloining P continues to be faithful to God's own country; if he had to remake a foreign flick he'd try and find a Malayalam remake of that flick (either his own doing or someone else's) and thus continue to remain faithful to the frond. Malamaal Weekly proved to be an exception only because the responsibility of remaking it in Malayalam seemed to have fallen on his trusty shoulders and our Arabian sea-facing Atlas shrugged and decided to do the Hindi remake first.

He makes no mistake this time. He chooses last year's hit Kadha Parayumbol, ropes in Irrfan to replace Sreenivasan (who also wrote the original) and HamStar Khan himself to substitute for Mammootty. The name's Billo Barber and it promises lots of laughter. kisii ke waade pe kyo.n aitabaar ham ne kiyaa, wrote Sahir. I agree. I hope he ropes in Pritam for the music. The highest-paid (in all likelihood) user of torrents in South Asia has been churning out unexciting homogeneous product of late. Being associated with a lift won't hurt in any way -- Anu Malik did that with Akele Hum Akele Tum (with some of the most rewarding stratified stealing on display), Sanjeev-Darshan did it with Mann ... heck! Pritam been doing this with the big P for a while now (Bhool Bhulaiya, Dhol, Bhaagam Bhaag, Garam Masala). One hopes that Priyadarshan will learn from the turmoil surrounding Bhool Bhulaiya and include credit for Sreenivasan.

The Rediff article includes a nice little note (my emphasis): Since the film is made in Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan will romance three girls -- Kareena Kapoor, Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra. Juhi Chawla will play Billo's wife. And one thought that having multiple heroines was something right down the alley of the likes of Pawan Kalyan, who, in his last release Jalsa managed to spend screen time with Ileana D'Cruz (born to a Muslim mother and a Christian father), Parvati Melton (born to a German father and a Punjabi mother) and Kamalinee Mukherji (from Calcutta; last seen by YT as Kamal Haasan's wife in Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu).

One cannot end without noting another Priyadarshan/Pritam collaboration that packs so much belly-aching irony that it deserves to be made (or remade, if you will). It's a film about a music band fighting piracy. And the film's called Pirate. ##black pearl## ke baare me.n kyaa jaanate ho?. And apparently Pritam's been roped in for the music to Golmaal Unlimited, Rohit Shetty's sequel to his comedy Golmaal [notes on the music], a film that echoes, only in the title, the wonderful middle-class classic of identity creation and theft directed by the late Hrishikesh Mukherjee, which included a reference to Pele and it all comes back to Jack's ship and the mind is now buzzing with references and connections. Oh Möbius!

update [April 17, 2008]: The clouds have sprung a leak. There's another offering in the pipeline from the Raja of Refurbished Reels. It's called Mere Baap Pehle Aap (kindly ignore the grammatical liberties here -- one can always blame Guru Dutt for convincing Majrooh to go with sun sun sun sun zaalimaa pyaar hamako tumase ho gayaa and starting it all). He raids the cellar of Sibi Malayil this time (having done it before with Gardish) and comes up with Ishtam.

steal krazzy after all these years

The plot thickens and Bollywood sickens. Continually. Unfailingly. The Malayalam film referenced earlier here as being the source for FilmKraft's Krazzy 4, has, it turns out, a parent across the seas in the land where such parents abound -- a film called The Dream Team, a film I only remember by name and star (Michael Keaton). This merely serves as the cake whose icing hit the fan when Ram Sampath (Khakee, Tanha Dil, you know the drill) decided to drag the Roshan butts to court for Bollywood's original sin, plagiarism. In a stunning display of finesse and speed rivalling that of Bollywood producers churning out desii-ised ghosts of foreign flicks, the High Court tossed the cherry to Ram Sampath. The murky aspects on display included SMSs from Hrithik Roshan to Ram Sampath that strengthened the case for the plaintiff asserting that they had gone ahead with using bits from the Sony Ericsson jingle only after receiving a No Objection Certificate from Sony Ericsson. This seemed like Plan B after the affidavit from Rajesh "Vangelis" Roshan stating that the music was his own (bhole o bhole). A sorry state of affairs. A Rs. 2 crore (1,77,34,600 after tax) out-of-court settlement seems to assuaged Ram Sampath and ensured that the comic filch will hit the marquee as planned with the songs intact (imagine the risk of releasing it without the Hrithik and SRK items designed to reel in the crowds). There's this irksome bit from Rakesh Roshan that lingers (note that another article has the date of the letter as December 13, 2007 -- but this is Bollywood; why bother about such small details?):

When I saw Hrithik's 'Thump' ad for Sony Ericsson mobile, I thought I could use some portion of the theme in my film Krazzy 4. In fact, I had requested Sony Ericsson for the same and they wrote to me on December 18, 2007, granting me permission to use the 'Thump' tune. Accordingly, with certain modifications, we recorded the 5.5-minute song.

