A Fan Apart

Super 8: DVD Review

2012-02-09T01:20:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-03T23:11:00.000-08:00

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

Grapes over wine

2012-01-29T23:53:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-24T21:45:00.000-08:00

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.

Is there livestock in any of them?

2012-01-17T02:43:00.001-08:00

Superlative short film by the Coen brothers, starring Josh Brolin's character from No Country for Old Men. "World Cinema" was part of an omnibus film called Chacun son cinema ("To Each His Own Cinema").

Every Picture Tells a Story

2012-01-09T04:32:00.000-08:00

In Every Picture Tells a Story, song after song, Rod Stewart and band stretch for and find surprising depths of emotion. The wearing of hearts on sleeves for sustained lengths isn't common in rock ‘n roll, especially ‘70s rock. Even its rival for the other great English rock album of the ‘70s – Mott the Hoople’s Mott – relies on ironic posturing to get its horrors across. This album also seems to starts out that way, with the “Ballad of John and Yoko”-like title track and its cheerful numbering of legal scrapes and sexual conquests. But “Seems Like a Long Time” is poetry without the punchline. Soon, it becomes clear that this is an album about memory, and the consequences of holding onto it too tight.

There’s the brief distraction of “That’s All Right Mama”, a lot bluesier that Elvis’ version, followed by a slide guitar-led “Amazing Grace” and “Tomorrow is a Long Time”, a Dylan outtake that never made it onto the Freewheeling album. There’s a stately flashback, the medieval-sounding mandolin piece, “Henry’s Time”. “Maggie May” follows; this was Stewart’s big hit off this album. This story of a boy in love with a more experienced woman is wry and emotional and funny and sad, and even more interesting if you consider that there was also a popular Liverpudlian ditty about a prostitute called “Maggie May”.

The band consists of Mick Waller on drums, Pete Sears on piano, Ian McLagen on organ, Dick Powell on violin, Martell Brandy and Martin Quittenton on acoustic guitars, and Andy Pyle and Danny Thompson on bass. The only really famous musician here is Faces (and pre Rolling Stones) guitarist Ron Wood. Yet this bunch (with an uncredited Lindsay Jackson on mandolin) contribute some of the most heart-rending ensemble playing I’ve heard outside of The Chieftains or some of Van Morrison’s backing bands. It comes to a head in “Mandolin Wind”: Stewart’s voice sounds like it’s lit by a fire of regret, and the band plays around it like winter. On to the last two. Stewart's rowdy version of the Motown hit “(I Know) I’m Losing You” sounds like it’s off another album. Fortunately, the closing track, a Tim Hardin-penned number called "Reason to Believe", is the kind of finish this album deserves. “Someone like you makes it hard to live without somebody else”, sings Stewart, sounding like he’s lived that line. The violin sympathises, as does the mandolin. The band musters up one last sigh, the singer, one last breath. They know they’ll never make music like this again.

The state of the stage

2012-01-06T22:10:00.000-08:00

Longer-than-usual piece for Time Out Delhi's recent theatre issue.

A fortnight ago, we found ourselves sitting in the aisles of the packed Alliance Française auditorium – even though we’d bought tickets beforehand. The show was The Weekend Cocktail, by Dramatech, one of Delhi’s busiest theatre groups. It wasn’t exactly untested material – the sources included Roald Dahl, W Somerset Maugham and Sholem Aleichem – but the troupe wasn’t taking any chances, splicing in five musical numbers. Though an unmistakably Indian twang often broke out from under their posh British accents, there was a real sense of giving the audience their 300 rupees worth.

A few days later, we were in a crowded basement in Panchsheel Park, where The Tadpole Repertory and a couple of their friends were putting on a show. The dramatic evening featured everything from skits to poetry readings, bossa nova songs and the inimitable Andrew Hoffland imitating accents of the world. Like the frequent performances Tadpole does in this basement lent to them by a friend, this was an informal gathering – a dog sat at our feet and watched proceedings, and there was hot punch to be had later.

This fortnight, we’ll be at the Bharat Rang Mahotsav. Since its inception in 1999, BRM has become India’s largest, and arguably most prestigious, theatre festival. Organised by the National School of Drama, with all the intellectual heft and grand ambition you’d expect from that cultural behemoth, it has seen growth both exponential – from 58 productions in its first edition to over 100 this time around – and all-encompassing. The current edition has a primary focus on Tagore, a secondary one on Poland, includes productions from England, South Africa, Japan and France, and will bring Indian dialects like Santali and Tullu to Delhi’s stages for the first time. This is the red letter fortnight in the city’s theatre calendar.

Somewhere within the boundaries of these three productions lies Delhi theatre. There’s the old guard at Mandi House, surfacing every once in a while to remind people why they are special. There’s the sharp commercial focus of groups like Dramatech and Pierrot’s Troupe. And there are a handful of independent voices, trying to emerge from the basement. Delhi theatre is in a curious state of flux. Even as the quantum of public performances increases, the amount of new writing seems to be shrinking. Selling out a show often means selling out literally – making concessions, using hackneyed material, repeating old tricks.

It’s easy to forget while the Bharat Rang Mahotsav is on, but one gargantuan festival does not a theatre scene make. Put that festival aside, and Delhi’s theatre calendar starts to look rather bare. The only other time audiences get to see a bunch of plays from other cities is during the META festival, hosted by Habitat World. There are, of course, exceptions. Mumbai’s Akarsh Khurana brought the popular Classic Milds and The Interview to town this year. Lillete Dubey premiered the Broadway smash August: Osage County in the city where she received her first theatre training as a student in Lady Sri Ram College. Even this apparent victory was a compromise: the play was supposed to open in Mumbai, but the organisers couldn’t get bookings on the dates they wanted.

“With Prithvi in Bombay or Ranga Shankara in Bangalore, groups are assured of a theatre audience,” said writer-director Neel Chaudhuri, of the Tadpole Repertory. “With the exception of the NSD, which doesn’t lend its halls out, there is no space like that in Delhi.” That might be why Quaff Theatre omitted Delhi from its travel plans for The Real Inspector Hound. And while last year’s META brought a bouquet of great productions to town, it was unfortunate that only two plays found their way to Delhi before the festival. Chaudhuri categorised Delhi audiences as “hungry for culture, as opposed to Bangalore, Bombay and Chennai, who have actual theatre audiences.” Khurana, one of the rare frequent fliers to Delhi, was more guarded, saying he’d had satisfactory responses to his plays here. He did, however, mention a resistance to adult humour: “I remember someone at the Habitat mentioned to the management that our play [A Guy Thing] was a little vulgar. Since then, I’ve been a little cautious of doing stuff of that nature, or jokes that are a little political, over here.”

Even if we assume there are local playwrights too wary of audiences to actually publish, there’s no denying the paucity of original scripts currently emanating from Delhi. In the three editions of Writer’s Bloc in Mumbai, an annual forum for emerging playwrights to interact and come up with new work, Chaudhuri remains the sole Delhi writer to have been invited. It’s also telling that in each of the last two editions of META, only one Delhi play has made it to the final list of nominees (Tripurari Sharma’s Roop Aroop in 2010; Arvind Gaur’s Ambedkar Aur Gandhi, written by Rajesh Kumar, in 2011). Syed Alam, founder of Pierrot’s Troupe, recalled how different the scene was in his native Aligarh. “There, every play had to be original, contemporary, topical, otherwise it was not liked by the students,” he said. “Delhi theatre is suffering from intellectual bankruptcy. Everyone just does adaptations.”

While Pierrot’s Troupe is guilty of a couple of adaptations itself (Big B, Tale of the Taj), it does balance this out by presenting original dramatic work like the Tom Alter-starrer Ghalib and the impressive solo piece 1947. It’s also one of the few local groups that can afford to pay its members a salary. They’re a successful group by Delhi standards, alternating historical dramas and broad comedies; and unlike Arvind Gaur’s comparably industrious Asmita, they come with little socio-political baggage. “People here need to stop giving these social messages,” Alam said. “As long as you’re not doing burlesques, if you’re staging something and charging people for it, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Both Alam and Chaudhuri stressed the importance of entering theatre with the awareness that it isn’t really a paying proposition. “I don’t see how people can realistically be expecting to earn a living from theatre,” Chaudhuri said. “I think it’s something you can foresee and work towards, but for that, you have to have something special and you have to toil, and I don’t think people are willing to do that.”

Set against this gathering gloom is NSD Director Anuradha Kapur’s assertion that the theatre scene in Delhi is amongst the most forward-looking in the country. “There are a lot of young people here who are trying to find alternate spaces, alternate ways of expressions,” she said, mentioning Aditee Biswas, Zuleikha Chaudhari and The Tadpole Repertory as examples of Delhi artists doing interesting work. She did admit that Delhi’s output of fresh plays had fallen, and that Bangalore had raced ahead in that respect. “Abhishek [Majumdar], Ram Ganesh [Kamatham], they have the pulse of the language,” she said. Kapur also voiced a concern about Delhi theatre suffering from a lack of internal communication. That’s probably an understatement; at present, there’s hardly any collaboration between playwrights and directors from Delhi’s different theatre circles, and no common platform (such as a Delhi festival) that might bring them together.

Still, Delhi theatre has made some important strides in recent years. For one, it’s started the difficult but necessary journey out of Mandi House. It’s begun to push an audience used to getting culture for free to part with the kind of money they’d pay for a movie ticket. There’s exciting work in new media, dance theatre and puppetry (Anurupa Roy in particular has gained a name across India for her puppet shows). And now, in addition to Bharat Rang Mahotsav and META, there are the idiosyncratic Ibsen and Short+Sweet festivals to look forward to – the former organised by Nissar and Amal Allana, the latter an offshoot of an international festival that began in Australia a decade ago and made its India debut here in 2010.

Perhaps what’s needed now is a dedicated venue like Bangalore’s Ranga Shankara, though it might be worth asking whether we have the material to currently sustain a place like that. Alam pointed to the ever-increasing number of public shows in Delhi as a positive. “We’re doing good, bad and average plays,” he said, “and to survive, you need to do good, bad and average plays. You also have to do many plays.” Forty-eight years ago, Ebrahim Alkazi directed a now-legendary production of Andha Yug against the backdrop of Feroz Shah Kotla. Bhanu Bharti’s recent staging of the play in October this year at the same site was, in a way, Delhi theatre’s salute to itself. With some luck, it might also prove to be a bookend for one Delhi theatre era, and the beginning of another, even more fascinating one.

2011: A Review of Sorts

2011-12-31T03:03:00.000-08:00

The year in review: 2011

After the significant gains of 2010 (Udaan, Karthik Calling Karthik, Peepli Live), Hindi cinema in 2011 was a bit of a letdown. Vishal Bharadwaj finally delivered a clunker, 7 Khoon Maaf. The story - about a woman who keeps killing her abusive husbands - needed something like the Wilder touch. Bharadwaj instead ended up directing like the David Fincher of Se7en and Fight Club: the film was cynical, oppressive and unremittingly dark. It did, however, have “Darling”, which would have been the song of the year if it’d been original (it was an acknowledged cover of the Russian song "Kalinka").

Aamir Khan continued his golden run as producer. Kiran Rao's Dhobi Ghat was a muted tribute to Mumbai, and far too gentle to remember for long. Yet, there was a lot that was just right about it: the performances by Prateik and Kriti Malhotra (who has the most relatable voice), the score by Gustavo Santaollala and a unwillingness to concede to popular appeal (down to Aamir Khan’s irritating mind games about how this wasn’t a movie for the masses). Delhi Belly was its polar opposite: loud, trash-talking, fast-paced. It had whipcrack editing, the funniest script in recent memory, three leads who cussed like they didn’t care, and crazy, cross-eyed Poorna Jaganathan stealing scenes from everyone's noses. Also, I hate you like I love you love you love you…

Shor in the City may not have been as slick as 99, but it did manage to take the manic comedy of that 2009 film and turn it into something darker and more substantial. Directors Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D also got Tusshar Kapoor to act, an aberration that was quickly forgotten after his turn in The Dirty Picture (which, despite a joyously smutty performance by Vidya Balan, was very average).

The close but no cigar film of the year: Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster, which had an impressive Randeep Hooda, a surprisingly effective Jimmy Shergill and an awful Mahie Gill.

Ra.One might just be the worst film ever made in this country's history. If you’ve already seen it, I don’t need to tell you why. If you haven’t, read this Vigil Idiot strip.

Level any charge you’d like against The Tree of Life, but I could not get those images, or the haunting “Les barricades misteriuses”, out of my head for a long time. The most ambitious and flawed film of the year.

Drive unfolded like a cool dream interrupted by hideous violence. Gosling was a real human being, and a real hero (how old-fashioned). Carrey Mulligan will have to stop with that sad smile, or every film she does is going to end up this way.

Yet to see Shame, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Artist, War Horse, any of which might be the year's best.

Finally, some miscellaneous categories with no significance whatsoever:

Best concert I attended this year: Vieux Farka Toure Toumani Diabate and the Manganiyar troupe at Siri Fort

The concert I attended that I wouldn’t trade for the best concert I attended this year: Bob Dylan, live in Singapore

Best concert I didn’t attend this year: Metallica, Gurgaon

Best concert I’ll never attend: R.E.M, who broke up this year

Album of the year: The Beach Boys’ Smile, pieced together and released after four decades in the vault

Oh, and I bought my first original Criterions this year: Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. And we won the World Cup.

But only worth living/ Manhattan

2011-12-18T05:13:00.000-08:00

Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face...

Dinner and a movie

2011-12-02T21:45:00.000-08:00

A piece I did for Time Out about PVR's Director's Cut

“Nowadays, people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing,” says Paul Kemp in The Rum Diary, quoting Oscar Wilde. The line wafts over to me as I lie back in my recliner, sip an ice tea and idly wonder whether I should tear my eyes from the screen long enough to glance through the iPad menu by the armrest. This is Director’s Cut, the new ultra-luxurious offering from PVR. It opened last month in Vasant Kunj’s Ambience Mall, and houses four movie theatres – the largest of which has a capacity of 108 – a multi-cuisine restaurant, a café and a bookstore.

Director’s Cut appears targeted at people who believe that things of value should come at a price. But just how valuable is this experience? The recliners are admittedly comfortable. It’s great to have a decent (if not very adventurous) in-theatre menu – though be warned, a pizza here can set you back Rs.500. The main benefit, though, is being able to watch a movie in a hall and in peace, in the company of other “connoisseurs” (as the press release would have it). Who could put a price on that? PVR can; tickets are Rs 750 on weekdays, Rs 850 on weekends. My bill, lunch included, came to Rs.1,778, a decidedly expensive outing for anyone who doesn’t shop regularly at Emporio Mall.

PVR entered the luxury movie-viewing market a couple of years ago with their “Gold Class” halls in the NCR and Bangalore. The plush surroundings in these theatres are roughly the same as what Director’s Cut is now offering. PVR’s Joint Managing Director Sanjeev Bijli acknowledged that Director’s Cut was an extension of the Gold Class concept, albeit with more food and beverage options. “It’s very annoying sometimes to be thrown into the exit corridors after the movie finishes,” he said over the phone. “A lot of people want to sit back, have a glass of wine and discuss the film. That’s why we decided on a restaurant.”

PVR also has plans to reel in the discerning (as opposed to simply wealthy) viewer with screenings of “vintage and classic cinema” in one of the four halls, under the Director’s Rare label. Try medium rare. This week, they screened the Javier Bardem-starrer Buitiful, which released in regular PVR theatres earlier this year (as did Drive, shown the week before). They also screened The Shawshank Redemption, a film whose rarity is compromised by the fact that it’s on TV every other fortnight. Cinephiles are more likely to find something of value in the bookstore, which has an impressive collection of literature on cinema, reasonably priced movie posters and Bollywood-inspired memorabilia.

Director’s Cut wants to be seen as the place for sophisticated cinema lovers. “The interiors…are soaked in classic and contemporary film-based art, so as to underline the classic quality of the experience,” rhapsodises the press release. This “art”, mainly signed photographs of directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa on the walls, is a smokescreen, an illusion to make the patrons of Director’s Cut feel like they’re discerning viewers. The truth is that Director’s Cut is a luxurious viewing experience, not necessarily a quality cinematic one. What would make this offering more interesting is if PVR could start screening genuinely rare movies, something that cultural centres here do for free. That would certainly add some value to the price.

In which we walked around Def Col Market looking at films on walls

2011-11-14T00:40:00.000-08:00

After years of treating it as a pathway to the other side, it was a bit of shock to realise that Defence Colony Market has a nice park down its middle. It was clean, and the shrubbery actually looked like it’d been tended to. It was on this lawn that a projector was set up, pointing at the wall above Soi, Thai & Burmese restaurant. A string of lights, left over from Diwali, hung down, obscuring the “&” as well as the pale green logo of A Wall is a Screen.

A Wall is a Screen originated in Hamburg in 2003, when three filmmakers decided to project short films onto the walls of the City Centre there. Since then, the same has been done in a few dozen countries around the world, and on just about every surface imaginable. When the Delhi venue was announced as Def Col Market, I wondered what they’d be able to do with that crowded, rather indistinct crush of bars and restaurants.

6.55pm. Some 20 odd people have gathered in the park. Most of them sound German (Max Mueller Bhavan is co-organising), though there are a few locals as well. The first screening begins, a pounding animation inspired by Blake’s “Tyger Tyger”. It’s over in five minutes – most of the films were about that length – and a couple of crisp, friendly announcements are made, first in English, then in Hindi. The organisers are clearly keen to draw in casual onlookers; there’s no sign of the cliqueshness that sometimes happens with foreign cultural centre events.

Two short screenings on the adjoining wall, and we make our first location shift. By now, the crowd’s gained some 15 members; it’s diversified to include a baby in a pram, a couple of interested-looking grandmothers, and smatterings of German, French, English and Hindi. We stop in the lane opposite Barista, and watch a rather disappointing Irish Bollywood spoof (a drunker heckler saying something about knowing Lata Mangeshkar was more entertaining). The next projection was on a private wall. The film, the announcer explained, was on German houses, so they felt it was fitting to layer it on an Indian house. One of the owners came out mid-film to scattered applause. By now, the crowd was closing in on 50.

The organisers continued to match wall and film; an animation on waste disposal was screened near a garbage dump, while Motodrom, with its gritty black-and-white images, was perfect for the crumbling, whitewashed-a-decade-ago facade beside the Orient Bank ATM. People sat on parked scooters and bikes and tried to make sense of the flickering images. Rickshaws passed on the road behind us, their passengers craning their necks. A couple of policemen looked on from a distance. An auto-driver was moved by the mention of Yamuna to emerge from his vehicle and tell whoever would listen exactly why the river was so dirty. And a young MBA graduate came up to me – incorrectly assuming that I’d been dragged here against my will – and asked if I went to these kinds of things often.

The last surface, in a break with tradition, wasn’t wall as screen, but just a screen. This was placed in the park at the head of the market. We sat in its mini-amphitheatre (which I didn’t know existed – I’d never even noticed this park before), and watched an entirely charming short about mobile cinema in Calcutta. As I stared up at the white canvas, I suddenly understood why A Wall is a Screen was such a success wherever it went. It reminds us of how we used to watch movies as children, heads raised, looking up in wonder.

Wisden on India: Review

2011-11-11T22:45:00.000-08:00

Just this month, Wisden announced that it would be launching an India edition in early 2012. It’s a measure of the times we live in that this announcement went out, to quote Douglas Adams, in a blaze of no publicity at all. Two decades ago, the news would have had Indian cricket fans out in the streets, waving their floppy-brimmed hats. But today, there’s Cricinfo and relentless TV programming and mobile applications to fill in the gaps – and that’s assuming fans here are still reading anything longer than Yuvraj Singh tweets. And what’s an almanack anyway?

The Wisden Cricket Almanack is the game’s one holy book. It was first published in 1864, and has come out every year since, making it the longest-running sports periodical in history. Since the game’s beginnings on the village greens of England, Wisden has been its most faithful scribe, and generation after generation have set its pronouncements in stone. Despite this God-like reputation, it would be unwise to view Wisden on India as a definitive history of cricket in this country. This is, at best, a selective history of Indian cricket, seen largely through British eyes. Compiled by writer Jonathan Rice, it brings together all the major reporting on Indian cricket that’s appeared in Wisden over the years, starting with the Parsee tour of 1886 and ending in 2009, with Virender Sehwag as Leading Cricketer in the World.

