Freeze Frame #139: Quiz Show

I watched Quiz Show on TV eons ago and thought it was a wonderful film. But over the years, my memory of it faded to the point where I could only remember one scene with clarity. Recently, when it came on TV again, I stuck around to watch that scene and then zapped on to other stuff.

The movie tells the story of the rise and fall of a quiz show named 21 which, it turns out, was rigged by its producers in order to get higher ratings. In the third act, when things slowly unravel for everyone involved in the show, there is a meeting between Richard Goodwin, the Congressional investigator probing the scam and Martin Rittenhome, the head of a pharmaceutical company which sponsored the show. The conversation features the sort of cynical truth-telling that we are probably quite used to by now:

You see, the audience didn’t tune in to watch some amazing display of intellectual ability. They just wanted to watch the money.

That Rittenhome is played by Martin Scorsese might have much to do with why I love this scene. Listening to Scorsese’s voice is almost as pleasurable as watching one of his best movies. But this isn’t just me being in love with how the man speaks.

To understand why this scene works so well, you have to listen to the movie rather than just see it. For two acts, the movie seduces you with softly spoken voices of well-mannered people. When you hear Herbert Stempel, the deposed quiz show champion, complain about the show being rigged, it seems like so much whining even though you realize that he is probably speaking the truth. John Turturro does a wonderful job with this character, and a big part of how his character is seen in the movie has to do with how he speaks with a rough, unpolished accent.

Goodwin, on the other hand, befriends the current champion Charles Van Doren — erudite, charming, born to a life of privilege. The movie is seen through Goodwin’s eyes, and his relationship with Van Doren is central to the movie. We, along with Goodwin, are charmed by the other man. We share his illusions about how the television business seems to work, even though we ought to know better. And when the illusion finally shatters, we share in his disillusionment. Again, even though we ought to know better.

Therefore, when the Scorsese character talks about what the show really meeant to the audiences, and when the Kevin Pollak character (who produces the show) talks about how they viewed the quiz show as entertainment and not an actual contest, the tone of these scenes is in stark contrast with the rest of the proceedings.

Rittenhome doesn’t tell us something we don’t know. He just reminds us of something we allowed ourselves to forget for the past 90 minutes.

 

Apropos Kambakkht Ishq

No, I haven’t seen it. And no, I don’t have a burning desire to see it either.

What I was wondering about was this. The reviews (1, 2) of Kambakkht Ishq on rediff mention that the movie involves a bickering couple –  a stuntman and a doctor. So does it borrow, by any chance, a reel or two for Pammal K Sambandham, that Kamalhassan starrer where he plays a stuntman and Simran plays a doc?If anyone who has seen PKS happens to see this one, please do let me know. I’ll even pay for your therapy sessions.

While on the top of not-so-promising Akshay Kumar movies, I happened to watch Chandni Chowk to China recently on TV. Aside from the fact that it mixes Manmohan Desai, Kung Fu movies, The Three Amigos and a few fish-out-of-water movies into some sort of diabolical chow mein, what struck me the most was how easily this could’ve been a good movie.

There are around 20 minutes in the middle when Akshay is going through the manddatory training sequence at the hands of a Chinese ex-cop who happens to be Deepika’s dad. It is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, and Akshay’s comic timing is just spot on. Why the hell couldn’t the rest of the movie maintain that standard? <Sigh>

 

Freeze Frame #138: Love Actually

There is nothing extraordinarily memorable about the movie, but if I’m stuck between watching Citizen Kane and Love Actually, I am likely to choose the latter as often as not.

To quote what is probably the best line in Some Like It Hot, nobody’s perfect.

I very often don’t watch this movie in one go — I just fast-forward to specific portions. Sometimes, I just follow one plotline from start to finish. Sometimes, it’s a specific scene. Like the one where Rowan Atkinson gift-wraps a necklace while Alan Rickman looks on. Or the one where Hugh Grant is first introduced to Natalie. Or any of Bill Nighy’s or Emma Thompson’s scenes. Sometimes all I need in order to make my day is a glimpse of Thompson’s smiling visage when Bye Bye Baby gets played at a funeral service.

But my favourite of all time is the one where Colin walks into an American bar. To quote Ebert’s description of this particular subplot:

There’s also one hopeful soloist who believes that if he flies to Milwaukee and walks into a bar he’ll find a friendly Wisconsin girl who thinks his British accent is so cute she’ll want to sleep with him. This turns out to be true.

