The author of that excellent Spiderman review was recognized for his talent in March. We’re slow over on this side of the pond:
Writer and journalist Sukhdev Sandhu won best critic at the British Press Awards… Currently the chief film critic for the Daily Telegraph, Sukhdev (pictured) also writes for the London Review of Books and Modern Painters… Sukhdev was educated at Oxford and has taught at New York University… He told AiM he was “a bit embarassed” about the award, as there were “tons of more deserving writers” than him.“I wish there were more British Asian films I could rave about. They’ll come in time, I’m sure,” he added…
Don’t we all, Mr. Sandhu, don’t we all. Here’s a great passage from his review of the Indian Spiderman comic in New York magazine:
… people used to scoff at Japanese anime. Aside from the absurdity of being a purist about one of pop culture’s most pleasingly bastard and vulgar forms, those carpers, if they’re to be consistent, should bemoan the popularity of Indian religious iconography and henna motifs among Western fashionistas. Cultural exchange is a two-way process…Hindi cinema has a long history of borrowing and adapting from Western sources, be they Busby Berkeley dance routines in the thirties, Chaplin-like heroes in the common-man social epics of the fifties, or Dirty Harry, a major influence on the wildly popular revenger tragedies of superstar Amitabh Bachchan… Hollywood animation companies have begun to outsource creative work to the subcontinent, where they can rely on a steady pool of ex-street painters whose former livelihoods waned because of crackdowns in illegal advertising and the rise of photography in film posters…
Sandhu’s the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. You couldn’t find a more recursive book topic, nor a more politically correct one 😉
Abhi’s previous post here.
Bah. I scoff at the Indian spiderman comic. What a bunch of BS that was. I agree with Fadereau (he of the CSF desimediabitch blog) that this whole business is rotten. Comic books as an art and entertainment form need to go beyond replicating american characters. And of course Mr. Sandhu is right about the cultural process being two way. This “fusion” bullshit doesn’t work.
Everything arose out of ‘fusion.’ All revolutionary innovation happens at the crossroads. Everything classical today was ‘fusion’ many years ago. The key issues are:
Does this particular merger work well?
and
Is this accurately marketed as fusion, or is it being passed off as classical?
Right. I don’t mind the actual act of merging something, everything comes from somewhere else, and nothing is original etc. I just don’t like it when its being passed off as original. To give you a completely weird example, I like Tarantino’s movies, even though I know he pretty much copies off from every director and movie he’s seen from all over the continent. I mean the first script he sold (true romance) was a straight up copy of Terence Malick’s badlands, and so was Natural Born Killers. Reservoir Dogs is copied from John Woo’s City on Fire. But Tarantino, slowly and surely (KIll BILL) has developed a style of his own that while being influenced is now so alienated from them that its taken on a meaning and being of its own. Obscure ref. to the book simulacra and simulation. But I don’t see anything “original” or appealing when rappers sample Indian songs or Ganesha or Krishna on Thongs and Slippers. Or when Amitabha bacchan poses for a poster that clearly resembles the one from “Collateral” and its still somehow “original” and different and NEW bollywood that’s going to amazing heights.