The Aristocrats is a new documentary about a hoary inside joke in the informal guild of American stand-up comics. The joke, a fraternity-like test of wit and manhood, involves improvising as many deeply sick events you can imagine within the framework of a simple story. Most comics tell the joke only to other comedians. They often begin with incest and pedophilia, delve into scatology and bestiality and finish with a chaser of sadism and necrophilia. This joke doesn’t play in Peoria. The most fun thing about the movie is seeing George Carlin, Robin Williams, Drew Carey and Jason Alexander together on the same reel.

The documentary shows a female comedian doing a throwaway joke about desis. It goes something like this: ‘Maybe we could bring in an Indian guy. The slurpee kind, not the casino kind. He could sprinkle curry all over everyone, make them stink.’ The joke, which takes much more racist digs at blacks and Latinos, is purposely illustrating offensive comedy. The comedian is pointing out that for shock value, race is the new sex.

You’d think the racism joke would be the least memorable thing about a movie which catalogues all the variants of a deeply repellent story. But it was actually the only one in the entire movie that stood out to me as mean-spirited. It proved its point exactly: sex and cartoon violence don’t hold a candle to what happens in real life.

Update: Watch the trailer. Here’s a very filthy, NSFW South Park version of the joke (thanks, Project37). Don’t watch it unless you have a strong stomach.

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Happy Independence Day, y’all.

(Manish says he planning to do a full review of Mangal Pandey: The Rising soon, so this is a post on just one aspect of the film, not a general review.)

The English actors speak quite a bit of Hindi in Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and they do it more fluidly and correctly than I’ve seen in any other Hindi film. There’s more here than in Lagaan, certainly, and more also than in the recent flop film Kisna (which was a breakthrough for Bollywood in some ways despite failing as a film; my review here). So I give props to Toby Stephens especially for putting in the extra hours to try and get it right. Props also to the director Ketan Mehta for not simply copping out of the language issue with the usual solution, namely, reducing white actors’ roles to an absolute minimum. (Most of the time, white actors in Hindi period films speak only the kind of functional, imperative voice Hindi a Sahib might use with a servant: “darvaaza khul!”.)

The issue of Toby Stephens’ use of Hindi relates to my earlier SM post on language vs. race in Hindi films. If audiences accept the Toby Stephens character in this movie, it might challenge my claim that badly accented or phonetically incorrect Hindi is unacceptable to mainstream audiences. He’s on screen a lot, and many of his lines go well beyond the usual “Baar aa jao!” type of fare. Stephens has to convey quieter emotions — tenderness, ambivalence, regret — a tall order even in one’s first language. I personally thought Stephens’ Hindi was ok: phonetically correct and generally intelligible, though not all of the time. More importantly, he’s not emotionally convincing in Hindi some of the time. (And as an ABCD, I’m possibly being overly gentle on this score.)

So I have my doubts about whether The Rising really pulls it off; many of the people in the audience where I saw the film (in New Jersey) were tittering when Toby Stephens first started speaking. They eventually stopped, but I’m not at all convinced it was the silence of satisfaction.

(The film might fail for other reasons too, but we’ll save that for another discussion…) Continue reading →

The NYT smiles upon Mangal Pandey: The Rising:

“Mangal Pandey: The Rising” … [has] important messages about global trade, corruption and martyrdom… the film takes you somewhere, teaches you something and inspires smiles in a way that few retellings of the anti-imperialist revolts of 19th-century India ever have before…

The crux of the epic is Mangal’s on-again, off-again alliance with a Glaswegian military officer who is in the employ of the East India Company… They both comprehend the fraud that the mercantile class perpetrates, and they both abhor the bigoted ugliness embodied in one British soldier who indulges in prostitutes and lies about it in polite company, who uses the power he has over servants to unleash some deep-seated cruelty…

At times, the racial hatred seems rabid and cartoonish, the political discussions of the opium trade become preachy, and the romance feels more like a cause for dance-offs… But the movie meets its grand incongruous aims with the exaggerated smiles and scowls of two gifted principal actors.

The camera drinks in gorgeous landscapes and trawls through high-end bordellos… [Pandey’s] biography is the basis for this spectacle of splash and meaning… “Mangal Pandey” proves that warfare mixed with winking sexpots can be a bloody good show. [Link]

I enjoyed the movie, will post a review later. The Friday late show in Times Square was completely sold out. Lines of dejected buskers tried to buy spare tickets off showgoers. The last time I saw that was with Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, and never before in Manhattan.

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Do I even need to say it? Mangal Pandey / The Rising, the film about our namesake rebellion, comes out in the U.S. today. It stars Aamir Khan, Toby Stephens, Rani Mukherjee and Amisha Patel. A.R. Rahman did the music, Ketan Mehta (the director of Mirch Masala) directs this story. Watch the trailer and do your mutinous best

In 1857 Mangal Pandey (Khan) is a sepoy, an Indian serving under the command of Britain’s East India Company, which by then had controlled the subcontinent for a century with its own laws, military and government. Mangal’s a close friend of the sensitive British captain William Gordon (Stephens), but the introduction of a new gun cartridge drives a wedge between them. Greased with cow and pig fat, it’s deeply offensive to both Hindus and Muslims. And a small standoff develops into a full-scale indigent rebellion. [Link]

It’s the McDonald’s beefy french fries scandal writ large!