Exactly how much this turns out to be true is, to me, the best part of this movie.

 

Little Terrorist

When we watch movies about people finding a way to live a normal life in the midst of an adverse socio-political environment, we marvel at their resilience and their will to live. But if any of these characters had a way to interact with their audience, would they turn to us and ask, “What would you rather have us do?”

I wondered about this in the opening scene of Little Terrorist where a little Pakistani boy crawls under a barbed wire fence into a minefield that represents the no-man’s land between India and Pakistan. He does this so that he could retrieve a cricket ball that has fallen there. We may sit here and wonder about his resilience, but think about this for a moment: How many of us have played gully cricket and found ourselves sneaking into that cranky old couple’s home to retrieve a ball that has fallen there? Aside from the little matter of the landmines, isn’t this probably how that kid views it?

Of course, real life has a way of busrting bubbles like these — the kid panicks as a result of some rifle fire from a distant sentry outpost, crawls past the first barbed wire fence he could see and finds himself on the other side of the border. While the border security forces search for what they presume is a terrorist who has slipped across the border, the boy takes refuge in the home of a kindly schoolteacher who can remember playing cricket at the very same withered tree before the barbed wire and the minefields came up.

At the man’s house, his neice makes them some roti for lunch. The boy, who is not given a plate to eat out of, unthinkingly tears off half the roti and drops it into the headmaster’s plate before anyone could prevent him. The man, of course, cannot eat something that a Muslim boy has touched. Even the plate is broken later so it cannot be eaten out of. The boy’s reaction is muted — it took me a minute to realize that, given the level of homogenization on the other side of the border, he probably doesn’t even understand what has just transpired. This may well be the first Hindu family he has encountered in his life.

His innocence and the family’s own awkward attempts to retain both their humanity and their religion are what make Little Terrorist such a pleasure to watch. The themes it tackles seem too heavy for its running time (well under half an hour), yet the movie skips lightly through them by simply focusing on the story and letting the subtext write itself.

It doesn’t seem like a normal life to us. But when it is the life you have, I guess you just get on with it.

ps: Some days ago, I was requested to review a couple of Ashvini Kumar’s short films on the blog. I agreed to do it on the condition that, if they sucked, I could say so. Thankfully, I haven’t had to do that. This one, incidentally, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Short Film in 2005.

 

Grace

As a die-hard Federer fan, I was both happy and sad to see Nadal lose in the fourth round of the French Open.

Like Federer himself says, he doesn’t have a problem on clay, just a Nadal problem on clay. And now that the problem lost to Robin Soderling, the path was finally cleared of its biggest obstacle. But I have to admit — him not getting a chance to win at Roland Garros against Rafa in the final is a bit of a let-down.

However, what the defeat did was make me a Rafa fan.

Think about this: At the beginning of the tournament, the only bets punters were taking on Rafa was how many sets he would lose on the way to his fifth title. Losing in the fourth round has got to hurt. And to a player you don’t even like very much? Double ouch. Now go read that post-match interview here.

So when one player bad, must lose. That’s what happened today. I have to accept with the same calm when I win than when I lose. After four years I lose here, and the season continue.

When offered an opportunity to frame an excuse about the wind causing him to play very short, he responded:

No, no, no, no. The wind is there for both players, so no, no? I not going to put any excuse right now. I think I played short because I played short. I didn’t have my day.

Now, this isn’t news. He’s always been gracious in defeat. When he loses, he simply says, in his broken English: I played badly, my opponent played well, I lost. It is when it comes at this venue that it begins to seem poetic, I guess.

Contrast this with someone like Serena Williams. A couple of US Opens ago when Serena lost to Justine Henin in the quarters, she started off blaming everything from her back to her ankle to butterflies flapping their wings in Tokyo to her fairy godmother having PMS. And when she did talk about her own faults, the gist of it was: my opponent didn’t do anything special to win this match, I lost it.

So my new resolution is: If Rafa is playing anyone other than Federer, I’ll root for him. If these two are on court, I’ll try not to pray that he trips and sprains his ankle. And if Federer wins a Grand Slam final against him, I’ll limit my happy dance to thirty minutes.

Because unlike Rafa, I think Grace is an actress who married the Prince of Monaco.

 

Shahrukh Aman?

I just watched bits and pieces of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi last night and it occurred to me suddenly that it was essentially a gender-swapped version of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, with SRK in the Zeenat Aman role and dancing instead of boinking.

Does anyone else agree, or is it just me?

