Rahman returns with twins!
“The first lesson we must learn from Hollywood: They take pictures without fighting between themselves,” joked Rahman, trying to ease the tension on his delayed entry with a hundred lensmen jostling to get a clear shot of him and his gold-plated britannium babies.
“Ok, I am going to leave then. Save my face and don’t fight here,” he pleaded before giving in and surrendered with a smile on his face, showing off his Oscars as the non-stop clicking bathed him with strobe light.
Rahman fielded questions for an hour at his first press conference on his return from Los Angeles – a trip that fetched him the priceless twins of the most coveted trophy on the planet.
“It (the Oscar) costs only $500. I didn’t even have to pay duty at the airport,” he laughed. From the shy composer who used to give single-line and near monosyllabic answers during interviews, A.R. Rahman has come a long way indeed. The new Rahman is confident, articulate and even funny as he demonstrated to the world with his now famous Oscar Speech. (“I am excited and terrified. The last time I felt like that was when I was getting married”)
But he still remains as down to earth as he has always been and cannot conceal his boyish excitement about having made it to the headlines in a newspaper in Bosnia or on being recognised everywhere from Starbucks to airports around the world.
What stops us Indians from winning Oscars, a journalist asked.
“Motivation to do something extra-ordinary and planning systematically. Look at you, if you had planned this photo shoot systematically, you wouldn’t have been fighting among yourselves.”
But then, he also added: “Our films are made for our audience and not for Oscars. Let’s make it for them and then see if we win or not.”
“The whole world’s eyes are on India. A lot of collaborations are possible. The West has started listening to us. A single recorded with Pussy Cat Dolls (a remix of Jai Ho called You’re My Destiny) is out and will be available on Youtube,” he said.
From Spielberg to Hans Zimmer to Michael Jackson, Rahman has made many of the people he once looked up to, look him up. Imagine growing up on Peter Gabriel and then robbing him of an Oscar. “I am a representative of Indian aspirations,” he said.
“My dream is to connect people with music. We live in troubled times. There is a divide between North and South India, East and West, Hindus and Muslims, and then, there’s the caste divide. And in these times, we can only look towards love,” he said, to a question on what prompted his speech.
What almost everybody wanted to know was if he considered Slumdog Millionaire to be his best. “I’ve said this before too. If there’s a beautiful ornament and if somebody really beautiful is wearing it, it makes the ornament look even better. I think Slumdog matched their sensibilities. According to your sensibility, you might have liked some other songs. There is no language for music. Gulzar’s song has phoenetic value apart from its extraordinary lyrical quality and meaning.”
He believes that Slumdog Millionaire won because it made a stronger impact than the other nominees as a film. “For them, it was a change of seeing something extra-ordinary.”
He recalled how initially there were no buyers for the film. “There was no budget either. Hardly one-tenth of the money needed. But Danny Boyle is a legendary director. People watch even his bad movies and they say this is his best.”
Though he has received two or three offers from Hollywood, he’s yet to finalise schedule.
“The expectations have become higher. My priority is good films, the language does not matter.”
But at his studio, it’s business as usual. He had just finished a song for him and handed it over to Mani Ratnam before he left to LA last week. He has Thirukkural and Bharatiyar projects in the pipeline and his KM Music Conservatory and Foundation to keep him busy.
Looking back at Slumdog and the few weeks he spent on it, he says: “At that time, that’s all the time I had and it was enough. I think it’s destiny.”
It was an opportunity he seized. Boyle came to him for two songs, Rahman gave him a full album. In the end, it all paid off.
Recalling the Oscar moments:
I was like a zombie. I did my rehearsals for my performance. And slept only for three hours. I woke up and had my Oscar rehearsal again in the morning. I think more than the awards, the performance was historic. Later, when the award was announced, I just said what was in my mind. When I got off stage, I didn’t have time to take in the happiness. I had to perform within minutes. And performing there was a matter of pride. I had only 5 per cent expectations of getting the second award.
Delhi 6: Dilli Chalo!
Genre: Drama
Director: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra
Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Waheeda Rehman
Storyline: A second generation Indian returns to his roots and discovers who the bogeyman really is.
