A whole bunch of stuff going on in the world of movies. Some we’ve missed; some yet to come:
- Amitabh Bachchan — Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the actor by screening 12 of his films (estimated total running time: 3683 hours). The undisputed king of Bollywood also appears in person on April 15 to talk about his long and storied career (estimated total running time: 3683 hours). (via BBC News)
- “Mughal-E-Azam” — Bollywood’s biggest film of all time is restored, colorized, re-recorded, and possibly molested (I mean, c’mon, they’ve done just about everything else to it). Film purists aren’t crying foul though. The production company behind the colorization says it was merely completing the unfulfilled dream of its creator. Playing in theaters now.
- “Continuous
Journey” — Ali Kazimi’s film won the Best
Documentary Feature Audience Award at the 23rd San Francisco International
Asian American Film Festival. It documents a period when Canadians weren’t
as nice as they are today:
Continuous Journey is an inquiry into the largely ignored history of Canada’s exclusion of the South Asians by a little known immigration policy called the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908. Unlike the Chinese and the Japanese, people from British India were excluded by a regulation that appeared fair, but in reality, was an effective way of keeping people from India out of Canada until 1948. As a direct result, only a half-mile from Canadian shores, the Komagata Maru was surrounded by immigration boats and the passengers were held in communicado virtual prisoners on the ship. Thus began a dramatic stand-off which would escalate over the course of two months, becoming one of the most infamous incidents in Canadian history. [Continuous Journey]
- “Morning Raga” — In
their own words:
Morning Raga is about the meeting of worlds. It is a story that brings the modern and traditional together, unites the past with present, Carnatic music with Western music, the comic with the tragic, fate and coincidence with individual choices. It is a story of our times where our worlds are interacting with each other. [Morning Raga]
Even tougher to figure out is where it’s playing. As far as we can tell, it’s slowly popping up in theaters around the country. - “Bomb the System” — The title screams, “movie about the digestive consequences of a bad batch of pani puri.” The official web site says, “first feature in over 20 years to delve into the world of graffiti art.” Let’s hope they read this, and find some way to combine the two. The film (Exec: Kanwal Rekhi, Prods: Ben Rekhi, Smriti Mundhra) opens in L.A. and N.Y. on April 22. (thanks, Abhijay Prakash)
- Kal
Penn — Yahoo! Movies hosts production stills from the actor’s new
flick, “A Lot Like Love.” Gawker, a Manhattan gossip blog, published
this Penn-sighting
from one of their readers:
on the afternoon of sunday the 3rd, i saw kal penn (from the new superman sequel, the lead role in the movie adaptation of jhumpa lahiri’s bestselling book “the namesake” and the role of kumar in “harold and kumar go to white castle”) at whole foods in Columbus circle. he was wearing a knit wool cap, a black fleece patagonia jacket and a vest over the fleece. was it really that cold? he noticed me squinting at him, so i asked him, “what’s your name?” he replied, “kal.” i then asked him, “were you in a movie?” he said, “yes.” then, i asked him if the movie had been “harold and kumar go to white castle.” he replied in the affirmative and asked me if i had seen it. i replied honestly that i had not. He seemed to be annoyed and bewildered at the same time by my answer. i guess his annoyance was compunded by the fact that i am asian and the movie i asked about was supposed to be the movie that proved asians could produce a mainstream hit. well, it bombed at the box office. at least he has now gotten those two nice roles that i just mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. [Gawker]
