…I can’t believe I just gave my money to these people.
Tag: Entertainment
Like I mentioned in the previous post, I had gone to the mall to watch Music & Lyrics. We usually don’t go to the mall on weekends as getting a parking space even in the enormous Mall of the Emirates parking lot on Friday can be a problem. However, it was not yet evening and with nothing else to do, we decided to chance it. The parking lot was quickly filling up, but we did manage to get a space.
I actually like the mall best on a weekend; for a guy who grew up in a city of 20 million people — and now resides in a country that has a population much less than that — have no fear of crowds, and almost miss them. The bustle of people of all shapes, sizes and nationalities is something I love. The noise of thousands of people and hundreds of conversations bubbling up through the four stories of the central atrium is also an experience that is not often found in this city of cars and their horns.
Weaving through the layers of crowd we made it to the far end of the mall with the cinema, and bought tickets a half hour early, giving us some more time to roam around, empty our tanks, and wait in the endless concession stand line for an overpriced and cinema-branded bottle of water (Seriously, I think the reason they show a half hour of trailers before a movie is because the lines at the snack bar take, on average, that long to work through). Despite being the first weekend of release, the screening was moderately full. It wasn’t the biggest screen in the house — that was, no doubt, still playing 300 (which I haven’t seen).
Sitting around waiting for the lights to dim I realised that it had been months since I’d seen anything in this particular theatre. For all of last year every single screening had begun with a Coca-Cola ad featuring Lebanese pop star Nancy Ajram. The ad was mediocre enough the first time, but seeing it dozens of times over the next year had begun to grate on me. I wondered if they still showed it, and at that moment the lights dimmed and up started a Coke ad.
Thankfully they had moved on from Ms. Ajram and replaced her with a mostly computer-generated ad showing the fantastical inner workings of a Coke machine. It’s and international campaign I’d seen on TV before. You’ve probably seen it too, and while I’m generally impressed with the technical aspects of it, the composition of the shots was terrible, so was the editing, and while the design of the fantasy universe was cute it was by no means memorable. I leaned over and said to my brother, “This is both the best and the worst Coke ad I’ve ever seen,” and he couldn’t help but nod in agreement.
The prospect of seeing this ad for the whole of this year — and possible beyond — was not a pleasant one. Nancy, come back!
They showed, among other things, a trailer for a Curtis Hanson movie starring Eric Bana (it’s good to see that despite Troy and Hulk‘s relatively disappointing numbers people still haven’t given up on him), and a short trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End that I had been avoiding on the internet. The trailer seems nice in that it didn’t focus too much on the special effects, and instead was almost entirely dialogue. What little scenery was shown looked disappointingly monotone and fake (a problem I had with the second Pirates film), but who knows, they might be able to pull it off. I wonder how many islands were ruined for this one?
I knew very little about Music & Lyrics going in, other than that it was a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, and that it had something to do with pop music. Really, that’s about all you need to know about a romantic comedy movie. I like Hugh Grant movies. I’m a sucker for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and especially Love, Actually, so I was pretty much sold on the whole thing to begin with. Still, must be objective, must be objective.
The film is solid, if a little short. It’s funny (poking fun at the 80s might seem easy, but the writers do it in continually interesting ways), it’s romantic, Hugh Grant delivers (as usual), and I’ve finally seen a Drew Barrymore movie I actually, really, like (okay, so Never Been Kissed was not bad either, but let’s not speak of those Charlie’s Angels movies she helped produce). Side characters are relegated to stereotypes for the most part, but they aren’t caricatured as much as one might expect in an American movie: the bumbling, lonely divorcee agent and the giggly fangirl sister aren’t overplayed. The young popstar played by Haley Bennet is sufficiently vapid; I’m just not sure if this is great acting or just the way she is.
I did say that it was a little short, and by that I mean that it doesn’t feel as large or ‘epic’ as Four Weddings or even Notting Hill. In fact as the credits roll we are shown some scenes that — judging by the characters’ costumes — took place during the midsection of the film, which I certainly wouldn’t have minded seeing there.
It’s still a good film and is well worth the watch, so maybe I’m just a Hindi film nut who expects a three hour running time to be par for the course. Also the pop songs in the film are exactly the kind of stuff that you can’t get out of your head — I’ve had the main one (“Pop! Goes My Heart” which in the movie comes complete with cheesy A-Ha-inspired music video) buzzing around in my brain for the past few weeks!
That’s Music & Lyrics in a nutshell: a bit on the light side, but far more memorable than the average pop song.
Excuse me, for now I need to go hunt down the lyrics to “Pop! Goes My Heart”…
The concept is simple. You read one of these posts. You put in a comment at the end that says, “Interview me!” and the author of the post sends you five questions — any five questions — to answer on your own blog or site. Dan answered some, and a bunch of us asked him to interview us (Spyder, Caren and Big Tony have answered already). Click on read more for my answers, which are, as usual, long and hence have to be broken into multiple pages:
1) Other than yourself, do you have an intended audience in mind when you write?
Saying “Everyone!” here would be a bit of a cop out, despite the fact that any human would (I hope) like to exert some kind of positive influence on all other humans (especially hot chicks).
I think I like to write for geeks. I’m especially interested in entertaining polymaths like myself (All polymaths are geeks, but the reverse is not true). I like to write stories that have the particular kind of chaos-embracing, seven-hundred-genres-in-a-single-bound style that I find completely satisfying. I don’t think there’s enough of it, and I’m sure there are others like me who think the same.
It’s a tricky thing to write well, because despite the fact that it very often has something for everybody, the lack of a traditional focus and a religious adherence to the tropes of a genre puts off a lot of people (this is especially annoying in Speculative Fiction genres because, hell, it’s supposed to mess with your preconcieved notions, not stroke it until a dull orgasm is reached).