In Beyond a Boundary, arguably the greatest cricket book ever, CLR James wrote about how, at one point in his life, he was so much “on the alert for discrimination” that he would underline anything said against the West Indian team in his copies of The Cricketer. Reading Wisden on India might stir similar feelings in history-conscious Indian fans. There are some major omissions – Palwankar Baloo and his 118 wickets at 18.11 apiece on the 1911 tour of England are barely mentioned. The tone, especially in the early years, is often patronising (for instance, the vague mention of a “want of harmony” in the touring team of 1936, followed by the sage advice: “If a team of India cricketers is to be successful, differences of creed will have to be forgotten”). There’s also a tendency, noted by Rice, to detail the exploits of blue bloods who merely dabbled in cricket in India.

But for every real or imagined slight, there are substantial rewards for the patient reader. Some are in plain sight, like the two guest articles by Vijay Merchant, the first great Bombay batsman. One is an overview of the first two decades of Indian cricket, the second an exhortation to the 1959 touring side titled “India, Be Bold!” (They weren’t, and lost the series 5-0). Others are buried treasure: the last line in the obituary of the Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi predicts a bright cricketing future for his then 11-year-old son. Mansoor Ali Khan “Tiger” Pataudi, who passed away this month, led India to its first series win in 1962.

Wisden on India is not for the casual fan. There’s a lot of statistical information, and little by way of anecdote. The Almanack’s writing, until recently, has never been of the flashy sort, and several pages go by without any verbal flourish. Serious readers may be disappointed by the lack of literary heavyweights in this collection. Neville Cardus and John Arlott wrote for Wisden, and about Indian cricketers, but never, it seems, at the same time. RC Robertson-Glasgow, Matthew Engel and John Woodcock only make cameos. There are, however, some memorable pieces by famous Indian cricket writers. Ramchandra Guha (whose A Corner of a Foreign Field Rice calls “by far the best national cricket history yet published”) hypothesises hilariously about Mahatma Gandhi’s cricketing career, while Mihir Bose does a spot-on bit of crystal ball-gazing, predicting, back in 1997, the impact Indian money would have on the game.

Wisden is obviously committed to striving to keep up with changing trends. In recent years, its pages have featured articles dedicated to the intricacies of powerplays, as well as a loosening of style (to the extent of including an explicit tweet by English pacer Tim Bresnan in the 2010 edition). If this book and their Wisden India plans show that they’re not above tapping a lucrative market, it also indicates their desire to not just survive the brave new world of modern cricket, but also remain the authority on it.

This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Citizen Kane: 70th Anniversary Edition DVD

2011-11-09T01:52:00.000-08:00

The year was 1941. After conquering Broadway and scaring the living daylights out of America with his “War of the Worlds” broadcast, Orson Welles was busy making his first feature film. Because he was already a celebrity before he arrived in Hollywood, he’d managed to negotiate a contract with an unprecedented measure of freedom. The film, then titled American, was about the spectacular rise and fall of a media mogul called Charles Foster Kane. It cost under a million, starred Welles’s cohorts from Mercury Theatre, and contained every manner of innovation, from overlapping dialogue to Gregg Toland’s stunning depth-of-field camerawork.

It’s been 70 years since then, but Citizen Kane – regarded by many as the greatest film ever made – hasn’t aged. One can only envy the uninitiated viewer, encountering, for the first time, Herman J Mankiewicz’s crackling dialogue, with its parodies of “Timespeak” and jabs at Hearst, the audacious, fractured narrative and the lively performances, all the way down from Welles as Kane to Agnes Moorehead’s few odd minutes of screen time. As for those who’ve seen the film enough times to have Bernstein’s speech about the girl in the white dress down verbatim, there are two excellent commentaries by critics Peter Bogdanovich and Roger Ebert included on this DVD.

There are several ghosts hanging over the 70th Anniversary Edition DVD of Citizen Kane. The first is Kane himself, or rather, the person he was based on – William Randolph Hearst, real-life media baron and a pioneer of yellow journalism. The second is Orson Welles, who directed this film at the age of 26, and died 26 years ago, striving till his last days to divert the public’s attention from Kane to his other excellent films. The third, and most obscure, is film critic Pauline Kael’s polarising 1971 article “Raising Kane”, which suggested that Mankiewicz had a major role in shaping the film. The article is mentioned by both commentators: Ebert calls it “lovely” and seems to agree with Kael’s assessment that the “Rosebud” device was a gimmick, while Bogdanovich caustically remarks that it “showed how wild some critical opinions could be”.

Viewers who’ve seen the film but are unfamiliar with the mythos of Kane – Hollywood’s jealousy of wonder boy Welles, the closed sets that concealed the film’s explosive subject matter, the blacklist of the film by the Hearst press – would probably want to hear Ebert’s commentary track, with its nonstop barrage of information, first. Ebert is particularly effective at explaining how Welles created such a grand-looking film on a relatively modest budget. One of his opening gambits is particularly fascinating; he mentions that this movie has as many special effects as Star Wars, it’s just that they’re invisible.

Bogdanovich, on the other hand, uses to his advantage the fact that he was a Welles confidante in the master’s later years (he interviewed him for the book This is Orson Welles). Many of his pronouncements come with the “Orson said” tag, making the track less exhaustive, more intimate. Of the many anecdotes he narrates, one is particularly resonant. Once, when Welles was talking about Greta Garbo, Bogdanovich mentioned what a pity it was that she’d only been in two really great movies. Welles stared at him for a while, and then said, “Well, you only need one.”

American History X: DVD Review

2011-10-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

As shocking as the day it first released, Tony Kaye’s American History X is a high-water mark in the director-as-sadist tradition. The movie pounds the sensibilities of the viewer like a piñata. Everyone is either yelling or cussing (usually both), and since this is a film about race relations, it’s interspersed with a slew of racial epithets. Get used to that and there’s the violence (filmed in slow motion so you don’t miss the finer details). Get used to that and there’s the yawning gap where something profound ought to be. You’d expect a film this inflammatory to at least have a stand about race relations in America beyond “violence begets violence”, but hey, why bother when it’s all so pretty to look at.

Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) is a skinhead messiah, someone younger zealots can look up to. He’s all the more dangerous because he has a way with rhetoric – something that white supremacist leader Cameron Alexander (Stacy Keach) recognises and uses to his advantage. It all comes undone when three African-American hoods try to jack Derek’s car. He does what any reasonable neo-Nazi might: he shoots one of them in the back and kills another with a brutal “curb stomp”. He goes to jail, and, for reasons that are never made entirely clear, has a change of heart there. Cured of his racist tendencies, he returns to find his younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) following in his goosesteps.

American History X has a large number of fans who laud its unvarnished take on what might well be a reality in some American neighbourhoods. Yet, there are questions that one needs to ask a film of this nature. One of the most disturbing about American History X is not so much its unbridled bile but its bias in granting the proponents of hate so much screen-time, while shutting out the voices of reason. There are exactly two of the latter – a school teacher (Elliot Gould), who is shown to be limp and pathetic, and Derek’s prison mate, who’s a comedian. Pitch that against the terrible magnetism of Edward Norton and you have an unfair battle.

In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, an equally controversial but far superior film on race relations, a character called Radio Raheem describes the battle between his two fists: one with “love” tattooed on it, the other “hate”. In his version “Left-Hand Hate [is] KOed by Love”, and though Lee’s film ends with an uneasy truce, at least it gives love a chance. Tony Kaye’s film doesn’t, preferring to believe instead in the circular nature of hatred. The cult of American History X is uncomfortably similar to the one shown in the film: loyal followers seduced by noise and violence, unwilling to ask the questions that matter. You can believe every claim made for Norton’s performance though – there’s no taking your eyes off him. Norton also had a hand in rewriting the film, along with Kaye, and was present during the editing process (unlike the director, whose erratic behaviour earned him a studio ban). Kaye later disowned the film and tried (unsuccessfully) to remove his name from the credits. It would have been fascinating to have him or Norton explaining exactly how their versions differed, but we have to settle for a few deleted scenes and a trailer.

This piece was published in Time Out Delhi.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

2011-10-24T00:53:00.000-07:00

Thrillers are best served funny. Howard Hawks knew that. So did Hitchcock. And, in 1974 at least, so did Joseph Sargent. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three mixes rough comedy with edge-of-the-seat tension, the same cocktail which Jaws used to break the bank nine months later. The film a hijack drama set in the New York City subway system, and is executed so flawlessly it’s a wonder Tony Scott thought he could improve on it (for the record, he missed by miles).

Four criminals, headed by Robert Shaw, take control of subway train Pelham One Two Three. They read out a list of demands, primary among which is the ransom payment of a million dollars for the 17 hostages aboard. On the other end of the line, in charge of negotiations, is transit officer Lt Gerber (Walter Matthau). Matthau, in a rare non-comedic role, is perfect as the quick-on-his-feet Gerber. The movie doesn’t make him out to be a great human being, but he’s the right man for the job – level-headed, pragmatic, committed. Matthau’s schlumpy heroism is complemented by Shaw’s precise hijacker and Martin Balsam as his sneezing cohort. There’s also an entertaining supporting cast of growlers, scowlers and wisecrackers.

In the years since its release, the film has spawned a 1998 TV remake, as well as Scott’s version with Denzel Washington and John Travolta last year. It had a vital role in pioneering the cult of the stripped-down action movie (Tarantino was a fan, and filched the idea of criminals identifying themselves as colours for Reservoir Dogs), though its clear how big-ticket movies like Speed have borrowed from it as well. A large part of the success can be attributed to cinematographer Owen Roizman’s work; the grungy look is like New York City sans makeup. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the kind of action movie they don’t make enough of now days – plain-spoken, funny, and conveying a real sense of the place and time it is set in. Compared to the CGI-heavy behemoths clogging theatres now days, this film feels like a wiry prizefighter punching above its weight.

It's been a bad day, please don't take a picture

2011-09-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

It happened yesterday

2011-09-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

My favourite rock band, R.E.M, just called it a day. This was conveyed via one typically non-dramatic message on R.E.M.HQ yesterday:
"To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening." R.E.M.

On a shortlist of Sachin retiring, or the remaining Beatles or Bob Dylan popping off, this is about the worst news that I can imagine. I'm still in shock, so I'll take a day or two to collect my thoughts and hopefully return with something coherent about what this band has meant to me and why I'll always be a fan.

"It Happened Today", from their latest, and now final album: a song whose words now read like a gentle warning.

This week in totally unnecessary censorship...

2011-09-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

Last night, Easy A was playing on Sony Pix. Reasonable people might describe this movie as sharp-tongued; only a puritan would call it profane. It began at 11.15 at night, not an hour at which innocent young ears need to be protected. Nevertheless, Easy A was subjected to a barrage of bleeps (blanks, actually – they’ve stopped using bleeps) that might have been appropriate if the movie in question was Reservoir Dogs. Anyone else getting the creeps over the gratuitous use of silencer on TV screens in this country?

On the evidence of last night, words we’re being protected from:

Bitch

Balls

Slut

Whore

Promiscuity

Sex

Twat

Ass

Tit

Pork

Half-assed (they cut ‘assed’)

Shit

Screw

Gay

Cat

I can’t decide which of the last two is more shocking.

Agora

2011-09-01T02:45:00.000-07:00

Agora’s plot may suggest swords and sandals, but it’s really about astronomy and 4th century religious politics. But before you go “Yawn” and head off to check the timings for Spartacus: Blood and Sand, let us also add that Agora, far from being a dud, is a decent stab at the legend of Hypatia, the Egyptian philosopher and proto-feminist. Though hampered by Hollywood’s penchant for putting plummy British accents in togas, the film raises several complex issues without sacrificing the considerable human drama – including the infamous sacking of the Library at Alexandria – of the time.

Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) is a scholar whose disinterest in marriage is matched by her love for the sciences. She tries to transfer this enthusiasm to her students, who are increasingly distracted by the events unfolding outside the library compound. For the first time in ancient Egypt, Christianity is on the rise, and the Pagan ruling class is feeling the heat. Director Alejandro Amenabar moves quickly into scenes of uprising, ransacking and pillage. Some Christian commentators protested when the movie came out, but the Pagans are shown to be equally merciless early on; the real target seems to be organised religion’s brutality and contempt for science. Amidst all this, Hypatia remains immersed in her work, even as her enemies plot her death.

Agora isn’t as satisfying as Amenabar’s previous films, which include The Sea Inside and Abre Los Ojos, but it does boast a number of strong performances. Weisz confirms her status as one of the most underrated actresses around. Also impressive are Oscar Isaac and Max Minghella (Divya Narendra in The Social Network) as her former student and slave respectively. There’s also particularly good use made of the overhead shot in the mob scenes, a twin reference to Hypatia’s study of celestial bodies and the tragedy of not being able to see the larger picture.

A version of this piece appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Les Baricades Misterieuses

2011-08-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

Francois Couperin was a 17th century French Baroque composer. Now, I don't want to pretend like I know from 17th century French composers. But that doesn't mean the spell that "Les Barricades Misterieuses", which I heard for the first time a few weeks back in The Tree of Life, is less all-encompassing than any it might cast over someone classical music-literate. It haunts my waking hours. It reduces me to near-tears in office. And what a tremendous title! What mysterious barricades is Couperin talking about? The piece is so simply and elegantly constructed that barricades are the last thing that come to mind.

Rabbit Hole

2011-08-17T23:32:00.001-07:00

Films about couples who’ve lost a child are invariably a bruising experience. Often, it’s not just the dark subject matter but also the fact that directors faced with such material often try to break though the sorrow with shocking dramatic devices. Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now had a serial killer dwarf. Lars Von Trier’s cheery Antichrist had genital mutilations. By those standards, Rabbit Hole is pretty tame. Sure, Nicole Kidman starts stalking a high school student and Aaron Eckhart trades group therapy for getting stoned in a car, but compared to a self-disemboweling fox, that’s practically normal.

Rabbit Hole is about a couple, Howie and Becca Corbett, who lost their son in a car accident outside their house. Eight months have passed since the tragedy but they’re still struggling to return any semblance of normalcy to their lives. The film shows how all-pervasive grief can be, how it can ruin anything from a conversation with a friend to a trip to the supermarket. David Lindsay-Abaire’s script, adapted from his own 2005 play, allows Howie and Becca moments of humour and spark, but their personalities mostly remain submerged, like icebergs in a sea of sadness.

Grief without catharsis is one of the least rewarding cinematic experiences, which is why so many sad films end up veering towards violence, be it physical or mental, or high drama. Former indie director John Cameron Mitchell may have considered these devices tawdry, but the downside of this restraint is that Rabbit Hole remains tied-down in its grief. Early on when Becca says “Nothing will ever be nice again,” one assumes it’s just a low moment. By the end, though, you end up agreeing with her. Though there’s little to fault in this movie, there are hardly any moments you’d like to take away with you either.

A version of this piece appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Reeling

2011-08-16T05:23:00.000-07:00

A Time Out piece I wrote, about the Hollywood Musicals festival (Fri Aug 19-Sun Aug 21) at the American Centre. Rocky Horror got cancelled but I'm including the writeup I did for it here, mainly because it gives me an excuse to hear "Hot Patootie Bless My Soul", which is hands-down the funniest title in rock 'n roll, again.

Berlin, Astaire, Berkley, Kelly, Rogers, Crosby, Caron. If they’re all in heaven together, that cloud they’re on must be one non-stop party. Rather like the films they left behind. This fortnight, revisit classic song-and-dance films at Celebrating the Hollywood Musical, presented by The American Centre and Cine Darbaar. The eclectic selection dates back to 1929, but also includes releases as recent as 2007. Here’s our picks from the line-up.

Top Hat (1935)

Hollywood ignores the Depression and heads to a Europe of the imagination, with Venice recreated, art-deco style, in a studio. Dale Tremont is awoken one night by someone tap-dancing on the floor above her. The culprit is Jerry Travers, and since he’s played by Fred Astaire and she by Ginger Rogers, we all know where this is headed.

Reasons to watch: Dance equals love whenever Fred and Ginger are together onscreen. Watch them tear up the floor in “The Piccolino”, and tear up yourself when they do “Dancing Cheek to Cheek”.

An American in Paris (1951)

Gene Kelly is an expatriate painter (why doesn’t he get a job dancing?) who, despite his wealthy patron’s advances, only has eyes for Leslie Caron, who’s engaged to someone else.

Reasons to watch: Eye-popping colour, the smoothest of opening scenes and a stunning climactic ballet (with one of the sexist moments in filmed dance), all of which bear the overblown touch of director Vincente Minelli. Oscar Levant as a misanthropic pianist is great too.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Gene Kelly meets Debbie Reynolds on a 1920s movie set. He’s a star, she’s dubbing for his opposite number. They dance, sing, fall in love, dance some more.

Reasons to watch: The elasticity of Donald O’Connor in “Make ’em laugh”. Jean Hagen as Kelly’s co-star, with a voice so ridiculous it earned her an Oscar nom. The title track, in which Kelly uses everything from a lamppost to a stern cop to augment his hypnotically graceful moves.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Tim Burton’s macabre vision found a perfect match in this 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical. Based on a Victorian pulp serial, it’s the story of a barber out to avenge his wife’s death. Sondheim’s cerebral melodies guide the viewer through shaving contests, throat-slittings and the baking of human meat pies.

Reasons to watch: The emotion that Alan Rickman and Johnny Depp, neither of them trained singers, bring to their rendition of “Pretty Women”. The artistry of production designer Dante Ferretti, also responsible for creating the grimy, cruel worlds of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Two lovebirds out on a rainy night take shelter in a castle: a standard B-movie start for a B-movie that set its own standards. The young couple are soon beset by dozens of perverted cross-dressing glam-rockers, led by Dr Frank-N-Furter of Transsexual, Transylvania.

Reasons to watch: The possibility, however remote, of this being the one link between Elvis and Lady Gaga. The song titles: “Sweet Transvestite”, “Dammit Janet”, “Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul”. Tim Curry, who is so outrageously winning as Dr Frank-N-Furter it’s difficult to believe this was his first onscreen appearance.

Anatomy of a scene: Boogie Nights

2011-08-13T02:05:00.000-07:00

The animal strains of “Spill the Wine” have just started as the chauffer in suit and tie walks towards the pool. Maybe it’s because he’s fully clothed but the camera has no use for him and is diverted to the black man in the red Roy Rogers shirt arguing with his girlfriend about whether the cowboy look is coming back. He gets up in disgust but we only follow him as far as the next table where a Hispanic man is trying to get word through to Jack via a lady so pale it feels like a medium-size slice of irony to put her in such strong sunlight. From there it’s on to a Joni Mitchell look-alike drawn to a table with an insultingly healthy man who’s doing lines. He has powder to spare but the camera is distracted yet again, this time by something sylph-like walking through like no one’s watching, taking a drag, disdainfully throwing the rest away. Seven small steps and she’s swimming away and surely now you’d expect that pesky camera to quit its stalking. But the water’s so tempting it dives in right after her. Eric Burdon’s voice gains in echo as her legs thrash decisively, propelling her away from us. Abandoned, possibly a little disappointed, the camera bobs like a cork on the surface as a man in orange trunks does a jack knife, the bubbles rushing up like a toast to a summer day so intoxicating it could scarcely be real.

This one-take scene is from Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful Boogie Nights. As the director acknowledges in his DVD commentary, it’s a very close replica of a similar poolside scene from the 1965 Soviet-Cuban production I Am Cuba. While the debt to the original is undeniable, there is one key difference – the mood. In I Am Cuba, the sunshine is deceptive. You may be watching people get high but you’re not encouraged to feel high yourself. In Boogie Nights everything is dappled and smooth, and you’re being asked to either glide by or jump in. It’s like you could pause this scene at any point and years later still be able to recall what that particular day was all about just from looking at that one isolated moment.

Watch: The Boogie Nights scene and the I Am Cuba one.

Bitte Orca

2011-07-19T03:43:00.000-07:00

There is no need for a song-by-song examination of The Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca. They all cohere into a trilling, thrilling whole. The numbers cast fond glances at art rock and modern R&B but refuse to settle in with either. The guitars are largely unplugged, with very little strumming, something which helps keep the songs unmoored and fresh even after multiple listens (I still can’t pin the individual tunes down in my head). Instead of riffs, there are complicated plucked figures – swirls of sounds that the voices can dance around. The drumming is splashy, crashing in when you least expect it, a necessary bit of violence to offset the delicacy of the vocals and guitars. It all comes together, song after song; in the enchanting backing vocal of “Cannibal Resource”, tossed at lightning speed between the three female vocalists; in the invigorating violence of “The Bride”; in the way “Fluorescent Half Dome” breaks down into what sounds like the end of the party and the dawn of a new day.