Bottomline: An RDB sequel in spirit
Dear Mr. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra,
I loved your film enough to want to buy the ticket for the very next show.
I would like to apologise to you on behalf of my tribe or the many who have misunderstood your film to be a ‘message movie’ about national integration and Hindu-Muslim unity. That has to be the most insulting simplification of the idea behind the film and I am sorry they have accused you of spelling out the message even without understanding what it is that you are trying to say.
But I also see why it is being perceived that way.
Most of us don’t like to be told what to do and when we suspect we’re being lectured, we switch off. Many of my critic friends do believe that your film is an ode to Delhi that’s slapped with a moral science lesson towards the end just so that you don’t disappoint your RDB fans.
I would’ve loved to write a review explaining your film to them but then nobody likes being talked down upon. Hence this fan-mail.
Proximity to the problem often turns out to be a disadvantage and we sometimes, get a better perspective from a rank outsider who can be objective and would see something we have got so used to. But then, we don’t want a firangi telling us what’s wrong with us.
Which is why I love the fact that you have chosen a protagonist who’s not one of us and yet one of us. He’s American, as he admits himself and I love the way you make him fall in love and belong here.
You make even a realistic Swades look like a simplified fairytale. Especially since you give Roshan a reality check quite early into the film. That scene where he slaps the sub-inspector after being slapped by the cop and is put behind bars. You just can’t change this country taking on the system.
Unfortunately, a lot of people saw your previous film as a glorification of counter-violence to fight the system instead of just seeing it as what it was – a nightmare of youth having to sacrifice their lives designed as a wake-up call.
You were just telling the youth to care enough to do something about what’s wrong but people merely interpreted it literally as: take the law into your own hands to set things right.
Hence, I understand that Delhi 6 is your way of making amends and addressing the same problem again, almost like a sequel in spirit.
Modern youth discover home and want to set things right but there’s the ubiquitous monkey (or mischief maker/s) wreaking havoc in our everyday lives.
We take our mythology way too seriously and have always felt the need to protect ourselves from the bogeyman. I like the way you’ve derived out of our age-old epics and modern day myths – the man-made media-promoted Monkey-man and the parallels you’ve drawn with mischief-maker Hanuman who set all of Lanka on fire single-handedly.
We sometimes do make mountains out of mole-hills and over the years, we have seen Ganesha idols drink milk and have also claimed to have seen the Monkey Man who is supposed to have a motherboard under its fur. I thought you were exaggerating until I read up stories that were reported at the turn of the century.
Educated mediapersons actually considered this to be newsworthy. But then, the Monkey Man as the bogeyman does sum up one of the many paradoxes our country is famous for. We believe in God as much as we believe in Science and Technology. We would call God-men but keep buckets of water ready to create kill him by electrocution.
To be honest, I was getting a little restless during the first half of the film as you leisurely rolled out a series of paradoxes one scene after another. Like how some of us still are still caste conscious but when it comes to sex, we exploit even the outcasts. Like how a girl needs to audition whether she’s participating in Indian Idol or getting a groom. Or like how you flip channels between our dual specialisation in science and religion – the Chandrayaan launch to the Sadhu doing a breathing exercise – in a sexually suggestive comic scene that intends to show us the consequence of an arranged marriage.
Having said that, I also like the light-hearted matter-of-factness with which you have addressed serious issues – like how our children are growing up too early and sexually aware.
Through the story of Roshan’s parents, we understand that we in the past have been so intolerant that couples who want inter-caste wedding have had no choice but to elope.
Through Bittu, we understand nothing has changed. Thanks to the ensemble, we understand how volatile we are, how stubborn we can be and vulnerable given our deep-rooted belief system that it is always the other person’s fault because we can do no wrong.
We are always looking at the person to blame, create our own bogeyman, make him stronger by giving him credit for all things that go wrong and finally take out our pent-up frustration upon him. I read that a four-foot tall Sadhu was beaten up by a mob that mistook him for Monkey-Man and a van-driver was set on fire.