The paradox of omnifiction — well, omnipunk — is that it’s the smallest genre in the world.
The only genre that has been wrestled by its very nature into being omnifiction friendly is conman and caper stories. All of them involve characters performing tasks of various skills from physical to mental and social.
I love con and caper movies.
2) If a Savant story had a soundtrack, what would it sound like?
Hmm, I think I came up with a songlist around the time I was writing Tale of a Thousand Savants (I think I still have it, …somewhere). It was basically a lot of Japanese Anime and video game soundtracks mixed in with modern Indian pop and other influences. So basically lots of Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Kanno and A.R. Rahman.
If I had to describe it now, I would say that like Savant and like the multiverse he plays around in, any soundtrack would have to be complex and varied. It would probably not be angsty (not even when he’s angsty), but it would be soulful. The kind of music that fills you both with joy and wonder. It would embrace genres but experiment, take bits from here and there and put them together in strange, unexpected and wonderful ways. No genre or type of music would be off limits, and no type of music would be treated like a sacred cow.
The three composers I mentioned earlier do exactly that. I find that composers who come from cultures other than the one in which a genre is born and settled, do wonders with it. For example, I think the work of The Teriyaki Boys and The Streets is much more interesting than any American hip-hop I’ve heard. Mitsuda does Celtic stuff with aplomb. A.R.Rahman does wonders with the entire gamut of Indian music (and beyond) because he’s a strange South Indian man with no Pavlovian training in the ‘right way’ to do a bhangra song (also, he’s A.R. Freaking Rahman, and sometimes genius can’t be explained).
3) What inspiration do you most wish Hollywood would take from the Indian film industry?
I wish they’d do things on a smaller budget. Seriously. Have you seen those Dead Man’s Chest DVD extras? Not only do they build a huge marina (a ‘tank’) to shoot boat scenes in, but on another untouched island they built a road across it and shuttle their small city of crew to the other end because the location scouts thought the palm trees looked cool there. Do you really need three hundred people on set to make a movie about a bunch of mangy pirates?
The philosophy in Hollywood seems to be, “Let’s just throw money at it!” rather than actually thinking a shoot through and doing it with the minimal impact. I’m not saying people should be walking two hours to their set, but really, when movies have “million dollar shooting days” something is seriously whacko.
And after all that, they still deliver a movie with no soul whatsoever, which, given all the mucking about with the Caribbean they did, is both a tragedy and exactly what they deserve.
Indian films are nowhere are sophisticated, we have sucky special effects and spotty technical work, but minute for minute I find myself being entertained more by the super-expensive 25 million dollar Indian film than the average budget 125 million dollar American one.
The unfortunate truth is that more Indian movies are starting to follow the Hollywood philosophy of money conquers all, but there are still a good bunch of people around who make nice movies. Also, all the good American movies are the ones made for relatively low budgets, so there is hope there too. Anything Wes Anderson does is bound to be less expensive than the average blockbuster, and is in no way lacking in the imagination and guts departments.
(And yes, I do know that the next Wes Anderson movie is set and shot in India, and I. Can’t. Wait.)
4) You have something of a knack for spotting plot holes and other problems in story structure. What advice would you give writers to help them avoid losing readers like you?
(Until this question was posed I never really thought of myself as being plot and structure sensitive, but after thinking about it — and noting the number of times I’ve discussed it in my old blog entries vis a vis both my own and others’ work — I guess it’s true: I’m a Plot Nazi!)
I’ve reached a point where I can watch a movie as a consumer of cinema parallel to appraising it on a technical level. So while I’m going, “Ooh!” at the latest special effects wizards (and/or Jessica Biel’s behind) I’m also thinking about whether or not the effect is working on a design level, a technical level and so on. I’m not one of those anal retentive people who submit things like, “His finger moves one inch between shots!” to movie mistake sites, but I tend to notice when there’s a sudden drop in pace (Casino Royale), characters behave inconsistently (Dead Man’s Chest), or that the director is masturbating behind the camera (Skull Island and everything after, Peter Jackson’s King Kong).
Weak plot points can be overcome with great characters, so keep your characters doing solid work and people may not notice the rough spots (which there inevitably tend to be). Last year’s Casino Royale did the stupid mistake of not only dropping the pace for no reason whatsoever (preceeding it was a poker game, and it despite being the most boring ‘sport’ in the world next to motor racing, was still written well), but after this drop the characters start spouting the most inane dialogue. Suddenly they’re going all Mills & Boons with cheesy lines about stripping off armour and all that. This is a James Bond movie — you can and should be romantic at times, but at least do it in character!
The Matador is a great example of good characters breezing past a few plot holes and structural inconsistencies with aplomb. So is, on a more magnified level, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Shaun of the Dead is pretty-much perfect and you can study that film to see why it works.
I think in all this seperation of plot, structure and character, I’ve failed to mention that absolutely everything in your story should be treated as these three things. Your protagonist is as much a character as he is the plot and the structure; the latter two are defined and shaped — and will appeal to you audience — based on how much they gel with and seem to be extrapolated from that character. Your world is also more than just a stage to put your stuff in. Describing it, in an indirect and abstract way, also shapes your structure, plot and character. Transmetropolitan and Kieron Gillen’s Phonogram spring to mind.
Most of these aren’t things you can plan ahead, but if you are a writer and have written enough shit you start to have strange hunches and gut feelings that won’t make sense, such as, “My character shouldn’t be eating pie here, he doesn’t like pie.” Stuff like that is your inner supercomputer crunching things far beyond your conscious thought, and you’re well on your way to being better writer.
Or, maybe you’re just a sick bastard who doesn’t like pie.
As far as technical advice is concerned, keep things consistent, first and foremost. If people speak a certain way, have them speak that way unless you wish to use a different style to generate comedy or surprise. Understand that the audience’s imagination doesn’t enjoy being thrown around, and that language is key to that: if your character is in the upper canopy of a tree don’t use language that describes the tree from the bottom up for one line. It immediately puts the mental camera at the ground level and throws the reader out of the story.
