Going to Poona

So today evening I got The Best of Z Z Top from the public library, to get myself an introduction to these blues-rock Texans. Thence we proceeded to Poona, a South Asian restaurant on Pleasant Hill Road in Duluth. Yes, it was the name that intrigued us. Our hostess was a friendly Bengali lady who wasn't sure why they had named the restaurant Poona. Our entrees were Vegetable Korma and Chicken Chilli to go with 2 naans. The food was good, except their tendency to add chopped peppers into the Chicken Chilli to add the "spice" to it was an unwarranted Chatpatti-style act {these people add uncooked masala as toppings to dishes like paav bhaaji}. Clearly there is a prevalent warped idea of "spicy" food. The portions are below modest, especially for the price. You wouldn't notice this, however, because their spice trick just gave you a "full" feeling.

Back home, we caught the special features on the Vertigo DVD. I must say I was disappointed. Most of the commentary (if I may dare to call it that; it seemed more like outtakes of a cofee-shop scene in a forgettable B-movie) focused on the effort involved in restoring this classic, minus any interesting technical details. The documentary was moderately interesting, including the add-on subdued ending and previews for the original release and the re-release. The original preview was a good indicator of why the film didn't do well -- the studio was clearly in no position to understand the property they had and persisted on marketing it with the tags that you would associate with Hitchcock. The re-release preview was much more faithful, except for the Powerpoint-style intertitles. Wish they had the good sense to get a film scholar to talk over the film. The closest they get is Steve Smith, Bernard Herrmann's biographer. Sadly, he deviates from the score of the film itself to other works by Herrmann, and his voluble description of Herrmann's music soon overstays its welcome. So, unless you want to listen to people go on tangents for over two hours, skip the commentary.

who's the black private dick ... and a 50s TV show...and some vertigo

The weekend has been fair (barring some Oracular unpleasantries). Caught three movies in all (phew!) in addition to the inevitable Star Trek TNG Sunday marathon on TNN. VH1 was running The Godfather II {aping TNN's efforts last month}. The nice touch was the use of Guns n' Roses' début single Welcome to the Jungle in the promos. Quite apt, considering the subject matter of the film.

Shaft (2000): John Singleton's sequel to /retake on the cult Richard Roundtree vehicle has Samuel L. Jackson as John Shaft Jr., the nephew of the original John Shaft (Richard Roundtree, doing an affectionate cameo, and making good on the opportunity to take digs at the character that made him famous) and even reuses Isaac Hayes' classic Oscar-winning theme. Although everyone does their best in the flick, the clear winner is Jeffrey Wright's Peoples Hernandez, who seems to have received the generous blessings of both screenwriter and actor. I liked the ending too, but everything else in this film reeks of glossy conventional action (having Armani do Mr. Jackson's outfits took the cake), losing out on the familiarity that the original had. The other great things in this good entertaining piece of fluff are the cameo by Gordon Parks (as Mr. P), director of the original, the Isaac Hayes video for Shaft's Theme added as a DVD bonus and Hayes talking about the theme itself (to paraphrase: "everything's a minor 7th -- starting with B-flat").

Pleasantville follows siblings sucked into a black and white 1950s TV sitcom, who proceed to add colour (no pun intended) to the routine lives of the inhabitants of the town of Pleasantville. Predictably, there's a parable about evaluating the good old days and taking a fresh look at the new world. The special effects complement the story and the slow transition of the town into full-blown colour is one the best things you can pay to watch. I couldn't help notice the uncomfortable ambiguity in the word "coloured". There are scenes in the film that indicate the resistance of the complacent townspeople to the advent of colour into their lives (and the colour obviously augments their lives and the way they think) and I cannot shake off the allegorical parable about racism. Feel-good, with a message. {read the script}

Vertigo: The restored collector's edition DVD. 'Nuff said. Slow, somnial and lyrical, Hitchcock's most personal film came out in the height of the studio system and sadly suffered from disuse. The restoration brings back the vibrant colours for both viewers and film scholars to drool over: the former over John Fergusson's increasing obsession and the latter over how the sets, colours and costumes complement one of the most disturbing spirals into mental ruin ever depicted on screen.