Bitte Orca’s that rare album which really is impossible to categorise, not because it hops or melds genres because it creates its own. If they are influences, they have been consumed and absorbed into the bloodstream of the band’s sound. Though I thought of Talking Heads the first time I heard them, and later Bjork (the band has collaborated with both), the Projectors are their own idiosyncratic snowflake. Talking Heads always seemed to be heading towards the groove in their songs; the Projectors are constantly dodging it (except on “Stillness is the Move”, a possible clue as to why this track was deemed most fit for radio play). And while they share Bjork’s off-kilter approach to vocalisation and sound, their harmonic juggling is based around melodies more welcoming than those of the combatively experimental Icelandic songstress.

No vocal combination has ever sounded the way the Projectors do on Bitte Orca. The reason is more than the sum of three superb female singers – Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, Haley Dekle – and Longstreth’s pleasant falsetto. It’s the way their voices are arranged, how they work in harmony and counterpoint to each other, how traditional ideas of backing vocals are transformed into something as unpredictable as birdsong. Most of the songs have Longstreth or one of the girls laying down the main melody, and the others circling and adding to it with little fills. Some of these interjections are like cuckoos peeping out of a clock, others like a bunch of children rushing through the door. The exhilaration of not knowing when or where the next voice is going to come at you from is what sets the Projectors apart from other superb contemporary vocal groups like the Fleet Foxes, who take their cues from the Beach Boys and other, more recognisable sources. It’s also what set Bitte Orca apart from the other albums released in 2009. And earlier that decade.

The winner by knockout: Coke Studio Pakistan

2011-07-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be unfair to slam Coke Studio India for not matching up to the magnificence that is Coke Studio Pakistan. In its first week anyway. So I waited a month, and from what's been trotted out till now, it looks like that sudden burst of brilliance everyone here's been hoping for isn't forthcoming this season.

Two songs, one from our Coke Studio, the other from Pakistan's. "Chitthiye" is limpid, inoffensive, swamped by the same all-pervasive synth sound that won't leave any of CSI's songs alone. It's...what's the word...contented. "Alif Allah-Jugni", on the other hand, is a stream of energy so taut driving that it sounds like it couldn't settle down if it wanted to. Why this difference? It's not the singers; Chauhan and the Wadalis are in the same vocal league as Shafi and Lohar. It's in the attiutude. It's the difference between rock and pop. It's in the annoying girl-group chorus they have in "Chittiye". It's the reason why Pakistan produces great rock bands and we don't, and why their Coke Studio success is something we have not, and from the looks of it, will not replicate.

Hereafter

2011-07-11T03:49:00.000-07:00

Hereafter begins with a recreation of the 2004 tsunami that devastated South-east Asia. It’s a tremendous sequence, eschewing overwrought visuals and concentrating on the suddenness and the sheer kinetics of the event. After it’s over, director Clint Eastwood seems to say, okay, everyone’s had their fun, now it's time to watch a real movie. The result is a film about the afterlife that’s moving at times but ends up frustratingly slight.

Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a psychic whose talent is forging a “connection” with people who’ve recently lost someone close, and helping them contact the spirit. Marie Lelay is a French reporter who, after a near-death experience in the tsunami, has started having visions of her own. Marcus is a young British boy who can’t let go of the memory of his lost twin. Eastwood and writer Peter Morgan seem to set these stories up to converge, but then refuse to let them do so till the very end. Instead, we get subplot on subplot, some of which involve Marcus’s drug addict mom, a potential love interest for George (Bryce-Dallas Howard in fine form) and Marie writing a book on the afterlife. Compared to his earlier Frost/Nixon, Morgan’s script is a letdown, trading insight for generalities. And even though Eastwood provides a lovely score and some witty directorial touches – a driver pausing to check his breath as an afterthought after hitting a kid in the street, an aerial pan of San Francisco as a nod to the opening credits staple in the Dirty Harry series – his treatment of the dead is too restrained and polite to bring the screen alive.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

U-turn art

2011-07-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

Okhla flyover u-turn, to be exact. Eve and the apple?

Fair Game: DVD review

2011-07-03T23:48:00.000-07:00

Fair Game is based on the real-life case of Valerie Plame, undercover operative with the CIA. Plame was outed by White House officials in 2003 after her husband, a former ambassador called Joseph Wilson, wrote an article exposing the false claims of the Bush government regarding the sale by Niger to Iraq of yellowcake uranium, allegedly to build WMDs. This effectively ended her career, though she fought back successfully, resulting in a Congressional committee sentencing the Vice President's chief of staff Scooter Libby to 30 months imprisonment. Fair Game, from Plame’s book of the same name, starts off strong. We follow Plame, played by Naomi Watts, on her covert operations, watch the build-up to the Iraq war, see Wilson’s malcontent manifest itself at dinner parties. Then Wilson (Sean Penn) writes his piece and the movie goes from political thriller to soggy domestic drama.

Director Doug Liman obviously wants us to feel as deeply for his characters as we do for their larger battles. The problem is that neither actor does much to warrant our sympathy for their marriage cracking at the seams. Penn is extremely dour until the last half hour, when he mutates into a speechifying crusader. Watts has an even more implausible transformation; she loses her steely resolve after the revelations and becomes another Hollywood movie damsel, making irrational decisions, in need of rescuing. The melodramatic script does neither actor any favours. As an expose of the Bush government, this movie feels dated (spoiler alert: there were no WMDs!). And as usual, the Iraqis are just a plot point, a way to illustrate how much the heroine cares, but not vital enough to keep around very long. No special features, which at these prices would seem to convey that the DVD-buying public here is fair game too.

A version of this piece appeared in Time Out Delhi.

The only student in the Morrissey dance academy

2011-06-22T05:05:00.000-07:00

Drawing a line from Johnny Marr to Peter Buck isn't difficult. But who speaks of Morrissey's influence on Michael Stipe's dancing?

Thoda khao thoda phenko

2011-06-22T02:42:00.000-07:00

I'd put together a list of food disasters from the movies to coincide with Delhi Belly's release. Only ended up using five, but here's the whole list.

“Dal mein kankad” (Mr India)
When this film was released, it wasn't uncommon to find stones mixed in with dal bought from ration shops. Mr India took this everyday frustration and turned it into comic revenge. An invisible Anil Kapoor forces a corrupt businessman and his date to chow down on a bowl of pebbles.

“Death by chocolate” (Chocolat)
The dire consequences of having diabetes in a Hollywood movie. Dame Judi Dench plays a spinster with an insulin problem, who, after denying herself for years, goes out in a chocolate-smeared glaze of glory.

“Pie-faced” (The Great Race)
The Stooges did it first – and best – but for destruction caused, number of flingers and sheer volume of pastry there’s no beating the pie-fight from the Jack Lemmon-Tony Curtis starrer The Great Race.

“Brain food” (Hannibal)
Anthony Hopkins slices open Ray Liotta’s skull, sautés a part of his brain and feeds it to him. Off the top of our heads, this is one of the most mind-bending food disasters ever.

“Yoga omelette” (Coolie)
As Amitabh Bachchan tries to make an omelette by cooking along with a radio programme, Rati Agnihotri keeps changing the frequency to a yoga show. Bachchan follows every instruction faithfully, ending up cross-legged, contorted and upside down.

Golmaal
Thanks to an inexpertly glued mustache, Utpal Dutt finds out Amol Palekar isn’t the upright citizen he says he is. Googly-eyed with menace, he walks towards the dinner table, offering to feed the offender select desserts from across India. His manner, though, is the opposite of sugary, and the dinner invitation soon turns into a hold-up.

Animal House
This scene, replayed across college campuses the world over since 1986, begins to build when John Buleshi starts to load his lunch tray. Item after item pile up until you can barely make out his face behind the food. Of course, in the best traditions of American Comedy, if there’s food, it must be flung.

The Gold Rush
A high-water mark of the Silent years, this scene shows Charlie Chaplain tramp boil and eat his shoe with sublime seriousness. Lucky for him method acting was still years away.

Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam
Among other things, this scene proved that the necessary impetus for eating 11 green chillies in a row – even if you’re fearless like Salman Khan – lies in the promise of Aishwarya Rai feeding you dahi-chini afterwards.

Hitch (Allergies)

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Thoda khao thoda phenko)

Namak Halaal (Dog eats cake and dies)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (The dinner that never happens)

Run (Kauwa biryani)

Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (Egg throwing)

Satte Pe Satta (Attack your food)

Dirty Harry Box Set: DVD Review

2011-05-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

In 1971, Clint Eastwood was on the verge of becoming a star. Sergio Leone’s Dollar trilogy had rescued him from TV Westerns and made him a marquee name (even if it was a man with no name). But it was with Dirty Harry, and in particular the scene which ends with “Well do ya, punk?”, when Eastwood’s scowl passed over into legend. The film, directed by Don Siegel, was as taut a cops-and-robbers tale as Hollywood ever produced but no one at the time paid attention to the craft involved. Critics, the media and the public were divided down the middle on the issue of whether the film was, as per reviewer Pauline Kael’s famous putdown, a “fascist work of art”. What’s interesting is how the remaining Dirty Harry films would take the premise of an edgy, violent cop at war with the system and tweak it in ways that were often unexpected.

Magnum Force, the second in the series, literally takes aim at its liberal critics; as the credits end, Harry points his .44 Magnum straight at the screen and shoots. With a group of rogue patrolmen playing the bad guys, the film tries to peg its antihero as a lesser evil. This is a bit of a con – Harry is excessive no matter who the antagonist is. But it’s difficult to deny the guilty pleasure in watching a perpetually pissed-off Eastwood battle the system until he gets frustrated and pulls out his cannon of a handgun. Next up was The Enforcer, the only film in the series that recognises the potential for humour in Eastwood’s stony mutterings. Under the direction of James Fargo, and paired with a female partner (Tyne Daly) for the first time, this was Harry’s last great outing.

Two more films would follow. Sudden Impact, with Eastwood himself directing, tried to present a more sympathetic killer, but ended up trite and predictable. The Dead Pool, directed by Eastwood’s one-time stunt double Buddy Van Horn, was also unremarkable, the only point of interest being a cameo by pre-fame Jim Carrey. Despite this decline in quality, the series as a whole has been remarkably influential (its raggedy spiritual heirs range from Lethal Weapon to Bad Boys) – a fact you’re reminded of again and again by the numerous special features on this box set. There are audio commentaries for three of the films, discussions on Harry, his methods and cinematic legacy and several looks back at Eastwood’s career. We’d recommend the Sudden Impact commentary by critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel; perceptive and wry, it’s a good deal more rewarding than the film itself.

Good Night Good Morning

2011-05-24T00:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve always had a soft spot for Richard Linklater, one of the few Hollywood directors who makes talky films. You might assume I’m talking about Before Sunrise/ Before Sunset, which are the most overtly talkative of the bunch. But Linklater has always been fascinated by words and their possibilities, from the rambling monologues of his breakthrough feature Slacker to the stoned, proud declarations by the teens in Dazed and Confused. Time and time again, Linklater gives his characters enough time to ramble, realise they’re rambling and steer the conversation back to safer ground (though some of them just go on talking).

This freedom to not make sense all the time lends Good Night Good Morning, which recently showed at the Habitat Film Festival, a bracing authenticity that’s perfectly in line with its subject matter. It’s been directed by Sudhish Kamath, and stars Manu Narayan as Turiya (The Love Guru) and Seema Rahmani, whom some may remember rising above average material in The Loins of Punjab, as Moira. The movie name-drops Before Sunrise early on and it soon becomes clear why: the movie is an extended conversation (on phone) between two almost strangers. It beings with Turiya drunk-dialing Moira from a car; he’d met her briefly at a party in NYC a couple of hours ago. She hangs up on him, then realises she can’t sleep and calls him back. You could argue that stuff like this don’t happen in real life. Or you could recall the times similar things have happened and you’ve said “Man, this is just like in the movies…”

Turiya and Moira proceed to talk the night away. They flirt, discuss their past loves, their mistakes and future plans. Since it’s their first meeting, there’s also an inevitable sizing up, followed by a subtle, ever-present struggle for the upper hand. The great triumph is in the way Kamath ensures that their lines never sound like a movie conversation. These two don’t have the nonchalance to look act when they say something witty – instead, they do what normal people do, and look extremely pleased with themselves. It takes great skill to write something that sounds this off-the-cuff. Too clever, and the viewer beings to question the likelihood of two strangers spitting out one-liner after one-liner at three in the morning; go too far in the other direction, and it becomes commonplace, and not worth watching. Kamath told the Habitat audience that when the movie was being scripted, he’s asked his friends to do what Turiya does – dial a stranger and speak to them. He said that what they spoke didn’t turn out to be important as the way their conversations unfolded, jumping from one topic to another. The dialogue in Good Night Good Morning has this same quality of leaping without looking. It’s that rare screenplay which sounds like it’s unscripted.

The movie’s shot in black and white, though I’m not sure I can see a reason why (I can’t see a reason why not, either). The leads had to be charming for it to work, and they are, Narayan with his timid overtures, Rahmani playfully knowing. The only off-note is Raja Sen as Turiya’s crass buddy J.C., providing comic relief in a film that doesn’t require it. The film is split-screen almost throughout, except for the flashback sequences (absent from the MAMI screening, but wisely inserted back). The actors in these sequences are always Narayan and Rahmani, no matters who the characters in question are. You could argue that the director uses this as a device to garner easy laughs. It’s also possible that this is his way of indicating how potential loves always have to measure up to past ones in the beginning. In the same vein, I must return again to the reference made in the movie to Before Sunrise. Once that title was out there, it would always be a question – maybe in the back of people’s minds, but there nonetheless – of whether Good Morning Good Night would measure up to it. I’m happy to say it does.

Addendum: A link to Sudhish Kamath's blog. Ain't nothing wrong with film critics making movies.

Wow

2011-05-23T00:20:00.000-07:00

Call Northside 777

2011-05-19T03:29:00.000-07:00

This 1948 film begins documentary-style, with grainy footage of Chicago’s streets and a portentous voiceover informing viewers about the crime wave that hit the city in 1932. The conceit isn’t kept up long; after those first few awkward minutes, Call Northside 777 settles down into a more conventionally satisfying whodunit, albeit with one important twist. The crime in question has taken place eleven years ago, and the two men sentenced to life imprisonment are innocent.

That much we gather from the first of five minutes. The rest of Call Northside 777 details the efforts of PJ McNeal, reporter for the Chicago Times, to help free the two men. Like every other Hollywood newspaperman of the time, McLean (James Stewart) starts off cynical but is eventually won over by the faith shown by the imprisoned Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte) and everyone who knows him. He starts piecing together the case again, and finds, like the real-life case this movie is based on, that it is full of holes.

Call Northside 777 is methodical to a fault, but Stewart’s performance, with its subtle transformation from bystander to crusader, is skilful enough to keep the viewer involved till the end. Lee J Cobb also does well, playing McNeal’s editor in his usual grouchy style. There’s hardly any score to speak of, unusual in a film from that time (maybe it was assumed this would extend the documentary motif). Joseph MacDonald contributes some top-drawer noir camerawork – plenty of shadows and just enough light to illuminate a silhouette. Director Henry Hathaway’s films, often uneven, have tended to produce some striking performances – John Wayne in True Grit, Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. Stewart’s may the best of the bunch, and is the primary reason why one ought to see this film.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter

2011-05-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

In pop cinema heaven, there’s a special corner reserved for Tokyo Drifter. Its story – about a veteran hitman who wants to call it quits but keeps getting pulled back – could have belonged to any yakuza B-film of the time. But in the hands of Seijun Suzuki, it was transformed into something strange and beautiful, an idiosyncratic mix of primary colours, eccentric editing and a score that ricocheted from opera to fifties rock ‘n roll to Morricone-like trumpets. Suzuki would soon become a thorn in the Nikkatsu studio’s side; he was never able to make his contracted commercial ventures straightforward enough for the studio bosses. This willful disobedience can be seen all over Tokyo Drifter – in the audacious jump cuts, in the unique visual aesthetic, and in the character of yakuza hitman “Phoenix” Tetsu, smart enough to do anything except find a way to quit.

In many ways, it is like a Melville film directed by Godard. The story isn’t unlike Melville’s Le Samourai, released three years later, in which the assassin Jef is carrying out what he hopes will be his last job (the scenes where the injured protagonists are standing alone in their rooms are intriguingly similar – though this is probably a coincidence). Suzuki also reminds one of Melville in the codified behavior that his protagonists exhibit. Notions of loyalty, to one’s bosses, one’s family, even to one’s enemies, populate Tokyo Drifter. It’s pretty much the first thing we hear, in the mournful song that accompanies the opening credits and spells out the movie’s world-view: “If I die, I’ll die like a man/ For me, loyalty comes before love”.

The treatment, however, is very different from Melville’s meticulous variations on gangster film genre. Suzuki never met a hurdle he couldn’t paint day-glo and straddle merrily. This aesthetic finds an echo in the early work of Jean-Luc Godard. There’s a similar use of colour in A Woman is a Woman, and Tokyo Drifter would make a great double bill with such unpredictable deconstructions of the gangster film as Breathless or Pierrot le Fou. But Godard was always political, whereas Suzuki by and large seemed to have no particular motive other keeping his audience as entertained as possible. In this, he is closer to equal Quentin Tarantino, who has acknowledged Suzuki’s influence on his pop fantasias. The more florid moments of Tokyo Drifter are paid tribute to in Kill Bill Volume I –fake, glittering snow, fountains of blood spewing from a slashed wrist.

A large contributor to Suzuki’s greatness is his use of colour, lighting and space. In this film, he’s assisted hugely by cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine and Takeo Kimura, one of the great art directors of Japanese cinema. I was particularly struck by three scenes, each with its own distinct visual style. The first is the gritty opening sequence, shot in high-contrast black and white. The second shows a girl unintentionally catching a bullet; after a long overhead shot, she keels over, and the stain on her blouse is matched by the luridly coloured red screen behind her. The third is the climax, in which the impossibly strange yellow décor tries to drag one’s attention away from a gunfight that John Woo must have watched and committed to memory years later. Each of these scenes could have been from a different movie. All of them, however, feel like they’ve come from the same director.

Branded to Kill, as memorable a flourish as any in the “cinema of flourishes” (as David Bordwell described Japanese cinema), released in 1967 and proved to be the last straw as far as Nikkatsu was concerned. Suzuki was summarily dismissed, but by then his reputation had grown. Retrospectives were held; his imprint was noted in the diverse styles of Tarantino and Woo, Wong-Kar Wai and Jim Jarmusch – four filmmakers who affected our conceptions of cool in definitive ways. Fans of their work should know this: if you like that Reservoir Dogs walk, or are fond of chewing a toothpick and wearing a long overcoat, Seijun Suzuki is where a lot of it began.

A music video with visuals from the movie expertly cut to a cover of the title song by Japanese Academic Punks.

Moments in Live Music Vol. 1

2011-04-27T01:53:00.000-07:00

Otis Redding brings “I can’t turn you loose” to what appears to be a close, then yells “I KNOW YOU THINK I’M GONNA STOP NOW, AIN’T GONNA STOP, WE’RE GOING ONE TIME, WATCH ME NOW” and dementedly raves on for another two minutes.

Bob Dylan, battling a combative crowd, mumbles incoherently into the microphone. When the hecklers finally quiet down to hear what he’s saying he ends his flow of gibberish with “…if you only wouldn’t clap so hard” and launches into “One Too Many Mornings”.

Three-quarters of the way through “Mountain Jam” at the Fillmore East, Duane Allman picks up his slide and burst forth with a series of licks so wild and joyous you understand why he’s ranked amongst rock’s best guitarists even though he didn’t live to see twenty-five.

Simon and Garfunkel, Central Park, New York City. Capping an evening that sounds like it was sprinkled over with magic dust, Gerry Niewood’s sax emerges out of a burst of horns with a short solo that’s absent in Simon’s studio version but captures perfectly the wistful ache of “Still Crazy After All These Years”.

Jesse Ed Davis’s syncopated solo in Taj Mahal’s performance of “Ain’t That a Lot of Love” in Rock ‘n Roll Circus. It’s the supreme guitar moment in a show that included Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton.

After performing for an hour and a half at the intensity levels of a man half his age, Bruce Springsteen is joined by the gathering dusk and every singing member of the E Street Band in a goosebump-raising rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More”.

The albums: Otis Redding, Live in London and Paris; Bob Dylan, Live 1966: Royal Albert Hall Concert; The Allman Brothers, Live at the Fillmore East; Simon and Garfunkel, Concert in Central Park; Various Artists, The Rolling Stones Present The Rock 'n Roll Circus; Bruce Springsteen, Live in Hyde Park.

