staying.cool

the hard-hitting realist movie maker is back. it is ironic that his movie lives in a dreamworld of his own making.

this is the guy who made ‘chandni bar’. which actually leaves you gasping at the brutality of life. then came ‘page 3′. which captured the very essence of the socialites. it appeared as though a new sense of film-making would soon eclipse an industry that revels in dreams. especially dreams with srk in them.

’satta’, ‘corporate’, ‘traffic signal’ started a slippery slope, but he had set standards too high. the rot was setting in. still bearable, a sense of heart, of portrayal remained.

and now, ‘fashion’.

if nothing else, that long-winded intro would have given you a sense of what a madhur bhandarkar film has degenerated to.

there is a protagonist, who has also degenerated from being a victim, or maybe an observer (in his early films).. to a central character (in his current movies). there is a path to going up, a path to coming down. attempts at redemption. some kind of weird conclusion that shows how life goes on. some intermittent attempts at incorporating real-world events, and snarky commentary. and a few mandatory gay characters all over the place.

‘fashion’ manages to pull all the cliched set pieces from previous films, some soppy acting and production values, and deliver something that you stare at in disbelief 20 minutes into the movie. seriously, models are supposedly thin and generally are meant to exhibit some modicum of attractiveness. some of the supposedly female people cat-walking here look like men. catwalks of all sizes and arenas have bad lighting, lines running all over them. every single designer is gay. every single person talks with a thick bihari accent, yes, even those oh-so-gay designers. we have a conclusion that tries to be as filmy as it gets, in the process violating any possible thought process that you might conceive, no matter how insane or stupid you are.

but enough of general comments, we should focus on the ’sow-stoppar’ (actual pronunciation): priyanka chopra. she goes from wearing jeans and minimal make-up, to jeans and lots of make-up. and cannot catwalk anymore (didn’t she used to be a model or something?). there are attempts to justify showcase the inevitable self-destructive tendencies of models.. or, something like it. she takes to smoking intermittently in a plausible manner, i am willing to grant that. before you know it, she is permanently sozzled, stoned, and surrounded by cig butts. impressive. she bitches about stuff and people because… because? she is supposed to! she’s gone from being a good middle-class girl (albeit stupid: contracts, affairs and sex have an equally shocking effect on her about 20 minutes after they should) to a snooty hoity-toity model. her a-class performance consists of staring blankly forward, laughing, pouting, and staring blankly forward. you feel a tad touched at the (expected) breakdown, her eyes have it - the despair, the feeling, the pathos. which goes away in 30 seconds flat as she rubs her eyes repeatedly in some weird symbolic way.

kangana ranawat is having a ball in bollywood. she gets to stay drunk, stoned and behave insane in all her movies.. which look like all she has been doing for a while. she appears intermittently, when madhur-ji gets bored of his hard-hitting female character who is decaying. she is also the worst offender on that ‘accent’ thing. ’selebrayshans’ and ‘cungratulashans’ indeed. [and, as pointed out by uber-t, the series of 'busturd' expletives that she attempts to mouth, in one of the most laughable scenes in the movie. which exists for no other purpose than to further underline what an addict she is. which you are well-convinced off by then]. there are a couple of supporting characters, the names of whom i could not be bothered to remember (ha! i can be snarky too!) who try very earnestly. there are a bunch of the standard supportive characters, straight and otherwise.. which stand around talking hinglish and pouting about something or the other. when they are not being interrupted by a hideously grating techno-type soundtrack.

the question remains: why? why does warsha think this movie is halfway even close to good? why did she spend an hour arguing with me about the merits of the movie?

why? why? why?

having spent 3 hours of my life in trying to get a dual-monitor setup + compiz on ubuntu 8.10, i have come to the conclusion that it is simply impossible.

[note: this is on a machine with 2 X300SE ATI cards which are connected to a dell (1280x1024) and a sony (1024x768).]
observations:

• ATI+ubuntu = configuration hell. always has been and always will be. make it the seventh hell of hells when you add a dual-head setup into the mix. nvidia (from all the forums) is apparently much nicer.

• ubuntu natively picks up my monitors + resolutions. impressive.
• compiz appears to need the restricted ATI drivers to even work, on this latest iteration. once they are in there, it just works (on a single screen setup). beautifully. memories of spending 5 hours grappling with xorg.conf are sweet mythology.
• if one ditches compiz, and sticks to the open-source drivers, there’s still no scope of managing to ensure that different monitors run at different resolutions, and all work together to form a single desktop. the sony seems like the screen is extending way beyond the actual monitor with icons somewhere in the air above it.
• the ATI catalyst GUI sucks. cannot set up monitors at different resolutions, does not understand how to arrange monitors, ends up setting up the 2 monitors as a single LARGE widescreen, $^%#^&^$…
• default for all graphics configs (initially) is to clone outputs on both screens all the time. why?
• due to this lack of configurability, i have to either downgrade res to 1024×768 on both and have wonky compiz effects, or not have compiz at all.
• i somehow managed to enable a 2560×1024 (don’t ask) screen expanding across both monitors, to find that my cards only support upto 2048×2048 (ok, this is slightly invalid, but i was highly frustrated by this point anyway). ergo, compiz still won’t work.
• ubuntu without compiz effects seems dinky to use, and somehow extremely non-intuitive without all the flashiness.