the goodwill used book fair

Once again Chris triumphs in evoking memories of home: this time of those tireless visits to the book exhibitions at the Institution of Engineers, Pune. Like old-timers I have cause to whine about the declining "quality" of those exhibitions, but I remember them as a great activity I indulged in with Dad {Mom loved reading too, but you should have seen her face when she saw Dad and me walk in with another haul from yet another non-descript raddi {read: second-hand} book store in a strange pocket of town. Chris convinced me to accompany him to the famous second-hand book sale organized by the Goodwill Industries of North Georgia. As it turns out, from this year on, the annual event has become a quarterly event giving bookshelf fillers three times the joy of replenishing their stocks. Prices range from 50 cents to $4. And the proceeds go to benefit programmes for persons facing barriers to employment. I think that's a good cause in these times, and I know what such people have to go through. On with my purchase list:

* Fahrenheit 451/Ray Bradbury

* Something Wicked This Way Comes/Ray Bradbury

* Danse Macabre/Stephen King

* The Seven Per-Cent Solution/Nicholas Meyer {wherein Watson, to treat his friend's cocaine induced delusions, takes Holmes to Sigmund Freud} {also the source for the entertaining film of the same name}

* 5,000,000/Dread Zeppelin {tape}

* 461 Ocean Boulevard/Eric Clapton

* Real Love/... {a 2 song "single" tape release from The Beatles}

* Stand By Me: soundtrack {tape}

original plagiarism

Screen is out for the weekend and has its share of howlarious interviews. My favourite is the Salman Khan interview. The reason: the bare-above-the-waist hunk has signed on a Hollywood-Bollywood film Marigold. The young Khan has not been doing that well at the box office (he claims otherwise) and (surprise! surprise!) penned the story for the Diya Mirza vehicle Tumko Na Bhool Paayenge: Yes, Tumko Na Bhool Paayenge was written by me, and I have to admit that may be it was slightly ahead of its time. It was good cinema...well shot. It was well conceived but perhaps it was not projected right. People didn�t understand the meaning and rejected the film. I think we slipped because the character was shown first as a Hindu and then as a Muslim.... Actually, Mr. Khan the story was ahead of its time, made in 1996 ... as The Long Kiss Goodnight. Of course, in a gender reversal Geena Davis became Salman Khan. But that shouldn't matter, right?

swing along

I've been working with JFC/Swing, the set of GUI class libraries for Java programmers and it's been a rather interesting experience (but don't get me started on putting buttons inside table cells...that was easier done in MFC. If you're starting out with Swing and have some issues with Java (like I do), here are a couple of references that you will like to have by your side: Java Cookbook and Graphic Java 2, Volume 2: Swing (third edition). Anything else won't help you navigate the bumps on the road.

more library hauls

Yes, it was almost as if I had known that it was going to be such a rainy and gloomy day today... Yesterday, thanks to Chris, I made a quick trip to the Dekalb County Library to pick up some more items on hold.

* Hair/Original Broadway Cast Recording

* Superfly/Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition

* Shaft {DVD}

the irony continues

just a few days after I got Billy Idol's Greatest Hits, VH1 has a special on the man himself ... complete with bleeps and a timeline on Generation X. Trivia buffs will note that Billy has a cameo in The Doors, and this feature tells you how his contribution to the film dipped from a major role to a cameo thanks to an unfortunate motorcycle accident.

new Google tab

just noticed a new tab on the main Google Page that takes you to Google News, where you can search and browse several continuously updated news sources. Have to remember to try this out once I get out of this coding shtick.

Related
: All the News Google Algorithms Say is Fit to Print {free registration required}

weekend bliss

Sunday, September 22, 2002

A woodwind ensemble at Spivey Hall. And The Jimi Hendrix Experience BBC Sessions 2-CD pack from CD Warehouse.

Saturday, September 21, 2002

Lunch at Maharaja. Duck Soup.

Friday, September 20, 2002

Sleepy Hollow.