Flash mobs

2011-04-19T02:47:00.000-07:00

This piece was written to coincide with a lecture on social documentary photography by Ram Rahman. That was a while back, but since it was one of the more interesting stories I'd meandered into, I thought I'd post it anyway.

Rome, 1958. An Armenian dancer called Aïché Nana does an impromptu striptease at a high-society party. Terni, 1958. A large crowd gathers after word spreads that children have seen the Virgin Mary. Rome, 1960. Anthony Steele, husband of Swedish starlet Anita Ekberg, tries to assault a member of the press who was attempting to take their photograph.

Ask a keen cineaste about the link between these images, and they’ll reply that all of them correspond to scenes from Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a legend of Italian cinema which won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1962 and had Fellini nominated for the Best Director Oscar. This is not wrong, but it’s only half the story. The real link is a man less well-known, a tabloid photographer named Tazio Secchiaroli. In a lecture on social documentary photography at The Attic this fortnight, photographer and Fellini-lover Ram Rahman talks about how Secchiaroli’s snaps of Rome’s high-society scandals served as inspiration for the much-lauded 1960 film.

“The still photograph, if you’re looking at it in its deepest sense, can be like the language a novelist uses – a visual novel, if you like,” Rahman said, explaining the importance of the photograph as social document. It’s unlikely that many at that time would have seen that quality in the photographs shot by Secchiaroli and his compatriots. Much like today’s Page 3 snaps, they were just good, salacious fun. But Fellini recognised potential for building a film around this profession and its ethical compromises. The central character in La Dolce Vita, a morally flexible reporter played by Marcello Mastroianni, was in some ways a stand-in for Fellini – an observer, detached from the scene, and an outsider to Rome.

Mastroianni’s partner in the film, though, had the more lasting contribution. A high-society photographer based on Secchiaroli, his name – Paparazzo – was adapted to describe a new profession, the paparazzi. According to Rahman, Fellini almost cast Secchiaroli himself for the part, but then went with Walter Santesso. The real-life Paparazzo went on to do the stills for the film, and later established himself as a still photographer much in demand at Rome’s Cinecittà studios (at one point, becoming the personal photographer to Sophia Loren).

Rahman plans to juxtapose photographs from his collection with scenes from La Dolce Vita, to illustrate how keenly art was imitating life in Fellini’s film. The director spoke with many photographers and used their stories to create scenes like the suicide of Marcello’s friend and the climactic “orgy” sequence. Anita Ekberg’s romp in the Trevi fountain, one of the movie’s iconic scenes, was based on a real-life incident. Rahman also pointed out that Ekberg had been photographed in “situations of scandal and confrontation” by Secchiaroli years before the movie was made (a fact that’s unlikely to have escaped Fellini’s attention). The style of the tabloid photograph even dictates the way some scenes are framed. A number of stills from the movie, Rahman said, could easily be substituted with samples of the photojournalism of the time.

Rahman’s talk will also zoom out to the broader story of social documentary photography. He will discuss his own work in this field, as well as the diverse styles of Sunil Janah, Walker Evans, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Brassai. We recommend watching La Dolce Vita beforehand, but in case you’re strapped for time, just bring along page three of the day’s newspaper.

Below: A Tazio photograph recreated in the movie; Anita Ekberg, on and off screen

North to Alaska

2011-04-18T04:33:00.000-07:00

North to Alaska has the some of the characteristics of a Howard Hawks film but nothing resembling the same execution. In the hands of Henry Hathaway, everything gets swept away in an avalanche of clichés. Sam McCord (John Wayne), a misogynist gold-miner, is sent by his friend (Stewart Granger) to pick up his French-speaking bride-to-be and bring her to Alaska. When McCord finds her, however, she’s already married to someone else. This is hardly a roadblock in a film whose view of sexual politics is about as subtle as a rabbit in heat. McCord can simply go to the whorehouse, pick out another “Frenchie” and bring her back as a substitute.

That unfortunate role is played by the French actress Capucine, and it’s to her credit that she manages to salvage some dignity despite her character being treated like a piece of meat, handed back and forth by Wayne and Granger. She looks so poised and lovely (there’s a bit of Jeanne Moreau in her features) that it’s not difficult to imagine men making fools of themselves over her in a much better movie. Here, though, she must make do with one sorry quartet: Granger, smarmy villain Ernie Kovacs, pop star Fabian (terrible in a bit role as Granger’s kid brother) and ultimately the Duke himself, reluctance written all over his face and muttering lines like “Women…I never met one yet that was half as reliable as a horse.”

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Heaven Can Wait

2011-04-18T04:21:00.000-07:00

Billy Wilder, the great American director, used to have a sign over his door that read “What would Lubitsch do?”. Wilder, who got his start writing for Ernest Lubitsch, was his biggest fan, and in Cameron Crowe’s book-length interview, he put his finger on a vital element to the German-born director’s success. As he explained, “[Lubitsch] realised that if you say two and two, the audience does not have to be told it’s four”. No matter how mannered it may seem at first glance, Heaven Can Wait has two and two all over it.

The film begins in hell’s lobby, with an aged Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) recounting his life story to a dapper, courteous Satan (Laird Cregar, addressed throughout as “Your Excellency”). Henry’s convinced his love crimes warrant a place in the netherworld, and counts down a list of his infidelities, beginning with his French teacher and continuing up to his cousin’s fiancée Martha (Gene Tierney), who he elopes with and marries. Though their marriage is a happy one, his eye continues to rove. None of this, of course, is meant to be taken seriously. Heaven Can Wait unfolds like a stage musical without music, set to the sounds of Sam Raphaelson’s sly script and Ameche’s mellifluous line readings.

By the time this film released in 1943, Lubitsch had a deteriorating heart condition. He died four years later – in bed with a young starlet, his biographer Maurice Zotolow claimed. If that is so, then Henry’s end in the movie, with death interrupting implied coitus with a nurse, was an uncanny foreshadowing of his own fate. “No more Lubitsch,” said Wilder at the director’s funeral. “Worse than that,” replied fellow-director William Wyler, “no more Lubitsch pictures.” They weren’t exaggerating.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Honour Roll

2011-04-03T23:37:00.000-07:00

Virender Sehwag
Sachin Tendulkar
Gautam Gambhir
Yuvraj Singh
Mahendra Singh Dhoni
Suresh Raina
Harbhajan Singh
Zaheer Khan
Munaf Patel
Shanthakumaran Sreesant
Yusuf Pathan
Ashish Nehra
Ravichandran Ashwin
Piyush Chawla
Gary Kirsten (coach)

And a shout-out to those without whom this would not have been possible:
Sourav Ganguly and John Wright, who built India's most competitive team, on whose foundations this team was built
Rahul Dravid, who donned gloves during the 2003 Cup, not because he was a wicket-keeper but because his country needed him to
VVS Laxman, still the most underappreciated cricketer in this country, and with as big a role as anyone in India being the number one test team
Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath, who bowled their hearts out for years on flat pitches
Ajay Jadeja and Robin Singh, templates for future Indian ODI players
Mohammad Kaif, whose death-or-glory dives in the Natwest Final are branded into every Indian cricket fan's brain
The Class of '83, whom no one gave a chance

...but we didn't

2011-03-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

47.4
Lee to Yuvraj Singh, FOUR, a poetic moment for the Indian fans. Australia's reign has ended. The crowd has lost it. Yuvraj is on the turf, mid-pitch, arms aloft, looking up at the sky and then waving his bat away in a frenzy of emotions. And just as well. We will have new World Champions, for the first time since 1999. Length ball on off stump, Yuvraj wanted to do it at one go, he backed away marginally and caned it through the covers. Everything is a blur. Australia are out. India will play Pakistan in Mohali.

Genesis abridged

2011-03-24T09:23:00.001-07:00

Just throwing it all away
throwing it all away
and there's nothing that I can say

We're throwing it all away
Yes, we're throwing it all away

The Guitar Canon

2011-03-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

We’ll start with the riffmeisters because rock ‘n’ roll is, when you get down to it, a guitar riff. Chuck Berry is king of this castle. Keith Richards is his queen (queen bitch?). Courtiers include Angus Young, Johnny Ramone. Jack White guards the gates.

The romantic poets. Mark Knopfler. Jorma Kaukonen. Eric Clapton sometimes. Peter Green.

The street poets. Jimi Hendrix. Duanne Allman. Johnny Winter. Mick Taylor. Mike McCready.

The innovators. Bo Diddley. Link Wray, for “Rumble”. Lou Reed. Tom Morello. Hendrix could just as easily be here, but then there’s hardly any category he that wouldn’t fit into.

The nihilists. Neil Young, when backed by Crazy Horse. Early Pete Townshend. Wayne Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith. Steve Jones.

Servants of the song. First and foremost, George Harrison, whose contributions, whether spectacular or not, were always apt. Roger Squire. Mick Jones of The Clash. Lindsey Buckingham. The Edge.

Picker-strumers. Tumbling melody lines, cleanly-picked, alternated with acousto-electric strumming. Roger McGuinn. Johnny Marr. And Peter Buck, whose style is reminiscent of both.

The minimalists. Curtis Mayfield. Robbie Robertson. Luther Perkins.

The savage. Bruce Springsteen. Paul McCartney, which can only come as a surprise to those who haven’t cottoned on to the fact that every jagged, bordering-on-losing-control Beatles solo (“Taxman”, “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, “Good Morning Good Morning”) is his. Dave Davies, because no single till this day has sounded as savage as “You Really Got Me”.

Dream weavers. Kevin Shields’ guitar symphonies. The shattered tapestries of Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore. Nick McCabe and Simon Tong, especially on Urban Hymns. And, when he’s in the mood, Jimmy Page.

The younger brothers. The unappreciated ones, playing vital roles in the shadow of their more illustrious axemates. Sterling Morrison. David Crosby. Stone Gossard. Malcolm Young, who’s actually the elder brother.

Brief Encounter

2011-03-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

It’s one of the simplest, most effective opening scenes in film history. As a policeman flirts with the owner of a railway platform café, the camera moves past them to show a couple quietly sitting at one of the tables, refusing to look each other in the eye. They’re joined by a garrulous lady, and their discomfort at this intrusion is visible. Soon it’s time for his train. He gets up, pauses, puts a hand on her shoulder, and leaves. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment, nothing much happens, but everything is revealed: they’re having an affair and are worried she’ll find out. There’s a secret hidden within this scene as well, but to speak of that is to deny the viewer the opportunity to experience firsthand the sweet ache of David Lean’s Brief Encounter.

The plot, an adaptation of Noel Coward’s play Still Life, concerns a bored housewife and a doctor teetering on the brink of an illicit affair. Trevor Howard as the male lead was inspired casting – he’d only begun his acting career a year back in 1944, and was not what you might call movie star handsome. Neither was Celia Johnson, who despite being everyone’s first choice for the role, almost turned it down. The makers must have seen something in their pairing that felt right – maybe the way their silences were so evocative. The supporting players too are flawless, especially Stanley Holloway (Eliza’s dad in My Fair Lady) and Joyce Carey as another, less cautious adulterous couple. Lean’s direction is intimate and measured, a world removed from Lawrence of Arabia, the film he’s most famous for. Robert Krasker’s camera, anticipating his singular work on Carol Reed’s The Third Man, is at its best when confronted with rain, or tunnels, or the night. Brief Encounter has a restraint and formality to it that is extremely British, yet at no point does it feel false or forced. To be seen with Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love in the ultimate unrequited love double-bill.

The Italian Jobs: DVD Review

2011-03-09T04:22:00.000-08:00

The 1969 Italian Job was a caper in both senses of the word – a crime film and a playful skip. The latter aspect is overdone, and for the most part the movie is fey, feckless and aggressively British. Directed by Peter Collison, it centres around one Charlie Croker (Michael Caine), a master thief recently released from prison, and his attempt to relive the Turin authorities of four million dollars via a daring heist. Unless you’re a diehard Caine fan, or thrill to the sight of Noel Coward (miscast as criminal mastermind John Bridger), there’s nothing in the first hour to quicken the blood. However, just as you’re prepared to give up, the characters stop yacking and start driving. The next thirty minutes, in which three Mini Coopers carrying the loot go down staircases, up buildings and through tunnels, are riveting – though an ambiguous ending messes things up again.

As the director, producer and writers of the 2003 Italian Job attest in the making-of featurette, their version was more of an inspired retelling than a remake. Some aspects of the original are retained – there’s still a Charlie Croker, a John Bridger, a heist, and the getaway cars are still Mini Coopers. What’s new is that the characters are now American, and the heist they’re pulling is against a former associate Steve (Edward Norton), who double-crossed them and killed Bridger. The original version had way too many thieves sharing screen time. This time they’re just five – Mark Wahlberg as Croker, Jason Statham, Mos Def, Seth Green, and Charlize Theron as Bridger’s daughter.

The build-up’s more fun this time around – especially when Steve becomes wise to their plans – but it wouldn’t be a Hollywood action remake unless the main aim was to better every stunt that was there in the original. In this, the movie is successful, even if certain complexities of plot and character seem to have been sacrificed along the way. Final verdict: good, speedy fun, but no Ocean’s Eleven. Both DVDs come with extras detailing how the films were made (Caine’s absence gives the 2003 interviews the edge in terms of star power). The original version does have a commentary track though, in which producer Michael Deeley clears the air regarding Croker’s unexplained “great idea".

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Self-aware

2011-02-27T22:59:00.000-08:00

I should really fix on one font, shouldn't I?

The Town: DVD Review

2011-02-27T22:54:00.000-08:00

Ben Affleck’s acting chops have come in for a fair amount of ridicule over the years, a tough break for someone who’s always been open to offbeat ventures (Chasing Amy, Dogma) and risky turns (an unexpected but scene-stealing cameo in Shakespeare in Love). As far as his directorial career’s concerned though, he is – in the lingo of a sport he follows religiously – batting two for two. Critics raved over his debut, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, a gritty thriller set in his hometown of Boston. The Town, adapted from Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves, doesn’t quite achieve the trash-talking heights of his debut, but is still a good showcase for Affleck’s fascination with working-class lives in Boston, as well as his growing confidence as a director (he directs himself for the first time).

As the veteran leader of a gang that robs banks in nun’s robes, you’d expect Doug McRay (Affleck) to be a bit more selective in his romantic pursuits than to fall for a former hostage (Rebecca Hall). Still, great action movies have subsisted on plots a lot flimsier than this, and we’re soon introduced to the competing interests of a sadistic mob boss (Pete Postlethwaite), an FBI agent (Mad Men's Jon Hamm) and Doug’s ex-lover (Blake Lively). Add to that a loose cannon of a partner (Jeremy Renner) who’s sulking because of Doug’s decision to go straight after one last job, and you have a situation set to boil over. And it does, in an extended heist sequence at a baseball park reminiscent of Michael Mann’s Heat.

Affleck and Hall’s improbable romance never really takes off, and the film is hijacked by several impressive supporting turns. Rheumy-eyed Jeremy Renner is one Red Bull short of insane (his performance received an Oscar nod for Supporting Actor). Blake Lively, star of TV’s Gossip Girl, is excellent as an old flame desperate for Doug’s attention; the bar scene between her and Hamm is one of the best in the movie. The Town isn’t flawless – the plotting is frequently weak and milder souls may tire of all that cussing. It is, however, an above-average cops and robbers flick by a director to watch out for. The DVD comes with two very brief extras – a look at some of the real-life characters the movie took inspiration from, and a featurette on Affleck as director.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

And the Oscar should go to...

2011-02-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

Last year, I decided, for the first time, to do some Oscar predicting on the old blog, instead of dragging unsuspecting friends into unwanted conversations. The response was so underwhelming that I decided to do the same this year. Here, a day before James Franco and Anne Hathaway (that’s inspired casting right there) kick things off, here’s my list of who will win, and who should.

Actor in a Leading Role

Who will win: Colin Firth is the front runner, and I think he does enough to see him through. Plus, never underestimate the hold of posh Brit accents on Academy voters. Plus, they owe him for A Single Man.

Who should win: Jesse Eisenberg is damaged and damaging, and he does it all with a face that never changes expression.

Actor in a Supporting Role

Who will win: Christian Bale throws the thespian kitchen sink at the audience in this role.

Who should win: Bale does too much. Hawkes and Ruffalo do too little. Renner is too much fun. Rush gets it just right.

Actress in a Leading Role

Who will win: Portman’s first truly great performance will not go unrewarded.

Who should win: Portman. Though I haven’t seen Williams in Blue Valentine. And Lawrence is scintillating in Winter’s Bone.

Actress in a Supporting Role

Who will win: Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit. Why she’s in the supporting category I don’t know. But she will win.

Who should win: Hailee Steinfeld.

Art Direction

Who will win: The King’s Speech.

Who should win: Inception.

Cinematography

Who will win: Roger Deakins.

Who should win: Did you notice the light behind Rooster Cogburn while he was deposing in court? God let it be Deakins.

Directing

Who will win: A good fight this year. I’d say The Social Network, and they’ll take Best Picture away for that.

Who should win: The Social Network.

Film Editing

Who will win: The Social Network.

Who should win: The Fighter.

Music (Original Score)

Who will win: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Social Network.

Who should win: I hope Rahman does, but Reznor and Ross wouldn’t be unjust.

Best Picture

Who will win: The King’s Speech seems to have the momentum. Damned if I know why.

Who should win: The Social Network, which will be remembered years from now, and long after the period politeness of The King’s Speech is a distant memory. Bad luck for True Grit, it ought to have been the runner-up.

Sound Mixing

Who will win: The King’s Speech. For it’s title.

Who should win: The Social Network, for that nightclub scene with Timberlake shouting over the din.

Visual Effects

Who will win: Inception.

Who should win: Inception.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Who will win: Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), for proving screwball isn’t dead.

Who should win: Sorkin, though, for the second time, I must say bad luck to True Grit.

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Who will win: David Seidler for The King’s Speech.

Who should win: I still cannot believe Leslie Manville didn’t get a Best Actress nod for Another Year, let alone nominations for the excellent supporting players. Give Mike Leigh the damn Original Screenplay Oscar already.

Sung this way

2011-02-23T04:21:00.000-08:00

Along with the rest of the world, I've been hearing a lot of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way". Lyrically, it's an "I Will Survive" for the singer's LGBTI fans, but what makes it thrilling and unique is the vocal, particularly the way Lady G repeatedly shifts between the lower and upper registers. The other great song that used this kind of vocal mannerism as a hook was Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line", and there the shift to upper was every second paragraph (here it's every other line).

7 Khoon Maaf: Review

2011-02-19T01:21:00.000-08:00

Has Vishal Bharadwaj lost his marbles?

7 Khoon Maaf is a distressing exercise in making the viewer squirm. When details of the plot out – a woman called Susanna killing seven unsuitable suitors – first started trickling it sounded something like a Coen Brothers-style black comedy. But are we really expected to laugh at all this? In the course of a hundred and twenty minutes, Susanna (Priyanka Chopra) is beaten, raped, mentally abused, cheated on and blackmailed. Her debasement is so realistic that her retribution seems justified. This was probably the director’s intention, but how can you cheer on multiple murders when all you feel is sickened? By half-time I was hoping that Susanna would kill herself and save everyone concerned a lot of pain.

Isn’t it surprising that the scriptwriters never thought of making at least one of the husbands a character worthy of the audience’s respect? It seems like an elementary choice for a film with this plot – to question whether Susanna is so far gone that she can no longer tell the difference between a predator and a paramour. Fair enough, that’s a choice made. But couldn’t the killings have been wittier? The film might have been more palatable if it had devoted more screen time to the setting up of the murders instead of the circumstances that necessitated them.

None of the performers bring their A-game. Priyanka Chopra goes through so much, it wouldn’t be fair to judge this as a performance; let’s just say she weathers the ordeal. Naseeruddin Shah’s Bengali accent keeps slipping like a sock. Annu Kapoor plays a simpering letch of an inspector, so much under Susanna’s thumb it is surprising that she feels she needs to sleep with him to shut him up. John Abraham is embarrassing. Only Vivaan Shah as Arun and Aleksandr Dyachenko as Nikolai Vronsky find an appropriately ironic métier.

Bharadwaj is a singular talent in an industry prone to exaggerating directorial gifts. His three previous films – if one leaves out the kids’ films Makdee and Blue Umbrella, both superior to 7KM – were Maqbool, Omkara and Kaminey, as strong a trio as any in Indian cinema. 7 Khoon Maaf is most likely a miscalculation, an aberration. Even Godard, after viewing his Breathless, said that he thought he was making Scarface but had ended up doing Alice in Wonderland. Bharadwaj has made great films in the past, and there’s no reason to suspect he doesn’t have a few more in him. All things considered, it would be churlish not to say – ek film maaf.

