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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