now, while i’ve always been a fan of the terminal and all the cool commands that you pull out of the hat in linux… why isn’t there even an alt-tab command in linux? or any apparently simple way to set it up? compiz has ultra-funky features, and ubuntu has…nothing? what sense does that make?

incidentally, i had to reboot after an update (first time ever, for a non-kernel update). nasty memory of windows rebooting in the middle of my experiments ensued.

i’m impressed with the ease of setup. ubuntu has come streets ahead since i used it last in 7.10. lack of user-interface customization tells. big time.

solution: back to winxp with ultramon installed. such simplicity. maybe i will now move to winvista-32 or 64 on this machine, just for the heck of it.

crossover works great though, installed office 2007 directly on ubuntu. very cool. too bad the one thing keeping me on windows is the customization, rather than office.

year: 2002. month: march. 48 hours interspersed with a grand total of 4 hours of sleep in between as i work, play and organize a college festival.

year: 2005. month: july. 57 hours with next to no sleep as i attempt to finish my thesis, get it corrected, and submit it in time.

year: 2007. month: june. 3 hours of sleep a day for 4 days as i try my damnedest to get the submission in before the deadline finishes. (i submit, and the workshop gets canceled, due to a lack of submissions.)

year: 2008. month: jan. an average of 5 hours of sleep a day for 15 days as i attempt to finish up all the work pending for my conference.

year: 2008. month: march (again). 18 hours of sleep in 5 days as i finish up a conference submission that was literally due ‘yesterday’ for the duration of the week.

year: 2008. month: october. try as i might, i am unable to work past 2 am, and am unable to get up before 830 am the next day. even with the deadline due ‘today’ for the duration.

yeah, i’m getting old.

is this all it comes down to? destruction and rioting due to justice being meted out to one of the worst communal leaders since… his predecessor? first fuck around with every possible community, claiming that the worlds largest melting pot is rightfully belonging to the nearest state. and then hold the city to ransom. all it shows is how little bombay (or in their words, mumbai) means to you.

sometimes i think my grandfather had it right: “line them all up in front of a shooting squad, and fire. the only way any of them will ever see sense. and learn discipline.”

update: an interesting thought-provoking letter from the man himself. [via ubert]

4 years = 602 posts.

602 posts = 1388 comments (2.3 comments/post).

1388 comments = 5 (minimum) blog-friends, 4 of whom i have never met. plus finding friends in people i didn’t know for 4 years of college.

1 friend = (just one of the results) severeanomaly.org

severeanomaly.org = 3 years (and running).

3+ years = 8.33% of my life.

8.33% of my life = a master’s degree. a phd (still in progress) . RAIT. the difference in india and UAE.

a phd = fewer posts (2/day to 2/week).

fewer posts = fewer comments.

fewer comments = irrelevant.

irrelevant = extraneous.

extraneous = neglected.

neglected = this is getting silly.

[an advance blogiversary post]

A thought. A word. A twinge. A smile. A shake. He went through them all, sitting outside in the afternoon sun. The sun beat down on him, but not hard. It was the changing seasons that were causing this.

A mild sun, golden-green trees, and a slightly chilled wind. Not uncomfortable. He sipped the coffee, wincing at the boiling hot liquid swirled in his mouth, and shot down his throat. He could actually feel the heat hit his stomach, sending bolts up his arms and down his legs. He didn’t know why he was out here, he was probably better occupied inside, in front of papers and computers. It was a deep sense of frustration that was causing this.

The mind rambles when left well alone especially after being forced into thinking about one problem, over and over and over… he let it wander. It probably deserved a break. That was it. This was a break. A hop, a skip and a jump and he was free of the world, the strappings, the problems waiting for him. The world passed him by; the student on the skateboad zooming to class, the girlfriends giggling over the fact that he looked lost, the frat-boy gang laughing and hitting each other. This was no break. It was the loneliness that was having him be out here. The loneliness that was causing this.

A faint smile came to his lips. He could remember a time when he would sit out in the open and everyone who passed him by greeted him. Then a time when all he wanted to do was never sit in the light again, only in the dark, no-one should ever see him. Now a time when such things did not occur to him, but no-one knew him either. Many things had changed, many things were going back to staying the same as well. Time always went full circle. It was the time that was causing this.

His mind couldn’t care less for the last thought. It was amazing how many trivia, how many inconsequentia had accumulated over the years. Facts he had no use for, and never would. But they were good old friends to have around now. Following them, applying what he knew, seeing a true explanation for what they represented. Each one was more interesting. Each one took lesser time. Would there come a time when he wouldn’t have anymore? Would he have to go back to that problem waiting for him? The one that drove him out here? Was it the problem that was causing this?

He jumped down off the wall, picked up the cup, and strolled back in. The doors closed behind him, and he sprinted downstairs. A last thought:

At the end of it, he had no idea what had caused him to go out there.

He had no idea what had caused it.

Or what it would cause.