Anatomy of a Scene: The 25th Hour

"It all came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening"

The best passage in the 2002 film The 25th Hour is nothing like you’d expect from its maker, combative Spike Lee. The series of short scenes that unfold after James Brogan puts his battered son Monty in the car are, in all likelihood, an alternative reality dreamed up by a father who cannot deal with the idea of his son going to prison. On the way to jail, James starts to talk about leaving town, driving out west. We’ll have one last whiskey, he says, and part ways forever. Monty will then change his name, get a job, settle down, have kids. He can never come back, or be who he was before, but he’ll have a life. As the old man speaks, images from Monty’s new life flash before us, teasing us with the possibility that all any jailbird needs is a dad willing to drive him out of town. Yet, I found myself moved to tears, and reduced to arguing, unconvincingly, with myself about how Monty does indeed escape and start a new life. What makes these scenes all the more touching is that you wouldn’t expect Brian Cox, a no-nonsense actor if ever there was one, to be selling you a can of hot baloney, and you don’t expect Spike Lee, whose career has always been about confrontation, to direct something that’s pure escapism.

Don't mind your language

A piece I'd written for GQ on cussing in Hindi films.

Swear on it

It’s fitting that two of the big year-end releases were The Dirty Picture, loosely based on the life of soft porn star Silk Smitha, and Desi Boyz, an Indian Full Monty. 2011 has been a bold year by Bollywood standards. Provocation equalled publicity; you could see it in the titles (Ragini MMS), the songs (“DK Bose”) and the material (the-road-to-heaven-is-paved-with-handjobs philosophy of That Girl in Yellow Boots). And while significant skin shows are still a no-go, profanity in Bollywood films has sprouted belated, rapidly fluttering wings.

For years, audiences in this country have had to make do with actors gritting their teeth and saying “Saale”, when they ought to be letting loose truly satisfying torrents of abuse. This embargo has now been lifted, with the Censor Board concentrating its scissorhands on (allegedly) inflammatory communal, political and sexual content instead. Still, today’s foul-mouthed films do owe a debt to Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen, which huffed and cussed the door down in 1994, only to be buried under a snowstorm of controversy. Twelve years later, mainstream cinema had its first brush with A-level gaalis with Vishal Bharadwaj’s Omkara. After that, it was just a matter of time before everyone joined in. Dev.D had a trilingual phone sex scene. Ishqiya introduced, to the horror of male-dominated Bollywood, the cussing female lead. Soon, directors across town were painting their scripts purple.

On the Fugees’ 1996 album The Score, Lauren Hill bragged that her rhymes were so complex, she had to couch them in the kind of language which people in the hood would understand. “And even after all my logic and my theory/ I add a muthafucker so you ignint niggas hear me,” she rapped. Thankfully, our filmmakers don’t seem to be hiding behind any such cop-outs. Foul language is one more element that’s been added to their arsenal, and they’re using it to suit their ends. Some treat it as a useful additive; like Peepli Live, where the abuses are sporadic and in keeping with the surroundings. Others use it as a cheap parlour trick, like the scene in Tanu Weds Manu where Rajendra Gupta, a distinguished presence in films like Seher and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, is made to shout “Ho gaya na phir...CHUTIYAAPA”.

One of the happy by-products of the freeing up of our cinematic lexicon is the way cursing has leaped across the gender bender. Ever since Vidya Balan called Arshad Warsi ‘chutiyam sulphate’ in last year’s Ishqiya, we’ve seen a series of female characters prepared to match their male co-stars cuss for cuss. This year, there was Kangana Ranaut mouthing off in Tanu Weds Manu, as well as two leading ladies – Rani Mukherjee’s inexplicably combative reporter in No One Killed Jessica, and Balan in The Dirty Picture – asking the question “Phat gayi?” Keen followers of Hindi cinema will also point to the young bride in Urf Professor – a decade-old unreleased film by the late Pankaj Advani – who stuns her initially condescending husband with a frank litany of her sexual conquests.

My nominee for Hindi cinema’s holy grail of onscreen cursing might seem an unlikely example. With Love, Sex aur Dhoka, Dibakar Banerjee showed that he wasn’t afraid to use profanity in ways that were disturbing and not at all cool. His Khosla Ka Ghosla, however, was as family-friendly as they come – unless, that is, you listen carefully when Sahni Saab is advising Khosla on the bus. A published version of the script might record the kindly sardar as saying “Yeh poora desh hi compromise pe chal raha hai [this whole country is working on compromises]”. Let the record show there’s a ‘behenchod’ in there as well. Now, I don’t want to build a stray curse into something bigger than it is. I’ll simply suggest that the ‘behenchod’ survived in the final cut because it fit in with the rhythm of Sahni’s speech and sounded so natural that no one really noticed it was there. Which plain-spoken Punjabi trying to make a point would think twice before saying that word? This is when cussing on film is at its most effective: when it seems so integral to the character’s speech patterns that you cannot picture the person talking any other way.