More Screen for the weekend

Sanjeev Kohli, the son of underrated composer Madan Mohan has just released a short film about his father titled "Madan Mohan Forever...". If his name sounds a bit familiar, dig out your HMV Golden Collection compilations and see the name of the person they are credited to. Yes, Sanjeev Kohli, son of Madan Mohan works for HMV. Pity he seems rather powerless to curb the grotesque atrocities that the label has exacted on listeners and fans of good rare film music lying gathering dust in their vaults.

Also is this weekend's issue, a little tribute to the late Kavi Pradeep, famous for the patriotic paean Ae mere watan ke logon.

A Little Big War...over love

Screen's cover story for the weekend explores the ek chhoti si love story controversy in detail. They also have an update on the issue.

On a lighter note, Taran Adarsh's list of newly registered movie titles continues to amuse:


Haste Khelte Ho Gaya..!

Goli

Goli The Bullet {just in case you were wondering what the last title meant}

Graduate Hall

Hope

Chicken Curry

Scars

Chicken And Rice


In recent times, there has been a growing tendency to name films with English translations tagged along as suffixes: Shakti - The Power, Goli - The Bullet, Sikkay - The Coins ... and the like. We continue, however, to endure indigestibly long titles that seem to appeal to filmmakers who wish to emulate the (questionable) success of trailblazers of the genre like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and the complete Karan Johar canon {wanna know what his next film will be titled? check this out}.


Related: previous howlers (a long time ago)

Just for Fun

That's the title of the book Linus Torvalds (author of the Linux kernel) co-wrote with David Diamond. Well, the book he was expected to write. Don't expect the evangelical tone and content of Eric Raymond's cult work The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This book is an easy read, witty as well as engrossing. There's enough self-referential humour to assure readers that Linus is just being a simple individual who is still trying to come to terms with his evolution into an important icon in the Open Source/Free Software community, and not someone trying to sound overtly important. What was interesting was that I got to the portion of the book where he describes how he released version 1.0 of the kernel. The date was September 17, 1991. And here I was reading it 11 years later. Linux and Linus have come a long way ... of course, so have The Simpsons.

On a sad note, Priya Tendulkar who made Rajni a household name lost her fight with breast cancer at the age of 48.

{TOI} {rediff}

Amol Palekar remembers Priya Tendulkar

Subhash K. Jha remembers Priya Tendulkar

More URL shortening

Tara Calishain discovers another URL-shortening service in this week's issue of ResearchBuzz, this time with a twist. Snipurl allows you to personalize the shortened URL you get back. It also warns you if the nickname you have chosen has already been taken. Check it out.

Related: Previous post on short links

Ira Levin double bill

It's probably a good time to note that I finished reading A Kiss Before Dying and Sliver, both by Ira Levin and marking good endpoints of his work. Both books are fast reads, but each gave me something to write about, so here goes.

A Kiss Before Dying may be familiar to triviamongers as the source for two films one made in 1956 and the other in 1991 with Matt Dillon and Sean Young. The latter adaptation with significant changes to the source novel served to inspire the Abbas-Mustan fronted gore-fest Baazigar, which established Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan's "evil hero" phase and also relaunched Anu Malik's career as a music director. The book is well-paced and has a great little twist (which may surprise even those familiar with the basic plot of Baazigar) that is unfilmable.

Sliver explores obsession and voyeurism with a technological twist and presents us with the unsettling and dangerous consequences of such compulsive behaviour. While not a literary masterpiece, the novel betrays an interesting writing style. Sentences are short and staccato. Conversations are made of such sentences with a few exceptions. It seems to be written like a little diary of notes that someone would maintain. Not too much detail, but just enough hooks to trigger the rest of a memory. Everything seems to be a play with the title itself (which refers to the high-rise buildings erected on narrow bases that resemble splinters). There's a nice little dinner conversation where Kay Norris is talking to a guest while refilling everyone's wine glasses. If you aren't paying too much attention, her words are likely to confuse you as they reflect her shifting attentions. Pity, the wrong people adapted this to film (the ultimate barbaric act being an altered ending that was as lifeless as the rest of the film).

Monday evening library trip

This was something I forgot to write about ... Thanks to Chris I got a ride to the Embry Hills branch of the Dekalb County Library to collect some holds of mine.

