Turkey Roast

I owe my abiding love for B-movies to Dabba.

The official name was Sri Ganesh Talkies ad it was located a couple of kilometres from the campus gate at BITS, Pilani. It had four walls, a makeshift ceiling, and the projectionist’s dhoti for a screen. I’m guessing he diligently washed it every February 29th. Front bench (and I really mean bench) seats cost 3 bucks, back bench seats cost 4 bucks and luxury seating in the back row cost 5 bucks. When they increased ticket prices across the board by one buck, we even bargained with the guy at the counter for a few weeks and got a discount. The front row seats were convenient — you could stretch your legs out on the bench. (The fact that there were rats scurrying around might have had something to do with it as well.) They changed the movie every 3-4 days  — not enough film-goers around to run a movie for a whole week.

Much of what made its way to Dabba came direct from Ooty, where Prabhuji Mithun Chakraborty ran a film factory that produced movies as often as Ram Gopal Varma  (but with less variance in quality or box office appeal). The immutable physical laws that govern the universe state that Prabhuji must have either a sister (who usually gets raped/killed) or a brother (who gets killed, leaving him to look after said brother’s girlfriend/fiancee/wife who may also have gotten raped in the process). It seemed to us that there was a virtual glut of interchangeable, well-endowed starlets vying for this role, because I don’t remember seeing the same actress playing his sister twice.

Mithun didn’t have a monopoly on this industry either: a movie called Rakhwaale (not to be confused with the Anil Kapoor starrer, Rakhwaala) remains seared into my neurons for all time. Sure, it had a preposterous plot and a no-name hero who delivered the Great Sequoia of wooden performances. What really made it special was that, every once in a while, there would be a shot of Mukesh Khanna in a tan overcoat and matching fedora watching the action from a discreet spot and then glowering significantly at the camera. Right at the end, it is revealed that he is a CBI officer or some such thing. Absoslutely sublime, I tell you.

But here’s the thing: I do not remember disliking any of these movies. They were honest, sincere efforts at making a B-movie and we received them in that spirit. Nobody went into Dabba expecting Citizen Kane. Nobody came out disappointed.

It was when I went to watch some big name star/director make an ass of himself that I came away disappointed. Mithun delivered exactly what he promised. But Aamir Khan in Mann — that was another matter entirely. These were the real cinematic turkeys, the ones I plan to roast in this post. This is a short, non-exhaustive list of some of the worst such offenders that I have come across. These don’t fall in the category of Locomotive 38 movies — they’re just plain crappy, period.

Aside: You’re probably wondering whether I really needed to take this long to get to the point of this post. I like to digress, okay? If you ever hear me say Abhivaadaye, you might notice the name Polonius slipped in between Bhargava and Jamadagni.

1. Mann: Indra Kumar’s remake of An Affair to Remember, starring Aamir Khan and Manisha Koirala. The first half, set aboard a cruise ship, involves ninety minutes of such abominable filmmaking that it ought to have been banned by the Geneva Convention. A few scenes from that nightmare :  as soon as Manisha boards the ship, she collides with…  no, not the hero, as usually happens, but a desi version of Mike Myers in all his shagadelic glory.  (Funny as the original?  Not so much.)  One character on the ship who keeps laughing like a hyena being sodomized by a cattle prod inside a room filled with nitrous oxide.  Imagine hearing it at the end of one scene, and just to make sure that you stay on the wall you’ve been driven up, a continuation of that in the beginning of the next scene. On top of which, Aamir and Manisha act like a Lifetime Achievement Razzie is up for grabs on the strength of this one performance. I have never prayed harder for icebergs.

2. Jhoom Barabar Jhoom: You get Abhishek Bachchan, Priety Zinta and Amitabh to act in the same movie and what do you do? Put them in something that looks like a musical, sounds like a musical and wants to be a musical but ends up being a pile of guano gone bad. Dress Amitabh up like he had an unfortunate incident involving a peacock and a quantum teleportation device. Painful to the point where regular readers of this blog, such as there are, will immediately understand what I mean when I call a movie a JBJ experience. (Full review here.)

3. Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag: Apparently, the Large Hadron Collider has been working fine for a few years now. RGV tried to produce antimatter by running Sholay from two separate projectors and smashing those beams together. The result so unnerved the scientists at CERN that they shut it down and made up a story about eddies in the spacetime continuum and somebody stealing magnets for their fridge.

4. Baba: I don’t mind the fact that Rajni wanted to showcase his spiritual side in this movie. Nor the fact that he and Manish Koirala looked like the Hobo and the Hippo (some people look good with a quadruple chin, but she isn’t one of them). What I do mind is the fact that Rajni thought he could mix up little bits from the Amman movie genre (the bits involving magicians with diabolical plans and much sinister laughter) with standard Rajni movie staples, add some mystical stuff about immortal ascetics in the Himalayas and get away with it. And a whole raft of actors and a director like Suresh Krishna (who, as it happens, directed Baasha) went along with him. Couldn’t somebody — anybody, really — have whacked him upside the head with something hard, blunt and radioactive? Was the money that good?

5. Anjali: Of the lot, this is the most disappointing. Its child stars won special National awards for their performances. It has a few really good moments and a beautiful story about prejudice and acceptance in various forms. But to get to all of that, you have to get past a bunch of loud performances, annoyingly precocious kids and and scenes set in an apartment that Howard Roark would’ve blown up on general principle. And to top it all off, the most annoying death scene in the history of cinema. If that little girl had screamed “Ezhundiru Anjali, ezhundiru” one more time, Mani Rathnam could’ve made Anjali 2: Night of the Living Dead as his follow-up feature.

Dedication: I don’t know if there is such a thing as dedicating blog posts, but I would like to dedicate this one to two of my friends, Renugopal and Tarun, with whom I have watched more crappy movies than anyone in their right mind ever would.

 

Thin isn’t always in

I just got a glimpse of Nigella Lawson on Discovery Travel & Living. Like I mentioned in my earlier post on Julie & Julia, watching people cook isn’t really my thing. But for Nigella, I am willing to make an exception. In the interest of not getting kicked in the shins by my wife, who is sitting nearby, I shall not rhapsodize.

Anyway, the reason I write is because the woman looks distinctly thinner this time around. I’m sure this is healthy for her. I might even bring myself to be happy for her.

But the truth is, the basis of her appeal is the fact that she makes stuff that would send dieticians shrieking in horror, eats it all up (sometimes even wakes up in the middle of the night to do it), and — here’s the important part – looks all the better for it.

At least that’s part of her appeal. The other part… well, I promised I wouldn’t rhapsodize.

 

Manjal Veyyil

There was a short-lived show on TV called Love Monkey starring Tom Cavanagh as an A&R rep for a record label. In the pilot episode, he starts off by saying that he’s a crime fighter, and his job is to ensure that criminally bad music doesn’t hit the music stores. If I were to be so deluded as to describe my blogging about the movies in such terms, then this movie would have to be The Joker. And I gotta admit, I got my ass handed to me by this particular clown.

Manjal Veyyil stars Prasanna and Sandhya as childhood friends, presumed to be lovers by the world and its grandmother-in-law. Not that they are lovers, but none of this matters until the bad guy comes into the picture. Said bad guy is betrothed to her elder sister but decides that he wants her instead. It so happens that the sister is a diabetic, so he messes with her medications and causes her to collapse during their engagement. His parents throw a hissy fit and her dad offers Sandhya’s hand in marriage instead. This, after the groom’s mom gets abusive enough to warrant calling off the match, diabetes or not. And not once does the dad ask his daughter if she is okay with this, or even apologize after the fact. She reacts by running away with Prasanna. I’ll give you a minute to try and work out which asshole she was running away from.

While everyone thinks that the two have eloped, we discover that he is actually helping her find her lover (who went missing sometime ago). When the lover eventually turns up, so does the villain. Cue a standard fight sequence, in which the bad guy does, but not before badly injuring Prasanna. The doc says he’ll live, but will need someone to care for him for the rest of his life. So Sandhya tells her lover that she has to sacrifice her love in order to take care of her friend. He is disappointed, but agrees with her reasoning and leaves. Now, since the two of them have this conversation within earshot of the critically ill but conscious Prasanna, he decides to simplify matters by taking the breathing mask off his face and committing suicide while no one’s looking.