Storytelling is a magic trick. You’re using words and language to form pictures and sounds and people and smells in someone else’s head. Any magic trick needs to be well done or it won’t be as effective, even if the audience doesn’t consciously percieve it. The sloppier it is, the more attention your audience is going to pay to the funny lump in your sleeve.
Don’t limit your idea of plot structure to a particular genre. What I’m trying to say here is that you don’t necessarily need to learn all of storytelling by reading more novels. Comics can teach you a whole lot about the economy of storytelling, and both comics and movies can teach you about the way imagery affects perception, about pace. There’s a reason a panel may be seen from an askew angle (it unsettles you without saying “SHOCK!” in big red letters), and a large close up that takes up much of the page can be translated into prose structure as a large, descriptive paragraph.
Storytelling is a lot like graphic design: you’re using the symbology and syntax of a medium to deliver information in a smooth, interesting and pleasing way (while also hopefully being unexpected and engaging).
Songs are a great way to learn plot structure too. I’m not just talking about single guy with guitar wailing about his love life and the state of the world type songs that use polysyllabic words (singer-songwriter stuff as it’s called) — you can get good stories in techno!
A song appeals to us on an abstract level, just like a good story does. Try to take a song and write it as a story, and usually, if you can manage it, there you will find a well-structured plot.
The basic advice here is write, write, write. Everything you write is gold, and everything you write is shit. Look for plot, structure and character in your emails. Observe and try to deduce why some real-world conversations are memorable and entertaining without being in any way literary or theatrical. Sooner or later you’ll be able to tell what in a given story is shit and what is gold, and then rearrange the shit to enhance the look of the gold.
Then you’ll write another story and be back to square one.
Enjoy!
5) Despite already being a skilled polymath (Gosh, thanks!), what talent do you most wish you could add to your repertoire?
This is the kind of question a polymath will never give a single answer to, but off the top of my head I’ll say I’d love to be able to tailor my own clothes. (Being able to sing, super yogic powers or growing my own food were my first answers, but Spyder already beat me to the last one!)
I don’t know about your schools, but in mine (Indian School Muscat, or ISM for those of use who have survived that enigma) Drama and Theatre weren’t big. Oh sure, you did have the odd teacher who’d come along every few years, fuelled by passion and memories of his or her golden youth (usually five years past) in some sleepy hill station boarding school where ‘The Classics’ were paraded out — bedsheet togas, pathetic iambic pentameter and all — and put on show in some august hall whose seats were varnished every other week. They’d pick up everyone who ever scored in the top five in English in every class*.
(* – Thankfully, despite achieving this, I was never taught by one of these imbeciles or was considered too uncharismatic. The few times I was pulled up I stood very still at audition and read in a continuous, droning whisper.)
The result would be a huge number of very bad ‘Indian Victorian’ accents (I can’t describe this any other way, except that it is so excruciatingly bad it makes me want to punch someone while simultaneously drilling into my eardrums through my sphincter with a frozen echidna), a great number of puffed chests swelling already overfilled gasbags, and then either the exams or periodic tests would crop up (as they do in Indian schools, every other week) and Mummy and Daddy and Mr. Vice Principal would put all rehearsals on hold because little Bunty had to study all the time and get 99 marks in everything (Mr. Vice Principal wanted everyone to get 99 in everything so that the overall grades of the year would surpass the rival Indian school across town), or Mummy and Daddy would realise that they don’t give out little trophies or certificates for a play and tell Bunty to go back to athletics practice so he’d get some on Sports Day.
End result: not many plays.
More frequent would be the Middle or High School Alpha Female, destined from birth to break free from the shackles of Savage India and be educated in ‘The States’. Hence, she played softball (when we didn’t even have a team or anyone else who knew how to play it) and only dated people on the basketball team, rolled her Rs and used various words as punctuation (“Like, I mean, rrrruuuhly.”)*
(* – This, I realised, was much more endemic in Dubai, where the glut of private Indian schools led to each institution developing its own accent based on how expensive it was (more fees = more States-bound little munchkins). I can still spot an Indian High School girl in seven words or less. Anyway…)
Alpha Female, no doubt feeling the twitch of alienation in her anorexic little bones after watching the ‘school play’ episode of Beverly Hills 90210 (or any of the various high school shows of the time) would burst into the classroom the next day, gather her gang of like-minded cool folk the rest of us steered well clear of (the smart ones, anyway. Most just couldn’t even understand what language they were speaking, and vice versa) and set forth her plan of action. This usually involved buttering up the same kinds of teachers I’d mentioned before (freshly burned from the previous term’s adventure of trying to teach Bunty that “How” in Shakespeare did not mean, “How?”), only instead of the classics they’d think of putting on West Side Story or something else that would give a proper vent to all those rrrruuuhlys they had stored up over the year.
Alas, exams would come about, maybe Sports Day. Or, as would usually happen, Alpha Female would have a fight with Alpha Male — the hitherto default male lead of the Extravaganza(!) — and Beta Female would act as ambassador between the two parties while hitting on Alpha Male as she always wanted to. Big Muscle, Intense Guy, Comic Relief and various Lesser Females of the pack would run helter-skelter and gossip or hit on Alpha Female, and then the winter vacation would come along and people would go back to watching Beverly Hills 90210 or NBA Inside Stuff.
End result: not many plays.
There were, however, two kinds of theatrics that one was bound to encounter in a year. One was the school elocution, a torturous affair during Lower School because the entire class had to stand up on stage and belt out some kind of silly poem written by an absinthe-addled Englishman, in forced Indian Victorian that the teachers thought was the proper way to speak (bastards).