The Right Stuff: Special Edition DVD review

2011-02-14T01:16:00.000-08:00

Back in 1972, Rolling Stone sent Tom Wolfe, originator of the New Journalism, to cover the Apollo 17 space mission. While researching “Post-Orbital Remorse”, a series about the post-journey depression some of the astronauts were undergoing, Wolfe grew fascinated with the astronauts and their lives. Out of this grew The Right Stuff, his 1979 novel about the famous “Mercury 7” – the first US astronauts in space – as well as one Chuck Yeager, passed over by the Mercury Programme, but regarded by those in the know as the finest pilot of the lot.

The film begins with Yeager attempting to break the sound barrier. His success triggers a race in the pilot fraternity to become the fastest man alive. It’s an early sign of the competitiveness they’ll take forward into their space training. Meanwhile, NASA is looking for pilots who can to woo the public in addition to doing their jobs. The reticent Yeager, despite possessing the “the right stuff” for the job, isn’t seen as charming enough to be an American hero. He recedes into the background, and the film shifts its focus onto the Mercury 7. It’s a risky move, taking your central character out after an hour and bringing him in an hour later, but it suits this film, which is anything but a straight-ahead biopic, as well as its director, the playful Phillip Kaufman.

As in Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being – a novel deemed “unfilmable” until he turned it into a funny, sexy piece of cinema – there’s a streak of absurdist humour that runs through The Right Stuff. These off-kilter moments – a monkey being put through the same tests as the pilots to judge who’d do better in space, Jeff Goldblum bursting into meetings with bad news that already everyone seems to know – counterbalance the more conventional ones where the legend of the programme’s success is built. By showing the doubts and fears of the astronauts, as well as their grudging admittance that Yeager may have been the best man amongst them, Kaufman creates a vivid, intimate history, untainted by chest-thumping, of a key moment in the space race.

The cinematography by Caleb Deschanel is as handsome as Bill Conti’s score is stirring. Ed Harris displays prodigious amounts of charm as astronaut John Glenn; also watch out for playwright and sometimes actor Sam Shepard as the soft-spoken Yeager, Dennis Quaid as the grinning, competitive Gordon Cooper, Jeff Goldblum as a Mercury recruiter and Levon Helm, drummer for The Band, as narrator and in a bit part as Yeager’s buddy. Tying together these talents is the often underrated Kaufman, whose film, while eschewing conventional patterns of build-up and dénouement, seldom has a dull moment in its three hours of running time. There’s more stuff that’s right by us on the second disc – deleted scenes, three documentaries on the film and one on Glenn, and commentary by the director and cast members.

Gordon Cooper, played by Dennis Quaid, post-takeoff and seconds before uttering one of my favourite lines in all of moviedom: "The sun has come up through the window now. Oh lord, what a heavenly light."

Al Pacino Box Set: DVD Review

2011-02-09T06:31:00.000-08:00

Between 1972 and 1979, Al Pacino appeared in The Godfather I, its sequel, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and …And Justice for All: a golden run, to least the least. Critical acclaim in the following decades was more sporadic, with his critics claiming a hardening of style, the method disintegrating into monotony, if not madness. Anyone keen to verify the veracity of this charge (or have evidence on hand to dispute it) should fund this box set – with Scarface and Sea of Love from the ‘80s, Scent of a Woman and Carlito’s Way from the early ’90s – a good starting point.

Sea of Love, directed by Harold Becker, is the only one in the set that never mistakes itself for a great film. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good film though. Pacino plays a cop trying to track down a killer who favours singles ads in the newspaper. Welcome amounts of humour are derived from an unremarkable plot – especially Pacino’s interaction with his taller, fatter partner, played by John Goodman, and his needling of a cop who’s married his ex-wife. Ellen Barkin, her mouth a mischievous upward curl, plays both love interest and possible suspect, and is almost too much for Pacino to handle. The film builds to an unsatisfying ending, but the journey is fun.

There’s nothing much one can say about Scarface or Scent of a Woman that will change the way most people already feel about them. The former, directed by Brian De Palma, is hypercharged, florid, crude – a classic of excess. Based loosely on the 1932 Howard Hawks film of the same name, it stars Pacino as one Tony Montana, a Cuban refugee who works his way up the criminal ladder and ends up a swearing, cocaine-snorting king. Pacino’s Montana is almost cartoonish in his over-the-top unpredictability and lack of restraint. The performance stays with you, like a blow from a sledgehammer. The same could also be said for his turn – more nuanced, yet still very loud and difficult to like – as a blind colonel in Scent of a Woman. It’s the kind of ornery-yet-life-affirming performance the Oscars tend to notice, and duly earned Pacino his second golden statuette.

Carlito’s Way, Pacino’s second collaboration with De Palma, has a tendency to get overshadowed by the bombast of Scarface. Seen today, it is in many ways the superior of the first film. Pacino gives one of his most restrained, beautifully-judged performances as Carlito Brigante, a former drug lord who’s sprung from jail by his lawyer (Sean Penn) and wows to go straight. De Palma envisioned the film as a neo-noir, which comes through in Brigante’s voiceover and the overarching sense of fatalism. The more Carlito tries to stay out the trouble, the more it seems to seek him out. The suspense is accentuated through long, sweeping takes, culminating in a bravura sequence at a railway station. Fantastic support is extended by Luis Guzmán, John Leguizamo and Viggo Mortensen. All four DVDs are sans special features and shorn of scenes with even the slightest hint of skin (Scarface’s 226 f-bombs are left intact).

Sons of Babur: Review

2011-02-02T03:29:00.000-08:00

Though the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II is usually referred to by his chosen moniker “Zafar”, or victory, the circumstances of his life do not to bear it out. Shah inherited a crumbling empire that was rapidly slipping into British hands and did little to reverse that trend until, at the age of 82, he found himself appointed nominal leader of the Revolt of 1857. The revolt, however, was soon stamped out, and Shah was exiled to Rangoon. He died there four years later. It is this final image of Shah that Sons of Babur chooses to use as guide to three centuries of Mughal history.

The pretext for this history lesson is the modern-day college student Rudra Sen Gupta, who’s having trouble finding takers for his play on the emperor. Ridiculed by his friends and professor, he wanders into the time-warp section of the stage and finds a crotchety old man who turns out to be Shah. There’s tension to begin with, with the young student disbelieving and Bahadur Shah dismissive, but the play soon finds its format. Shah hosts what might be described as a Mughal history highlights show – Babur sacrificing himself for Humayun, Akbar founding Din-i-Ilahi – commenting from the sidelines as the action is played out centre stage.

Sons of Babur tries to coax laughs out of an exasperated Shah bemoaning Rudra’s inability to speak without using English phrases, but it’s low comedy at best. Rudra is given a Bengali accent so thick that one sympathises with the old man – even his Hindi sounded like a foreign language. His friends come off no better, though it’s difficult to decide whether the doubter who says “Dastango… Go where, Rudra?” is more insulting to the audience’s intelligence than the believer with a British accent (whose “How interesting this Mughal history is!” could qualify as the play’s leitmotif).

Sons of Babur was originally penned in 2008 by Salman Khurshid in English and translated into Urdu by Athar Farooqui. The translation to stage is by M Sayeed Alam, who knows a thing or two about playing around with this period (his Ghalib in New Delhi has a similar farcical approach), as well as directing plays in Urdu. But unlike his melancholic 1947 earlier this year, it all comes undone in Sons of Babur. The contrast between the forced hipness of the students and the melodrama of the courtiers is too difficult to reconcile, and the undoubted good intentions of the playwright feel more like revision than revisionism. Attempts are made to draw connections between the policies of the Mughals and present-day events, but nothing concrete emerges.

In the role of the last Mughal, Tom Alter is headliner, crowd-puller and ultimately, the best thing the play has going for it; the lines roll off his tongue with an ease that befits an emperor known more for his poetry than his politics. Shah’s warming up to his young fan as the play progresses might have been more touching if Rudra (Ram Naresh Diwakar) wasn’t such a caricature. Various actors double and triple up to portray the other assorted Mughals, with an impressive Ekant Kaul as Babur/Akbar/ Mahabbat Khan.

Bubbling under the surface, and hinted at by the title (an inflammatory term aimed at latter-day Muslims), is the much-debated issue of whether the Mughals were Indian or not. Alter’s pained groan when Rudra asks him this makes clear the author’s thoughts on the matter. Yet this is a question rich – and relevant – enough to be explored in a play with similar ambition, though with more thought put into its mechanics. Sons of Babur ends up midway between Ghalib and Ghlalib in New Delhi. Both are plays directed by Alam, the first serious and biographical, the second broad and funny. He tries to have it all here, and ends up, like his titular character, with nothing.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Fab

2011-02-01T05:34:00.001-08:00

It's a tad self-indulgent to blog about your own header, but I've been trying to find this picture online for some time now. Photographer Stephen Goldblatt apparently asked the Beatles to mingle with onlookers at St Pancras Church in London. It's my favourite Beatles photo by some margin, and an indication that their old habit of playing the fool had remained intact even in their final, turbulent days.

Strange old/Brave new world

2011-01-29T22:32:00.000-08:00

In the past fortnight, I had two very unique movie-watching experiences. I don't mean the actual films themselves - though both were very good - but the process of seeing them. The first was a screening of Ozu's I Was Born But..., which I'd been waiting for ever since I learned the Habitat was screening it (confession - it was my first Ozu). The catch was that it was completely silent, sans dialogue and even a recorded (or tacked-on) soundtrack. That may not sound like a big deal, but really, in Delhi, when are things ever that quiet? I went in praying that I wouldn't embarass myself by a) walking out or b) drifting off. Luckily, neither happened. I watched it through, and realised why everyone (or at least everyone who's seen his films) keeps on about about Ozu's profoundly democratic camera.

The second instance was unexpected, a Hindi movie (Dhobi Ghat) in a hall I'd visited dozens of times (Priya). The audience response was tepid, and I guess it wasn't that difficult movie to deride, if one was in that sort of mood (the structure is similar to ensemble films like Babel and Crash, nothing major happens in terms of a plot, and the whole thing is light to the touch, not something our films are known for). I loved it though, most of all for it's meloncholic tone - utterly different from both the Bolly mainstream and the indies being made now days - but also for the all-round strong performances, especially by Prateik and Monica Dogra, the sound of Kriti Malhotra's voice, Gustavo Santaolalla's music (the other element borrowed from from the films of Inarittu), moody and spare, perfectly matching the feel of the film. When it ended, though, it felt strangely incomplete. I realised a few seconds later that this was the first movie I'd seen in India which hadn't run with an interval. It took me back to what Karan Johar, of all people, said in an interview to Raja Sen of Rediff (http://fanapart.blogspot.com/2009/11/stop-start.html). Still, props to Kiran Rao, it's a great film. And another Delhi director...

Abohoman: DVD Review

2011-01-21T03:04:00.000-08:00

By the time Abohoman got a DVD release in Delhi, it had been conferred the National Award for Best Actress (Ananya Chatterjee) and Best Director (Rituparno Ghosh’s second win after 2000’s Utsab). Like most other films by this director, it’s a wordy, elegant look at the troubled relationships of people who speak in modulated voices and are too cultured to throw things. It’s not a particularly new theme – ageing director falls for debutante actress, she becomes his mistress, wife doesn’t approve – and Ghosh probably knows this, which is why he boldly structures the movie as a series of cross-cuts across time.

To begin with, the strategy pays off. Ghosh introduces the central characters – director Aniket, his son Apratim, wife Deepti and muse Shikha – in a series of vignettes, all occurring at different points in their relationships with each other. Very little expository assistance is offered, and the result is engrossing, if disorienting. The scenes blend into each other seamlessly – Shikha at Aniket’s house auditioning, then at his funeral, then as a character in the movie he’s directing – and just when you’re wondering how long the director can keep this up, Ghosh loses his nerve. Abohoman retreats into a semi-linear narrative, the scenes become longer, and everyone onscreen starts to sigh a lot.

Abohoman sets up more interpersonal conflicts – director-muse, husband-wife, wife-mistress, father-son, wife-mother-in-law – than it knows how to deal with. Specifics get sacrificed; we never learn at what point Aniket becomes infatuated with Shikha, or how matters deteriorate to the point where he no longer cares to hide the affair from his family. Further confusion arises from the use of Nati Binodini as the film he directs. Ghosh starts off by suggesting a parallel between the legendary stage actress (also a kept woman) and Shikha, but drops the idea altogether in the second half. Even less convincing is Apratim’s wishful explanation that making a film on his father’s life would mean the end of the scandal his affair caused.

Ghosh is a genuinely gifted director of women, and it shows in Mamata Shankar’s controlled performance as Deepti and in Ananya Chatterjee’s seductive, steely Shikha. Deepankar De as the director and Jisshu Sengupta as his son do little wrong, but aren’t privy to Ghosh’s affection in the way the women are. Special mention must be made of Arghya Kamal Mitra’s editing; it’s the driving force behind the opening half hour, the only part of the movie with true greatness in it. Otherwise, Abohoman is two steps forward, two back, and pirouette.

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

Re: Stacks

2011-01-06T02:01:00.000-08:00

Those who've seen the unbearably sad ending to Season 4 of House will recognise this song. The lyrics tell their own sad, elliptical story, and I never realised till today that the three-line chorus involved subtle variations on a sentence and not just repetitions of it. Listen carefully, and you'll hear this:
On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load
In the back and the racks and the stacks are your load
In the back with your racks and you're unstacking your load

2010: The Year in Review

2010-12-21T23:01:00.000-08:00

I've restricted myself to whatever I can recall from this filmic year without double-checks, this in the hope that memories strong enough not to require the crutch of Google are the ones that are ultimately important. In order, then...

Ishqiya, with each its characters more foul-mouthed than the next, played out like a Vishal Bharadwaj movie crossed with a Western and shorn of beauty. Vidya Balan was unsettling, and Arshad Warsi, looking at everything with kohl-edged eyes, was as good as everyone suspected he might be.

Karthik Calling Karthik was the underrated film of the year. Its secrets laid bare by halftime, the last half hour was a surprisingly poignant look at whether it is possible, in this wired age, for a man to disconnect.

Love Sex aur Dhoka was shot on digital, and the coldness of the technology found an echo in the lack of overall human feeling that ended up making the whole enterprise seem like a slightly sadistic prank. But there's tremendous control displayed by Banerjee, and a conflicted, strangely moving performance by Raj Kumar Yadav.

For those who remember their childhood as a time of doubt and humiliation, Udaan was the real 400 Blows. Ronit Roy's performance was a reminder that Bollywood's lack of good roles often gets mistaken for a lack of good actors.

A Single Man barely ran a week, but whoever saw it, raved. The cinematography was astonishing, as were the sets, as was Firth's performance.

Raavan looked stunning, and were it not for its two unredeemable lead performances, might have been a half-decent film. As the pursuing police inspector, Vikram was a lot scarier than Bachchan, whose role should have been played by Ravi Kishan.

The fact that Peepli Live had a month-long media blitz on the very channels it so caustically sent up was a slice of irony missed, or ignored, by all concerned. The film was black, black, funny and black.

Tere Bin Laden was the only comedy this year that took its job seriously. Everyone else tried to make a statement, TBL just made people laugh.

Inception bent spoons and, for some strange reason, divided the critical community down the middle.

The Social Network will go down as a late entry in the screwball comedy canon.

These ones didn't release, but...

Remember the ten minutes or so of Ray Liotta's really, really bad day in Goodfellas? That's every second of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Nicholas Cage atones for a decade's worth of irrelevant films.

Emma Stone in Easy A was this year's Juno.

Music-wise...did anything happen? Vampire Weekend's second was as strong as their first. K'Naan's The Troubadour I loved. The National's High Violet sounded like autumn. Eminem did a couple of decent songs and more importantly, stayed alive. Clapton's album was mellow, perhaps a bit lukewarm. Gaga, Perry, Swift, "New York State of Mind", K$sha - who cares? I heard more music than ever, but hardly anything recent. It was a bleah year.

Who knows where time goes? ¡Felíz año nuevo anyway. Keep warm.

His fearful trip is done

2010-12-21T01:32:00.000-08:00

Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, died a few days back. His idiosyncratic sound influenced everyone from post-punkers to Lester Bangs to Tom Waits. Here's a Guardian obit, but the man's weirdness/greatness is best judged when it's played out loud. Start at the deep end with Trout Mask Replica. If you recover, try the Mirror Man Sessions.

Ten Reasons to Love The Wild Bunch

2010-12-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

1. "Why not?"

2. The Treasure of Sierra Madre haunts it

3. John Woo's entire aesthetic's here

4. Peckinpah was as wild as any of those guys onscreen

5. "We're after men, and I wish to God I was with them"

6. How in the world did he film that bridge collapsing?

7. Robert Ryan is so crazy he had to die within the first twenty minutes

8. Warren Oates being denied the bottle

9. Never underestimates a child's capacity for cruelty

10. Ernest Borgnine's face just before the final shootout

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro on page

2010-11-28T22:34:00.000-08:00

When Jai Arjun Singh was approached by Harper Collins, his first thought was to do a book on the Kamal Hassan-starrer Pushpak. However, it took one mention of Kundan Shah’s 1983 comedy by commissioning editor Saugata Mukherjee to change his mind. “I realised this would be a compelling film to write about,” Singh said in an interview. “With Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, you just know there’d be an interesting behind-the-scenes story. Coincidentally, I’d just seen the film for the first time as an adult a few weeks back, after a gap of 17-18 years.”

While Singh does drop a warning coda early on in the book (“It is difficult to describe this film to someone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand”) chances are most of his readers would be familiar with this, Hindi cinema’s ultimate cult film. Nearly two decades after its release, fans still quote its absurdist lines, discuss the philosophical implications of Satish Shah’s highly entertaining corpse, and write mini-theses on the Marxist (Groucho Marxist) Mahabhratha sequence. Even dedicated viewers of the film, though, should find plenty that’s new in this breezy (yet thorough) piecing together of how the film fell into place. Singh speaks to most of the major players – among others, director Kundan Shah, screenwriter Ranjit Kapoor, actors Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani and Om Puri – and uses their first-hand reports to illuminate why the movie played out the way it did.

While Singh had written about this film on his blog Jabberwock, he decided to approach his first full-length by not “pre-deciding how the book was going to be. I decided I’d keep my mind open and if something interesting came up during the research process, I’d go with it,” he said. He stressed how different the film might have turned out if the script hadn’t been through multiple iterations, and the crew hadn’t been receptive to new ideas while shooting. Shah’s original English script had a talking gorilla and Anupam Kher playing an inept hitman called “Disco Killer”. These ideas were shot and subsequently dropped, as were many others, notes Singh in a fascinating chapter entitled “Outtakes from the Shadow Films”. This was as much due to the vision of the filmmakers and the legendary scissor-fingers of editor Renu Saluja (her contribution, along with Shah and Kapoor, is singled out by the author as most vital to the film) as it was to NFDC tax regulations, which stipulated that movies shorter than 2 hours 25 minutes fell under a different slab (Yaaro clocks in at 2 hours, 24 minutes).

The more one reads Singh’s book, the more one is struck by the fact that Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro may not only be one of India’s best-loved comedies, but also the encapsulation of the possibilities of a moment when a supremely talented bunch of individuals decided to collaborate on a project that seemed jinxed from day one. Its cast and crew reads like a non-mainstream honour roll – besides those mentioned above, Pankaj Kapoor, Satish Kaushik, Sudhir Mishra and Vidhu Vinod Chopra were all involved with the production – and Singh cites not only FTII, where the director and most of the actors studied, but also NSD, of which Ranjit Kapoor and Robin Das, the art director, were alumni, as important founding grounds for the film.

What makes Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro all the more unique is the fact that it has proved surprisingly resistant to imitation. When asked why, Singh mused “I don’t know if it’s too mystical to suggest that when Shah and Kapoor came together, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe other directors didn’t have the same sensibility. Or maybe some did, but didn’t have a crew that was on the same wavelength.” In such a situation, what might Yaaro’s legacy be? The book points in some surprising directions. Sudhir Mishra, for instance, remarks how the harrowing scene where two cops beat up Shiney Ahuja’s character in Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi had, to his mind, an undercurrent of black humour that was a result of his having worked on Shah’s film. Singh also mentioned Pankaj Advani’s Sankat City and Peepli Live as films possessing the same absurdist comic outlook. Ultimately, though, the best analogy for Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’s ethereal lightness, and well as its elusiveness, can be found in Akhtar Mirza’s advice to Shah: “Your script is like snow, so it’s floating. If you put all this logic into it, it will become ice and sink.”