* In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the power of Rock Music/Susan Fast: A great book that studies Led Zeppelin both from a musicological perspective as well as an ethnographic one. Susan Fast tones the technical content of the book appropriately, so that feeble readers like me (who have come to detest humanities texts for their abstruse insistence of substance in nothingness) can grok. Since the book includes the sociological angle, it's not as musically enlightening or explorative as Walter Everett's twin pack The Beatles as Musicians {volume I, volume II}. It's also not the "look at the cool hedonism they indulged in" book that Stephen Davis and Richard Cole contributed to. If Walter Everett is reading/listening, please write a book on the music of this band. It's the least they deserve.

* Shaft/Isaac Hayes: Finally, I get my hands on the awesome soundtrack (desi disciples include Kalyanji-Anandji and R. D. Burman)

* Greatest Hits/Billy Idol: If only for his covers of L. A. Woman and Don't You (Forget About Me).

* Essence of Rhythm/Zakir Hussain: This one's for the interesting beat cycles he performs (including pancham sawAri which I recently read about in Raga Mala)

the casualties of war

The first casualty of war is innocence screamed the tagline for Oliver Stone's brilliant anti-war film of memories Platoon. That film opened with an ironic quote from Ecclesiastes 11:9: rejoice o young man, in thy youth. The film proceeds to depict the most vivid and basic memory of Vietnam: going there and getting killed or watching people die. Any gung-ho patriotic fervour was shredded by the harsh reality and horror of war, blood and guts. All Quiet on the Western Front {which we completed yesterday: part One} made in 1930 focuses on similar issues, but the battleground is WWI. Stone's film brutally explored the descent of soldiers into a confused maelstrom of violence unleashed at both the innocent and the ostensibly guilty. Lew Milestone (as does Remarque's source novel, I would imagine) focuses on German youth (and our protagonist Paul, in particular) who have joined the war effort with patriotic fervour, stirred up by their school teacher. Soon they (as well as we) realise that war only about death, blood, smoke, bombs, guns, bullets and hunger. In one of the great scenes in the film, the group lightly ponders the cause of the war. The humour in the scene only serves to emphasise the futility of the war (there is a more gut-wrenching horrifying moment in Coppola's almost-masterpiece Apocalypse Now when Willard asks a soldier firing away, "Who's your commanding officer?" only to get a confused reply "Ain't you?"). The battle scenes are well done as are the performances.

To truly appreciate the film, it is important to understand when the film was made. As I blogged yesterday, the film bears the unmistakable influence of silent films in its staging. The dialogue, as is typical of the films of the time, is often hurried and the scenes seem 'artificial' in their cutting, especially because of the pauses that punctuate the dialogues across shots. Once we get that 'annoyance' out of the way, what we have is a great film that thankfully wasn't remade with a modern cynicism so evident in films like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Platoon.

The film ends with a poignant scene, and the makers are prudent enough to spare us the trumpets and rolls for the end title, giving us, along with Paul, the peace of silence. The effect of this scene, and other great moments in the film, may be diluted by the millions of clones we have seen over the last several years. This makes it difficult at times to appreciate the film for all its merits. Yet, it still stands strong as a great film.

A Stick for Piracy

Epic Records just came up with a real brainwave to tackle music sharing (which they describe, in a really broad sense, as "piracy"). The goal is to prevent online trading of prerelease music. The test samples are Tori Amos' Scarlet's Walk and Pearl Jam's Riot Act. The solution: provide reviewers with the CD glued shut inside a Sony Walkman with headphones glued on to it. Lovely. Mercifully (and quite expectedly) a reviewer figured out a way to get the CD out -- in order to be able to do justice to the music on a good music system -- his own! {NYTimes}

Sunday, September 15, 2002

return to where no one has gone before ... again and again

We finished watching Gandhi today afternoon. I spent the evening emulating a couch potato as I ingested one Star Trek:TNG rerun after another. Quite a good bunch of episodes, including one dealing with my favourite topic: time. We've also started watching another AFI Top 100 movie, All Quiet on the Western Front (#54). It's long, but interesting, especially in the use of visuals. It seems more like a silent film with dialogue added.