In Middle and Secondary Schools it became torture only for the audience, as the best and brightest of each class was picked up to subject the rest of us to more prolix, absinthe-addled verse. Worse, the elocution always seemed to take place on the same day of the week we’d have our only art class (bastards). The sole highlight of these affairs was when someone would flub a line and whisper a terse — but eloquent — “Shit!” (I think they got extra points)
The Second, more free-form method of theatrics was known as a skit.
Skit.
Skit.
The very term sounds mediocre and transient. Skits were usually performed by five man or woman troupes on Teacher’s Day, Children’s Day, those five days after the exams but before the winter vacation when people would come to school but nothing was taught, and at various Scouts and Guides thingamajigs (I only ever attended the three day camp in the desert, staying well clear of any regular meetings involving spurious knot-making instructions and disturbingly cheerful renditions of Anna-na Cycle-a Belle Yillee Seat Yillee Mudguard Yillee Yillee!)
First problem — and, to be frank, most damning: Skits were usually written by the students themselves. Oh nooooooo.
Oh, the horror of watching five people you sort-of get along with during the week suddenly turn into giggling, lobotomised train-wrecks of ‘thespians’ making some kind of unoriginal five minute monstrosity (that always ended with everyone saying the catchphrase of the ‘show’ at the same time)! I remember one was a direct rip-off of a supposedly popular — I’d never heard of it — Hindi sitcom (a term always used lightly) except to stave off nonexistent copyright lawyers they changed the show’s scene/episode ending catchphrase (Hindi sitcoms and school skits seem to share much DNA, hence my loathing for both) to something else (Genius!). The term they came up with was “Oof!”, which by the end of it the audience was saying anyway.
Second Problem: Skits were perfomed by students with no Pavlovian input from teachers, and so while it did finally free them from the curse of Indian Victorian, the delivery ranged from dead (Bunty) and bored (Mallu girl) to overboard (Elocution Boy) and requiring subtitles (Like, rrrruuuhly). It was not even bad enough to be good, if you know what I mean.
The one time I somehow ended up becoming part of a skit (I was bored, the group was sitting one row in front of me and their comedic stylings were, how shall I put this, skitshit), I added in bits of writing to what was supposedly a guy’s radio set tuning to different channels at random, with crazy — I said, Kerrraaaazy! — results. I’ll admit, even my 14 year old self couldn’t come up with anything too interesting or good (I did do something I was proud of a few months later, but that’s another story for another time) and mainly I streamlined a few jokes and helped things along.
Came time for the audition, for the Teacher’s Day show, and our boring bunch of nerds got up on stage (these guys weren’t nice nerds: they thought Transformers was a three mark Physics paper question). The year previous I had been a part of a sickening white-shirt/black-pant/red-bowtie group song recital that made it to the final show, where I had left the stage with a leap and a fist pump that got more applause and laughs than the entire performance, much to the surprise and embarrassment of my colleagues. Heh. Anyway, we got into our skit (being one of the writers I was also, unfortunately, one of the ‘actors’) and we lasted all of two minutes. I think it was the unpalatable juxtaposition of a cooking show with a news report on a famous (at the time) murder involving a tandoor oven that sealed our fate.
Needless to say, I didn’t write that one (or if I had, it would have been filthier).
Skits are terrible. You can do them well, but the chances of that happening at school are about zero and, well, zero. About the same amount of chance that you’ll be able to bang out a rollicking Musical Shakespearean TrageComedy Event in between exams, periodic tests, unit tests, Sports Day and private tuitions in an Indian School.
I’d pretty much forgotten about either, um, ‘art’ form, until today, when I saw Pyaar Ke Side Effects.
I’d missed it in theatres because the trailers didn’t look interesting. The teaser poster was much more promising, but the subdued nature of the TV promos made me take it off my “Watch it in a theatre” list. There were a lot of Hindi movies coming out last September, and I like to watch as many of them as I can even if they seem in the slightest bit promising, because Hindi movies are my opiate and without watching one or two every week — any movie — I get grouchy and depressed.
Now, a lot of people had to told me, “YOU MUST SEE PYAAR KE SIDE EFFECTS!” in a voice roughly approximating all caps. It seemed to be a movie that instilled the kind of wide-eyed, excited feeling that I rarely see in people who, unlike myself, aren’t movie nerds.
So yesterday when I was browsing through the racks of my DVD rental store I came across a copy with that same alluring teaser poster I had seen a year or two before. Rahul Bose is usually hit and miss for me: good in Jhankaar Beats, great in Chameli, and Mumbai Matinee looked so bad I didn’t even bother. Mallika Sherawat is not usually a memorable actress (she can, in fact, be quite terrible) and I don’t find her sexy. Still, all those enthusiastic recommendations plus the thought of seeing India’s most clearly defined mainstream Sex Symbol acting with a guy who is known for never dancing and singing on screen, being in practically every ‘Hinglish’ and Crossover movie of the past ten years, and playing rugby, piqued my curiosity enough rent the thing.
Note to self: don’t listen to anyone. Ever.
The movie is as awkward as any of those skits I saw in school, and is full of the kind of vapid, overbearing characters I avoided (and who are now, unfortunately, possibly tormenting my geek friends in America. I feel for you guys). When the protagonists aren’t acting like idiots they’re delivering punchlines to technically funny jokes as if they’re sliding dead fish under their neighbour’s porch. Granted, I’m not the target audience for this kind of movie — I have a brain and not the pretence of one — and I know enough people who would relate to this stuff (worse, they are this stuff) but that’s still no excuse for the kind of amateurish direction that runs through the production. Once in a while the cinematographer wakes up and gives us a five second shot that isn’t boring. Once in a while a line that is funny is actually delivered that way, and for those few moments you think the film might actually turn around and start behaving like, well, a movie.
