I really want him to succeed. Really, I do. But if I hear one more movie commercial/trailer that starts with, “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan,” I may just throw in the towel on the whole affair.
Category Archives: Film
Barrymore goes to Bollywood
The floodgates are opening and more Hollywooders are going slumdogging:
The Lifestyle is a Bollywood movie that will be managed by an Indian production house and produced by first-time writer and director Santosh Kumar Jain. “I really liked her performance in Charlie’s Angels and decided to cast her in my film. Fortunately, she liked the script and agreed instantly,” director Santosh Kumar Jain told the Times of India.
The Lifestyle will talk about three women who are all trying to find their identity. “The film is about three women from different walks of life, trying to assert their identities. Drew plays the role of a foreigner in the film. The other two will be top Indian actresses. The river Ganga is in the backdrop throughout the flick,” Santosh Kumar Jain added.
The flick is set to start shooting in November and will probably only hit theaters in 2012. The Lifestyle’s cast and crew will travel to Haridwar and Benaras, but will mainly work in the U.S. So who will be the lucky B-town artists who will get to work with the popular Hollywood star? [Link]
I still can’t decide. Is there really a profit motive/viable business model here or is this just a novelty such that some of these Hollywooders can have a chance to put on nice Indian clothes? Someone convince me it’s the former.
King Khan Comes to Times Square
We get a lot of press releases here in the bunker. Sometimes one comes along advertising an event that looks like too much fun to pass up.
That’s how I felt when I heard that Madame Tussauds New York would be unveiling of their newest addition- a life-sized statue of Shah Rukh Khan. So last Thursday I headed to the museum’s Bollywood Zone to see the statue for myself.
As costumed dancers from Bollywood Axion performed to a medley of songs from Om Shanti Om, photographers quickly snapped photos and fans patiently waited for the area to be opened to the public. According to Rosemary del Prado, the museum’s director of marketing, Khan’s fans are the reason Madame Tussauds commissioned the statue. “Visitors just started to ask right after the Bollywood Zone opened last year,” she said. While the museum doesn’t keep track of how many tourists from South Asia visit each year, they do know that half of all museum guests are international tourists.
Some more fun facts about the statue: It takes about 3-4 months to create a figure after the celebrity has a sitting. All of the hair is individually inserted, and the eyes are created using silk thread. Shah Rukh Khan is the second Bollywood star to be displayed at the New York Museum. He joins Amitabh Bachchan.
Of course, none of these facts would matter if the statue didn’t look like Khan. I thought it looked quite realistic and the fans I spoke to agreed. “I think it looks really nice. It looks better than the one in the UK,” said Sanchari Ghosh, a 16-year-old fan from New Jersey.
Her brother Saurabh Ghosh, 18, agreed. “I think that Madame Tussaud would be proud,” he said.
Do you agree? And what other celebrities would you like to see at the Madame Tussauds Bollywood Zone? Continue reading
Innoru pazham
A quick post in which we celebrate Kavundamani and Senthil, fixtures in the storied comedy track of Tamil cinema. Actually this is just an excuse for me to share my favorite routine. For a more in depth look at these guys’ comedy and their caste implications, check out “On Castes and Comedians: the language of power in recent Tamil Cinema” by K Ravi Srinivas and Sundar Kaali in Ashish Nandy’s 1999 book, The Secret Politics of our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema. Excerpt:
Especially noteworth is the dominant mode of comedy over the past several years which comprises two comedians, one of whom is in a dominant position and the other subservient (these are usually played by two well-known comedians in Tamil cinema, Kavundamani and Senthil, though there are exceptions). The dominant one constantly bullies, exercises authority over, and is scornful towards the physical appearance and personality of the subservient one. The latter is clever at dodging this direct and indirect violence, and eventually succeeds in outwitting the former. Though this is nothing new in terms of structure and is well represented in a variety of comedy traditions, ranging from circus clowning to the Laurel and Hardy films, its caste implications are particularly strong in Tamil cinema and this adds a different dimension to the basic structure of comedy.
Anyhoo, here’s the clip, from the 1989 film, Karagaattakkaaran (translation after the jump):
Bollywood x Hollywood: Horror Edition
This isn’t your grandmother’s Nagin movie–this is “Hisss,” the Split Image Production directed by American Jennifer Lynch, daughter of the famous David Lynch. The story of the Nagin is a classic in Bollywood, and has been portrayed in film and television for decades, even by such high-brow names as Sridevi, Vyjayanthimala, and Rekha. Most often the tale follows the basic plot of somebody angering the mythic Cobra goddess by killing/capturing her husband-snake and thus she exacts her supernatural vendetta on said human. And of course, in true Bollywood style, there are a plethora of songs, some of which have become quite infamous. This formula for a Nagin movie may have been popular in India several decades ago, but for a movie to be successful in today’s India, much less in front of an American audience, a Nagin story would need a major re-telling.
If you can get past the cringe-inducing title, there seems to be quite a lot this film has to offer that many recent Bollywood/Hollywood crossovers failed at. In fact, while some may claim that the two cinemas are a perfect match, the epic flop of Hrithik Roshan’s recent movie, “Kites,” would show that it may be simply impossible to perfectly please both audiences. And now where superstars Rai and Roshan have left off, the sex symbol Mallika Sherawat steps in, along with the great Irrfan Khan, who, coming hot off a role in Slumdog Millionaire, is back on the world stage to play co-star to Sherawat. Continue reading
On Amitava’s “Nobody Does the Right Thing.” (and bye for now from Amardeep)
“Write what you know” is one of those creative writing class truisms that actually happens to be true, if our goal is to tell a realistic story about a society at a given moment in time. Writers want people to believe that the kinds of fictional lives they’re asking them to live with and care about for a few hours, as they read, are actually plausible. Chances are, what makes a story seem plausible is the fact that it is based, even if only partially, on the truth.