The root of this mass hysteria and fear psychosis can be only be traced back only to blind faith, superstition, need for mythology and Hubris.
I like how you end the film with a near-death ending for the harbinger of change. Because, that’s what we are. We want to celebrate the death of a villain so much that we end up creating them. We want our villains so bad.
But because you decided to spell out through the protagonist that the monkey exists in all of us, we have, as always, decided that we don’t need moral science lessons. We hate message movies. Because we know everything there is to know.
When Mani Ratnam makes a movie where Hindus and Muslims magically join hands and form a chain, we rave about it. We unanimously love it. Simply because he makes us look good. You on the other hand Mr. Mehra are telling us that the monkey resides in us? How dare you?
I truly salute the guts you’ve had to keep it real. I am glad you didn’t kill the man who wants to change things this time around because I know you are trying to say we can still change things around and that all is not lost.
Thank you for making Delhi 6.
Yours truly,
Sudhish Kamath
P.S: I love how you’ve used Rahman’s soundtrack but I will save that for another letter.
Oscars 2009: The night they got their due
Sixteen of this year’s 24 Oscars went to films that have nothing to do with America – eight of them went to Slumdog Millionaire.
Two of the other eight went to a film about one man who stood up for a minority of Americans (Milk), two went to a franchise born out of a comic book (incidentally, a dead Australian accounts for one of the two awards for The Dark Knight) and one went to an apolitical animated film that moved us to tears (Wall – E).
Americans had to be content with just three cosmetic awards out of the 13 it was nominated for (only make-up, visual effects and art direction for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), as Aussie host Hugh Jackman poked fun at Brad Pitt.
So, have Oscars suddenly become anti-American?
Just like it is stupid to assume that, it is equally lame to assume that the Oscars are given out to tap into unexplored markets around the world – an accusation made against beauty pageants.
Slumdog won not because the Academy wanted fans or because Hollywood studios are eyeing Asia and Britain markets. In fact, it is the non-Oscar blockbusters like The Dark Knight, Iron Man and Spiderman that actually rake in the moolah. But Oscars do help an indulgent art film like The Reader to be seen, unlike Slumdog that grossed ten times its $15 million budget even before it was nominated.
This year’s edition of the Academy Awards has proved beyond doubt that mainstream Hollywood is running out of sequels and movie franchises, and not just stories. Also, Indian Cinema hadn’t got its due and it was time.
Slumdog Millionaire won eight out of ten not because it’s “poverty porn” as some have alleged but simply because it is a fascinating story about the triumph of the underdog painstakingly put together in a country were chaos rules supreme and truth alone finally triumphs (at least in our movies).
When filmmakers around the world are spending millions on sets and visual effects, one man chose to take contemporary material relevant to our times and decided to surrender to the madness of filming in the most challenging of places. Here’s a team that had the guts to shoot on location – from the slums of Dharavi to the insides of Taj Mahal – in a language and grammar they dared to learn.
It is only fitting that Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy were rewarded for watching and internalising the elements of Indian Cinema. They took the formula of lost and found, brother against brother and anti-establishment angst from the seventies and set it up in a country governed by politics of hate in the nineties that was making its transition into the information age as an IT superpower catering to the needs of the world that outsourced its business to the workhorse that is India.
Though its DNA makes it Indian beyond doubt, Slumdog Millionaire is a baby of the global world – shot by a British filmmaker with a largely Indian cast and crew, it’s based on a book written by an Indian (Vikas Swarup) who used the format of a game show that originated from UK, whose rights are owned by a Japanese company (Sony Pictures Television International) and named after a song by an American composer (Cole Porter).
Now, this was also a show that became a phenomenon in India, thanks to its iconic host. The angry young man who rose from the cinema of the seventies had now become the caretaker of a system that rewarded those who knew the answers. Can an underdog take on this ruthless system? Aren’t films about triumph?
Even murder charges are determined on the basis of intent and any accusation about the filmmakers intent to show India in bad light is only laughable because films at the end of the day are meant to make money and a filmmaker or studio will have be stupendously stupid to diss off a nation that sells three and a half billion movie tickets.