Alas, we’re stuck with Rahul Bose playing the standard commitment-phobic, confused urban man he usually does, with none of aplomb of Jhankaar Beats, or the quiet sincerity of Chameli, and Mallika Sherawat, while never as bad as she was in, say, Kis Kis Ki Kismat, is never any better than just okay. It doesn’t help that her character is flat and unlikable.
Side characters come and go. Ranvir Sheorey plays the crazy roommate (because nobody has a normal roommate, of course) and does so quite well with what little he’s given. Then they go and ruin it by ramming in a clumsy attempt at a character arc towards the end. Other people play other stereotypes and are quickly forgotten or just annoying enough to make you hit fast forward.
About the only character who actually comes off as having a brain is Sophie Chowdhury, and she’s the damn item girl. When your sexpot has more sympathy than your lead, there’s trouble. This, of course, leads to the same thought I had after watching Dil Se, which is, “Oh thank God the two crazy people got together and the sane one is left alone.”
[Dil Se SPOILERS ahead]
Unfortunately, Pyaar Ke Side Effects does not end with the two protagonists blowing themselves to lovelorn smithereens by triggering a suicide bomb with their embrace.
[END SPOILERS]
In fact, it barely seems to end. Suddenly there’s an even clumsier (than everything before it) attempt at slapstick, guns and horses and a chase are cobbled together for fifteen seconds while the DOP goes off for a smoke and leaves the camera on ‘landscape’, and the credits roll while the final lines are still being spoken. They don’t even resort to the good old Hindi sitcom and school skit formula of ending on a catchphrase (the Sidey Stud’s oft-repeated “It’s not a big deal” could have been trotted out one last time, thereby summing up the whole experience nicely, just like that school skit ten years ago!).
I’ve learned a lot of things from Pyaar Ke Side Effects. Never trust the movie recommendations of Indian High School Dubai girls. My classmates could write better. Hell, half of them could act better, even Elocution Boy. Never has “Written and Directed by” meant so little. The quality of Cinematography does not increase with the amount of cleavage on screen. All those vapid kids you knew in school will go though a similar experience as the characters in the movie, and just like them they won’t actually learn something, get married and have kids anyway.
Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
Oof!
~~~~~~~~
© Vishal K. Bharadwaj, 2007, All Rights Reserved
Just back from seeing Don: The Chase Begins Again. The short version:
WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW.
Longer:
Not disappointed at all. Grinning like a kid throughout. Captures the pulpy mood of the original, heightens the realism and paradoxically also ups the fantastic elements. Farhan Akhthar, you shrewd old boy. Amitabh Bachchan was awesome in the old one, but Shah Rukh Khan in this version is utterly perfect. I can't think of another actor who would do justice to this Don like he does. Top marks to Boman Irani (as usual) and Arjun Rampal (please, can somebody 'notice' this guy — he's criminally underrated).
Superb cinematography, great music. Paced like an old Hindi flick, so it takes its time (a refreshing change from all these break-neck 2 hour rides with no plot and slick tricks). The plane sequence is worth the price of admission alone. So are Kareena Kapoor's fabulous legs. The choreography of her song is a bit frantic, but oh my god, those legs. Too bad she doesn't live long and we have to make do with Priyanka Chopra, grumblegrumble (Farhan tries to make her look sexy as she comes out of a pool wearing a swimsuit she can't even fill out, and this is the only time the director fails miserably). Meanwhile, fleeting glimpses of Isha Koppikar's arresting, sculpted Mangalorean looks (I'm biased) serve as some consolation (but don't go expecting her to go full on like in Kya Kool Hai Hum — it's a guest role, at best).
The script avoids many of the cliches of typical switched hero plots, has a bunch of nice, bloody fights and the ending…. oh, the ending! Let's just say: excellent replay value. Don't let your friends spoil it for you.
Dammit, I need to watch it again.
PS Don't tell anyone about the ending. Just. Don't. Please?
Even though I’m a pukka Bombay kid, ethnically speaking I’m from Karnataka (Mysore on my dad’s side, Mangalore on my mom’s). It is generally a well established fact that Karnataka, out of all the national and regional industries, makes the worst films in the entire country. I mean, there are so bad they’re… they’re… oh, just watch this. The lyrics are in English. Trust me, they are.
Aishwarya got tagged with this and then proceeded to tag ‘You’. “Hey,” I said, “I’m a’You’! Or am I a ‘Me’? And if she would have tagged “Me” would she have been referring to me or her?”
Anyway, after I took my medication…
3 books
- Bikini Planet by David S. Garnett
- Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg
- Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar (article), Dave Johnson et al
3 albums
- Let’s Go Classics by Takeshi Terauchi (MP3s at link)
- A Different Class by Pulp
- Xenogears: Creid by Yasunori Mitsuda and Millennial Fair
3 movies
(all of these are by Katsuhito Ishii)
3 thoughts
- I have far too many old computer mice.
- Switching the ball of the newest one with the oldest one has made the new one much smoother.
- I must recommend ball-switching for added smoothness to people, and keep a straight face while doing it
I suppose that as a graphic designer and movie buff, it must come as no surprise that I pay particular attention to film posters. Next to trailers, posters represent the overall feel of a film best. A million interviews and sneak peeks usually end up sounding the same anyway. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a thousand words paint a thousand pictures, but when you’re trying to sell a film — in essence a big, long picture — then it’s best to cut the chatter and distill it down to an image. More often than not I find myself swayed by a good poster (my views on trailers have been made clear several times), and here’s a few that caught my eye recently, for various reasons.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is a film I’d heard a lot about, yet somehow never got around to seeing, which I finally ended up doing a few months ago. It wasn’t that I was expecting something mindblowing — and it was certainly better than Corpse Bride — but it failed to make a great impression on me. This poster for the new 3D rerelease, however, impressed me because the colour palette of the image is more in tune with some of the later sequences of the film instead of the usual blue and black tones associated with the film.