A version of this piece appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Yay

2010-11-26T03:47:00.000-08:00

Two thumbs up for emotional writing. Two down for Wikipedia's reputation as a unbiased source. These are the site's concluding words on the Jessica Lal murder case:
"Senior advocate Ram Jethmalani...alleged that the High Court Bench had made up its mind to hold Sharma guilty. Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium submitted that there was sufficient evidence against Manu Sharma for his involvement in the crime. Yay."

Bari Theke Paliye: DVD Review

2010-11-24T22:35:00.000-08:00

Bari Theke Paliye is often described as India’s The 400 Blows, even though Truffaut’s masterpiece was released in 1959, a year after Ritwik Ghatak’s film. While the basic storylines - a delinquent boy runs away from home - are similar, the two films make an interesting study in contrasts. Ghatak’s protagonist is younger than Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, more of a Bengali Huckleberry Finn in his resourcefulness and cheerful defiance of authority. Bari Theke Paliye is a lot starker than Truffaut’s film – by the time it is done, the runaway has had to deal with hunger, poverty and death. But the most crucial, and least deserved, point of contrast is this: Truffaut’s film kicked off the French New Wave and is one of the most revered in film history, while Ghatak’s is a neglected masterpiece, little-known even in its country of origin.

This neglect is evident from the first frame; the picture jumps around alarmingly, and the quality of the image cries out for restoration. Even through the murk, Ghatak’s singular vision shines through. Kanchan (Param Bharak Lahiri, in one of the greatest-ever performances by a child actor) is irritated by the dampening effect his professor-dad’s disciplinary ways have on his shenanigans. He runs off, leaving his village home for the big city of Calcutta, vowing to make enough money to support his doting mother. With no money, friends or relatives, things look bleak until he’s befriended by a good-hearted trickster named Haridas (Kali Bannerjee). Ghatak incisively hones in on the distracted nature of children; even though Haridas is his best chance for survival, Kanchan keeps wandering off to have adventures.

Ghatak was just two films old when he made Bari Theke Paliye. In the coming years, he would go on to make some of the starkest films ever to come out of Bengal (or India, or anywhere) in Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha. This film too has its strident moments – Ghatak’s startling overlays of sound and image, for example (and a tribute to their intellectual source – a brief visual homage to Battleship Potemkin’s famous image of an old woman with broken spectacles). But the mood on the whole is one of lessons learnt, and of hard-won forgiveness. The cinematography by Dinen Gupta is as heartfelt a tribute to Calcutta in the ’50s as Henri Decae’s in The 400 Blows was to Paris. The score, courtesy Salil Chowdhury, is another source of wonder, shifting from sitars and flutes to orchestras to emphasise the character’s journey from village to town. The director’s decision to construct the second half as a series of short vignettes upsets the film’s rhythm somewhat; the ends of some scenes feel like they’ve been loped off. But that’s a minor quibble. Bari Theke Paliye translates as The Runaway; given the relative obscurity of its status, it should have been The One That Got Away.

This review was published in Time Out Delhi.

What might have been

2010-11-21T23:28:00.000-08:00

Movie buffs ceaselessly cast and recast the movies they see. Salon's outrageous piece inspired me to do some replacing of my own.

1. Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train
Granger wrecks every Hitchcock film he's in (he's awful in Rope as well), and in this one, Robert Walker's silky pyschopath runs rings around his quavering, ineffectual tennis player wimp. Hitchcock might have been served better by going with the other actor rumoured to have been considered for Granger's part - William Holden. The handsome soullessness he displayed in Sunset Boulevard would have been just the right quality for this role, something to make the audience doubt whether he actually wanted his ex-wife dead or not.

2. John Mills in Great Expectations
Simply too old to be a twentysomething Pip. It fairly ruined the film for me, despite all that lovely camerawork and Alec Guinness as Herbert Pocket. Replacement would have to be Brit, and young at the time. How about Marius Goring, the ernest conductor in The Red Shoes?

3. Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code
Hanks is one my all-time favourites, but he lacked energy and a certain Indiana Jones-ness in this movie. A terrific replacement, to my mind, would be the talented Hugh Laurie, who's proved more than capable of putting on an American accent when required.

4. Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood
PT Anderson is almost as good a caster as his friend, Quiten Tarantino, this is the only role I can recall where I feel he slipped up. Dano tries hard, but Daniel Day-Lewis's performance is monstrously powerful, and Eli ends up seeming weak. Edward Norton would have fit the bill a lot better in my book (though he's a bit old). And how about Jesse Eisenberg?

5. Richard Gere in Days of Heaven
It's a magical, painterly film, but Gere doesn't make half the impact he should, and Sam Shepard's low-key performance overtakes his easily. John Travolta, originally considered for the role, might have brought more charisma to the table, as might Jeff Bridges, or even (I'm going out on a limb) Kevin Costner.

6. Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights

Wong Kar-Wai had had some success with casting pop stars in lead roles before (most notably Faye Wong in Chungking Express). It backfired, however, with the beautiful but visibly nervous Norah Jones in this, his only English-language film. Cat Power's chemistry with Jude Law in a small cameo indicates that Kar-Wai may have cast the wrong smoky-voiced singer in the lead role. Natalie Portman (there's also Rachel Weisz, in case you think this film could accomodate any more astoundingly beautiful women), stealing scenes like a professional thief, would have done even better.

This beauty a dipping neophobia

2010-11-15T08:46:00.000-08:00

Let it all hang out

2010-11-07T01:57:00.000-07:00

Just about the funniest song I've ever heard. This is the 1967 original by The Hombres.

A John Mellencamp cover of the same. Adds little in terms of musical value, but the video is sexy and hilarious, qualities that make it a perfect fit for this song.

Ace in the Hole

2010-10-28T01:22:00.000-07:00

Those who appreciated Peepli Live’s vision of a cannibalistic media feeding off one man’s tragedy will find Ace in the Hole an intriguing companion piece. Made over half a century ago, this movie stars Kirk Douglas as a washed-up reporter forced to work for a small-town newspaper, who sees his ticket back to the “big league” in a man stuck in a cave collapse. Newspapermen – whether muckraking or crusading – were the basis for some of Hollywood’s best pictures of the ‘40s and ‘50s; this movie is no exception.

As Chuck Tatum, Douglas is as enterprising and ruthless a leading man as Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. He gambles with the victim’s fate, forcing the rescue team to drill instead of shoring up the walls because it would mean more time for him to whip up a media frenzy. He also strikes deals with the crooked sheriff, and the trapped man’s wife, who, in a way, is also trapped. The film intersperses the increasing despair of the man inside the cave with a savage indictment of society at large, as hundreds of tourists turn the sleepy town into a capitalistic carnival. The media’s attitude, meanwhile, can be summed up in Douglas’ practical assessment of the situation: “One man [trapped] is better than 84…that’s human interest.”

This hardboiled outlook will come as no surprise to those familiar with director Billy Wilder’s films. His black comedies took aim at those aspects of life that America held dear – corporate zeal, the institution of marriage – and turned them inside out. His leads were often unsympathetic; Fred MacMurray helps an adulterous wife murder her husband in Double Indemnity, and in Sunset Blvd, William Holden is a kept man who leads on an ageing star. Ace in the Hole may be the sharpest of them all, the grainy darkness of the dust-covered faces matched every step of the way by the blackness of the humour.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi. Also, an earlier post of mine on Peepli Live.

If you like your poetry hardboiled...

2010-10-25T00:08:00.000-07:00

"And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn't care about that forty grand"

(Out of the Past, 1947. Directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas. Script by Daniel Mainwaring, who also went by Geoffrey Homes, important in this case because a certain Geoffrey Homes wrote Build My Gallows High, the novel on which the film is based)

Thoughts on the CWG closing ceremony (even as it continues to continue)

2010-10-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

Why are they singing English songs?
Why is Shiamak singing at all?
Why did they resurrect the ghost of Usha Uthup?
Why does Kalmadi give such long speeches?
At least they aren't messing around with intricate classical dance moves that no one can see from the stands...
...or large laser-generated outlines of people doing yoga
Maybe there's a level of self-understanding that set in post-opening ceremony that made them say, look, this is us. We are Indians, and we are best at large-scale synchronised dances set to a medley of random film songs. All that talk about showcasing culture and heritage was a way to spend the ginormously inflated budgets that we were given to...well, to do exactly those things. But that's the past. Today, we sing, we dance, we rationalise

Canis lupus

2010-10-12T02:33:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from an interview with Jason Schwartzman, who describes his favourite scene from Fantastic Mr. Fox. Its mine as well. It comes out of nowhere and plays like an old Disney scene, full of wonder and an elemental sense of fear. Also, as Schwartzman tells us, it has an uncredited contribution by Bill Murray.

Q: What is your favorite part of the movie?
JS: I love this one part of the movie, but it’s in the end. What should I do in this situation? Can I tell it anyway?

Q: I think it’s okay.
JS: Well, okay. I’m just gonna say it. There’s a scene at the end of the movie when George Clooney’s character, myself, my cousin and the opossum, Kylie, are all on a little motorcycle driving back to our home. And we’ve just rescued my cousin. And we stop and we see a wolf on a distant hill, and it’s a really beautiful, beautiful scene. It’s like so heart-warming because it’s just a beautiful moment between these foxes and little animals and this really like mysterious wolf who we’ve heard about the entire movie and who doesn’t talk in this scene and he’s not wearing clothes. He’s kind of, he represents I guess, the wild. He’s a wild wolf and animal, and it’s a beautiful moment where they have this great connection, and in that moment, it really like to me the point of that scene is let’s keep on being free. Let’s keep on being animals. And it’s such an uplifting moment, and like when I’ve seen it with audiences, a bunch of people break into huge cheers and hooting. It’s such an awesome, awesome scene. It really just blows my mind.

And actually, when we did the movie, you know, we did the movie basically live together as a cast. We didn’t do the scenes, none of us really did it separately in recording booths, which is how typical animated movies are done. This one, Wes Andersen had us literally go and move onto a farm together and we all lived together. And we’d wake up in the morning, have breakfast and then if there was a scene, for instance, that took place underneath a tree, George Clooney and Bill Murray, everyone, would walk over to the tree that we’d find, we’d take our scripts out and we’d just start acting out the scenes. And it was basically like doing a movie just with no cameras. So there were actors, the director, Wes, and a sound man. And we were running around, growling and hooting and hollering, and if we had to eat a bunch of food like in the movie we always are eating like French toast or biscuits, we would literally be eating French toast and biscuits and toast, I mean it was so much fun.

Anyways, one day when we were doing this particular scene with this wolf, we were all about to shoot it and then Wes said, you know we should really get someone to play the wolf so that the guys have someone to act opposite, and we looked around and Bill Murray was standing there with his hands in his pockets. He took his hands out and said, “I can be the wolf.” And Bill Murray just took off running, or I guess trotting. And he ran, ran, ran, ran really far away until he was tiny. And he turned around and actually became the wolf, like he, it’s almost as if he embodied the wolf. And he acted it out for us, and it was so inspiring and so beautiful. And Wes actually took out his camera phone, filmed it, and then sent that footage to the animators to base the wolf off of Bill Murray, so Bill Murray is the uncredited wolf in this movie. And he actually, it was so good, it was as if he practiced it. I mean, it was incredible, his wolf performance. So, I think because of what the scene means, what it represents in the movie and the great warm message that it has in the scene, plus knowing the behind the scenes, what went into that scene, I think that’s my favorite scene in the movie.

Full interview here

Superman: DVD Review

2010-10-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

Some movies are better viewed young. As we grow older, we become less susceptible, more jaded. We start to pick holes in our childhood fantasies. Superman is great for picking holes in. For starters, it’s very, very square. The screenplay is turgid, despite having names like Mario Puzo (Godfather) and Robert Benton and David Newman (Bonnie and Clyde) attached to its earlier drafts; characters say things like “I'm here to fight for truth, and justice, and the American way.” The adolescent Clark Kent looks very little like the older one. The scenes on Krypton are stagey and visually unimpressive. And no matter what Marlon Brando does as Jor-El, Superman’s father, all you can see is that ridiculous wig.

Superman was always the square one – the all-American superhero mothers wanted their daughters to bring home. Batman was a brooder, Spiderman was a troubled teen, Superman was blander than bread. It’s a miracle that Christopher Reeve manages to make Superman so appealing without deviating from the original template. His belief in the character pulls the audience along. The movie’s original marketing hook was “You’ll believe a man can fly”. What Reeve does is even more impressive, because he makes you believe it while decked in bright red underpants. Thirty-two years after Superman’s release, this much is clear: his performance makes the movie. It’s also fair to point out that some of the flying scenes still look pretty nifty, and that Margo Kidder is a hoot as Lois Lane.

If you’re the kind who values footnotes as much as the novel, you’ll enjoy the bonus features included. There are three documentaries: one on Superman’s pre-production, another on its development, the third concerning its visual effects. Reeve, Kidder, principal villain Gene Hackman and gravel-voiced director Richard Donner all turn up to reminisce. Also included is Reeve’s screen test, proof that he had the character down from the very beginning. The commentary track, though, is a rather dubious error – the disc advertises one by the director, instead we get producers Pierre Spengler and Ilya Salkind, who fired him after he’d shot a major portion of Superman II. Apart from that, it’s an interesting glance at a movie which, for better or worse, set the standards by which future comic book flicks would be judged.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

Away We Go: DVD Review

2010-10-03T23:44:00.000-07:00

Ever since he debuted with American Beauty in 1999, Sam Mendes has, in his polished way, spent his career taking different aspects of American life apart in films like Road to Perdition, Jarhead and Revolutionary Road. Now, with Away We Go, he’s given himself a chance to deconstruct his own process. By doing something that few big-ticket directors ever come around to – making a small movie, writer-led and not dependent on stars, as he states in a making-of segment – Mendes is pushing himself to see whether his art remains relevant when one removes the advantages that Hollywood affords.

Burt and Verona, unmarried but very much in love, are expecting their first child. When Burt’s parents, their reason for being in Denver, inform them that they’re going abroad for a few years, the couple sets off on a cross-country trip to find a place they can call home. The film subscribes to a brand of deadpan eccentricism pioneered by Mendes’ own American Beauty and more recently, Little Miss Sunshine. Nearly everyone Burt and Verona meet is more than a little unhinged, from a mother who calls her daughter a dyke and asks her to do a “tough-girl walk”, to another who believes that strollers are evil. While the supporting players are all talented (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Dianels, Allison Janney) there’s no real sympathy for any of their characters, and the scenes involving them end up a compendium of outlandish, if inventively humorous, situations.

The leads, though, are fleshed out beautifully. It helps that the writing team – writer and columnist Dave Eggers and novelist Vendela Vida – are husband and wife. They have a great ear for the speech patterns of married people, with all the assurances given and compromises made from sentence to sentence. John Krasinski is funny and endearing as Burt, a bearded, bespectacled, supportive square. And fans of Saturday Night Live will find Maya Rudolph’s performance as Verona a revelation. With Krasinki the more animated of the two, she sails just under the radar, her unconventional-by-Hollywood-standards face registering half smiles and occasional panic. These two are the main reason Mendes’ film ends up being touching and relatable, when it might otherwise have been ironic or arch. Included are a nice set of bonus features, including interviews with cast and crew, audio commentary by the writers and director, and a segment on how everyone who worked on this film tried to keep the process eco-friendly.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

I Confess

2010-10-03T23:40:00.000-07:00

I Confess may fall short of the sombre power summoned by Hitchcock in The Wrong Man, released three years after it. Yet, as the making-of featurette points out, these two films are of the same feather, and ought to be grouped together. Both are shot in black and white. Both are austere by Hitchcock’s standards. Both lack his trademark playfulness, which may have something to do with the fact that religion, a subject rarely given to humour, is a big part of both these films.

Father Logan, a priest in the Canadian town of Quebec, hears a confession of murder. He is barred by the rules of his faith from telling anybody, and matters become even worse when the evidence starts to point towards him and he becomes a suspect in the case. Montgomery Clift plays Father Logan as a man whose faith is so unwavering, it could cost him his life. Though Hitch was no fan of method acting (he never believed in instructing actors beyond a point) this doesn’t seem to have affected Clift’s performance. His face betrays only the tiniest signs of emotion as he finds himself further and further enmeshed, unsurprising in an actor who knew a thing two about keeping a secret (he hid his homosexuality from the public to protect his career).

The supporting players are very good as well, especially OE Hasse as the frightened, desperate killer, and Karl Malden, taking down his usual blustery style a notch, as a detective who’s convinced of Logan’s guilt. Bleak from start to finish, I Confess is a film that grips rather than thrills. In a key moment, the murderer tells the priest that he would be doing him a favour by killing him, because his life is so empty. Hitchcock doesn’t follow up on that insinuation here, but it obviously intrigued him enough to explore more fully in The Wrong Man, the implications of emotional deadness.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

Zangoora - The Gypsy Prince: Theatre Review

2010-09-28T03:35:00.000-07:00

What do you get when you cross two soapstars, a dancer, three directors, the latter half of Salim-Javed, a hall with giant LED screens, an infinite numbers of dancers and a flying witch? The next big Abbas-Mustan release, you might say, and you’d only be half wrong. All of this adds up to Kingdom of Dreams’ new production Zangoora - The Gypsy Prince, billed as the “world’s biggest live Bollywood musical”. One assumes that they have Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams in mind when they say “world’s biggest” because it’s India’s only. Zangoora goes where no Indian theatrical production has had the money, inclination or imagination (you can argue on which combination of the three) to go before.

Funny then, that it all felt so familiar. You realise the makers really meant what they said when they promised “Bollywood on stage”. The directors, Vikranth Pawar, Darshan Jariwala and David Freeman, seem to have decided that since there was already 80 years of popular Hindi cinema to choose from, why risk untried material? So you have Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy in charge of the music, but there’s just one original song; the rest are all interpretations of older hits (of which only one, a sinister version of the previously sunny “Chaand Taare”, sounds markedly different from the original). The makers play on the familiarity of cultural signposts; “Chura Liya Hai” is still seductive, “Mehbooba O Mehbooba” still has tents in the background. It was hardly surprising to hear the hero’s mother say “Iss din ke liye paal pos kar bada kiya hai? [Did I bring you up to have to see this day?]”. When you play to the gallery, there are no points given for originality.

The story exists mainly as a hook to hang songs on. It unfolds like this: kindly royal couple is killed by scheming minister, their infant son spirited away by loyal courtier. Son is left at gypsy camp where a couple pronounces him a sign from God. Grows up to be Zangoora; is loved by all but especially by fellow gypsy Laachi. Fly in her ointment comes in form of visiting princess whom Zangoora is smitten by. Many, many dances later, loyal courtier returns to tell Zangoora the “truth”, rest is about prince reclaiming his “destiny” and choosing between two women throwing themselves at him. The dialogues (Javed Akhtar might have been better employed here than on script duty), familiar riffs that involve heroes saying “I don’t understand who I am” and heroines saying “Bachao [Help]”, skirt banality. Luckily, there are dances, aerial sequences, magic tricks and other impressive distractions every ten minutes or so.

Though they may not admit it, the sheer scale of the production may have left the directors with little choice but to go with the tried and tested. And it’s all credit to them that they imbued it with as much energy as they did. There were 20-odd dance numbers in Zangoora, and almost every one of them was thrilling, ecstatic fun. The choreography by Shiamak Davar used the massive stage to good effect, adding line after line of dancers until the bodies were a moving tapestry and each song a mini-crescendo. Giant LED screens created backdrops for the action that gave a 3D-like effect. This effect was overwhelming in its sheer scale, even when the animation wasn’t up to scratch. It also allowed the makers to create scenes like the courtier galloping across the desert without having to get an actual horse on stage (though if that had to happen anywhere, you’d bet on Kingdom of Dreams).

Zangoora was played by TV actor Hussain Kuwajerwala, whose dancing abilities (he won season two of Nach Baliye) must have gone a long way towards winning him the role. Limited to weepy TV melodramas for most of his career, he seemed to enjoy playing a larger-than-life hero who dances, lip-synchs, fights, romances and takes off his shirt (let the record show a six-pack). The two leading ladies were just as much fun. Gauhar Khan, pegged as an item girl despite an excellent performance in last year’s Rocket Singh, played Laachi with stares withering and hips slithering. And television actress Kashmira Irani gave Princess Sonali a sense of humour and an appealing coquettishness. The rest of the performers hammed it up, all except Savita Kundra as the wicked witch Chambuti; her shrieking laugh was all the more impressive when one took into account that her entire performance was conducted in mid-air, suspended by wires.