A careful examination of the covers and sleeves of the CD of the soundtrack fails to reveal any note of acknowledgement for this permission (but this is Bollywood, the crowd screamed again). The case of the uncredited Pyarelal on Om Shanti Om comes to mind.

There's a victory somewhere in this, but one wonders how many more victories will result in a formidable defence against tidal waves such as Pritam Chakraborty.

Do it anyway, just put the K. Krafty Kriminals. Kalm Kchors.

update: [april 20, 2008]: In an interview that covers this and more, Rakesh Roshan notes There should be a novelty in everything you do, every time. I see to it that I don't fall into the trap of making something that has already been explored. That must explain why Khoon Bhari Maang exists even though Return to Eden was around and why Khel exists despite Dirty Rotten Scoundrels having come first.

update: [may 05, 2008]: More pearls from the pilfering pasha himself in a feature dedicated to the making of the video for Break Free: [...] jo ##hip-hop song## hai ... ##I have made a song on that beat for the very first time##. Right!

a cold stab of memory

We were in the middle of a discussion about a little donkey as commonly found in restaurants in the US being probably different from the real deal, when a sliver of memory flashed by the mind: a unique burrito place on Howell Mill Road and its vindaloo burrito. And yet the mind refused to yield its name. Ths cold knife bearing the drips of recollection probed further: the place didn't last long and was soon replaced by an Italian restaurant, which I remember having visited at least once (Figo Pasta and Osteria de Figo continued to dominate as favourites). Once again, the name escaped me. It was only a Google search later that yielded something more substantial than the sign for the burrito place (which boasted the sketch of a little donkey). The magic words: Burrito Art. It's Italian successor (in 2003) was Misto. The original Emory location for Burrito Art closed in October 2005 and the phoenix was another Italian restaurant called Saba. Some say that the ba in the name is a reference to the now-a-thing-of-the-past home of the vindaloo burrito.

Currently playing: Trains by Porcupine Tree

resurgence of the robe

Buried near the end of a Subhash K Jha exploration of the Shabana Azmi/Smita Patil relationship with tidbits about Shabana Azmi taking the late Smita Patil's sun under her wings[sic] and her noting how much Chitrangda Singh echoes the late Smita Patil is a nugget about Gulzar's Libaas that, despite an impressive soundtrack by the late R. D. Burman and a strong cast, has languished in the cans for years:

Strangely, there's news that Gulzar's long-delayed film Libaas, which was made 20 years ago with Shabana and Smita's husband Raj Babbar, is finally going to be released. Libaas was one of the films Smita had accused Shabana of stealing from her.

transit goes great guns

Georgians (that is to say, residents of the state of Georgia in the United States of America) with concealed weapons permits could carry guns on MARTA trains, and into restaurants as long as they don't drink, under a bill that passed the Senate ... [more].

update [May 18, 2008]: Things like this could happen.

the daunting stack

Almost a year ago, I waxed in glum disarray about needing to rekindle the reading habit. The library hauls have resumed over the last several months as has the effort to actually read some of those books I snagged in book sales. Although those pesky addictive DVDs still show up in the lists, I've been able to sample a few interesting books, been unable to get through a few before they were due back on the shelves and been able to slap the back cover shut in triumph on a few. The mixed bag has featured clusters by writers who have been favourites:

* Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things: Short Stories and Wonders, Smoke and Mirrors

* Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet [in a strange coincidence, the stash bearing this book also featured the Criterion release of the Preston Sturges gem Unfaithfully Yours containing an essay by Jonathan Lethem

* Shashi Tharoor: Bookless in Baghdad, The Elephant, The Tiger And The Cell Phone -- both unfinished for want of time

* Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast Of Champions, Cat's Cradle

There were books that had languished long on the "Must read this some day" list:
* Love And Longing In Bombay by Vikram Chandra (please pray for me as I embark upon the mission of trying to get through Sacred Games, the large tome dedicated to Sartaj Singh.

