SF mutineers, together with writer / director Manish Acharya imbibed the Loins of Punjab last night as part of the SF South Asian film festival. Two word summary – it rocked.

Two word summary – it rocked.A crowd numbering several hundred packed the Castro theater in San Francisco for the laugh out loud ride and presented Acharya with a standing ovation and even a little bit of spontaneous singing (“Bole chudiyan… bole kangana…“) for his work. Although, as expected, Desi’s dominated the audience, the movie really resonated with the surprising gora / gori representation and the hispanic lesbian couple I was seated next to laughed most of the time as well. Still, much of the appeal of the genre comes from being in on the joke and the real magic is best experienced if you’re ABCD and perhaps even moreso if you’ve spent time in New Jersey.

Nevertheless, Loins is, by a wide margin, my new title holder for “Best ABCD Comedy.” My previous candidate was the (panned by many) Where’s the Party, Yaar about a group of desi college students in Houston. Both movies transcend the usual “cultural idenity” story line and instead solidly demonstrate a new, hybrid culture that’s neither here nor there but nevertheless confident about where it is and where it’s going. American and desi stereotypes blend fluidly and we’re far from feeling sorry for the folks with one foot on either side.

A Universe of Patels

Probably owing to the respective backgrounds of the film makers, WTPY is a bit more “American” in its character portrayals while Loins was far more Desi. Although both Manish Acharya and Benny Mathews of WTPY are 1.5 gen, Benny undoubtedly got most of his material from the Music Masala parties aimed at Houston’s desi young adults – hence, a more overt “hormones gone wild” and, unfortunately a generally less flattering FOB portrayal. By contrast, Loins of Punjab brings in a much broader audience of heroes and heroines sporting both ABD and DBD colors.

Loins, however, is yards ahead of Where’s the Party in the quality of its writing, execution, fit, and finish. Some critics weren’t impressed by the “gimmicky” humor but, as an audience commentor noted, Manish does a fantastic job of making old punchlines fresh and unexpected. I know we’ve seen the hero’s significant other defect and return a million times before… But, in Loins it’s so well executed that even a sophisticated, and sometimes cynical audience in a place like SF was still taken by surprise.

WTPY: ABCDs, FOBs, Boys, Girls, and a Party

The casting was superb and, as Acharya emphasized in Q&A after the flick, character development is the backbone of the movie. Their quirks and interactions had me solidly entertained for its hour and a half duration and I can honestly say that I wish the movie overall was longer. The title leads one to expect more story / character development around the Loin King, for example – a promising angle but one which is unexplored. Jameel Khan’s sleazy event producer made the most of his on-screen time and yet, I still wanted more. Ajay Naidu’s Turbantorious BDG was so well done I had a hard time believing it was really him dancing, rapping and shooting off angrier-than-thou lines. Still, going further down all these avenues while keeping within acceptable bounds for movie length would probably have been impossible and I’m forced to credit Acharya for his restraint.

It is critical to note that while poking fun at character and ethnic quirks (the individual Guju family members captured the panoply of stereotypes so well it’s scary), the comedy was ultimately good natured and uplifting. Yes, we’re often laughing at them but we also all recognize that the world would be a worse place without them. Acharya firmly believes & demonstrates that there are many paths to being a movie hero. And when the foundation for your story is a diaspora as diverse as India and America, it’s a fitting moral.

Straight Outta Da Pindh

Good news for mutineers in other cities – Acharya says that Loins is aiming for limited release in the US in March 2008.

After the movie, a dozen mutineers & I tried to converge on Samovar Tea Lounge for a mini-meetup…. However, the venue turned out to be far more of a restaurant than an alternative to Starbucks and menu’s + white-linen table service tends to be pretty antithetical to the flow of a meetup. So, we ended up rerouting ourselves across the street to Urban Bread for coffee and pastries. Consensus at the table was strongly positive and with many surprised by the negative reaction other mutineers seemed to have to the flick. To each his own, I suppose.

[related – Manish Vij’s Loins of Punjab review & link compendium]

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Bollywood film Om Shanti Om brought in about $1.8 million at the U.S. box office over the weekend, which puts it at a respectable #11 on the U.S. chart (on only 114 screens). It’s certainly the highest U.S. opening for a Bollywood film I’ve seen in recent years; it may be the highest ever (anyone know for sure?). The film also did very well in India and other markets, coming in ahead of the Tom Cruise war flick, Lions for Lambs, internationally.