Gordon’s character has been written with great care, so as to present a saner side to the British who would all otherwise fall into the stereotypical category of moustache-twirling villains. [Link]

Check U.S. showtimes here. American prints are usually subtitled.

Here are photos from the premiere in Bombay. Here’s the movie’s official site.

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Everybody knows the James Bond theme music, right? Well, did you know that the tune was originally written for a musical based on a VS Naipaul story?

Norman first wrote the classic tune … for a musical version of VS Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr Biswas. After he was hired to provide music for the first Bond film, Dr No, he reworked the song as a theme tune. [BBC]

The tune was then given its distinctive, big band orchestration by composer James Barry. Monty Norman (the composer of the original tune) is now going to record it, with its original lyrics intact. The song was called “Good Sign, Bad Sign” and the lyrics are as follows:

I was born with this unlucky sneeze

And what is worse I came into the world the wrong way round

Pundits all agree I am the reason why

My father fell into the village pond and drowned. [BBC]

Kinda bollywood actually …

p.s. am I the only one who finds the idea of a VS Naipaul musical in 1961 (?) really bizarre? Continue reading →

Quizman sends us the following message over our tipline:

[Here is an] Article on Aamir Khan and The Rising. How can The Sepoy(ia) mutiny refuse to carry it? 🙂

How indeed?

Circa 1857. A wounded soldier arrives at a doctor’s clinic after a skirmish with his British superior. The sepoy has challenged his senior’s order to shoot opium farmers who were agitating against the English East India Company’s monopoly. As he is being treated, the sepoy meets a courtesan, Heera, played by Rani Mukherjee. While the woman admires this young sepoy for his bravery, he snubs her. Heera shoots back: “Sepoy saheb, we prostitutes sell our bodies, but you sell your souls.”

The courtesan’s words stir the sepoy’s conscience. And Mangal Pandey turns a rebel. It eventually leads to a chain reaction which triggers off the first war of Independence in 1857, described by the British as the Sepoy Mutiny.

Director Ketan Mehta is bringing alive on an epic scale the story of Mangal Pandey, the sepoy of the 5th company, 34th Native Infantry Regiment, Barrackpore. And who better to play the rebel who roused society to challenge imperialism than a rebel himself.

“He is one of the few actors who stand by their convictions,” said Ketan, who hails Aamir Khan’s portrayal of Mangal Pandey as his finest ever. “A revolutionary and a rebel in his own way, Aamir is a contemporary Mangal Pandey in many ways. Only he would have given everything to a venture of this magnitude.”

Mangal P. even has a profile up on MySpace MSN Spaces complete with a blog.  If Kal Penn can do it why not Aamir Khan? Continue reading →

Writer, director, actor, and comedian Albert Brooks is working on a new film set to be released next year (tip from Srinath).  IMDB has only the most basic details about it (including cast), but Ain’t it Cool News has more (with spoiler warnings):

Okay, so I went to a screening in Pasadena of the new Albert Brooks film. I love this guy’s movies, but I wasn’t crazy about The Muse (I’m with Moriarty on that one). However here’s the truly excellent news: The Albert Brooks I know and love is in fact back!

The title is indeed: Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World and the premise is essentially the title. Albert Brooks, playing himself again – brilliant! (For any of you who haven’t seen Real Life, first, you’re lame. Second, run, don’t walk). So he gets called up by the powers that be, i.e. real life ex-Senator, and current day Law & Order cast member, Fred Dalton Thompson – who too is playing himself, to go to India and Pakistan and find out what makes the Muslims laugh. This is a late in the game attempt by the government to try something other than the “usual methods of spying and fighting” to figure out what the hell is going on on that side of the world.

Mr. Brooks appears somewhat incredulous. He even stops the meeting to point out that India is largely Hindu, not Muslim. To which the one of the suits responds that there are 150 million Muslims in India, and Fred Thomson says, “Is that enough for ya?” Hilarious.

DANGER DANGER SPOILER AHEAD!!!

So much happens once he’s in India, but so much doesn’t too, I mean this is really the brilliance of the movie, but let me save that for a minute. Albert spends the whole movie asking people what they think is funny and never gets any real answers. It turns out that Muslims (and Hindus) are pretty much like Americans; their sense of humor is completely idiosyncratic and doesn’t tell you jack shit about what the country as a whole might consider funny.

I can understand this last point.  Only a few people find funny the things I do.  I’d love to hear some stories of jokes that didn’t go over so well due to cultural differences from our readers.  There is more to the review above in case you aren’t too worried about spoilers.  Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is set for wide release in January 2006.  Let’s hope that for Brooks sake it doesn’t inspire any Van Gogh type critical reviews.

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