* Hard-Boiled by Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow with its excrutiatingly detailed art and its seductively horrifying exploration of a world ridden with vice

* Kafka Americana where Jonathan Lethem (yes, him again) and Carter Scholz collaborated in solo and duet with a post-post-modern, reflexive set of tales laced with pop culture that presented Kafka as (among other things) the creator of Batman and as a Hollywood screenwriter. This is so much more fun that it sounds like. Then we had the Dennis Hopper biography, the engrossing Bernard Herrmann biography A Heart At Fire's Centre and Sprawl City: Race, politics, and planning in Atlanta by Robert Bullard.

The ones that never got done included

* An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest: I only managed to read one of the tales, Whores, which offered a delirious experience in synaesthesia (as the train clattered through the devastated towns and countryside, I seemed to taste the music of pain, feel the gay dancing colours of sound)

* Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg

* Samuel Fuller's delightful memoir A Third Face.

Time to get back to Reading Comics and Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons.

quad core brain damage

You know there's something eerie in the air when two forthcoming additions to the Bollytrash stockpile of mind-numbing product have so much in common. In one pala.Daa we have, milord, Rakesh Roshan's production Krazzy 4 that has ensured sufficient interest not through its cast roster or script (or what passes off for it), but through the presence of Hrithik Roshan and SRK strutting their stuff in individual item numbers that share the same tune (belted out with aplomb by Vishal Dadlani on one of his increasingly common gun-for-hire assignments) but boast different lyrics (Asif Ali Baig, Javed Akhtar). In the other pala.Daa, your honour, we have Nakabandi Nath himself reprising the role of Monty Oberoi in Satish Kaushik's remake of Subhash Ghai's filch Karz; this film is called Karzzzz (aka Karz4 -- get that, Kar-zee-4). We've already talked about this film before, milord.

Roshan's production is supposedly based on this old Malayalam film called Mukilla Rajyathu. This translates as In the land of the Noseless and is part of a Malayalam saying that goes mukilla rajyathu murimukkan rajavu (apologies for not iTrans-ifying it, milord). That means In the land of the Noseless, the Half-Nosed is King (yes, yes milord, just as they say in English, In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is King). One wonders if the nasal element is a reference to the now de-cap-itated star of the Ghai rip-off. Yes, yes milord, a possible conspiracy theory.

Before we close, your wigness, may we also draw your attention to the poster of this remake, whose USP has been that its star is slated to appear without a cap for 75% of its running time sporting the results of his hair transplant. The poster looks familiar, does it not, your eruditeness? Does the film Walk The Line sound familiar, your astuteness? Perhaps we should consider letting Shepard Fairey know ...

That's all your judiciousness.

the I in the objective as a south african flower gets a serenade

K.K.'s new album Humsafar sports a mix of Pritam-echoing Pakistani pop (aasamaa.N ke), an echo of Leslie Lewis with the title track and rainaa bhayii, by far the most interesting track -- one that mixes the boat song with a rock/pop arrangement and phrases in Malayalam. The final track is called Cineraria and is presumably an ode to the South African genus of flowers. The singer gives lyricist Mehboob a break and pens the lines himself; and they become fodder for a grammatical peeve: Is there another place / Another place in the sun / Where you and I could be together, love / Tell me why is it so hard / So hard for you and I / At times alone I sit and wonder. The only consolation is that this bit of hyper-correction is tucked away inside the song instead of being an egregious assault like Jessica Simpson's Between You And I.

all debts are clear'd between you and I
-- (Antonio's letter to Bassanio) Act III, Scene 2; The Merchant Of Venice / William Shakespeare

postel and pedantry

Joel Spolsky tackles the flames greeting the decision to have Internet Explorer 8.0 support a revised refined "better" "Standards" mode in another entertaining article that employs an interesting example of MP3 players on Mars. The second half of the article brings up Jon Postel's robustness principle: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. This is something that abounds in several areas of software development. It also reflects, for me, the state of communication. It makes pedantry extremely hard and unrewarding. After all, if you've understood what the other person was trying to say, any attempt to correct the words and phrases used (or abused, if things are in really bad shape) seems like a waste of time. Yet, there's so much time wasted as the brain tries to rearrange and remedy the words heard or read. Apologists for the evolution of language and creative expression will argue quite convincingly in favour of such errors that may eventually, as history has shown us on several occasions, make their way into the language. The "wrong" becomes "right." But evolution cannot assuage the pedant's wounded eyes and ears.