If profanity really is the new sex/violence, I’m inclined to believe it’ll cause more good than harm. Hearing someone abuse can be very revealing. You probably couldn’t tell much about a person by the way they fight or screw, but you can certainly peg someone by the way they cuss. Like the three young slackers of Delhi Belly, upper class youth in lower-middle class surroundings – it makes sense that they’d abuse with equal fluency in English and Hindi (or combine the two, as with “Your gaand is a solar eclipse”). To call this gutter-speak is to wish away reality; it’s the language of the streets, of the people. The closer our films come to approximating this, the sooner we’ll arrive at a truly representative cinema.

Here's the piece on their site. Also, an earlier post I'd done on the subject.

Rio Bravo

Fred Zinneman’s High Noon is considered one of the great Westerns, but fellow director Howard Hawks was no fan. As he later remarked, “I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help.” So Hawks teamed up with John Wayne (who disliked High Noon even more) and set about making the exact opposite of that film. The result was Rio Bravo, a movie about a sheriff who does ask for help – though unlike the Gary Cooper character in High Noon, only from those who are likely to be of use.

Despite its indignant origins, Rio Bravo is one of the most blissfully entertaining Westerns ever. Sheriff John T Chance (Wayne) is in a tight spot. He’s just arrested Joe Burdette for shooting a man at point-blank range, and knows that Nathan Burdette, Joe’s brother and a powerful rancher, will be looking to bust him out. He also knows the townspeople are either too afraid to help, or too inept to fight. So he assembles a strange posse – his former deputy Dude (Dean Martin), now a recovering alcoholic, an old cripple named Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and the youngest draw on the block, the Colorado Kid (Ricky Nelson). There’s also a seductive cardsharp called Feathers (Angie Dickenson), who Chance can’t intimidate or seem to shake.

Howard Hawks was lionised by the auteurists because his films – no matter what genre – always looked like they’d been made by the same man. Rio Bravo certainly does have that patent Hawks mixture of screwball comedy, sexual tension (male-female and male-male) and economically choreographed action. Yet this film, rated by many as the director’s best, also deviates from the Hawks canon in certain ways. The relaxed fatalism that hangs over the film is miles away from the frantic rhythms of His Girl Friday or Scarface. There’s also a melancholy – especially when Dean Martin is onscreen – that one doesn’t see too often in the director’s films.

The script was by Hawks regulars Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, and the broad-ranging score by Dimitri Tiomkin (to hear “El Degüello” once is to have it haunt your dreams). Dean Martin showed why he was the best actor in the Rat Pack. Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez is a caricature of an excitable Mexican, but funny nevertheless, and Angie Dickenson’s voice is so laden with mischief one gets the feeling she scares John Wayne more than the killers. Wayne was already an icon by then; he exudes the confidence of one who’s realised the audience doesn’t expect him to act, but just be himself. A couple of years later, Sergio Leone ushered in the age of the revisionist Western. Rio Bravo thus stands not only as Howard Hawks’ last great film, but also the first “last great Western”.

A shorter version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Super 8: DVD Review

In the months leading up the release of Super 8, there were rumours about how the movie was JJ Abrams’ tribute to the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg. This seemed unfair, especially since Spielberg’s produced several films that bear no resemblance to his oeuvre (Transformers: Dark of the Moon, for one), and JJ Abrams is a serious talent in his own right (he created Lost and directed the sleek 2009 reboot of Star Trek). Yet, once the film released, it turned out the rumours were accurate. Super 8 is strongly reminiscent of early Spielberg, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Kids on bicycles in tense situations. Check. Townsfolk looking up in wonder at bright lights in the sky. Check. Henry Thomas in the lead. Check. (Okay, it’s Joel Courtney, but they’re dead ringers for each other).

So Super 8 is definitely Spielbergian. Sadly, it isn’t quite Spielberg. Six kids working on a Super 8 zombie movie witness a strange train crash. After they pick themselves up, they hear a loud banging from inside one of the derailed bogies. As they watch from a distance, something indistinct and animal-like breaks out and disappears into the night. Almost immediately, sinister military men arrive and refuse to say anything useful. It transpires that the escaped creature is an alien, and this time it isn’t phoning home, but roaring, mauling and slaughtering its way back. What starts out as a fluent piece of ’70s nostalgia turns into a monster movie that’s high on spectacle and low on logic.

In its stronger first half, before we actually see the creature, Super 8 conveys a real sense of what it must have been like to be young and film-crazy in small-town USA in the ’70s. Abrams, his friend and cinematographer Larry Fong and the film’s producer Bryan Burk all started out this way, making genre film rip-offs in their backyards (in a neat bit of back story, Abrams was given the chance to restore Spielberg’s own 8mm films as a teenager). The affection the director has for these kids and their cheesy horror flick is palpable. The younger actors respond beautifully, especially the self-possessed Elle Fanning and Riley Griffiths as the young director.

