Desi Libertarian Activist – Govindini Murty

(Thanks to Deepa for alerting us via the Tip Line!)

Back in college, a single guy friend had a taxonomy of the type of women attracted by the different bands of the political spectrum.

He argued that the average attractive & approachable gal on campus was a soft lefty. She’d advocate things like national healthcare out of a semi-fashionable, prima facie concern for her fellow human beings. Of course, she felt this concern naturally extended into politics & was blind to the economic logic.

Angry, granola gals oppressed by the patriarchy often filled out the far left, weren’t exactly the most dateable & he avoided them like the plague. Being famously politically incorrect, he’d remark that these gals were “either angry cuz men always treated them like sexual objects or angry cuz men never treated them like sexual objects.” I’ll reserve my comments.

By contrast, the few & far between campus Right Wing gals tended to be a tad too country club / prep school for our tastes.

But Libertarian activists? Well unfortunately, a libertarian rally is possibly the only gathering that scares gals off faster than a Star Trek convention. As a self-described libertarian, ’twas a pity.

BUT, enter the first, and possibly the most attractive Desi libertarian female activist I’ve seen in a long time. Govindini Murty was recently profiled in the Washington Post for hosting a Conservative / Libertarian film festival in the People’s Republic of Hollywood –

The festival was organized by a husband-wife duo of young filmmakers, Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, and underwritten by the Foundation for Free Markets, which likes privatizing Social Security, cutting taxes and issuing school vouchers. …Murty, an aspiring actress, says the impetus was, in part, the cool reception she and her husband have received in Hollywood for their own screenplays and their film “Terminal Island,” which premiered at the festival.

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I love watching movies on tiny screens. Not.

Anna_looks_like_my_stepmom

So my favourite MC leaves me a message about this article from ABC News…apparently an Indian cell phone company is going to broadcast a new Bollywood phil-im in its entirety, for free. On their customer’s mobiles. (Well, the customers who dished $270 for a phone that can stream video…)

“Rok Sako To Rok Lo,” or “Stop, If You Can,” will be available to Bharti Tele-Ventures customers in 11 Indian cities, provided their phones have the supporting technology, said Atul Bindal, a director at India’s second-largest cellular service provider.

They are boldly and potentially annoyingly going where no company has gone before:

Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. will be “the first cellular service in the world to premiere a full-length movie on mobile phones,” Bindal said. “I am certain that this service will add a whole new dimension to the concept of mobile-based entertainment.”

“Rok Sako To Rok Lo” stars Sunny Deol (pictured)…and no one else, meaning the film’s other actors aren’t well-known, exciting or important. 😉 Directed by Arindam Chaudhary, the teen flick will debut on cell phones Thursday, and be released to regular old theaters Friday.

Don’t everybody try and drain your cell phone batteries at once:

A maximum of 200 people will be able to connect and watch the movie simultaneously, and the movie cannot be copied or replayed.

If this novel experiment in using mobile phones for something other than, oh, talking, is successful, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. may air other phil-ims, for a phee. 😉

Amitabh is huge now…imagine him on IMAX!

What on earth would inspire you to see DDLJ, KKHH or KKKG again?

Perhaps if Shah Rukh Khan was magnified to half the size of a football field?

I know what you’re thinking…and no, though it’s Friday night, I’m not drunk. 😉 I’m just surprised that IMAX is interested in Bollywood. That’s right, the next time you visit your cousins in Mumbai, you could while your day away watching Aftab on a screen “large enough to show a whale life-size”. (ahem. i’m in no way commenting on the girth of certain bollywood stars, but if your mind goes there, don’t blame me just because I said the screen could show a life-size whale.) 😀

Before you forget the original point of this post because of my bloggy meanderings, I was trying to tell you faithful SM-readers that IMAX might be coming to INDIA. Read on:

“Eventually, Bollywood films will be converted into IMAX format. It can happen in three to four years,”said Richard L. Gelfond, co-CEO and co-chairman of IMAX Corporation.
“But India needs at least 20 IMAX theatres to justify converting films to IMAX format,” he said.
Gelfond said the company had already started talks on the subject with some film producers. India, which presently has only three IMAX theatres, will add seven more by 2008, he announced Friday.