a dash of mishra

Sudhir Mishra's Aur Devdas, a political mix of "Devdas and Hamlet" with Shiney Ahuja, Lara Dutta and Chitrangda Singh (more hereabouts) as Devdas, Paro and Chandramukhi respectively, seems to have lost to Tera Kya Hoga Johnny, a quickie set in a time when Bombay wants to be Shanghai" and when nobody gives a damn about a kid called Johnny who sells tea on the streets. Turning co-producer with the film, Mishra plans to give Karan Nath a second lease of life with the film besides having live songs in it. There's also the juicy tidbit that Chitrangda Singh's been roped in for an item song of sorts. What boggles the mind, however, is the cast roster for the film: joining Sikander Agarwal (who plays Johnny) and Karan Nath is a host of familiar names -- Neil Nitin Mukesh (who made a stupendous début as Johnny Gaddar), Soha Ali Khan, Kay Kay Menon, Anurag Kashyap and Aditya Bhattacharya (director of the undersung Raakh and the criminally hard-to-find Dubai Return). One drools in anticipation.

RMIM Puraskaar 2007: the results are out

The results for RMIM Puraskaar 2007 (mentioned hereabouts) are out. A big round of applause to Vinay for continuing to nurture this wonderful idea. (Disclaimer: YT was on the jury). This time around I also got to get my hands dirty with some code assisting with collecting song metadata -- all with the JavaSound API through an MP3 SPI, the Java Excel API and OpenCSV mixed with strategies. All in good fun and I now also have a way to check the tags on my MP3s.

Related: RMIM Post | post on the giitaayan blog

the self-deprecating filmmaker returns

After the debacle of his take on Sholay, RGV trounces everyone in the race to rip the film and its maker apart (Although the quality to be critical of one's work is admirable, it's a pity that he's had to do this for a while now).

I don't blame anyone else for going wrong in Aag. Amitabh Bachchan trusted me completely in Aag. But I feel my intention was wrong. Aag was a three-year-old dream. Many changes happened. I was told by lawyers to change the story because my Sholay had to be different from the original. I lost my way along the way. Aag ended up as a caricature of Sholay. When people around you keep saying it's turning out well, you tend to get carried away. Aag was a special flop for me. Just as Sholay was benchmark, Aag was a landmark for me. It was not even a wake-up call. It was a slap.

There's a new film called Contract in the making with Bombay and Bangkok being key locations and it's laced with newcomers. One wonders if this is Dhyeya sporting a new title.

Sarkar Raj, the sequel to his tribute to The Godfather is all set for a May/June release this year complete with the promise of political undertones and of being larger in "scope, scale and span." It would be a big stretch to expect the kind of leap in texture, complexity and cinematic achievement that The Godfather Part II was after The Godfather, but as a fan of the maverick, I'd still like to hope for something to remedy some of the harm done by the recent rather disappointing years of The Factory.

a flourish here, a spot there

In an interview with Q magazine, Robert Plant was asked what Led Zeppelin thought about how widely used the beat for When The Levee Breaks was. His respons contained a nugget of information that, surprisingly, I've not read elsewhere:

We were flabbergasted and impressed when people started using When The Levee Breaks. when Jimmy and I talked about it, we figured nothing was sacred, as we'd been nicking old blues stuff since the beginning of time. it got a bit preposterous when Michael Jackson did Bad -- which is the riff to Heartbreaker [from Led Zeppelin II] with one note changed and as far as we're concerned is a nick.

[courtesy: When The Levee Breaks: The Making Of Led Zeppelin IV by Andy Fyfe, a book that's low on style but laced with information and one that sports one of my favourite photographs of the band on the cover]

Pop quiz, hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do? . That was Speed. 5 years later, someone latched onto the idea of combining the buddy film along with this premise and a generous helping of mad science to come up with Chill Factor: Things will turn radioactive and bad, if a new biological chemical weapon is exposed to temperatures over 50 degrees Fahrenheit (that's about 10 degrees celsius) and it's going to take an ice cream truck driver (Cuba Gooding, Jr. in a career-questioning role) and a convenience store clerk to keep it getting into the hands of some ex-Army terrorists.

Meanwhile, Subhash Alfred Ghai, last seen as his unsubtle self in Om Shanti Om is returning to the director's chair (Kisna anyone?) with Black and White (in search of harmony). The font echoes the Leone-ian territory covered in Omkara and the ebony-and-ivory packaging aside, the film's premise echoes The Devil's Own; this is quite a comeback for Ghai, whose Karz, the muse for Om Shanti Om was an echo of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.

video gaga: sonu nigam challenges ziggy stardust

There's a new Sonu Nigam (or Niigaam in astrologicalese) album on the stands and it's called Classically Mild. It features the voice of the vastly talented singer blended with a soundscape boasting a bevy of clichés from the world of easy listening ... nan.d, kaafii, bilaawal and ahir bhairav (among others) meet keyboards, kazoo and fugle[sic] horn.