It’s genetic, I think. My dad happened to watch Bombay on TV one day and commented that the song Kannalanae was simply a gender-swapped version of Maankuyilae Poonguyilae from Karakattakkaran, with Manisha in the Ramarajan role.

ps: While on the topic of SSS, could someone please assure me that it was all meant to be symbolic? Otherwise, I’d be up all night screaming at those characters to have their tubes tied and do the gene pool a favour.

 

Freeze Frame #137: Pasumpon

I remember watching Pasumpon years ago on TV and thinking, there’s no earthly reason why this movie should work.

The son (Prabhu) of a zamindar is estranged from his mother (Radhika) for two decades because she remarried after her husband died. He grows into adulthood and still carries around that resentment, although by now it has become more of a habit than a conviction. Indeed his own actions as the local lawmaker are in favour of widow remarriage. It is only in the end, when his mother is on her deathbed, that he manages to swallow his pride and reconcile with her.

The entire movie is replete with scenes of dramatic excess. Take the timing of the reconciliation scene, for instance. The son finds out that his mother is seriously ill, and spends an entire night lying awake before walking over to her (and his stepfather’s) home. Why would he do this other than to draw out the tragedy?

And yet, the closing moments manage are so powerfully moving that it comes as a surprise. Nothing about the scene is surprising, you could second-guess every line of dialogue, subtlety isn’t even on the same continent… And yet it worked. Or is it just that I am an utter sap? (Most people who know me reasonably well would nod, smile and say yes, that’s exactly it. But humor me for a moment, will you?)

My choice of standout scene in the movie, however, wouldn’t be the aforementioned. It would be one that comes a bit earlier, where the son beats up a local goon who insults and hits his mother and half-brothers. At the end, he tells the goon that, if anyone has the right to beat up on his brothers, it would be himself.

I was midway through my groan when the camera panned to his mother’s face. As she is led away from there, she speaks in a voice tinged with such pride in her firstborn, yet such sadness at their separation… Two decades worth of price and sadness, distilled into two minutes of dialogue.

 

Some guys have all the talent

Nearly everybody hates those telemarketing guys. There’s really no fun in taking their trip. It seems unfair, somehow.

But then, when someone comes along and does it so well, you realize that there are two kinds of people in the world who hate those telemarketing guys:

1. Those who don’t have much to say that is intelligent or witty.
2. Bikerdude. And maybe a few others like him. I doubt there are more than three such people on the planet, including him.

Sample this sublime AV offering from the man, which I discovered only recently when I visited his blog after a long time. There are two audio blogs in this post, both brilliant. But it is the latter that had me clutching my sides.

When God gave out talent and a sense of humor, my guess is that he came back for second, third and fourth helpings. And then God gave him some more for being such a loyal customer.

 

Freeze Frame #136: Pineapple Express

Right at the end of Pineapple Express — which follows Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle into the annals of the Improbably Good Stoner Movies — the three heroes have breakfast at a diner and unwind. I am no homophobe, but I believe that the only plausible human reaction to their conversation would be to laugh and say: “How gay!” I also believe that this is precisely the reaction the makers wanted to elicit.

What is interesting, though, is how David Gordon Green frames his shots. The guys are sitting at a table in a diner, two to one side and one to the other. Right behind their back is another customer eating breakfast at his table. In a number of frames, this guy is visible. It is obvious that he can hear the entire conversation. He has not appeared in any of the earlier scenes. So you expect one of the following things to happen:

1. The guy would turn out to have something to do with the plot, and would announce his presence and function at the appropriate moment.
2. He has nothing to do with the story, but is there simply to provide a reaction shot to the conversation.

Throughout the scene, I kept looking at the guy, wondering which of these it would be. I expected him to do something, anything. But he just sat there, eating his breakfast with nary an expression flitting across his features.

It was only after the scene got over that I realized how skilfully the director had been eliciting my reactions while keeping this seeming nonentity in the frame. There are times when you just gotta love being f***ed with like that.

 

Diamonds in the rough

Every so often, you’ll stop to watch some movie you haven’t heard of just because you want to rest your finger a bit. And it will surprise you with a line that you just know will stay with you forever. Today morning’s line is from a movie called Summer Catch, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. (I sincerely hope he strangled his parents for giving him a name like that) and Jessica Biel. Freddie’s dad’s character says at one point:

The reason the Indian rain dance works is because they wouldn’t stop dancing until it rained.

Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Do you guys have any such lines that came out unexpectedly in the middle of a not-so-great movie?