You can see Boyle’s love for song and dance and Indian Cinema by his decision to approach Rahman. And even if there was politically incorrect content in the film, isn’t it the right of the creative artiste to speak free and not be afraid?
Critics of Slumdog can now suck it up because the film is not just highly entertaining storytelling, it’s revolutionary to the point of being inventive.
We are talking about a team that was decidedly determined to find a still camera that shoots 11 frames a second because conventional cameras and Steadicam units were not conducive to shooting in the narrowest of lanes in the slums. The fact that you could see only 11 instead of the regular 24 frames gave the film the edgy feel and a sense of speed, perfect to capture the frenetic pace and energy of Mumbai. This could’ve only come from technicians who are familiar with the sanctity of Dogme school (the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle worked in a host of Dogme films) that dictates that the filmmakers must be true to the story and let it tell itself by pure facilitation – by setting its characters in real locations and capturing the sounds and sights of that space.
In a world that’s becoming increasingly smaller, matters of nationality are becoming purely academic. It is small-minded to nurture the ‘us versus them’ notion and even racist to view Slumdog as the Westerner’s take because if there’s one thing that’s been the trademark of our nation, it’s tolerance and willingness to assimilate. Remember Vasudhaiva Kutumbukam?
And, as the girl from Alcobendas told us accepting her award: “I, always on the night of the Academy Awards, stay up to watch the show and I always felt that this ceremony was a moment of unity for the world because art, in any form, is and has been and will always be our universal language and we should do everything we can, everything we can, to protect its survival.”
Amen to that, Penelope.
* * *
Penn beats Rourke
“You commie, homo-loving sons of guns,” exclaimed Sean Penn, picking up his trophy. It was a night when the Academy gave the devil his due. “I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me often,” he chuckled and acknowledged Mickey’s heartbreaking Oscar-worthy performance: “Mickey Rourke rises again and he is my brother.” This is Penn’s second win in five nominations. He last won an Oscar for Mystic River.
* * *
Kate robs Anne
Yes, poor Anne Hathaway probably deserved this but should take heart in the fact that the Titanic actress had missed out five times before she got lucky.
“I’d be lying if I hadn’t made a version of this speech before, I think I was probably eight years old and staring into the bathroom mirror. And this (holding up her statuette) would’ve been a shampoo bottle. Well, it’s not a shampoo bottle now!” she said. “I think we all can’t believe we’re in a category with Meryl Streep at all. I’m sorry, Meryl, but you have to just suck that up!” But hey, Meryl has been nominated 15 times now and has won only twice.
* * *
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: To cut a short story this long…
Genre: Drama
Director: David Fincher
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson
Storyline: An old woman on her deathbed tells her daughter about the man who was born old and aged in reverse.
Bottomline: You will grow old watching Button grow young.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a curious case indeed. Why did they make this movie? Did Brad Pitt really believe the Academy would hand him a statuette without him having to act mentally ill, gay or African American? Or without him having to act period? Or did he think the period piece along would suffice? Or did the writers think that borrowing elements from Titanic and Forrest Gump would crack it for them?
Benjamin Button opens pretty much like Titanic. A woman who’s so old that she looks like someone who survived the sinking. Well, she’s on her death-bed and wants her daughter to read out a journal.
Fincher cuts from a naturalistic, realistic looking hospital set to a surreal world where a clock built in reverse marks the birth of a baby that seems to age in reverse. Born almost dead, the baby is hideously old and ugly, blind with cataracts in both eyes, arthritis etc. that the father is convinced it is evil. He abandons it in front of a nursing home and the story is told through Brad Pitt’s voiceover that makes you believe you’re watching Forrest Gump aging in reverse.
More so when the young old man fondly refers to his foster mother (a brilliant every-bit-Oscar-nomination-deserving Taraji P. Henson) as Mama. If Forrest’s Mama told him ‘Life’s a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get,’ Button’s Mama tells him ‘You never know what’s comin’ for you’.