The pièce de résistance is the video for a track on the album called suunaa suunaa. I won't spoil it for you; all I can provide as a portent is a cloud of words: a Greco-Roman composite of Eros, Christ and Krishna warbles and struts his efforts in the gym in a bushel of exercise routines, romantic overtures and memories of childhood.

SN's been prone to silly antics before (remember bijuriyaa? [youtube video]), but this marks a new visual milestone for him. He seems to be entering Abhijit Pohankar territory with this attempt at a fusion of everything aural (raags, lounge, smooth jazz, electronics) packaged in videos featuring a camera gaga about the female form (except that Mr. Niigaam prefers, like Mr. Adnan Sami, to hog a significant portion of screen real estate himself). Yet, for all the criticism levied against him, Abhijit Pohankar's ouevre seems to sport a certain sense of the aesthetic. Mr. Niigam's been shedding clothes for a while now (A tribute to decades of Hindi film singing at a Filmfare Awards show comes to mind -- he had stacked up clothes appropriate to each decade and proceeded to pop them off as he made his way from the past to the present).

It was tragic enough to hear the fine voice done justice in a bhajan on the virtually unheard soundtrack of Mr. Ya Miss. It's a pity seeing such a great vocal talent in a state of comic undress. Listening to this effort might not have been such a bad experience, but the eyes have now been scarred.

catastrophic apostrophes

One of the most enduring memories from the Monty Python Flying Circus sketches for me has been the It's Man where Palin's beleagured hermit's exaggerated efforts to approach the screen across obstacles that would in real time be insurmountable culminated in a victoriously exhausted gasp of "It's."

That word haunts the contributions of some exhibits of apostrophe abuse (it's and its get swapped merrily as if they were identical twins).

The promos (this IndiaFM promo watch page has links to one of them) for Priyadarshan's rip-off Kyon Ki seemed keen on achieving sarataaj status in this matter. They completely eschewed the apostrophe and exploited possessives for their inter-titles (its salman, its kareena, its love, its passion, its madness, its fate, this diwali its special). To interpret it as an auteurist move would have been an equally extravagant exercise.

Raja Sen's review of Vishal's soundtrack for Ajay Devgan's directorial début U, Me Aur Hum sports another editorial gaffe:

It's a neat, uncluttered visual, not trying too hard but succeeding immensely -- and bodes well for Devgan's directorial debut. And it's soundtrack.

I recently started reading Shashi Tharoor's Bookless in Baghdad. The 14th chapter of the first edition is an article about R. K. Narayan titled "R. K. Narayan's Comedies of Suffering." Smack in the middle of page 98 is an example of abuse in plural (to wit): the ABC's of bad writing - archaisms, banalities and cliches - abounded. Interestingly enough, the online version of the article on Tharoor's web site exploits the pliable nature of web content and knocks off the egregious apostrophe: the ABC of bad writing - archaisms, banalities and cliches - abounded.

It's time to end this burst of bile.

grammy whammy

While Herbie Hancock (whom I was privileged to catch at the 30th Atlanta Jazz Festival) caused a few several jaws to fall to the floor at the 50th Grammy Awards ceremony by taking away Album Of The Year, good old Slowhand's collaboration with another key inspiration of his, J. J. Cale, The Road To Escondido snagged the award for Best Contemporary Blues Album. The last time EC collaborated with another key influence, B. B. King was Riding With The King and that won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album.

An interesting non sequitur: The Cale collaboration opens with Danger, a song that shares its chord progression with After Midnight, a Cale song that EC covered on his eponymous début and scored a hit. Quite apt.

The tribute album We All Love Ennio Morricone contributed two nominees: Metallica, for their cover of The Ecstasy Of Gold, a track that, in its original form, they've used to open their concerts and Bruce Springsteen for his cover of Once Upon A West.

different frequencies

A glances at the three issues of Wired on the desk as he carries on a discussion with B. B sees the interest in A's eyes and also the screaming words advertising the title story ("100 mpg! the race to build the ultimate fuel-efficient car") and starts talking about supergreen cars and A has to tell B that it wasn't the title story but the line above the title that caught his eye: "radiohead and the new world of music by david byrne." B doesn't register Radiohead, he only registers the word music. A enthusiastically tells B why he thinks the line is cool: David Byrne was the frontman of Talking Heads and Radiohead got its name from a track on the Talking Heads album True Stories. A feels the enthusiasm drain away as he registers B's reaction. They return to their discussion, wrap it up and A returns to his desk with the issue, hoping to read the article in a spare moment.

