staying.cool

having experienced ‘yuvvraaj’, i firmly urge a.r.rahman to sue subhash ghai for mutilating a perfectly good soundtrack into something you cringe at when the first notes hit your ears. not just because mr. ghai has recut the songs, no.. he’s gone one better. he has remixed them. recut them. added sounds and clips from all over the place. “improved” them, i guess?

almost seems like a case of plagiarism to me.

please, mr. rahman, please. i beg you. sue subhash ghai’s sorry ass. for killing your songs. for murdering tune, tone and beauty. for ensuring that gulzar’s lyrics make even less sense than they did when we listened to them without the vision of salman and boman irani miaowing and growling at each other, while prancing around like a bad case of elves on acid. add anil kapoor doing his best hammy himesh impression while OD-ing, as well as getting a chance to acting permanently brain-dead. katrina talking. boman irani playing something that yowls and prances with a morsing. zayed khan never forgetting the 2 most important things when saving someone’s life: a gun and taking off your shirt. while shakin’ the booty with african women. and of course, a wigged-up salman who gets to pretty much.. well.. i have no words to describe what he does. i don’t want to stray and review a movie that is so far gone that, as galadriel pointed out (paraphrasing from friends), it makes you “want to put your finger through your eye into your brain and swirl it around”. or even “rip your arm off just so that you can have something to throw at it”.

indeed. i kid you not.

to sum up. mr rahman: destroy mr. ghai. ensure he cannot inflict such torture on us again. ensure he never asks you for another song again. request salman to stop acting. katrina to stop talking. boman to stop whatever it is he’s doing in place of a career. convey sympathy to the others for their being beyond redemption. riddle mr ghai with bullets, and bring him back to life just so one can have the satisfaction of watching him suffer in death. while being stampeded by bulls.

and, of course, prabhuji has the final say: “indipendunt ve liwe, yunitud we staand.. a huppi phamilee.”

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?

the k’s and the a’s have it: ektaaaa kaaapooor has done it. she has reinvented the greatest epic of our time. to the greatest maahaaa epic of our time. the wikipedia admits it: the six-pack, the half body armor, the musculature have been inherited, nay, evolved from 300.

our story begins in a galaxy far, far away.. where dice is played by men. we know they are real, true men as they all flaunt six-pack flabs, and stare moodily into space while dialogues are screamed. the skies scream, whether in protest we are not informed, but they scream. a real true man acting like a half-gay hyena (shenzi, banzai or ed?) - read shakuni - cackles in glee when he lands a 2 and a 1 with some ancient looking dice. a real true man broods moodily, rather.. continues to brood, while words are screamed at him. a hand comes into focus… and our new sherkar - read duryodhan - gestures in his direction.

one listens for the ‘govinda’ chant.. but then we get ahead of ourselves.

‘uuuu, meee aurrr ahhummm’ warbles vishal bharadwaj, as silky white words flash up on the screen.

trying to read them is pointless, there exists a world of wisdom here that requires true genius to initiate; much less understand. as a simple example, ‘doctors bhi toh mobile patient ki stomach mein chod dete hai. lekin uske baad woh kutta unke peeche bhaagta rehta hai.’ (in reference to the iconic hutch ad). and then of course, sequences involving seduction at a time of strife, and naked walks at a time of dance.

a ton-load of reviews exist deriding the cinematic tastes of raja sen and taran adarsh: people who seem to enjoy the raping of perfectly decent hollywood-inspired ideas. granted, the source material here is classic bollywood fare - poor guy, rich girl, war, love, reunion in the rain, and a final twist that can be seen halfway into the movie. the current iteration of this idea somehow manages to take out the semblance of logic maintained in the original, the decent acting, the casting, the focus… and replace it with everything that could possibly grate on you. flashback: check. song in flashback: check. flashback in flashback: check. attempt at non-linearity: check. song nearing finale: check.