There’s plenty of trivia on the audio commentary, as well as in the two mini-features “The Dream behind Super 8” and “The Visitor Lives”. None of these is successful in explaining why the town suddenly becomes a war zone, or why exactly all the dogs disappear. What they do make clear is the extent to which everyone on the project was in awe of the Spielberg. Abrams, Fong and Burk spend half the audio commentary’s running time trying to come up with a suitable question to message the man; the next half is spent anxiously waiting for his reply. As always, you can rely on Spielberg to transport grownups back to childhood.

Closing night

Ben Gazzara, best known for his films with John Cassevettes, died today at the age of 81.

Grapes over wine

Listen my friends, and I'll tell you about Moby Grape. They were tremendous and tragic, sublime and perverse. They had five members - Skip Spence, Bob Mosley, Jerry Miller, Don Stevenson and Peter Lewis. Spence played guitar, sang and wrote some of their best songs. Mosley played bass and howled like a white Otis Redding. Lewis also sang finger-picked beautifully. Miller was responsible for some of the most stinging lead guitar in rock history, Stevenson for some of the most kinetic drumming.

It doesn't end there. All five of the Grapes sang on record and in concert; one of the particular glories of their early work is hearing all those voices colliding with each other. Their incendiary guitar interplay was almost with parallel: at the time, only Buffalo Springfield could boast of three guitars playing in tandem (and they fought so much, it was usually two). In addition, all the members of Moby Grape were song-writers, right from the first album.



There's more. Moby Grape was a failure almost as soon as its first album released, overhyped by the record companies, embroiled in legal battles, destroyed by drugs and disagreements. Spence, and later Mosley, would wander off into the thickets of schizophrenia. What makes this even sadder is that that first album, Moby Grape, was an unmitigated masterpiece. Opening with the caterwauling, almost ridiculously exuberant "Hey Grandma", it runs through r&b ("Mr Blues"), country rock ("Ain't No Use"), delicate balladry ("Someday", "8:05") and jagged, jet-propelled rock ("Indifference").



And there's "Omaha", a song that should be bracketed with "Johnny B Goode" and "She Loves You" as one of the most unstoppable, shout-it-from-the-mountaintop unhinged force of nature rock 'n roll singles ever. It's a driving, breakneck love song to friendship, centering around the repeated phrase "Listen, my friends". The Grape were a product of the '67 Summer of Love scene, and it shows in the lyrics that go from earnest ("You thought never/ but I'm yours forever/ Won't leave you ever") to poetic (No more rain/ From where we came) to carnal ("Get under the covers, yeah!/ All of your lovin'/ Beneath and above ya/ Bein' in love!) in the space of a few paragraphs. Under, beneath and above are also where the guitars are at; never breaking for a second to admire themselves or see what the others are up to. I've added both the studio version and a live one from Monterey Pop below; the latter has an extra guitar break that arrives after the famous opening riff and before the vocals arrive. It's a) as good a reason for the enduring legacy of this band as any - those few odd seconds approach a ragged perfection that many other bands wouldn't be able to touch after a dozen albums and three reunions tours - and b) so good I could weep. Which is the way I feel about Moby Grape in general, and Moby Grape, the album, in particular.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: DVD review

For the majority of its running time, this Planet of the Apes reboot makes the same mistake that Peter Jackson’s King Kong did – it bleaches the original of all its frivolity and fun. Sure, times have changed since 1968, the year Franklin J. Schaffner’s silly but enjoyable Charlton Heston-starrer released. But have viewing habits evolved to the extent that we’re now making emotionally sensitive, psychologically acute movies about apes taking over the world? It’s like someone took Chuck Berry’s advice and decided there was too much monkey business going on.

So the first hour of Rise of the Planet of the Apes is solid and unremarkable. James Franco plays scientist Will Rodman, whose experiments involving a possible cure for Alzheimer’s come crashing down when a chimp they’re testing the formula on goes berserk and is shot. After it’s discovered that she’d just given birth, Will, hit by the sort of half-baked guilt that screams “plot furthering”, adopts the baby. The chimp, who he names Caesar, grows up so smart and sensitive, you’d almost think he was human. Oh wait, he is. Andy Serkis, master of performance capture (he was Gollum in Lord of the Rings and the ape in King Kong), plays – or more accurately, acts out the movements of – Caesar. It’s still the most compelling performance in the movie – beating out Franco, Frieda Pinto as primatologist and love interest, John Lithgow as Will’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted dad and Brian Cox as a very bad zookeeper. Whether or not it feels like there’s too much that’s human in the monkey’s body language is something for each viewer to grapple with individually.

The film finds its mojo in the last forty-five minutes, with the now-violent Caesar in a facility and plotting an ape revolution. Director Rupert Wyatt builds to the moment when Caesar says his first word (the earlier movies had talking apes), and from that moment on it’s a breathless rush to the climactic man versus money showdown. The ending, as with every other Hollywood action movie now days, is left wide open to the possibility of a sequel. No one stands to benefit from this more than Serkis, who, with an extra feature on this DVD all to himself, is clearly being seen as the franchise’s trump card.

A version of this piece was published in Time Out Delhi.