Now you’re probably waiting for me to tell you all that is wrong with the movie, in the most vitriolic language I can summon up.

I ask you: After that plot summary, do I really need to?

 

Ars Gratia Arse

My wife and I went to the Kala Ghoda Arts festival this weekend. It had all the usual stalls with handicrafts and clothing and assorted knick-knacks, so we indulged in some impulse-purchasing. Caught a bit of one of the performances — quite nice. Finished off with a cup of coffee at Moshe’s nearby. All in all, a few hours well spent.

A fair bit of space in the art festival was allocated to exhibits by contemporary artists. There was an imposing tower that seemed to be made entirely of plastic mugs and water bottles. And exhibits that critiqued the current state of our lives, consumerism and what not. Some of these were pretty interestingly done, whereas some others were… oh, well.

Anyway, since mucho banner space was spent promoting the concept of recycling, I decided to pull out yet another old piece of mine and update it. (Yeah, this is beginning to become a habit. Don’t worry, when I write something fresh, you folks will be among the first to know.)

This particular rant is about art. Of the abstract variety. And I mean the intentionally abstract stuff. Not like my paintings, which are intended to be stick figures but end up looking a lot more abstract.

Several months ago, a friend of mine proposed an idea for a piece of software that could, given a particular painting, automatically identify the artist.

<Aside>

The friend I was talking to is Angshuman Saha. He’s the only Homo Sapien I know who can tell the difference between Monet and Manet. He can actually distinguish between impressionist and post-impressionist stuff like they were chalk and cheese. (To me, they’re both just splotchy stuff on canvas. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure I can tell the difference between chalk and cheese.)

Angshu’s own artistic ventures are somewhat minimalist bordering on wierd. My favourite work of his is “Black straight line on ruled paper No. 32″. Then there’s “Fish in a Napthalene Ring”, “Default risk model”… you get the idea. I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on him called Portrait of an Artist as a Middle-Aged Statistician but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Someday…

</Aside>

Marcel Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase

Now, back to automatic artist identification. Seriously, this can be a fairly difficult task. For one thing, great artists may take a while to evolve their own signature style – their early work may have elements of other artists’ styles that they tried to emulate back then. For another, it may be easier, sometimes, to try and identify a certain school of art (impressionism, surrealism and whatever else) than a particular artist. Maybe you could look at some very specific things relating to certain artists. For instance, if you see a soft watch, it’s either Dali or someone trying to imitate him. If you see a badly drawn anorexic horse, it’s M. F. Hussain. And so on and so forth.

But then there’s the case where the whole damn canvas makes no sense. If there was only one school of art that did this, then you could use it as a default option if you found no pattern whatsoever. The problem is, there’s more than one school. Different forms of chaos, if you will. Then what do you do?

The conversation segued from there to the arbitrariness of art in general.

Consider Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, for instance. Do you see the nude? Do you see the staircase, for that matter? Heck, do you even know if the painting is hung right side up?

Henri Matisse: Le Bateau

Sometimes, even the experts can’t tell. Take Henri Matisse’s Le Bateau . Apparently, it was hung upside down for 47 days in the New York Museum of Modern Art and no one noticed. Frankly, what shocks me is that the phrase “no one noticed” is often followed by an exclamation mark when this painting is mentioned.

And don’t even get me started on Martin Creed, the guy who won the 10000 pound Turner Prize for his exhibit Work No. 227: The lights going on and off. Are the judges on that panel the same guys who would stuff their kid with ADD medication if the brat kept switching the light on and off in their living room?

And what’s with this business of numbering paintings, huh? If you can spend so much time working on it, you can damn well spend a couple of minutes naming it, okay? 

There’s a good reason why artists like these don’t rule the world. Imagine what it would be like if Duchamp and his ilk took over Playboy magazine. That painting by Duchamp could be Miss January. “Our playmate of the month likes long walks on the beach, working out on the stairmaster and making out in the MoMA while everyone’s looking.”

Hell, the Matisse painting could be Miss January – what bloody difference does it make?