In the end, Zangoora works as spectacle (not as theatre, sadly) largely because the makers had a venue like Nautanki Mahal and enough visual sense to know how to use it. Sheer economics should rule out potential imitators, even if India’s first attempt at a quasi-Broadway musical is a hit (audience reaction seemed to suggest it might). The real test will be the extended run its creators have planned. Theatrical productions in India run for a week or two at most. If Zangoora breaks the one month barrier, this might be the point when this fairy tale-mimicking production starts becoming an actual one.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

The Wrong Man

2010-09-28T03:27:00.000-07:00

Tell us if you’ve heard the story before. An honest man, trying to make ends meet, is picked up by the police. They tell him that he matches the description of a man who’s been conducting hold-ups in the neighbourhood. He accompanies them back to the station, and things start to unravel. He is identified by two witnesses as the criminal, his handwriting is a match as well. He is put in jail, insisting all the while that he is innocent. In another story, he might have been a faceless victim in a Kafkaesque nightmare; here he is Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, played by Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man.

The “wrong man” theme was one of Hitchcock’s favourites – he had already used variations on it in a number of his movies. However, as the director himself warns in the narrated opening, The Wrong Man differs significantly from what one might expect from a Hitchcock film. It is based on a true story, and remains faithful to it. There are no MacGuffins. No black humour. No toying with the audience. The tone is somber, often harrowing. Regular collaborator Robert Burks, shooting in black and white, keeps the camera trained on the stricken face of Fonda, while Bernard Hermann contributes a moody, modal score. This austerity, combined with the Catholic references of the second half, reminds one of a Robert Bresson film – even though it’s hard to imagine two directors more dissimilar.

Released in 1956, The Wrong Man was one of Hitchcock’s best-received films. Its impression on the French was especially strong. Godard, then a critic, wrote a lengthy piece about it which invoked everyone from Murnau to Dreyer to Griffith; Truffaut declared it “probably his best film till now” (this in 1957, with Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Rear Window behind him). Having gotten it out of his system, Hitchcock never returned to this unironic, spare style. His next “mistaken identity” movie was North by Northwest, a caper so entertaining as to seem light-years removed from The Wrong Man.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

Angel: DVD Review

2010-09-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

What is it that drew Francois Ozon, director of sensual character studies like Water Drops on Burning Rocks and Swimming Pool, to romance novelist Elizabeth Taylor? Angel, his first English-language feature, is based on her novel of the same name and set in Edwardian England. Angel Deverell starts the movie as schoolgirl who dreams of becoming a writer. A couple of reels and one sympathetic publisher later, her dream is on its way to being fulfilled. The only problem is that by now everyone dislikes her – the other characters, the audience, and most surprisingly, the film itself.

What do you do with a lead character who is self-absorbed, shallow, vain, manipulative and melodramatic? Liking her is out of the question, though one might have respected her if she had talent to back her spunk. However, even here the film seems to suggest that she’s little more than a hack. Still, the camera refuses to leave her. She’s in almost every frame, the undeserving cynosure of everyone’s eyes. The more we will the movie to dig deeper – to explain her motivations and give us a reason to sympathise – the more it pushes its Mills and Boons agenda.

The cast does their best – a quiet Sam Neill as the publisher, a wasted Charlotte Rampling as his wife. Michael Fassbender, playing her love interest, has a cruel glint in his eye reminiscent of a young Daniel Day-Lewis. Ramola Garai, meanwhile, has the thankless job of playing a lead character who, as she admits in the cast interview included as a bonus feature, is far from admirable. She tries hard, but it’s a losing battle, what with her own film setting her up from the beginning.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Fables of the Reconstruction: Reissue Review

2010-09-16T01:28:00.000-07:00

An album review I did for Time Out Delhi. I leapt on it because it was R.E.M and if you think this review sounds generous, I assure you I was holding back. In a happier, more R.E.M-literate Delhi, I would have written a straight rave. And try and get your hands on the Reckoning reissue, it has a bonus live disc that's just one long glorious garage-punk set.

It’s been 25 years since Fables of the Reconstruction first confused R.E.M fans who expected them to continue in the direction established by their debut Murmur, or its follow-up Reckoning. These two albums set the template for that early R.E.M sound – guitar-driven folk-rock with a hint of punk, mumbled vocals by Michael Stipe, gorgeous three-part harmonies and elliptical, evocative lyrics. Fables broke this template in ways that expanded on the band’s sound even as they departed from it. Now, the I.R.S label, home for their first five albums, is reissuing Fables (and the rest of their catalogue, to coincide with each record’s silver anniversary).

This album, with Joe Boyd (Fairport Covention, Nick Drake) on board as producer, is described by guitarist Peter Buck in his liner notes as a “doomy, psycho record, dense and atmospheric.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opener “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, a nightmarish mix of scratchy guitars, strings, and Stipe’s insistent voice telling you about a “Man Ray kind of sky”. This feeling of unease runs through the album, in songs like the creepy “Old Man Kensey” and the hurtling rockers “Auctioneer (Another Engine)” and “Life and How to Live it”. There’s also the flat-out weird soul-funk pastiche “Can’t get there from here”.

There are, however, moments that are more easily identifiable as R.E.M. “Driver 8” is a perfect encapsulation of their early jangly sound. “Green Grow the Rushes” combines Peter Buck’s unmistakable Rickenbacker sound with obliquely political songwriting that would grow more strident on their next few albums. "Good advices" appears to be a happier flipside to "Camera", a song off Reckoning which would have fit right in with this album's haunted, off-kilter universe. And the album closer, “Wendell Gee”, is a country ballad, complete with banjo and the sublime backing vocals of bassist Mike Mills.

The reissue comes with a bonus disc of demos. All the songs on Fables get a run through, and the band must have been well-prepared by the time they performed them, because they differ very little from the finished product. Still, fans will probably appreciate the bare bones versions of “Auctioneer” and “Kahoutek”, as well as two discarded songs - the enjoyably daft “Bandwagon” (a different version from the one on Dead Letter Office) and a number called “Throw Those Trolls Away”. Fables of the Reconstruction may not be R.E.M’s greatest album, but it’s an experiment that is brilliant in flashes and intriguing throughout – and coming from by a band that can list Radiohead, Coldplay, Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain amongst its admirers, that should be enough.

2010-09-14T00:06:00.000-07:00

Is cross-listing bad for the soul?

A version of this post did not appear in Time Out Delhi.

Unishe April: Review

2010-09-03T00:16:00.000-07:00

Though Hirer Angti was his first film, Rituparna Ghosh truly arrived on the national scene with Unishe April. A loose remake of Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, it won Best Film and Best Actress (Debashree Roy) at the 1994 National Awards. Like its acclaimed inspiration, at the heart of the film is the relationship between a famous, talented mother and the daughter who she neglects. The similarities end here - Ghosh’s approach may be spare, but it’s hardly as stark or unforgiving as the Swedish maestro’s.

Sarojini, a dancer utterly devoted to her craft, keeps her daughter Aditi at arm’s length. Aditi, having lost her father to a heart attack and her mother to dance, is the bhadralok version of a rebellious teen: she is studying to be a doctor, and gets on her mother’s nerves by being excessively polite. Early on in Unishe April, Sarojini learns that she’s been selected for a prestigious award, resulting in her making immediate travel plans. This triggers off Aditi’s long-repressed feelings of abandonment, and when her mother unexpectedly returns that night, the resentment spills over.

Ghosh displays great assuredness for someone at the start of his filmmaking career. He patiently layers long, dialogue-heavy scenes one onto another, until the cumulative effect starts to show its power. At times one wishes that the visual flourishes – like the beautiful first shot where the camera pans away from the dancers, or the silhouette of Aditi lit by a single candle - were more frequent. The performances, however, keep one from straying. Roy gives Aditi a complexity often missing in such roles – her change in demeanour from the time she demands that her boyfriend call her long-distance to her break-down when he does, underlines the illusory nature of control. And Aparna Sen goes from affected to affecting as her character’s past is illuminated. Films made in this country often have teary endings, but few earn them the way this one does.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

The Odd Couple

2010-08-30T00:28:00.000-07:00

In all its incarnations on stage and screen, the definitive Odd Couple is inarguably Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau (other combinations have included the likes of Martin Short and Eugene Levy, and Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane). Matthau, part of the original Broadway production, reprised his role as Oscar Madison, and Lemmon replaced Art Carney. It was a dream pairing - Lemmon’s natural fussiness as an actor was a hilarious contrast to Matthau’s brusqueness. Their chemistry has the crackle of a Bogart-Bacall exchange: no wonder we never see their wives in the movie.

Screenwriter Neil Simon adapted his own play for this 1968 movie. Felix is a worrywart, an obsessive neat-freak, who’s recently been divorced; Oscar, also a divorcee and concerned about his friend’s well-being, invites him to stay at his place. But the two are oil and water, and we watch as they start to get on each other nerves. Rounding out the cast are their poker buddies and two very giggly women.

Even though Gene Saks is the man in charge, it’s obvious who the real director is –Simon’s script. With the exception of Lemmon clearing his nose in the diner, every laugh is derived from it - the wit on display is never visual. The on-screen movement remains constricted, as if the camera and the actors had been given a fixed space and told not to move beyond it. One wishes that someone like Billy Wilder, who was originally offered the chance to direct, had had a go at it. As it stands, it feels stillborn, like watching a very funny play on film. The Odd Couple is great theatre, but not necessarily great cinema.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Being There

2010-08-18T01:39:00.000-07:00

An outrageous piece of punning transforms Chance, the gardener, into Chauncy Gardener. As often happens in movies, he is pushed into outlandish situations (like advising the president on economic policy), and though its clear he’s talking rubbish, everyone around decides that he is brilliant. “You have the gift of being natural”, he is told by Melvyn Douglas’ character, a dying king-maker whose wife brings Chance (played by Peter Sellers) home after inadvertently injuring him. Natural, sure, but at what price interesting?

Chance is of the same ilk as characters like Forrest Gump and Rizvan Khan, but he has nothing of their charm, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the viewer to forge any sort of connect with him. In fact, the only character who comes close to engaging the audience’s sympathies is Shirley MacLaine as a sad widow-to-be. It’s almost degrading when she throws herself at Chance - one just cannot see where the attraction lies. Chance isn’t enterprising, or funny, or perceptive – he just walks around making vague pronouncements, and inexplicably, the world is his stooge. But that’s a movie world, and those watching this in the real one may ask themselves exactly why they have to pretend to be so stupid.

Unstructured thoughts on Peepli Live

2010-08-14T23:38:00.000-07:00

Even in the years before it gained a cult following, this much was clear about Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron - the builder-politician nexus was just a smokescreen. The film’s real target was a larger, equally malfunctioning entity – India. Two decades later, Peepli Live, even though it is set in a village and looks at the specific problems of its inhabitants, is aiming at that same target, which is both changed and unchanging. Is it depressing to think that the same issues Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron provoked people into laughing about in 1983 – political opportunism, media manipulation, the crushed spirit of the average citizen – feel so of-the-moment when raised by Peepli Live today? It should be.

It’s a premise both audacious and completely probable. Natha, a farmer unable to feed himself and his family, decides to commit suicide with the misguided notion that the government will pay his family one lakh rupees in compensation. However, the media gets wind of this story and puts his ‘live suicide’ attempt on primetime. From then on, the decision of whether he will live or not is virtually taken out of his hands by TRP-crazed journalists and power brokers at different points along the political chain. The media sets up fort in Peepli and follows Natha everywhere, even to the fields to catch him during his early morning business.

There are times when the film is reminiscent of The Gods Must Be Crazy, but there’s at least one significant difference. That film sailed along on the helium of the supposed ‘innocence’ of the bushmen, while in Peepli, no one is completely innocent. Buddhia, Natha’s brother, and the one who plants the suicide idea in his head, certainly isn’t. Even Natha isn’t especially naïve; you always get the feeling he knows that something is wrong but before he can put his finger on it someone else has said something new and confusing. I liked that the director refrained from showing the villagers as necessarily nobler than the urban folk who invade their village (and also from employing the canard that they’d be happy if only they were left alone). It leaves the decision about whom to like and dislike up to the viewer, in a way that most films in the recent past haven’t. I found myself drawn to the character of Rakesh, a small-town journalist who badly wants to impress the imperious English-speaking reporter who breaks the story. Also fascinating was the near-wordless farmer who keeps digging (for reasons I am unable to explain, he reminded me of the master swordsman from Seven Samurai).

Peepli differs on a couple of counts from most of the breakthrough Hindi films of the past few years. For one, it focuses on a people whom mainstream cinema has less and less time for today. Though it may seem callous, I don’t think one can condemn this trend – one which started mid ‘90s and picked up steam in the aughts. If anything, it’s an accurate reflection of literate society’s urban bent of mind. If talented filmmakers are choosing to tell stories set in urban India, they’re simply making films about subject matter they’re familiar with. That may not be very civic-minded, but decades of making films that were set in a rural milieu didn’t do much for the people there either. If the truth is that there’s an ever-widening gulf between village and city life, then this urban bias on the part of movies is simply art imitating life (and also going where the money is).

The second way Peepli differs these films like Omakra, Dev D, recently Udaan, is stylistically. While these films employ considerable cinematic high-jinks to get their stories told, Peepli is unobtrusive by comparison. Apart from the occasional cranked-up frame for comic effect, Peepli refrains from showy camera movements or dramatic lighting. Instead of dazzling audiences, it seems content to wait and watch as events unfold. There are few moments of beauty – no waving fields, or villagers ‘forgetting their troubles’ and dancing, and Ghar aaja pardesi-type sentimentality to emphasise a return to roots. The structure was almost orchestral – moments of stillness broken by flurries of movement, every character an instrument contributing to the larger sound.

Where does Peepli’s ending – with Natha escaping his village and finding work far away in the big city, as a labourer in a construction site – leave us, the audience (maybe I should say urban audience)? Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron had an unhappy ending too, but it was played for laughs. Peepli doesn’t – a sign, perhaps, as to how the makers really saw the project. Rizvi had said in an interview that she’d be happy if her audience was made uncomfortable by her film. I think Peepli Live is ultimately a bit too successful in inducing the laughs to leave a lasting feeling of unease with its viewers. That’s hardly an indictment – the laughs earned by this movie are of a rare sort, in that they stem from understatement, not exaggeration. Peepli Live’s humour taps into something that is uniquely Indian; it flies in the face of the widely-held belief that humour is the truth narrated in a funny manner. Out here, it could simply be the truth. Our crazy country takes care of the rest.

Fancast #5: Beta Band/ Dirty Projectors/ Feelies

2010-08-11T08:06:00.001-07:00

The Beta Band

The ultimate rainy day band. A mishmash of styles - folkie strumming, subdued harmonies, new age bleeps and blips, drum machines, chipmunk noises, the occasional rap, and a tendency to gravitate towards movements like the second half of "Hey Jude" - all held together by sad-sounding melodies. It sounds terrible written down like this. Its the most originial thing you're likely to hear.

Album to hear: The 3 EPs

The Dirty Projectors

Demented arty pop, with the most suprising harmonies ever. They sound like a grapefruit.

Album to hear: Bitte Orca

The Feelies

Strum, mumble, churn. Like a cross between R.E.M and The Velvet Underground. For some people, that's enough said.

Album to hear: The Good Earth

Umberto D.

2010-08-04T23:23:00.000-07:00

In the 1930s and ’40s, a group of filmmakers in Italy decided, in the words of one of their practitioners, to show the world their rags. Neorealismo, or Italian neorealism, favoured natural locations to studio sets, untrained actors to matinee idols, and were a key influence on the French New Wave and Indian cinema’s golden era of the ’50s. Vittorio De Sica was perhaps the most representative of this genre, and Umberto D. was one of his most critically successful films (though it never won at Cannes, as the DVD cover erroneously claims).

Like most of his movies, it’s a simple tale – Umberto Dominigo Ferrari, a pensioner down on his luck, is evicted by his landlady and wanders around Rome in search of money, shelter and companionship. His only friend is his dog Flike, a mongrel with “intelligent eyes”. It’s a Chaplainesque conceit, but De Sica denies his main character the charm that could have turned this story into saccharine. Umberto, played by non-professional actor Carlo Battisti, turns his piercing gaze outward on the world (inward as well, in a heartbreaking moment when he almost considers begging) and receives in return occasional pity, but mostly indifference and contempt.

His mood darkens as the film progresses, and the general feeling of hopelessness is complemented by GR Aldo’s camerawork, which takes us, via the dog pound and the hospital, on what is decidedly not a Roman holiday. The film, however, is let down badly by the score. Too melodramatic for a film of this nature, sweeping when it ought to have be spare, it compromises De Sica’s approach by making the viewer feel manipulated into feeling sympathy. Apart from this, Umberto D. manages to remain clear-eyed and unforgiving.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Canceling stamps at the University of Ghana post office

2010-07-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

There's a strong element of faddishness involved in declaring oneself a fan of 'world music'. But that's the label 'Canceling stamps at the University of Ghana post office' would probably fall under, and how can one not be a fan of its effortless buoyant charm? For a listen, and a nice write-up, stamp here...

A certain tendency of Indian cinema

2010-07-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling when you’ve been waiting a long time for a storm to come? How every time the wind picks up, you think it’s arrived, but then the clouds clear up and it’s hot again. And then, one day, you know it’s arrived. Its not even there, yet you know for sure. This is that time for Indian cinema.

It’s been getting clearer, at first with every passing year, now with even more regularity. It is all falling into place; visions are getting surer, scripts are getting tighter. A few years ago, it might have been impossible to pace a film like Karthik Calling Karthik the way it was done, with the potential twist done away with in the middle, and the lucrative prospect of a thriller sacrificed for a meditative, rewarding second half. Filmmakers are learning to relax, make films in a minor key. If you were disappointed by the absence of a climax in Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance or Shimit Amin’s Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, its likely you were looking to play by a rulebook that hasn’t quite been thrown out, but has begun to be wilfully misplaced.

In the midst of these gathering winds comes Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan, its very title a provocation to take flight. And make no mistake, the stakes are high now. Every blow which Ronit Roy strikes in this film, he strikes for orthodoxy, for respect demanded without being earned, for sons following their fathers. And every time Rajat Barmecha picks himself up, he does it because something within is telling him it’s important that he do his own thing. It is this instinct that led Anurag Kashyap on the uneven path from Paanch to No Smoking to Dev D. It’s this instinct that must have led him to see the same drive in Motwane, and clear the way for the young director the way Vishal Bharadwaj has done for him earlier. One must also note that Kashyap producing Udaan or Bharadwaj producing No Smoking is hardly something that smacks of a sound business decision. If motives must be implied, let it be put down to a burgeoning sense of collective responsibility to not let this precious momentum flag.

The first generation of Indian filmmakers who grew up in the post-cable TV era borrowed the gloss and bombast of movies made outside this country, but ended up attaching them to the same old stories. In a way, these were the necessary practice years: the industry sharpened its technical skills, while audiences waited for original stories and people who could see things through without making the whole experience seem compromised. When the stories finally started to arrive, and screenwriters with a ear for everyday dialogue like Jaideep Sahni found the correct key to pitch them in, things began to fall into place. They found their champions in an increasingly demanding and discerning multiplex audience, and on the internet, where a new breed of critics were emerging, cine-literate, candid, equally at home with Resnais and Ratnam.

Udaan was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes film festival, one of the few Indian films to have done so. That this honour came to fall on a debutante director is even more exciting - one wonders what might happen if directors such as Vishal Bharadwaj or Dibakar Banerjee take this as a gauntlet thrown down. Udaan is also reminiscent of another very well-known film, with similar subject matter and protagonist, shot in a similar grainy style. That film, of course, was Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, a lyrical meditation which marked the beginning of the most influential of film movements, the French New Wave. Is it a coincidence that the key scene in both movies is a long triumphant run? Or that Motwane choose to end his film the same way Truffaut did: with a freeze-frame of the young protagonist? One way or the other, it really doesn’t matter. What’s important is to acknowledge this: something is up. It’s been a long time coming, but the air is full of it now. It could start raining anytime.

Catch-22: DVD Review

2010-07-20T04:56:00.000-07:00

After the resounding success of 1967’s The Graduate, it wasn’t surprising that Mike Nichols felt encouraged to take on Catch-22, one of the most celebrated American novels of 20th century. It seemed like a good fit as well - Joseph Heller’s novel about a bombardier named Yossarian who is increasingly frustrated in his attempts to escape the war has a blackly comic outlook that seemed allied to Nichols’ sensibilities. The shoot that followed, however, was anything but smooth.