It’s rare to see US film posters — even those aimed at children — which are not monotone in nature. Somewhere in the shift from the illustrated and painted posters of the 60s and 70s to the photographic ones of the 80s and 90s (and today’s photoshopped-to-death monstrosities) the posters have started to look more like the films themselves. I suppose this is good, in a way. No sense wasting a perfectly composed Robert McGinnis poster on a film that is composed mainly in gunmetal grey.
Walking into a theatre used to be fun just to look around at the pictures. Nowadays, not only do I have to contend with the blandness of multiplex design, but the somewhat intended purpose of that bland design — to act as a blank canvas for the promotional materials such as posters and standees to catch your attention — is lost due to the fact that the poster row is a landscape of sepias, cobalt blues, and pastels on white for chick flicks. There are definitely good uses of monotone (the Miami Vice posters spring to mind) but most of them are quite unremarkable.
On the other side of the pond things don’t seem to be faring much better. Here’s a bunch of posters for Eragon which, as I recall, is some kind of fantasy book written by a teenager. The book itself sounds interesting (although it does seem to suffer from High Fantasy Names syndrome, in which every character has some kind of unpronouncable name with either too many syllables or random use of the apostrope), but we aren’t discussing the book, its upcoming movie adaptation, or its pretty looking videogame, we’re talking posters (specifically, this one).
Let’s see… General green/brown cast: check. Principal players all lined up and looking menacingly at the viewer: check. Weapons drawn: check. Castles disappearing behind ominous atmospherics in the background: check. Bad photoshop on absolutely everyone: check. Oh, and then there’s the dragon, who seems to be bored and passing through like some kind of fantasy version of a jumbo jet at the corner of your holiday snaps.
Also, the perspective changes between cast, castles and dragon are quite ridiculous.
Am I going to see the movie? Yeah, sure. It has dragons (even bored ones are nice), John Malkovich, Robert Carlyle, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Irons (oh wait, he was in Dungeons & Dragons too, eeeep) and Sienna Guillory (her presence alone is enough to sway me).
Also some emo dude* and a guy named ‘Speelers’ — yeah, probably wait and see if there’s anything better that week.
*Oh, that poor boy. His name is Garrett Hedlund. If you’re Indian and multilingual, that name is hilarious. hehe.
The Eragon posters remind me of the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire posters, although some of those were quite well done — they contain all the same elements, but the composition is certainly more interesting.
Speaking of Harry Potter, Alfonso Cuarón who directed the third (and best) Potter film has a movie coming out called Children of Men. Here’s a few posters, and these are the perfect example of a muddled, inconsistent brand image. The one sheet at the top of the page is, well, boring. It looks like it could be the poster of a documentary on the birthing process, and the copy is so generic it hurts. Must be aimed at the American market, then.
Scroll down on that same page for the teaser posters, which are much better. We’ll forgive the designers their trendy Banksy homage, because the copy is interesting and the stark design seems more in tune with what the film is about.
Living in a place that is influenced by many different kinds of media cultures, I suppose I’m in a privileged position that I get to walk in to, say, Virgin Megastore and see imported design that is aimed at US, European or Asian markets, usually for the same product (eg. three different versions of the same book) and can compare. The American one, I’m sad to say, is usually the most boring. The Asian one, regardless of its origin, is usually like the American one only with looser composition, and the European one is minimalist and crazy and takes you by surprise.
Globalisation, of course, has its flipside. I’ve talked about Farhan Akthar’s remake of Don before, and here’s the teaser poster, which I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it perfectly illustrates that this ain’t your father’s Don, but on the other hand it is a lot more monotone than Hindi film posters usually are. I’ve noticed this in many of the top films this year. The fact that now nearly half or more of a film’s potential box office comes from outside India (albeit from NRIs — Non Resident Indians) as well as commerial Indian cinema’s simmering desire to make it to #1 at the US box office, is now clearly dictating the style. The films themselves are now slicker, but in aping the west they may unfortunately be adpting the bad as well as the good. Having seen the teasers for Don, one does notice a green tone to the film, but it isn’t as heavy as in the poster.
Of course, there are somethings that will always be uniquely — and terribly — Indian.
I was at IKEA yesterday looking for a knife sharpener and some clothes hangers (nearly typed ‘hangars’ there, which I’m sure IKEA will be stocking flat-pack versions of someday), and, as usual, spent two hours walking through the store, sitting on every couch, imagining myself inhabiting every show apartment (I quite liked this little two-bedroom number that was 55 sq. metres — unfortunately I can’t afford an apartment of that or any size for the forseeable future). I ended up with not only the (red) hangars and the sharpener, but a cute little milk foamer (it was less than a dollar, how could I resist?) — and I spent far too much time sniffing the chocolate-scented candles. I love going to IKEA even if I have nothing to buy. It’s a great, relaxed way to kill an hour and take in a steady, unrelenting stream of good, and often great design.
IKEA, however, has nothing like this.
Somewhat along the same lines is this concept, although its applications are much more noteworthy than a (non-functional) motorcycle-styled armchair could ever be (a functional motorcycle chair, on the other hand…). However, the concept still doesn’t make a place like Dubai any more wheelchair friendly, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Completing a trifecta of strange and new things with two wheels on them, this scooter ‘mod’ is apparently from the same person who made the rocket powered VW Beetle from a while back. I must say, this one seems a tad more exciting. Put some wings on it and I’m sold.
Why do I get the feeling I’ll be seeing one of these pelting down Sheikh Zayed Road sometime soon? (Also, does it need rustproofing?)
There’s a rumour going around that Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and my favourite, Love, Actually) may be writing Bond 22, i.e. the one after Casino Royale. It’s a bit of a straneg choice, but who knows, it might work. Curtis’s writing talents — albeit in the romantic comedy genre — are phenomenal. His dialogue and characters are always memorable, so who’s to say he won’t be able to inject something brand new into the franchise that others who have been hired with a back catalog of similar action/thriller work have not been able to. One thing’s for sure, though, with Curtis writing, the lead Bond girl has to be American, and Bond has to have five supporting friends. Also, at some point during the climax the mute supervillain will turn to Bond and sign, “Your fly is open.”