Or if Dali and assorted surrealists decided to remake Superman:

Bystander 1: It’s a flying tiger with an elephant coming out of its mouth!

Bystander 2: It’s a violin playing goat!

Bystander 1: And don’t forget the giraffe with brightly colored machine tools in the bathtub on the side.

Bystander 3: No, it’s Gala posing as both Superman and Josef Stalin at the same time, depending on which way you look at it!

Not that I am against abstract stuff per se, mind you. Part of the fun of being an artist is seeing the world in one’s own way, I’m sure. But when it gets to the point where you can pretty much put anything together and sell it on the strength of your interpretation of it, one begins to wonder where art ends and marketing begins. 

Part of this marketing exercise seems to involve putting the work in a particular genre. Consider the term “Modern Art”. Kind of a cop-out, isn’t it? It’s like naming a newborn baby “Baby”. (Hold on, they actually did that in Dirty Dancing.) 

At least the Dadaists had the sense to just open a dictionary and pick out a random word and name their genre after it. Can’t give them points for effort, but at least they were honest.

I don’t follow these trends too closely, but not too long ago, “post-modernism” was the flavour of the month. I asked Angshu what it meant and he said, tongue firmly in cheek, that “Postmodernists express incredulity to the metathesis.”

Which, in plain English, (apparently) means that they don’t believe in categories. Kind of a safe haven if you can’t quite figure out where to put yourself, ain’t it? And what is more, even the term “post-modern” is sort of a cul-de-sac. You already have modern, and now you’ve got post-modern. Where are you gonna go from here? New and improved modern? With active salts?

Come to think of it, the active salt idea might work. I could exhibit a tube of toothpaste. Maybe they’ll even put it up in Kala Ghoda next year.

Full (sheepish) disclosure: I actually love some of the artists I mentioned in my rant. Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus absolutely blew me away. It was that painting that got me interested in art in the first place. For reasons I don’t completely understand, when I see  pictures of Jackson Pollock’s paintings, I feel *something*, even if I can’t define what I feel.

But you gotta admit, pretending to be the unartistic boor who ought to know better is a lot more fun when you’re blogging.

No wait, I am an unartistic boor who ought to know better. 

 

To Kate Winslet

Dear Kate,

Congratulations! I am extremely glad that you won not one, but two Golden Globes for your performances this year. I haven’t seen either movie, but I am sure you deserved them.

I am fairly certain that the Oscars aren’t that far away. The Academy has a habit of awarding people a statuette on the basis of cumulative achievement, so there is only so long that you can keep racking up the record for maximum number of nominations before a certain age.

But when you do win, could you please spend some time preparing a good acceptance speech? Practice before a mirror, learn to compose yourself before you walk on stage, do what you have to do. Spend some quality time with Brits who seem to know how it should be done with class and wit — Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson… It can’t be all that difficult.

Whatever you do, just don’t stand there gasping thank-yous like you’re orgasming after a mercy fuck. It doesn’t become someone of your stature.

Okay? Okay.

Sincerely

Ramsu

ps: Youtube link attached for those of you who haven’t seen it. To her credit, she starts off by apologizing to the other nominees for having taken more than her share

 

Five Rahman moments

Thanks to his Golden Globe for Slumdog Millionaire (and the possibility of an Oscar), Rahman is now the flavour of the month. While I haven’t been too impressed with much of his recent work, it made me think about his career over the years.

I heard Roja when I was in high school — to say that we were gobsmacked would be an understatement. It was like nothing any of us had heard before. But while it was new and exciting to us, there were also many who felt it was too synthesized and artificial and wouldn’t stand the test of time. Seventeen years later, it now seems fair to say that he has accomplished enough to earn his place among the greats of Indian film music.

This post is not about Rahman’s contribution to Indian film music (I may do that later), but simply a recollection of five Rahman moments that have surprised  and delighted me over the years.