Saturday, September 14, 2002

Italian horror ... in style

A slice of a legend ... again
We started watching Gandhi. The DVD does wonders to the epic. Every time I saw it was in the horrible dubbed version (thanks to the Indian film board). The film has all the trappings of a great epic. I seem to have reached a point where I recognise the devices employed by a film to evoke reactions to its epic elements, but am unaffected by them. This may be detrimental to a complete moviewatching experience, but I don't let it affect my judgement. It's a great film that only fails in the superficial approach it must adopt in telling the tale of man whose life was full of filmable experiences.

Friday, September 13, 2002

Smoke on the weirdo/Charred finger

With a friend from out of town visiting and it being my turn in the kitchen, I dished up a mongrel of chicken biryani and khichdi as well as some daal from blackeyed peas. We watched the rest of MST3K/Manos. Outrageously funny. And highly recommended. My heart bleeds for the people who made Manos.

The first smiley

Just followed a post on slashdot to Mike Jones' account of his efforts to track down the first smiley.

Related: The Dead Media Project

A Gem of a dinner and the serendipitous event of the week

A tradition that Chris keeps alive is a dinner every Thursday. We (including a bunch of friends) try out or revisit an Indian restaurant (or sometimes one of the numerous great eating places in Atlanta) and have a good time. Yesterday, we took our friends to Heera of India (which we visited on Sunday last). We placed our orders in a fashion reminiscent of the group dinners back home: each one orders an entrée along with grain at the side (a roti or a nan). Everyone digs in to the common pool and splits the tab. This makes the activity more fun (since you get to sample more dishes) and also cost-effective. The latter was also something reflected in the menu at the restaurant. The food was great and the service friendly and polite. The only downside would have been my grazing the glass of water that created hydrogenic design patterns on the glass top of the table. Thankfully, the table was adequately horizontal, so the patterns never made it off the table into our laps.

As we had pulled in to park, we noticed an Indian walk out of a store called Universal Groceries Ltd.. As it turns out, it was an Indian grocery store (in retrospect, the name is rather misleading), run by Malayalees (or Keralites) and housing an interesting collection of movies (VHS/DVD) and music (tape/CD) from hindi and malayalam films (as far as I could see), the latter being also nicely priced. Needless to say, I grabbed a few:

* Ratnadeep/Kitaab/Angoor (CDF 120353) {a compilation I have been scouring stores for a while to obtain}

* Many Moods: Yesudas (CDF 132155) {couldn't resist}

* Aap Ki Kasam/Raja Rani (CDF 120060) {featuring R. D. Burman's take on Aquarius from the cult Broadway musical Hair}

* Ek Mahal Ho Sapnon Ka / Naya Din Nayee Raat / Shankar Hussain / Ek Hans Ka Joda / Kadambari (CDNF 120400)

Serendipity: The last item in that list above contains the song that had me scouring the net over the phone on Sunday. There are songs/albums that you have never heard of and suddenly once you find out about them, you are keen on procuring them, and lo and behold, life just tosses them at you. This happened when I found out about Forbidden Kiss (where Najma Akhtar pays tribute to the Burmans by covering some of their songs, with newer arrangements and interpretations. A day after I had heard about it, I found it on eBay. Likewise for a squeezed compilation alike the last item in the list above (a distinctive HMV characteristic) of five Rajesh Khanna starrers (incidentally, I just saw this compilation staring back at me on a shelf, at a lower price, at the store yesterday. Does wonders for your choices of purchase, in retrospect).

To follow up on the great proceedings for the evening, we drove to Movies Worth Seeing to turn in Zelig and got ourselves a DVD treat for the weekend: The MST3K episode featuring Manos: The Hands of Fate (and a short film called Hired: Part II) and Dario Argento's classic Suspiria. Chris tells me the former has been reputed to be the best MST3K episode ever. We caught the first half an hour of it, and I must agree. The film they spoof is really really terrible. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, for the first few minutes nothing happened; then after a few minutes, nothing continued to happen. The film also had a scene dissolve into itself! Nothing can beat that.

To round the night off (and to mess up my sleep) I tuned in to a rerun of the TNG episode "Brothers"