Here’s the superbly designed poster for The Prestige. Is that really Scarlett Johansson? Can’t really tell. The very modern poster is an interesting design direction to take for a film set in the Victorian Era (by contrast, the Batman Begins posters were more classical looking.
Dominic Purcell is maybe/probably/hmmm/dunno going to play Bruce Banner in the Incredible Hulk project. Cool. I haven’t seen Prison Break, but I loved Purcell’s previous TV series, the criminally overlooked (and then cancelled!) John Doe. There’s no doubt in my mind that even though he may not physically look like the meek geek steerotype of Banner, he can sure bring that kind of crazed nerd mentality to the role, and also do a good job as a template for the Hulk. Here’s hoping this is true, and they don’t end up giving it to Colin Farrell or something*.
(* Were such a choice to come up, I would gladly go with ‘Something’.)
I guess that, being the cinephile and video game junkie I am, eventually I’d have to replace the 12-year-old 21 inch TV with a widescreen HDTV (waiting for CRTs, no plasma or LCD for me) and set up a proper home cinema. When that occurs, I’d much rather plonk down for one of these Open Source-powered media PCs than any of those Windows-based machines out there. Sure, I may not be able to play some PC games, but that’s what the PlayStation 3 will be for.
Do you want to teach your kids to dance? Can’t get a decent instructor for less than the cost of a small island? Very soon, your robot vaccuum cleaner may be able to do the job.
Further to last time’s mousepads with, um, ample cushioning, here’s a pad [NSFW] that may not keep your wrist comfy, but it is for a good cause. One case of a flat chest actually being more attention-grabbing than a more rounded one.
And finally, the gift for that Resident Evil fan in your life (sorry, no trendy, up-to-the-minute Dead Rising reference here).
Some more info on the now confirmed Wes Anderson/Owen Wilson India project. It has the kickass name of Darjeeling Limited, and will be co-written by Anderson, Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola.
Dear God, multiple geekgasms.
Simon Pegg is going to star in the film version of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which, following The Devil Wears Prada, seems to be setting up a whole new genre: the Thinly Disguised Exposé by a High-Level Secretary of Life in a Major Company Under Crazy Boss chick-lit bookflick (T.D.E.H.L.S.L.M.C.U.C.B… Toodeholslemcucob? Sounds like some sort of gyroscopic Swedish sexual dysfuntion correction device). Don’t get me wrong, I’d see any movie with Pegg in it (and regarding DWP, I may have already mentioned that Anne Hathaway = drool, therefore I’m sold), but can The Dalai Lama Wears Ecko and Condi’s first bestselling ‘fiction’ book be far behind (and will it also be called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People)??
I live in a hot country. I know this fact, it doesn’t escape me, even locked up in my constantly air-conditioned home one needs only walk into the bathroom when the exhaust is off to be met by a cloud of warm, humid air. Still, for some inexplicable reason, I’d really like one of these radiators.
Here’s an old trick made new. The upshot of this is that it’s a service, which means that doing a bulk order for say, a promotional direct-mail campaign might be economical. Hmmmm (gears turn…)
This watch looks a bit impractical, and the paint job on the fascia is ugly, but hot damn do I want one. Granted, ideally it would play Pong and Space Invaders and be able to hook up with a wireless bluetooth headphone, but if you don’t mind running the wire up your sleeve it shouldn’t be a problem. I have to admit, though, that what I like most about the entire watch is the design of the time readout because it reminds me of some ’80s animated show like Pole Position. I’m so lame.
Finally, someone mates a hand-crank radio set to a cellphone charger and makes one of these things properly useful. The problem with hand-crank radios, to me, has always been their lack of a killer app for urban customers. Fine, it may be subsidised and designed to be used by poor people in the African bush and whatnot, but any device such as this should have a sustainable commercial presence to offset its more charitable arms. Also, the addition of a cellphone charger will not only help us more wired folk, it will be quite useful for some of those remote areas the older ones were intended for. Wouldn’t you like to be able to charge a satellite handset if you were stuck in the middle of nowhwere?
I remember these when they had anime characters on them, but it seems that like in videogames, every year brings about new innovations in realism.
And finally, something to go with those Levi iPod jeans you bought.
The Sin City team of Frank Miller and Robert Rodrigues are set to bring Will Eisner’s The Spirit to the screen. Miller categorically states that the film ‘won’t be nostalgic’. Great! Both directors have a penchant for highly stylised, graphic moviemaking. If they approach it like Sin City then you’re sure that Eisner’s ridiculously good panel composition will be brought over to the screen, and that the pulpy, hard-nosed style of the comic will be kept intact. If it was any other director, they’d look at all the suits and the fedoras and immediately it would be tinged with nostaliga and caricature to evoke what someone from our time would make of the period.
Who would play the Spirit, though?
Mike Mignola’s poster for Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Can we get these two to work together on everything? Please?
I’ve noticed that regular action figures in store are getting much, much worse than when I was a boy. Now I know why: they’re making all the good stuff in a separate line aimed at geek adults, and charging like crazy. Look at that Jack Sparrow — does Tussauds have a better one?
Also check out the Shaun of the Dead toys (and some spiffy steampunk ray guns). I want.
Speaking of Team Shaun (Wright, Pegg, et al), here’s a poster of their new film, Hot Fuzz.