1. The repeated shehnai notes in Yeh jo des hai tera (Swades). The song is nice, but what makes it unforgettable is the use of the shehnai. (Aside: Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy achieve a similar effect with bagpipes in the title tune of Salaam-e-Ishq.)
2. The use of the tanpura in Hai Rama (Rangeela). My friend Ratul brought this one to my notice. Who would’ve thought of using a tanpura to bookend a steamy song involving Urmila Matondkar and Jackie shroff prancing around in their underwear?
3. M. S. Viswanathan singing Vidai kodu engal naade (Kannathil Muthamittal). Instead of any of a dozen conventional singers, he picked a veteran composer with a voice that belied his age and got him to sing this one about leaving one’s homeland. (More on his unconventional choices for singers here.)
4. The second sax interlude in En kaadhalae (Duet). The credit for this probably goes at least partly to the director K Balachander. Nonetheless, what he accomplishes here is beautiful. Two brothers (one a singer, the other a composer and sax player) in love with the same girl, singing a song at a function where she might make an appearance. When she does, the sax player announces it with four happy notes that are the musical equivalent of jumping up excitedly, then launches into his theme for her (Anjali Anjali). But as he gets into it, he is reminded of the fact that he is estranged from his brother because they both love this girl, so he quietly segues into a sadder theme. It was so well done that I didn’t even realize until later that it was all done through a musical instrument.
5. Tu Bole Main Boloon (Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na). Exactly how often have you heard a jazz tune in Hindi film music?

Memsaab has a lovely post on her favourite Rahman numbers. Worth a dekko.

 

Dear Sir, As I am suffering from fever… (Redux)

I will be traveling to Germany and Poland on work for the next fortnight. 24fps will be on hiatus until I return.

Those of you who wonder about the sheer waste of beer involved in sending a non-beer drinker to Munich during Oktoberfest are welcome to rant and rave in the comments section.

Those of you who might be in Munich between 22 and 28 September, or in Gdansk (Danzig, if you’re German) until 4 October, are welcome to drop me a line in case you’d like to meet up for coffee or dinner.

The last time I put the blog on hold for a trip abroad, I promised a travelouge post that I never got around to writing. Since it has been established that breaking promises do not bother me any more than the average Member of Parliament, I shall make the same promise this time as well. And while I am at it, I also promise to end global warming and pass a constitutional amendment outlawing Himesh Reshammiya. 

Those of you who wish to roll your eyes at the above paragraph are requested to desist. If you haven’t done so after reading any of my earlier posts, now is no time to start.

Auf wiedersehen, Do widenzia etc.

 

Dirty Love

I found this little gem when I was searching for some other link in my bookmarks. It got filed under a work-related folder by accident. I think.

If ever you feel like reading a nasty review of a bad movie would make your day a bit better, go search for Roger Ebert’s zero star reviews. It’s not just that he tears the movie apart — he does it with such style that you feel like watching the movie just to see what he wrote about. Here’s one that I particularly like.

Dirty Love :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews

My favourite line in the review: 

She (Jenny McCarthy) is cheated on by her boyfriend, Richard (Victor Webster), aka Dick, who looks like the model on the cover of a drugstore romance novel about a girl who doesn’t know that guys who look like that spend all of their time looking like that.

As analogies go, that one is positively Wodehousian.

 

Wr on splng

Much of the time I spend writing a blog post goes into figuring out the opening and closing lines. I spent quite some time trying to figure out how to open this one. The options I ran through were:

 

1. Literature: A reference to Catch 22, where the main character is given the job of censoring letters sent home by soldiers, and decides one day to declare war on adjectives.
2. Nostalgia: Back when I studied in BITS, we used to have to work on rickety old terminals at the Information Processing Centre. Those machines had some kind of buy-one-get-one-free offer so that, if you typed in one character, two of them would appear on screen.
3. Biology and Music: I even tried to imagine Ella Fitzgerald singing a version of Let’s Do It about cell division: 

Eukaryotes do it

Prokaryotes do it

Even letters in film titles do it

Let’s split ourselves up…

 

Eventually I decided to fall back on my usual trick of listing down my various attempts and getting on with it. 

So anyway, this post is about the war on spelling being waged by Ekta Mata, Himes-bhai and the like. Except, unlike Yossarian, they don’t take things out. They put them in. 

Ekta has one mega-weapon and she uses it everywhere. Her rules are pretty simple:

1. If there’s no K in the title, put one in.
2. If there is, put in another just for good measure. 
3. If you don’t quite get it and need an example, here’s one: C Kkompany.