bored in the light

The premise of Red: The Dark Side smells like a lift: a guy falls for the widow of the donor of his heart. What can you expect from the director of such once-agains as Yakeen, Aetbaar, Footpath and Awara Paagal Deewana? By the time the end credits begin to roll, you're left wondering how such promising material met with such undeserving wretched execution. The film essentially represents another of Vikram Bhatt's poorly executed maudlin buckets of ennui (see also Inteha) besides being another vehicle featuring his on-screen alter ego Aftab Shivdasani. Aftab is not alone; he has Amrita Arora (Girlfriend, the dillii kii sardii item song in Zameen) and Celina Jaitley (made her début in Khel, spoofed Vanessa Mae in Janasheen, was one of the zombies in Zinda and contributed 50% of the wood falling for the hirsute Hashmi in Jawani Diwani).

At this point it must be noted that it is a carnal (no pun intended) sin to encourage the acting aspirations of such fine pieces of wide-eyed bambi-brained silconeans as Arora and Jaitley. Ladies, you have been specially chosen to be eye candy, to load the screen with oomph, to sashay and sway in various family-friendly stages of undress. You were not designed to -- shudder! -- act. It behooves the producers of cinematic enterprises featuring you to encourage you to answer your calling and to nip any aberrant strains of ambition in the nascent bud.

You miss a tribute to Dan Brown and his trademark opening sentences, when the credits are followed by an inter-title that says "A few months back." A change in the colour palette is denied any subtlety by the annoying and expected inter-title "Now" several shots later. Need one also note that the colour employed in these inter-titles is ... duh! ... Red?

A tribute to the penchant of directing duo Abbas-Mustan to have a misspelled sign in their movies (I remember Khiladi and Baazigar) comes in the form of the Hindustan Times headline "the greiving widow."

A tribute to Bollywood's refusal to worship the details is evident in the sequence when a cop holding an iron rod from the scene of a crime is asked to send it for fingerprints. The tendency of going overboard with technical devices is evident when a nice narrative technique of inter-cutting moments in the present and the near past is overused.

If you thought Bhatt was going to reveal an immaculately presented B- forest cake under this icing of quotes and tributes, you picked the wrong tree to hug. Given a trio that seems to have found a font to educate a wretched pleasure in wallowing with dour faces and sour lines, you can only try and seek solace in the occasional pearls that the dialogue track coughs up. Sushant Singh hams away with glee and lends an eerie depth of sincerity to his part as the investigating officer. There is a calm confidence when he notes the three reasons for a crime (zar, joruu, zamiin) or when he riffs on nahii.n jaanataa. It's a pity that he has to share footage with the murderers of choice lines like you've not only given me a life; you've also given me a reason to live, you used me in bed and I used you out of it, tumane merii zi.ndagii me.n zahar milaayaa, aur mai.nne use champagne me.n and I'm ready to die in love, I'm ready to kill in love, but I'm not ready to be a fool in love. The only ray of hope emerges when a manager at Sea View offers his reason for thinking that a now deceased guest was an honest man: wo hameshaa ek hii la.Dakii ke saath aate the. Oh! If only that had come with an accompanying subtitle that read he was singularly unfaithful.

When The Nose was chosen to deliver chart-busting songs for the soundtrack, he churned out a standard set of sneezes laced with infectious riffs, thumps (consider aafariin) and ridiculous lines (loneliness is killing everyone). These also meet a dire fate at the chopping block of ennui.

The previews throve in mendacity. Skin-hungry viewers were duped by the visuals into expecting a G-rated ménage à trois, but only got the trademark Bollywood sniffing and a shot of Celina Jaitley standing like a man in the gym ready to do some sets with dumbbells. This epidermal treachery seemed very much in keeping with flicks like Girlfriend and Paap.

One is only left in the vermeil darkness contemplating all the promise that this flick held.

incoming traffic

last post in this series

* utopian vision meghna actress: Gulzar, Kothari or Naidu? The first has no known desire to face the camera, the second has aces like Prem Aggan and Vadh in her kitty and the third bounced about the screen in lipidinous levity featuring in Classic Dance Of Love and promised to break new ground with sleaze master Karan Razdan's Shock (sadly not much has been heard of this film since). I fail to see the utopian angle.
* daya nayak licensed to kill telugu: Was his target the people or the film industry? Surely, he wouldn't want to deny us the blessings of Balaya?
* is old tb6 channel has come back and on which satellite?: I don't know dude, but I'm sure you've already found out by now.
* samay item song dancer: Aah, you must have been looking for this long piece dedicated to the first film of the director of MP3: Mera Pehla Pehla Pyaar...