Heath Ledger’s been confirmed as the Joker in Chris Nolan’s Batman Continues, now officially titled The Dark Knight (I wonder if they’ll chicken out and re-title it Batman: The Dark Knight later). Heath Ledger has been one of my favourite actors ever since the days of Roar. You just took one look at this guy and went, “Yeah, this is a star. More, please.” Seeing his interpretation of the Clown Prince of Crime — perhaps the first actor to come to the role with no manic/crazy/funny roles in his career so far — is going to make the ride doubly interesting. So far, barring Catwoman, DC and the Warners have been treating their core franchises well (come on, they have Joss Whedon doing Wonder Woman!). Always been a DC fan myself. Also, they have the Vertigo line, and I’d give a million spandex Marvel movies for one Fables or Swamp Thing or Transmetropolitan.
What a coincidence. I was just thinking of shopping around for a render farm. Of course, with my budget, I’d be happy to afford an Intel graphics card.
Forget goatse and tubgirl (warning: do not google the previously mentioned terms), this is the creepiest thing ever. (Safe For Work, not really disgusting, just creepy.)
This device brings up an interesting philosophical point. Is delaying the reward of the candy by placing a claw game between you and it negated by the enjoyment of the claw game? Ponder this as you waste precious pr0n time trying to grab the elusive bar of Snickers.
I have a strange feeling that these models are based on the actual 3D meshes from Ocarina of Time. Not that it would in any way take away from the sheer awesomaliciousness of the work (there, I was stuck for a word. Solved it. Welcome to the world of the speculative fiction writer, kids).
Yeah, well, you’re all still just going to end up playing Scorpion anyway.
Hyper Scan! <sarcasm> Isn’t it just the coolest thing ever! </sarcasm> When I was 8-12, we left the collectible card games to the sweaty Magic: The Gathering geeks (because anything with unnecessary usage of colons must be treated so), and kept our game consoles safe and sound so that they could process Street Fighter 2 and Shining Force in peace. Nowadays everything has some kind of collectible crap and a bad anime show attached to it.
Yet another example of why Terry Pratchett is a shining example of humanity (I’m referring here to his answer, not simply the duck on his head)
On that note, I have to announce that I have a sudden, uncontrollable urge for an overcooked, salty omelet with green chillies and bits of onion just like they make it in India. It’s 3 am. There aren’t even any eggs in the house. What’s a boy to do?
One of the disadvantages of living in a country that is obsessed with football is that during the world cup or the European cup the country pretty-much comes to a standstill entertainment-wise (the upshot being that evening traffic is much reduced). Movie releases are postponed by months because the attendance figures in cinemas drop, and that is why, much later than the rest of the world, Superman Returns only opened here this weekend.
Usually I stay away from the first weekend crowd, because they’re too noisy and irate and walk in late, still talking on the phone no less. However, this was Superman, so I decided to risk an early Thursday show*. Guess what, the fire alarm went off just as the opening Warner Bros. logo came up. Lights start flashing, alarms blaring, projection shuts down.
(*Thursday/Friday being the weekend, but many people work a half-day on Thursday so there was a good chance most of the crowd I dislike wouldn’t be there until the later shows, and I was right.)
I had to wade through mind-numbing Coca-Cola and Fair & Lovely ads for this?! Luckily, a few false starts later, the nice new DC logo came up, and it was smooth sailing from there. To be more precise, smooth flying.
I don’t think I’ve conveyed quite how much of a cultural icon Superman is to an Indian my age. When I was growing up in the eighties, Superman (the 1978 Richard Donner film) was one of the first films I had ever seen in a theatre (moving to Oman later relegated me to videoland, but that medium helped to teach me much about cinematic form and language). Every year or so the film would be back in Indian theatres, and every time it did my dad would take us to see it. At the local raddiwalla, Superman comics were priced higher than other comics, even Archie. Spider-Man was on TV, but Superman could fly. He had that fantastic, soul-stirring background music to go with it (Spider-Man had some strange 70s rock thing and a funny theme song). I had a Superman suit when I was a kid (it was black. hehehe) and still have a photo of me trying to fake a flying shot (one of my legs was hidden behind a light-coloured headboard — it was pretty convincing). I still have that suit somewhere.
No, I don’t think it fits.
A long time has passed between those days and now. A lot of comics, a lot of movies, and a lot of comic-book movies (in the nineties I would never have imagined that we’d have any comic book superhero movies any more, and the future seemed bleak and dull and populated by Schwarzenegger sweat-and-gun-a-thons), two good TV shows about the guy and a plethora of Elseworlds interpretations (of which Mark Millar’s excellent Superman: Red Son, about a man of steel who is raised in Russia instead of the USA is my favourite, and a must read).
I was a little worried that the simplicity of Superman would not be enough to entertain me anymore.
Boy, was I wrong. Bryan Singer and crew have crafted an amazing piece of film. It stays true to what has come before it and yet, just as the previous films reinvented the character and created a lot of the mythology that we consider a part of the character today, Superman Returns does away with the restictive, old-fashioned collective idea of what Superman is and gets to the heart of the character, showing for what he is: complex, straightforward and most importantly, good.
SPOILER WARNING
They also cheekily take the film in a direction that should have fans howling, but again this subplot should only really offend those who cling to the Superman-as-ascetic-Jesus-figure notion (an incorrect one, if you’ve ever read the comic). This fan, for one, is very glad that the movie goes boldly, where no official canon, retcon-fearing comic-book writer every dares (but secretly wishes) to go, and they do it subtly.
END SPOILER
The film is a very quiet one (another quality I love about the old Superman, as well as Bryan Singer’s films), and except for Kate Bosworth’s well performed, but straight and bland version of Lois Lane (who, from comic to screen to radio to TV has always been portrayed as a bit of a nut), the entire cast (especially Brandon Routh and Kevin Spacey) put in masterful performances, aided by the classic John Williams score and the new John Ottman compositions.
I’m very tempted to go see this one again to catch what I missed, because I’m sure I missed a lot when I was just grinning like a little boy.
Excuse me, I need to go find a cape.