But “write what you know” is also much, much harder than it might seem. At times, it can even feel like a chain around your neck — though that doesn’t mean you can just walk away from it. In his new novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing, Amitava Kumar acknowledges the problem directly in what might be my favorite line of the book: “If you could tell just any story you wanted, no demands ever needed to be made on your honesty.” [Another favorite line: “Bihari society was conservative; it was also corrupt, hollow to its core; you put a finger on its thin, distended skin and it split under your touch, revealing white worms”]
For Amitava Kumar, who was born and raised in Patna, in the Indian state of Bihar, it’s Bihar that encapsulates the memories and history that are what the author “knows,” and what he returns to (always slightly differently), in book after book. “Honesty” and “Bihar” live in the same site for Amitava, and yet the content of that Honesty — the Truth one seeks to represent — remains stubbornly elusive. Kumar’s recently-published novel Nobody Does the Right Thing, which was first published as Home Products in India in 2007, continues to develop this theme. It’s a terrific novel, which I think will be challenging to many readers in the Indian subcontinent as well as the West, but many of the elements that make it challenging are also what make it great. Continue reading
M.I.A.: Mommy In Affluence
Oh M.I.A…. How we loved you at The Mutiny when you first came out, hustlin’ like a brown around town. Only five years later…. how far you’ve fallen. (h/t Ateqah)
MIA — Paper Planes Brentwood Redux – watch more funny videos
This video was hilarious while being oddly depressing. It echoes with truths. The actress in it is Lindy Jamil Gomez, a Spanish-Lebanese comedian out of N.Y.C. I hope she’s prepared to get a sternly worded tweet from M.I.A.’s wrath. M.I.A., I still love you tho! I’ll keep buyin’ your music! Um, unless I can get it online for free….you know…! Continue reading
Not All Indian Émigrés Are Engineers
[Originally published in The Caravan under the title “A Normal Man in a Not So Normal World.” Photos by Preston Merchant.]
On a warm July morning, I boarded the London Tube to Boston Manor station. The southbound Piccadilly Line, represented by a Navy Blue line on my map, would terminate at Heathrow airport. My stop came a few stations before the line ended.
The people I had come to meet were waiting outside in a car, and after introductions had been made, we drove to a store to buy meat and beer for lunch. The man who was driving was in his early 30s. He wore a stylish shirt and dark glasses. His name was Aryian Singh, but he later told me that this wasn’t what he had been named at birth. He had changed his name after he had come out of prison. When I questioned him about his job, he said he was working on a couple of film projects but didn’t provide details. I noticed that there were small scars on his face. I later learned that a couple of them were from injuries inflicted by his mother when he was a kid–once, his mother had smashed his face with a milk bottle.
The man whose face I was now watching in the rearview mirror interested me. His name change and the reason for it wasn’t what one has come to expect as a staple of Indian fiction about diasporic lives–Samiullah changing to Sam or a Madhu becoming Maddy, one pining for the neem tree outside his ancestral home and the other for her mother’s cardamom-scented fish curry. In those stories, particularly those written in the US, the only crime a human seems capable of is forgetting to write a letter home. Or if there are transgressions they seem to have blossomed out of a fantasy spun out in a garden called a creative writing MFA program. But Aryian Singh’s story appeared to be different. Sitting in the backseat of the silver Mercedes E220, I imagined an entry into another life. Not one offered as homage to quiet domesticity but one lived in recognition of the reality of the street. Continue reading
Somebody’s feeling a little snippy
Looks like all of the recent criticism of his work has gotten to the notoriously sensitive M. Night Shyamalan. At the Mexico City press conference promoting The Last Airbender, Shyamalan went on the defensive after a questioner pointedly noted that “the audience has lost its faith in [his] work” and asked whether Airbender was his attempt to reinvigorate his career.
Shyamalan’s response? “If I thought like you I’d kill myself… Your impression of my career is not my impression of my career. It’s something you read on Google.”
He goes on to make the dubious claims that Unbreakable was a better film than The Sixth Sense and that his favorite film was The Village. (Editorial note: The Village?! Really, Night? Really?)
Watch the whole clip below:
Perhaps worst of all for Shyamalan is the fact that this isn’t the worst story that’s come out about him this week. IFC reports that moviegoers have been “audibly recoiling” at the sight of the filmmaker’s name during the trailers for the movie Devil, which is due out this fall. (Devil is directed by Drew and John Erick Dowdle, but the plot comes “from the mind” of Shyamalan.) Continue reading
Saxophones and Seduction
One of my favorite film songs of all time is “Roop Tera Mastana” from the 1969 Hindi film [Aradhana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aradhana_(1969_film). The song appears just before a dashing young Air Force pilot, Arun (Rajesh Khanna), spends his first night with his new bride, Vandana (Sharmila Tagore, with her bouffant and perfect liquid eyeliner ). Arun and Vandana have just been married by a priest in a small temple because Arun has to leave to fight, and they’re in a rush to get married before he leaves. Unfortunately now it’s raining, and they’ve been drenched, so they huddle together in a rustic wooden cabin for warmth. Because they’re married, their isolation shouldn’t be a problem. But they’ve jumped the gun by getting married without their families’ presence. And now they’re getting closer and closer, to the point of no return…