Serious cinephiles (and some not-so-serious ones) have reviewed the film and dissected its merits and flaws. But the director, Farah Khan, has essentially credited the film’s success to one thing — Shah Rukh Khan’s exposed torso:

“The entire credit for the film’s success goes to Shah Rukh,” director Farah Khan told Reuters over phone on Sunday. “He is the film’s main attraction and the shirtless song is definitely one of the main reasons for the film’s hit. It is the scene to watch out for.” The bare-chested act by the 42-year-old actor who underwent rigorous training sessions to develop a six-pack, has helped the song “Dard-E-Disco” reach the top of the charts across television channels and FM radio stations. (link)

See the following hard-hitting report from Star News, for a more behind-the-scenes look at Shah Rukh’s abs:

The segment opens in Hindi, but after about 30 seconds there are English subtitles. It’s worth staying at least until Shah Rukh makes that comment about his cleavage (!); there’s also a sneaky little insinuation about Karan Johar there at the end. Continue reading →

Once upon a time, in a land called “college”, I dated a wealthy white boy from Arizona. He was a nice boy, with nice parents who rushed to embrace and accept me. I was young and eager to be embraced. Trouble was, his mom had an odd way of tacking on an explanation (sometimes sotto voce, sometimes not) to anything “cultural” whenever she addressed me. Implicit in every conversation was the assumption that they would refine me, expose me to the better things in life, elevate me somehow. I shrugged it off time and again until the weight of all that well-intentioned condescension finally felt too crushing: for god’s sake, high art to this family meant Monet’s fucking Water Lillies!! They spent gobs of money on interior designer who made them buy a pool table swathed in beige felt!

I would stand there in my thrift or Army-Navy surplus wear and thrill at the fact that I was secretly turning up my unrefined nose at them, a giant thought-balloon screaming “TACKY!!” rising above my head. I didn’t say anything because it was all so deliciously meta. Also? I was a chicken-shit people-pleaser.

So, anyway, it’s been a great many years since I dumped the guy, but seeing Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited brought on some strange flashbacks.

I’m a sucker for cinematography. Great art direction and visual flair can supplant character development, direction, or even plot, as far as I’m concerned. So naturally, I’ve been a rather ardent Wes Anderson fan. His stilted little diorama-like movies were fine by me. I accepted his narcissistic, self-involved characters because I was watching Anderson’s carefully constructed little world, and if the darker/foreign people were always a little goofy, and not really treated all that well by the main characters, well, that’s alright, right? His world, his prerogative, and all that. Besides, the soundtracks were so great! Continue reading →

The following two paragraphs from A.O. Scott encapsulate pretty well why I’m not rushing out to see The Darjeeling Limited:

“The Darjeeling Limited” amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.

But humanism lies either beyond his grasp or outside the range of his interests. His stated debt to “The River,” Jean Renoir’s film about Indian village life, and his use of music from the films of Satyajit Ray represent both an earnest tribute to those filmmakers and an admission of his own limitations. They were great directors because they extended the capacity of the art form to comprehend the world that exists. He is an intriguing and amusing director because he tirelessly elaborates on a world of his own making. (link)

Are people planning to stand in line for this one? I’m not; after four quirky films (and one amusing AmEx commercial), I’m bored of Wes Anderson’s whole approach to filmmaking, which I call “quirky for quirky’s sake.” It’s not that quirky is always bad; I found Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, for instance, pretty compelling — and that was a damn quirky film. But I often feel like Wes Anderson’s approach to filmmaking is to simply think, “wouldn’t it be funny if the old Indian manservant stabbed Bill Murray with a pen-knife at this point?” And then do it, just for the excitement that comes with absurdity.

And as much as I was intrigued by Anderson’s use of Waris Ahluwalia in The Life Aquatic (he’s credited in Darjeeling Limited as well), the non-speaking part in that film made the striking Ahluwalia into a sort of exotic turbaned curiosity. Ahluwalia’s role in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, though brief, was much more provocative and engaging. Even if audiences didn’t sympathize with Ahluwalia’s character as much as one would have liked, at least that role led to a meaningful reaction.

Incidentally, there is another travel film with India as a destination coming out. Though from the review, Outsourced does seem to flirt a bit with cliches, I’m much more interested in it than I am in Darjeeling at present. Continue reading →

Gabbar Singh: You have a lot of strength left in your arms, don’t you? Remember what you said to me that day? ‘These aren’t arms, they’re your noose’. Look at you now, the noose has opened! You still have alot of strength in your arms, don’t you? Give me your arms, Thakur.