i personally believe that the movie was an attempt at a sci-fi movie, which people seem to have mistaken for romance. at some point far, far in future we have a cruise going towards mars. old man and woman meet at table, old man tries to hit on old woman by telling her a poignant story of love lost and found. then of course, we realise that the people they are talking about are real people from earth, but from 50 years previously. in an effort to never lose the love of his life, our hero constructed cyborg clones of himself and the missus who regale in the soppy tale of love everyday… forever and ever. the ship runs on the energy generated by the construct in repeating the story over and over.

indian cinema is going the next step though: we are now buying the rights to the movies we copy. at least we’re learning to be honest about it.

i need to watch one more such movie. the inspiration will overflow.

its finally done. harry potter 7 is out. 72 million copies have been sold in 72 hours, including nearly 150 copies a second in the first hour of release.

i still remember my mom plonking down books 1-4 all the way back in 2000. ’twas when ‘the goblet of fire’ was released, and i plunged into the world of wizards, witches and magic. for a kid who has long tried to levitate playing cards having seen kered do it in the strips, this was a bit of a dream. my sis and i launched into a reading competition, to which there was an obvious winner.

the world was beautifully detailed, something i recognized as being a gift of tolkein. and now that the series is done, i can say that it contained something more too, the additional element of the jigsaw puzzle. and dollops of my beloved sense of english humor.
mind you, no real comparison can be done to tolkein though: similar worlds, but the approach and the audience are very different.

i did not anticipate book 5 and 6 like everyone. there was no pre-ordering for me. get the books within the first week seemed good enough. then of course, a 2 year wait for the seventh ensured much more on my part.

one very obvious point i realized within 30 pages of the book is that ‘this is a book‘. to me the sixth was a glorified screenplay. the work and effort in this book are obvious from the word go. this has been in the making since book one. most importantly, this was probably part of the sixth book before she realized she had put too much into it (or maybe it was the publisher). and so we had an average sixth with choppy writing, obvious screenplay notions etcetera. and now the seventh. in all its grandeur. and completely worth it.

the series is finally over. the fifth and sixth undoubtedly had some very heavy-heart moments, but this one - this one had shock and sorrow unmatched. i had to re-read some passages to let them sink in completely.

i’m sad.
but now i’m trying to figure a way to read all 7 together. for the sake of some very memorable characters. and some great page-turning.

after all, it always about finding that little bit of magic.

Mickey did not know what was to hit him that evening. After all, in the last 14 years, ‘McClane’ had gone to ‘Mickey’. The problem of hanging out with Ricky was that everyone else’s name started sounding like his. And Ricky was no stranger to ‘doing his own thing’. With his dad walking around in his feathered hat, strumming a double handed guitar tunelessly…it was all he could do not to bring the place down around him.

And to think the day had started with that song and dance about how life, love and everything else was just a big dance. And those pouty females wearing shapeless dresses…bliss pure bliss. Amazing, the things that people ended up doing while just walking around.

So, when Mickey was called in to take Sattu-the-scary-hairy hacker, he had to take Ricky along. Once they had blown up half the neighbourhood, fallen down 4 buildings (luckily all at the same time), and managed to sing a serenade to those two booty shaking females…it was time to hit the road. Unfortunately the females wouldn’t come along - not due to the lack of tickets - quoting the immortal lines:

Mujhe ticket nahi, Thukral chahiye.

Eventually, they reached the CIA headquarters. And found that due to a cross-connection (caused by all that damn hacking that was going on nowadays), the place they had been sent to was the Cow Incense Association. Apparently some kind of replacement for incense, which was environmentally friendly. And the fact that people may not want to burn cow-based products had possibly escaped their attention. Then, of course, they realized they’d ended up in Bhatinda instead of Washington.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (in Washington), the real CIA realized that they were on the brink of world collapse, due to some of the engineers finally believing the popups that flashed on their ultracool mind-controlled touch screens. The uppermost thoughts on their minds had finally taken over. And they needed Sattu to get them back on track. He was scary enough to make one want to never sing and dance again, after all.