India is a natural choice for this experiment; it has a robust film industry and the cost of converting a regular 35mm film into an IMAX movie is more competitive. Normal cost? $4 million. Indian Price? $2.5-3 million. Continue reading

The Windfall that Bhopal never got

Aishwarya Rai announced yesterday that she will be the executive producer and star of a film dealing with the 1984 tragedy in Bhopal. As reported by emediawire.com:

The fiction feature film [titled “Windfall“], a murder mystery inspired by true events, is set mostly in present day America, with flashbacks to Bhopal. Movie is the story of a young womanÂ’s search for her father, a plant manager on duty the night of the disaster. Ms. Rai plays the lead role, Jasmine Singh, an Indian-American debutante born in Bhopal but raised in Beverly Hills.

“The story of the disaster in Bhopal is all too tragic,” said Ms. Rai. “But this film will be inspiring. The story of a young woman’s search for her father, the love story with her American fiancé and the issues she goes through as a survivor of the disaster – I simply had to be involved. And I hope the films’ success will draw attention to the need of victims in Bhopal, and to those everywhere who’ve suffered from injustice.”

“This is a heroic role, like Erin Brockovich, but on an epic scale – THE INSIDER meets TITANIC,” said producer Zachary Coffin. “Aishwarya was our first, last and only choice to play the lead, and I truly believe this will be the most inspiring performance of her career yet.”

The INSIDER meets TITANIC? Surely we can minimize the latter? The film will borrow facts from a non-fiction book, The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk, by Ward Morehouse and Arun Subramaniam. The film is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2005.

Checkmate cheating

Filmmaker Vikram Jayanti’s documentary about the royal sport of chaturanga is coming to the U.S. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine covers the famous chess match between Garry Kasparov vs. IBM’s famed supercomputer.

The film hints darkly at human-machine collusion in Deep Blue’s win. The filmmaker expands on his conspiracy theory:

IBM hit the jackpot. Their share value went up and up. And it strikes me that someone in the corporation had a brilliant idea that if they could beat Kasparov, people would think that IBM were in the frontline of computing. IBM was seen as a dinosaur before this match. No one saw them as an innovator. They’re still using Deep Blue in their advertising.

He sees Kasparov as a giant betrayed:

I’ve watched him play inferior players. He just wants to get it over with. I mean, when you’re that good at chess you want a good opponent. And I suspect his fantasy was that a computer would give him that… In terms of walking naively into the lions den, I think he thought there was a chance to make some money and to do something of scientific interest.

Jayanti throws in some puffery about the sport of chess, which apparently is as physically bad-ass as badminton claims to be:

I wanted it to be a combat film. One of the first things Garry said to me was, “Chess is a contact sport.” You know he’s very physically fit. And I asked him why he has to work out so much, and he told me that you had to be very fit in order to play.

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Brimful of Reese’s on the 35

Mira Nair waxes about Sapphic pleasures while discussing her Vanity Fair lead Reese Witherspoon’s pregnancy:

“[W]hen I first met her husband [actor Ryan Philippe], I said ‘knock her up, won’t you, I need some flesh on the girl’,” she joked. “I’m not a fan of the underfed Los Angeles actor at all… I love the luminosity that pregnancy brings, I love the fleshiness, I love the ample bosom – it gave me much more to play with.”

Sounds like she appreciates someone with a kachori in the oven. Nair managed to work around Reese’s pieces on screen:

Nair explained how camera tricks had been used to disguise Witherspoon’s “bump” in various scenes – including hiring a number of young boys in costumes to stand in front of her. “She runs, she gets off coal carts, she jumps off horses – she does everything,” Nair said. “But there’s also a certain carriage with horses that is going to wipe the screen at a certain moment, because of the bump.”

The artist formerly known as MC Hammer would’ve understood.

Mr. Birdie Num-Num gets a biopic

Many people look better in the animal wax of nostalgia: dictators, drugrunners, Starsky & Hutch. But one never does: Peter Sellers, the British comedian who made a habit of playing mentally-challenged desis in brownface.

The original film [The Party] was a more-than-a-little-racist comedy with a white comedian playing ‘Hrundi V. Bakshi’ in brownface, sporting a degenerate imitation of an Indian accent. Sellers wandered around a film set for a sequel to Gunga Din, itself a landmark of racism featuring civilized British soldiers vs. naked Indian savages.