A pie chart tells me that most of the incoming traffic comprises innocent first-timers. Boy! This must be one scary portal.

RIP bharat gopi

Veteran Malayalam actor Bharat Gopi passed away at the age of 71 on January 29, 2008. Although he's got an impressive list of performances in films by Adoor Gopalakrishnan and G. Aravindan (among others), my immediate memory is of Paadheyam (starring Mammootty), which he had produced as well. You will be missed, Sir.

elsewhere: Shobha Warrier article for Rediff.com

quote libet

One of the numerous sops to the media for Gowariker's forthcoming period opus Jodhaa Akbar (rejected tagline: when doves cried) casts a shadow of doubt on the nature of the intended audience of the film and the presence of brain cells in the marketing/PR department; it also offers quiet assurance that Bollywood has a long way to go before it acquires a new approach to movie marketing. I have shown my body in Jodhaa Akbar too screams the headline for a collection of responses from the film's star Hrithik Roshan in response to a bunch of questions that came from the WeThinkWeRCool department:

Will youth identify with this film?
If it doesn’t the film will be a failure. It's a love story and people should like it.

No body show in Jodhaa Akbar like in Dhoom ?
I have shown my body in Jodhaa Akbar ! (smiles)

Meanwhile Anjaan's son Sameer crows about his work on Saawariya while griping that he's been accused of playing to the gallery. Some people just don't know their worth:

'For a recent film, 'Phir Hera Pheri' I wrote 'All day, all night' which was in four languages - Rajasthani, English, Hindi and Punjabi - that's the effect of globalisation on our cinema and music. That is how today's youngsters speak. That's the spirit one has to capture in our film songs,' he added.

is this good or bad for atlanta's public transit?

On Wednesday, January 23, 2008, a 22 year-old woman robbed a Wachovia Bank, ran across the parking lot to a Quizno's, got sprayed with orange ink when a dye bomb exploded, tried to store her sullied clothes and the money in a women's bathroom in a Publix nearby, changed her clothes and ... wait for it ... went to the MARTA bus stop at Dunwoody Place and Hope Road to wait for a bus. She was spotted and arrested, thus being denied of tasting the success she had with a similar move before. [sanitised AP report that mentions no names | AJC report with more juicy details]

The question now is: does this represent something good (look, she got arrested only because she was waiting for a bus instead of driving away in a car ... imagine if we had more buses around; we'd be able to catch more people while they're waiting for a bus to make a getaway) or something bad (there you go; didn't I tell you that having buses around is going to cause more crime?) for public transportation in Atlanta?

announcing: RMIM Puraskaar 2007

It has been amiss of me to delay this post. Vinay is back with the second edition of RMIM Puraskaar. Voting closes tentatively on January 31, 2008.

The announcement's also posted on the giitaayan blog.

related: announcements hereabouts for the first edition and its results.

the last laugh

Heath Ledger was found dead on Tuesday afternoon in a Manhattan apartment. He was 28. After fame with Brokeback Mountain, he was all set to make another role his own -- that of The Joker in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's follow-up to Batman Begins, the eminently satisfying boost to the film canon that had suffered from a descent into high camp reminiscent of the Adam West-Burt Ward days. Ledger had been signed on for Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, on which production began in December 2007 (one wonders how much work Ledger clocked for the film). Nolan's film seems slated to mark what might be Ledger's last complete screen appearance (the entry in his filmography indicates that the film is in post-production); Ledger's death will also lend a very ominous air to the character of The Joker, a character slated for much more recognition than anyone might ever have hoped for.

addendum [January 30, 2008]: Christopher Nolan shares his thoughts on working with Ledger on the film.

julia, O, and a new blog for vishal bhardwaj

One of the closing flourishes of the last year came fromJR in the form of a blog dedicated to all things Vishal Bhardwaj. He graciously asked me on board as well. This means that straight news on the happenings in the cinemagic world of Vishal will go over to that blog, including notes on the mysterious state of Julia, the possibility of a prequel to Omkara (he could dispatch the script to RGV's Factory and the next Vishram Sawant could churn out O (Meerut Maharaja)) and his travelling to Pune (passing by Das Auto Works^[1], no doubt) to work on a script. Both Sudarshan and LL pounced on that news bit when it showed up online.