Gabbar Singh: How do you plan to fight me Thakur? I’ve long cut off, and discarded, your arms.
Thakur Baldev Singh: One uses their feet to crush a snake Gabbar, not the hands. [imdb]

The highest grossing Bollywood film ever, and still one of the best, is the 1975 film Sholay. [Film synopsis.]

As a boy, my favorite part of the film was the (original) ending, where Thakur Baldev Singh confronts his nemesis, the dacoit Gabbar Singh. The Thakur has no arms, Gabbar Singh having cut them earlier, but he still manages to fight and kill Gabbar Singh using just his feet.

It’s perfect bolly. The scene rings true emotionally, but makes little sense as a fight. I mean, who could believe a man with no arms could defeat somebody who was built like Amjad Khan? Clearly I was overly skeptical:

Snelville, Georgia police are investigating whether William Russell Redfern, who has no arms, may have caused the death of his neighbor after head-butting and kicking him in a fight.

… Elliot said the armless man attacked her brother. “They got into a big confrontation, a verbal confrontation and a fist fight and he came after my brother, he came with full force, and head butted him as hard as he could,” said Elliot. [Link, via 3V]

OK, head butting somebody until they have a heart attack lacks the potent symbolism of killing them by “trampling him with spike-soled shoes” but it seems that the movie was more “realistic” than I had thought.

Film clips of the fight on the other side of the fold.

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As brown people we constantly urge greater authenticity in fiction films about brownistan. But authenticity comes at a price, as the producers of The Kite Runner movie have found out as some people are alleging that it may endanger the life of one of the main actors in the film. [SPOILER ALERT]

The novel The Kite Runner was written by an Afghani-American from Fremont about two boys growing up in Kabul: a wealthier child (the protagonist) and his servant who is also his best friend.

The producers of the movie went out of their way to try to make the movie as authentic as possible. They filmed in nearby Kashgar (in China, for security reasons), filmed in the vernacular, and they tried to use mainly local kids.

The problem comes because a critical scene in the novel involves a rape, in particular the rape of the protagonist’s best friend. This made the father of the actor playing the best friend uneasy:

“When I told them I would not let Ahmad Khan take part in this film, they said: ‘We won’t film that scene’,” … [the father] says. [Link]

However, what the producers did was to shoot the scene without showing very much:

Because this key scene was filmed in a non-explicit way, it seems that at the time Ahmad’s father did not even realise it had happened. I called up one of The Kite Runner’s producers, Rebecca Yeldham, in Los Angeles… “The scene contains no nudity. It’s rendered in a very sort of impressionistic way. But it’s also important in being faithful to that story – that there’s no confusions that the attack in the alley that took place on that child was a sexual violation…” [Link]

This past weekend I ended up seeing the Jodie Foster movie, The Brave One, which co-stars Naveen Andrews of Lost fame. Was the movie any good? Well no, not really, but that is what you get when you ignore the all-powerful tomato meter. The synopsis of the flick is as follows:

For Erica Bain (Jodie Foster), the streets of New York are both her home and her livelihood. She shares the sounds and the stories of her beloved city with her radio audience as the host of the show “Street Walk.” At night, she goes home to the love of her life, her fiancé David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews). But everything Erica knows and loves is ripped from her on one terrible night when she and David are ambushed in a random, vicious attack that leaves David dead and Erica close to it.

Though Erica’s broken body heals, deeper wounds remain–the devastation of losing David and, even more overwhelming, a suffocating fear that haunts her every step. The city streets she had once loved to roam, even places that had been warm and familiar, now feel strange and threatening.

When the fear finally becomes too much to bear, Erica makes a fateful decision to arm herself against it. The gun in her hand becomes a tangible way to protect herself from an intangible enemy…or so she thinks. [Link]

As a couple, Foster and Andrews have zero chemistry. The one brief “sex scene” between them actually made me want to vomit (for reasons that are all too obvious if you watch the film). Still, my companion to the film noted that Andrews’ character was not exoticized in any way. The fact that he was desi was barely even acknowledged in the film. In fact, the only two references I caught included one quip about his mother worrying about the wedding invitations and a “Mughal” ring which served as an engagement ring and was pertinent to the plot of the story. So, even though the movie kind of sucked, I found it really refreshing that a desi actor was cast to play a character that was not required to “act Indian.” Unless you count the fact that he plays a doctor.

There is one other little coincidence (planned??) worthy of pointing out. The soundtrack to The Brave One features the luscious voice of Sarah McLaughlin at various points throughout the movie. She is married to a brown dude too. I’m just saying.

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