Yes, Mr. Birdie Num-Num just got an HBO biopic, which means that Glitter has lost its lock on the Razzies. Even worse, Dreamworks is remaking The Party:

The Party, a minor success in comparison to Sellers films like Dr Strangelove and The Pink Panther, was banned in India for some years. Some politicians protested the film caricatured Indians and showed them in absurd light. Only after editor Khushwant Singh intervened was the ban lifted.

The only saving grace is that they’re making the protagonist non-desi.

Kids with Cameras

bornintobrothels.jpg
Since some people disagreed with my decision to post a picture of a dead child prominently on this site (in reference to the Bhopal disaster), I thought I would use another entry to try and convey the importance and the power of photography to address social issues.

The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, which is the first major, of the many organizations giving nods to the year’s best films leading up to the Oscars, announced its 2004 awards yesterday. The Best Documentary award went to Born into Brothels, a documentary about the children of prostitutes in Calcutta’s red light district. This should make it a frontrunner for the Oscar as well.

The most stigmatized people in Calcutta’s red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother’s fate or for creating another type of life.

In Born into Brothels, directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman chronicle the amazing transformation of the children they come to know in the red light district. Briski, a professional photographer, gives them lessons and cameras, igniting latent sparks of artistic genius that reside in these children who live in the most sordid and seemingly hopeless world.

The photographs taken by the children are not merely examples of remarkable observation and talent; they reflect something much larger, morally encouraging, and even politically volatile: art as an immensely liberating and empowering force.

Devoid of sentimentality, Born into Brothels defies the typical tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly. Briski spends years with these kids and becomes part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities or primitive imagery, and a true testimony of the power of the indelible creative spirit.

See Sajit’s previous post. Continue reading

Film Festival hosts 14 South Asian premieres in New York

The inaugural South Asian International Film Festival (SAIFF) kicked off a five-day showcase of works from the Asian subcontinent with a screening of Gurinder Chadha’s “Bride and Prejudice.”

Altogether, 38 short, documentary and fiction films will screen in New York City at the Clearview Chelsea West and Rubin Museum of Art. The festival bills itself as the biggest of its kind in the country, and will host the U.S. premieres of 14 films.

“I think when audiences come out for this year’s SAIFF, they’ll see the kind of high-standard South Asian entertainment that they’ve really been craving in this city,” said SAIFF managing director Soman Chainani.

Among the numerous films worth checking out are “The Inner Life of Shah Rukh Khan,” a documentary following the Bollywood star, and “Shwass,” India’s 2004 Oscar-entry.

The high-powered festival has some big sponsors — Time Warner Cable and The New York Times — and big advisors — Shekhar Kapur and Sepia-favorite Vikram Chatwal — overseeing the event.

Yesterday’s opening night party and screening of “Bride and Prejudice” (will anyone have not seen this movie when it officially releases in February?) was attended by Chadha, in addition to the ambassadors and consulate generals from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Rediff: New York gets a taste of India
Sepia Mutiny: Dueling film festivals in Manhattan

Update (12/20/2004): SAIFF’s official web site has photos chronicling the festival.

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‘Lagaan’ director joins Oscars jury

The director of Lagaan, Ashutosh Gowariker, was invited to join the film jury for the Academy Awards. He’s not on the foreign film jury, which is either an odd omission or a compliment. Gowariker is now advising the director of Shwaas, India’s current Oscars entry: it’s all about awareness, baby.

I haven’t yet seen Lagaan. The combination of cricket and Bollywood is an enumeration of boredom. You start with baseball, the sport of paunch and waiting. Slow it down further and you end up with cricket. Now play the game over multiple days and film it as a bladder-busting, four-hour Bollywood movie. It all makes Gujarati wedding rites or a flight to Moscow seem like a blessed relief.

Gowariker’s latest movie, Swades, releases Dec. 17. It’s about a desi NASA astronaut but does not star our in-house rocket scientist. Abhi wants you to know that…

Yes. I am VERY bitter.

Personally, I can’t believe Sonali filmed Kal Ho Na Ho in my daily haunts and ‘forgot’ to call me. What’s up with that?