[1]: an element from the detailed texture of Sriram Raghavan's delicious pulpy Johnny Gaddar

zed's dead baby; zed's dead

Farah Khan's moolah-raking Om Shanti Om owes an obvious debt (no pun intended) to Subhash Ghai's Karz. After much ado, the next one in line features He Who Has Deigned To Unleash His Tresses. Astrologically stammering at the tip of a delay pedal, Karzzzz is reportedly going to sport an interesting casting choice. Instead of a see-saw of the Singer of Snotty Song, audiences might now see the mongrel who shot to fame by being the face for the voice of The Nose. Urmila Matondkar will get to bump off Emraan Hashmi; Emraan Hashmi will be reborn as Himesh Reshammiya. Enraptured by the sight of uncapped hair, the audience is slated to shell out rupees, dollars, pounds and more while the tinny sound in the ears refuses to go away.

A fragment of Anand Bakshi's lyric became the title of his grandson's directorial début starring Emraan Hashmi; the film made a star of Hashmi and The Nose's songs became a rage. A couple of years later, one sees more connections. An industry whose product has thrived on narratives built from coincidences owes itself such a rich tapestry. "Vengeance is back" screams the poster. Soon the audience will scream. A star will be reborn.

elsewhere: JR explores one interpretation of the title.

14 years since pancham passed away

and the tributes and reminiscences seem have dwindled to a trickle. Over in Pune, the PanchamMagic guys have effected yet another wonderful tribute show. The drying puddle of skeletal articles offering little new in substance is offset by the announcement of Brahmanand Singh's labour of love: A film called Pancham Unmixed: Mujhe Chalte Jaana Hai that collects a host of people who lived and worked closely with the late music director and offers a thaalii of delectable memories, anecdotes and musically rich nostalgia. Some extracts can be relished in a CNN-IBN feature as well a longer fragment hosted by IndiaFM.

more SATYA trivia

While opening his PFC post pitching for Sudhir Mishra's Khoya Khoya Chand, Anurag Kashyap drops a nugget of trivia about Satya:

Satya, the much celebrated cult classic of this country was conceived after Ramu saw Iss raat.. infact[sic] Sudhir was asked to work on it in the beginning before getting the famous Ramu Indifference treatment..

In a wonderful world, this would've been enough incentive to have a DVD of Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin on the stalls. But this would fall right next to the other scenario from the wonderful world: in anticipation of Khoya Khoya Chand's release, stores have DVDs of previous Sudhir Mishra ventures on display. Alas, this is far from a wonderful world despite what Satchmo had to say.

the moon returneth?

In a wonderful post on PFC, Sudhir Mishra offers some background on his latest release Khoya Khoya Chand with some especially enlightening notes on the songs. The following extract might explain Shantanu Moitra's filching of Jingle Bell Rock (something that JR brings out in his notes on the soundtrack):

Three of the songs in the film, namely the cabaret, the mujra and the piano song "khushboo sa" , "chale aao saiyan", "yeh nigahen", are referential. They have to deliberately remind you of similar songs. "Yeh Nigahen" for example has to deliberately sound like other western songs. Like yeh hai bambai meri jaan is actually O my darling Clementine.

The highest point of the post comes with the following extract:

I do wish to at some day make a sequel to Hazaaron. And now that I hear Chitrangada is coming back at least to do a film with me. That's great. You could write the sequel many ways but you can’t write it without Geeta.

There's a shard on TOI that adds more fat to this fire. If this is indeed true, the vanishing lady will find a horde of fans waiting.

On a related note, if anyone has seen the DVD for Ruchi Narain's Kal:Yesterday and Tomorrow, please drop me a note.

February 16, 2008: Chitrangada's slated to play Chandramukhi as a socialite in Sudhir Mishra's Aur Devdas and she's also on board for Sorry Bhai, the third directorial venture of Onir (My Brother Nikhil, Bas Ek Pal).

March 14, 2008: More proof from the sets of Sorry Bhai. The location of the first shot added an ironic echo to the video Sanjay Suri and Chitrangda Singh had featured in for the Vishal/Gulzar collaboration Sunset Point (The production house for the film (Anticlock Films) takes its name from the club in Bas ek Pal)

April 01, 2008: A Rediff interview treads familiar ground, but features a few more photographs of the lovely lady.

April 13, 2008: ad filmmaker Abhinay Deol has her interest for Delhi Belly, a comedy of the risqué kind set in Delhi (duh!); while she awaits the script there are talks of roping Aamir Khan in as well.

April 15, 2008: Tehelka has a nice article, which includes a note that Vishal Bhardwaj was among those that had wanted to work with her. Now that she's back, one hopes that the opportunity to see the two talents work together.