The all-star cast (Alan Arkin, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles) spent six frustrating months on an island with Nichols trying to recreate World War II and cinematographer David Watkin insisting that they only shoot between 2 and 3 in the afternoon because of the quality of light there. One AD leaned out too far from his helicopter and fell to his death while shooting one of the aerial sequences. Heller’s novel also proved stubbornly resistant to transfer. Key characters were dropped, back stories condensed. The end result, pitched somewhere between broad comedy and graphic depictions of war, was possible to follow if one had read the novel, but only just.

Despite its distinctive blanched look and convincing turns from Alan Arkin as Yossarian and Jon Voight as Milo Minderbinder, Catch-22 today appears too anxious to live up to its famous source and ends up looking like an uncertain shadow. Film lovers and Nichols enthusiasts though, should consider buying this for the illuminating audio commentary, conducted as a conversation between Nichols and director Steven Soderbergh. Besides being a fascinating look into the nuts and bolts of making a major studio movie, it is also a lesson in humility, with Nichols admitting, “I could have scored it, I could have used a warmer actor for Yossarian, and most of all, I could have made it for half what it cost…there was a certain arrogance in all that.”

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

A Prairie Home Companion: Review

2010-07-19T02:48:00.000-07:00

Of all the renegade filmmakers who emerged from Hollywood in the ’70s - Coppolla, Scorcese, Spielberg, dePalma – the one with the least amount of commercial success was probably Robert Altman. Yet, few directors have seen such adulation from amongst their own, and his idiosyncratic influence can be seen in films as varied as Magnolia and Monsoon Wedding. A Prairie Home Companion was his last film (he died the same year it was released), and in many ways, it feels like the final film of a great director – a summation of personal style that also functions as a gently comic look at mortality.

A Prairie Home Companion is an actual radio show that broadcasts from St Paul, Minnesota. It is hosted by Garrison Keillor and features a mix of musical numbers, vignettes and fake jingles. In this film, scripted by and starring Keillor himself, the show is about to be closed down by the sponsors. Ostensibly a behind-the-scenes look at a radio programme, this film is also Altman’s way of orienting us with his views on impending death and how a true artist should deal with it.

Trademark Altman touches - an ensemble cast, overlapping dialogue - lend this film an off-kilter feel that recalls some of his best work (Nashville, McCabe and Mrs Miller). The cast, replete with Oscar nominees, is charming. Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly are performers on the show (and do their own singing), while Keillor plays himself. Tommy Lee Jones is a morose corporate hitman and Kevin Kline is hilarious as a cut-rate Raymond Chandler-esque private eye fascinated by Virginia Mardsen, who is credited as “Dangerous Woman”. Watching all these actors bounce off each other, with their constant movement from backstage to live-on-air choreographed as intricately as a dance, one is left to conclude that Altman never lost his powers till the very end.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

Six from Steely

2010-07-13T09:33:00.000-07:00

I think when I'm 60 years old I'm going to be listening to Mark Knopfler, Paul Simon and Steely Dan. I can't believe it took me so long to hear a single damn song of Dan's, and I credit my buying their boxed set as one of the better impulse purchases I've made over the past few years.

The Boston Rag

Greil Marcus described it as ‘inexplicably apocalyptic’ I can’t think of a better description for this song. The savage guitar stabs that accompany almost every line are played by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, the only (semi) permanent guitarist to ever play with the band (Fagen and Becker decided after a couple of albums to disband the original lineup and work exclusively with studio musicians).

Kid Charlemagne

For those bordering-on-gospel backing vocals that are so unexpected that every time you hear the chorus, it’s a surprise. And the brainiest of solos, courtesy Larry Carlton.

Any Major Dude Would Tell You That

Steely Dan has a reputation as a dense, difficult band (and they can be that as well, musically at least), but so many of their tunes have moments that belie this; simple, melodic progressions that seem as natural as an arpeggio. The piano figure that follows the chorus in this song is one of them.

Any World (That I’m Welcome To)

“Perhaps I'll find in my head/ What my heart is saying/ A vision of a child returning/ A kingdom where the sky is burning/ Honey I will be there/ Yes I’ll be there”. Their most affecting song. A plea to escape one’s roots, upbringing, neighbourhood, country...who knows, except that it sounds desperate. Those who know their rock history will note that that’s Hal Blaine on drums.

Sign in Stranger

I guess it isn’t the most obvious of pairings, but doesn’t Warren Zevon and Steely Dan together make great sense? Both have a cynical, blackly humourous edge to their writing, both compose jagged pop songs backed by great sidemen. “Sign in Stranger” is typical Dan: genuinely funny, yet also dripping with unsubstantiated menace.

Time Out of Mind

The reason I like this track so much is because a) Mark Knopfler is on it and b) it sounds like everyone concerned must have had a great time making it (a ridiculous assumption, since everything down to the last beat in this song is so meticulous that it must have taken 48 takes and Knopfler threatening to set fire to his guitar before it got done).

The Battleship Potemkin

2010-07-09T23:13:00.000-07:00

The year is 1905. Stretching before us are the great steps of Odessa, where townspeople have gathered to support the mutineers who have rebelled against their Tsarist officers and taken over a battleship. The atmosphere is joyous, all smiles and waves. Suddenly, the crowd starts running. At first we don’t see why, but then a line of Cossack soldiers comes into view, guns at the ready. They fire at the crowd. A woman is shot at point-blank range, a child is trampled on. Thus unfolds The Battleship Potemkin’s most famous sequence; manipulative, vivid, controversial till this day.

Released in 1925, The Battleship Potemkin was Sergei Eisenstein’s dramatisation of the unsuccessful anti-Tsarist Revolution of 1905. Sailors aboard a battleship refuse to eat maggot-infested meat and revolt. They take control of the battleship and later use it to blow up the enemy stronghold. The theory of Soviet montage is used to great effect here, with contrasting images of innocence and brutality presented in a series of rapid cuts. Predictably, it was labelled propagandist in the West and banned. There may have been more than an element of jealousy involved - the Americans and the British would make their own “war films” in years to come, none as stirring as this.

Sacred cow status aside, is there a good reason to see Potemkin today? Its methods of audience manipulation (personalise protagonist, dehumanise antagonist is always handy) have long since become part of cinema’s DNA. Montage was radical then, now it’s a Nike commercial. The Odessa steps sequence has been parodied and imitated in films ranging from Woody Allen’s Bananas to De Palma’s The Untouchables. 85 years after its release, there’s little that Battleship Potemkin can still teach us. Neither was this a film made to entertain. One might end up watching it for the same reason one visits monuments of old - to seek out the foundation of everything that came up after it.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

King Creole: Review

2010-06-29T02:39:00.000-07:00

Man with a face like a cherub and a smile like a hustler does a bluesy duet from his balcony. A few minutes later, he’s rescuing a floozy in a bar, wielding off drunks with a broken bottle. He drops the floozy off, resisting her advances at first, then kissing her to prove a point to his gawking schoolmates. To top this manic sequence off, he punches one of them in the face and gets expelled. And this is just the first five minutes of King Creole, starring Elvis Presley.

Elvis movies were never high art, and King Creole doesn’t pretend to be so. But its great low art – imbued with the spirit of noir and offsetting the natural charm of Elvis with a toughness that’s very much of its era. Perhaps the director, Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), was more difficult to influence than the journeymen who directed the later Elvis movies. The musical interludes retain the anarchic energy of Jailhouse Rock; we’re still a few years away from the dreaded Hawaiian movies. And the action, when it comes, is fast and imbued with the spirit of noir.

King Creole has a grittiness that’s very much of its era - it isn’t difficult to imagine Brando or Newman playing the lead (Montgomery Clift was offered the role when it wasn’t a musical). It’s also interesting to note that “king” of the title isn’t Elvis, but Walter Matthau, playing a sadistic gangster. The Elvis of this movie is clearly aimed a notch higher than the teeny-bopper market - he falls for a hooker and mugs his own dad – and he seems believably tough (he looked naive anyway). You wouldn’t want to step on his blue suede shoes.

Sherlock Holmes - DVD Review

2010-06-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

It’s ironic that the 2009 movie version of Sherlock Holmes is more successful in seeing through what Arthur Conan Doyle attempted in “The Final Problem” - namely, killing Sherlock Holmes. Not literally - the big guns at Warner Bros would have balked at the idea - but rather, killing off a certain idea of Holmes and replacing it with another. Gone are the deerstalker cap and the clipped British accent. In its place is a brawler-scientist who behaves like a cross between Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow and Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity.

Its fun to watch Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law quarrel like bickering lovers, but co-dependent hero-sidekick relationships are a common enough trope in action movies today without submitting Conan Doyle’s creations to it. Similarly surprising is Ritchie’s decision to use the vague mention of “baritsu” in “The Adventure of the Empty House” as an excuse to turn Holmes into a bare-knuckled brawler. Still, it’s all quite diverting while it lasts. Mark Strong as the criminal mastermind, Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, and Eddie Marsan as Inspector Lestrade are appropriately menacing, spunky and befuddled. Downey Jr has fun with the titular role, but he’s a little too good-looking, and possesses such unending reserves of wit and brawn that even hardened fans might find the package tough to digest. Jude Law, though, makes a charming Watson, displaying the same virile charm he did as Errol Flynn in Scorcese’s The Aviator.

The DVD comes padded with an extra disc of supplements, including a making-of featurette, and closer looks at the production design, costume and casting. It is during the course of one of these that two comments, which sum the film up perfectly, are made. “This is best described as a Guy Ritchie version of Sherlock Holmes”, says one of the producers. “It’s the 1890s version of James Bond”, says another. Exactly.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi.

The Dirty Dozen: DVD Review

2010-06-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

A sincere, if unlikely, tribute to The Dirty Dozen occurs midway through the romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle. After Rita Wilson has cried her eyes out over An Affair to Remember, Tom Hanks derides it as a “chick’s movie” and invokes Aldrich’s 1967 cult classic. The choice is no accident - Dirty Dozen is the quintessential anti-chick’s movie. It’s also the most anti-establishment war movie to ever come out of a Hollywood studio.

It’s been forty years since the dozen snarled and slouched their way into cinematic history, and while its influence runs deep (the ending of Inglourious Basterds is an unabashed tribute to the “turkey shoot” climax) this two-disc edition is a good opportunity to refresh one’s memory. Even though the story is pure pulp - 12 hardened convicts given a chance to escape their sentences if they agree to blow up a Nazi chateau behind enemy lines - the movie manages to capture the prevailing mood in society remarkably well. In 1967, America was deeply divided over the ugly fallout of the counterculture movement, race issues and the Vietnam War. One can only imagine the heat director Robert Aldrich must have taken for certain scenes, like the one where Victor Franco (John Cassevettes) responds to an order to kill every officer in sight with the question “Ours or theirs?”

If it’s true that a movie’s success lies is its casting, this would be a good case in point. Actors like Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine and pro-footballer Jim Brown were a different breed of movie star - ornery and utterly believable as sadists and killers. Lee Marvin plays the tough-as-nails Major Riesman, a role John Wayne rejected for its lack of patriotism. Aldrich also made some fortuitous oft-kilter choices - like the casting of indie legend John Cassavetes, whose anti-authoritarian rants have a joyful exuberance.

Despite a running time of well over two hours, the pace never slackens. Instead, a steady stream of provocation is aimed at every possible quarter – the military, the justice system, women, African Americans, rednecks, homosexuals. The unabashed cruelty of the finale is jarring even today - Aldrich insisted it remain so that audiences were left with no doubt that “war is hell”. Ultimately though, this movie both embraces and eschews realism, playing out like a demented version of Boy’s Own Paper. Special features include an introduction by Ernest Borgnine, a ”making of” featurette , audio commentary by some of the stars and a recruitment video for the US Army with Lee Marvin.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

¡Happy Birthday Guadalupe!

2010-06-01T03:05:00.000-07:00

Poetic. Poetic as hell. It seems very natural that the Killers, whom I've been raving about since way back, have matured enough to feel their way on upwards from "Mr Brightside" to "Read my mind" to this. Its a Christmas single, but I hope it lands up on their next album, 'coz God knows hip-hop's shallow cyphers and Jason Mraz and Rihanna and the Jonas Brothers and Kid Rock have no use for mariachi horns or genuine emotion, and not necessarily in that order. Anyway, hear it if you haven't. If the humour and the heartbreak and the catch in the Brandon Flowers' voice doesn't get to you...well, you can always turn on FM radio. Meanwhile, my friend and I will keep waiting for that one astonishing album that we're convinced The Killers have in them.

¡Happy Birthday Guadalupe!

Well I woke up Christmas morning and what did I see?
I saw a lovely señorita looking back at me
Named Guadalupe, with big brown eyes
Boy what did you do this time?

Made my excuses and a beeline for the bedroom door
She was beggin’ and a-pleadin’, screamin’, “¡Por favor,
Mi cumpleaños, stay with me,
Baby it’s cold outside!”

We are livin’ in a difficult time
We’ve been walkin’ down a difficult line
Put your feet up baby, it’s Christmas time
Cumpleaños feliz¡
Happy Birthday Guadalupe!

(Our time will come)
(We both hold on)

She gave me coffee and tortillas to console my head
Prepared the slippers on my feet before she made our bed
And blew the candles from her favourite cake
And we kissed beneath the mistletoe

I pulled her body close to mine and I had just one chance
I whispered, “Baby will you marry me for just one dance?”
Infatuation, the things you say
I got scared and I left that night

‘Cause we are livin’ in a difficult time
We’ve been walking down a difficult line
Put your feet up baby, it’s Christmas time
Cumpleaños feliz¡
Happy Birthday Guadalupe!

Deck the halls with rosaries
Wish upon a Christmas tree
Silent night please come to me
Bearing gifts from my… my Mexican angel

At night I wake up cold and lonely, bustin’ at the seams
She haunts the early morning hours of December dreams
My Guadalupe, with big brown eyes
I wanna break the spell tonight

‘Cause we are livin’ in a difficult time
We’ve been walkin’ down a difficult line
Put your feet up baby, it’s Christmas time
Cumpleaños feliz¡
Happy Birthday Guadalupe!

¡Happy Birthday Guadalupe!

1947: Play Review

2010-06-01T00:54:00.000-07:00

For all its strengths, 1947 is an unfortunately named play. People in India are conditioned to think of this year either in terms of India’s independence from the British or Partition from Pakistan. But these events occupy less than five minutes of the play’s running time of an hour and a half. Instead, this is a work preoccupied with more symbolic partitions. Geography has parted Ghazanfar Hussain from his friend Mushtaq, death has parted him from his wife, and Alzheimer’s is in the process of parting him both from his long-suffering family members and eventually, from his conception of self.

Written and directed by M Syed Alam, who heads the Delhi-based Pierrot’s Troupe, 1947 is a running dialogue between Hussain, the sole protagonist, and several off-stage characters. Since we neither see nor hear any of other characters (though Hussain repeats some of their responses) we are privy to his views alone. These turn out to be less than reliable – one poignant moment sees his attempts to visit a friend fall through when he is reminded that the person is dead. To resist using Alzheimer’s as a plot twist is a brave move – it could have been used strategically to raise dramatic tensions, but this would have shifted the focus away from old age in general and to the disease, which is not what the play is about.

Still, it’s tough to resist the temptation to make your senior citizen cranky. Hussain’s situation gives him plenty to complain about. Family members keep foisting pills on him, the memory of his deceased wife haunts his days and his son corrects his anecdotes just when he’s in mid-flight. 1947 is strongest when it stays close to Hussain and his travails, and weakens when it strays into the realms of political and cultural commentary. Telling the audience about himself, Hussain shares his views on Bilkis Bano, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lord Dalhousie, the current state of Urdu and the possibility of peace with our neighbours. Like any experienced arm-chair critic, he has occasional bouts of insight (as when he discusses the narrow-mindedness of people who dismiss Hindi poets writing in Urdu), tempered by a sea of generalities and the odd incomprehensible pronouncement (“Urdu today flourishes only in India”).

Although the NDA-era references (POTA, the Indo-Pak bus service) are dated, the writing on the whole succeeds at evoking very different eras. We grow to understand Hussain as he addresses the various off-stage characters differently – boasting of past glories to his daughter-in-law while bickering with his less patient son. The play is written in Hindustani, country cousin of Urdu, but a Hindi-speaking audience shouldn’t have trouble understanding it. The sparsely populated stage is lit dimly, as if to suggest the dual interiors of a lower middle-class household and a brain that is slowly shutting down on itself. With the exception of some attempts to bridge the fourth wall, which created the uncomfortable feeling of a lurching gear-shift into a different theatrical genre, 1947 proceeds smoothly – an anti-thriller of the mind, as it were, its secrets laid bare in the beginning.

Ultimately, though, one-man performances must sink or sail through on the prowess of the one man in question. In 1947’s case the man is Saleem Shah, a 45-year-old playing twice his age. That may sound audacious, but it’s a decision that paid off, especially because Shah circumvents the clichés associated with “acting old”. Ghanzafar Hussain is testy and loud, a raconteur with the worst possible affliction. Shah wisely avoids letting him become too endearing; his voice and mannerisms are arthritic and ungainly, his manner querulous. In the end, he retains our sympathies not because he is charming company, but because he is, in all his struggles and insecurities, and in his embodiment of what Charles Dickens called “poor dreams”, every man.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

Miss Pettigrew lives for a day: Review

2010-05-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

Screwball, a genre of comedy whose heyday is long past, has the following dictionary definition: “A movie featuring the amusing antics of appealing characters in a glamorous world”. Miss Pettigrew lives for a day is definitely screwball. The question is if it’s a comedy.

This film, set in 1940’s London, is directed by Bharat Nalluri, who is, as the DVD cover screams, a debutant Indian-origin director (which other country would write something like that?). Miss Pettigrew, played by Frances McDormand (Oscar winner for Fargo) is down on her luck, having been dismissed from a series of babysitting jobs, when she runs into ditzy socialite Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). Delysia, who is juggling the affections of multiple suitors, hires Pettigrew as her “social secretary”. There’s a pro-forma Pretty Woman moment with the “transformation” of Pettigrew, after which the film devotes itself to picking an appropriate suitor for both the women.

Nalluri gets the frantic pace of screwball spot on, but the writing, courtesy Simon Beaufoy and David Magee, isn’t a patch on Ben Hecht or Preston Strurges, to name just two of the many writers who churned out comic gems in the ’30s and ’40s. The absence of genuinely witty writing means that the actors are exposed. Amy Adams boldly goes over the top, and misses. McDormand is grim for the most part, though she lets a shy smile radiate in her scenes with Ciarán Hinds, who is excellent as a designer who falls in love with her. In the end, though all the rushing around isn’t unentertaining, this movie is best when it pauses for breath.

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi

The Last Tycoon: DVD Review

2010-05-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

When The Last Tycoon released in 1976, people must have expected the world from it. For one, it starred Robert DeNiro, who was then coming off a golden run that included Taxi Driver, Godfather II and 1900. The director was the legendary Elia Kazan, by then on the verge of retirement, coaxed back by producer Sam Spiegel, with whom he had made On the Waterfront. Add to that half a dozen star cameos, music by Maurice Jarre and a screenplay by Harold Pinter, and what do you get? A box-office disaster and a puzzling artifact for future generations of cinephiles.

Based on an unfinished novel by F Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon is a thinly veiled portrait of Irving Thalberg, one of Hollywood’s legendary studio heads. Dubbed the “boy wonder” for his ability to match the right director with script and cast, he was also the object of considerable jealousy. DeNiro reins himself in as Monroe Stahr, a studio head whose ability to rake in the profits is at odds with his desire to make “quality pictures”. Kazan recreates the big-studio era in sure, swift strokes, and the early scenes are as incisive as anything in The Player or Wag the Dog. Things slow down however, and stay that way, with the introduction of Stahr’s love interest, played uneasily by fledgling actress Ingrid Boulting. Her screen time with DeNiro generates few sparks, and we’re left wondering what Anjelica Huston, seen here in a brief cameo, might have done with the role.

Alternating between turgid love scenes and biting satire, Kazan manages to keep the audience interested without really satisfying them. In such a situation, one’s attention is likely to be diverted by the sight of three different Hollywood generations interacting on screen. Tony Curtis and Jeanne Moreau turn in excellent cameos as aging, insecure stars; Ray Milland, Dana Andrews and Robert Mitchum also appear. Jack Nicholson sneers his way through a memorable bit role as a suspected red, a subject very close to Kazan’s heart (he infamously “named names” during the McCarthy investigations). In the end though, we’re left with the feeling that this movie might have benefitted if its subject had cast a cool, appraising eye over it and said “If you cut twenty minutes out, you’d have a great movie here.”

A version of this review appeared in Time Out Delhi