 

Himes-bhai, on the other hand, is an equal opportunity offender. Aap Kaa Surroor: The Moviee — The Real Luv Story is mostly a war on vowels, although the extra “r” and the spelling of “Luv” suggests a more inclusive approach to bad spelling. His next movie Karzzzz declares war on the letters K, A and R for having the temerity to try and coexist with the Zs. The title reminds me of Tawneee (from Terry Pratchett’s Thud) whose name has to be pronounced with each ‘e’ considered as a separate syllable. I have little doubt that, if he makes ten more movies, he will have had his way with the English, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabet. Frankly, having seen Himesh and heard him sing, the thought of him having his way with anything scares the crap out of me.

It isn’t just these two either. There’s a whole raft of numerologically-appropriate names with extra letters hanging on everywhere. So I got to wondering where this would all lead eventually. I came up with a few possibilities, all of them based on some significant assumptions:

 

1. We’ll arrive at a well-ordered world where every letter will end up getting spelled twice, and we’ll just have to get ourselves glasses that would correct our vision and show just one of them. 
   • Assumption: The world will, at some point, be well-ordered, which it never will be.
2. We’ll have normal spelling, but with a little asterix at the end of the title, and a line in tiny print at the bottom that says something like: Numerological taxes extra. Conditions apply. 
   • Assumption: The world will, at some point, make concessions to sanity, which it never will.
3. We’ll have normal spelling, period.
   • Assumption: I’m a lobotomized ass who needs to cut down on his coffee intake. Which is true actually, but we still won’t have normal spelling in the future.
4. Someone will come up with the bright idea of using the letter P as a substitute for all the other letters that need to be repeated and putting it in front of the title. For further clarifications on this and other idiosyncrasies of the English language, watch Chupke Chupke.
   • Assumption: See Prediction 3.
   • Aside: Why is it that only the English transliteration of Hindi titles have numerological problems?
5. Some numerologist will become fashionable for removing letters from words, and we’ll end up with SMS-spelling for movie titles.
   • Assumption: The world is full of people who either can’t spell or don’t have the patience to use the dictionary feature on their mobile phone.

Hands up everyone who thinks the last one is the most likely?

 

Will the real Hari Puttar please stand up?

A few weeks ago, Memsaab posted a review of Makdee wherein I had commented that Shweta Prasad would be my choice for Hermione if someone were to remake Harry Potter in Hindi. So I got to thinking: If I had to remake the Potter franchise in Hindi, what would my casting choices look like? I’m gonna assume that I can pick actors from across the ages to play various roles, so that a really appropriate casting choice doesn’t get thrown out simply because I didn’t have a time machine handy.

Ron Weasley: Kunal Khemu.

Hermione Granger: Shweta Prasad, hands down. 

Albus Dumbledore: Amitabh Bachchan. One of those choices that seems obvious in hindsight, but trust me, I spent a lot of time agonizing over this one before deciding that it really had to be AB. For what it’s worth, my next choice would’ve been Prithviraj Kapoor.

Severus Snape: Kay Kay Menon.

Sirius Black: I’m thinking Vinod Khanna.

Remus Lupin: Boman Irani

Minerva McGonagall: Dina Pathak. 

Hagrid: Dara Singh.

Draco Malfoy: Really can’t think of anyone for this role.

… and in minor supporting roles:

Arthur Weasley: Anupam Kher

Molly Weasley: Kirron Kher

Lucius Malfoy: Jeevan.

Gilderoy Lockhart: Salman Khan. A lot of people can play handsome, but Salman can play silly like few others can. He comes by it naturally, I think.

Horace Slughorn: Utpal Dutt

James Potter: Dharmendra

Lily Potter: Sharmila Tagore

Peter Pettigrew: Pankaj Kapoor. 

Mundungus Fletcher: Keshto Mukherjee. Not really a major character, but I had to give ol’ Keshto a part somehow

And finally…

Lord Voldemort: Naseeruddin Shah.

Any suggestions on who should play Harry? Write in with your casting choices, or post them on your blog and drop me a note. I’ve restricted my choices to Hindi cinema, but one can consider other Indian languages as well.