So Button moves through life in America pretty much like Forrest did – he first wears leg braces, learns to walk/run, fights the World War, buys his own boat, forever keeps writing to his girl, waiting for her to come back into his life. If Forrest Gump had a mentor in Benjamin Bubba, Benjamin Button has Captain Mike to get him laid. Like Forrest’s girl Jenny who left town to become a hippie, Ben’s girl Daisy (Cate Blanchett) has left home to become a dancer. Like Forrest, he finally wins her over and late into the film, we find out they have a kid.
It’s easier to tell the story of Ben Button by telling you what’s different from Forrest Gump. The most obvious one: Ben ages in reverse. Here, he has an affair with a married woman (Tilda Swinton). While a floating feather acts as a metaphor for Forrest Gump’s life, here a humming-bird acts as the motif for Ben.
That said, Benjamin Button, though slow, is an entertaining film you can watch for its concept, faux philosophy and Brad Pitt.
He has very little to do, with make up and visual effects taking care of most of his work – to look old. Nevertheless, he shines with understatement and the ladies are sure to swoon and faint watching him dash off on a motorcycle. Be warned though, the handsome Pitt lasts barely ten minutes of a really long film. Even Cate Blanchett looks ravishing and we know how rarely that happens.
The film has some genuinely sincere moments thanks to Fincher’s unique touch and flair for storytelling. Sample the sequence Ben narrates a series of happenings that led to Daisy’s accident. Wow! No doubt this film spanning decades is painstakingly put-together, well detailed and meticulously directed as the filmmaker manages to take the most bizarre story and give it a semblance of plausibility with its emotional core. The last act of the film is fittingly poignant and that alone would merit it a watch.
But then, a few scenes of brilliance alone don’t make a movie win a bagful of Oscars. A little less than three hours long, Benjamin Button will make you age quite a bit. But hey, watch it for Brad.
TN 07 AL 4777: The second-hand car
Genre: Drama
Director: A. Lakshmikanthan
Cast: Pasupathi, Ajmal, Simran, Meenakshi
Storyline: When a bitter taxi-driver picks up a spoilt rich-kid, their lives change for worse.
Bottomline: Taxi Number 9211 minus the fun.
There’s always something that’s lost in translation.
GV Films production Tha Na 07 Ah La 4777 loses pace and humour from the Hindi original. In fact, the only things that irk the film are the few original touches added by the director who has also been nice enough (to himself) to credit himself for the writing.
Since when did remake rights translate to hogging credit for someone else’s story, screenplay and quite a bit of dialogue?
Milan Luthria’s film written by Rajat Arora, roughly translated to us by A. Lakshmikanthan is certainly watchable, but only because of its cast.
Taxi-driver Mani (Pasupathi) here is a Sri Rama Sene recruit, he can’t bear the sight of young lovers coochie-cooing. He’s also a compulsive slapper and like most poor people in Tamil cinema, owes money to a Tamil-speaking settu. He also happens to be a call taxi driver who picks up customers on his own maybe because he is not really a call taxi drivers who takes instructions over radio. And we never get to find out because the director never got a chance to make up his mind.
Never mind, the film begins with a double dose of songs and the only thing funny about the first act is Vijay Antony taking himself seriously as a radical music director (he claims to have invented the gaana-rap with the peppy Aathichudi).
Gautham (Ajmal) is the typical filmi rich-kid. Anyway, so Lakshmikanthan employs songs to establish character but it is a little difficult to tell the two protagonists apart except for costume and preferred form of dance, because they both seem to love rap and alcohol. They both drink and drive over the same flyover.
Finally, after this initial starting problem, the taxi takes off and stays faithful to the original, to our relief.
Both the leading men, Pasupathi and Ajmal, are at their best when they have to be subtle and realistic and it’s only during the screaming and the drama that you can see a conventional Tamil filmmaker at work, asking them to play it up for the masses.
However, the second half of the film is surprisingly naturalistic as the actors decide to stay faithful to the vision of the original and bring about a heartwarming climax. Pasupathi excels here and Ajmal too underplays it with refreshing restraint.
Simran is first rate, and turns in a finely nuanced performance, efficiently dramatic without ever turning on the histrionics while Meenakshi keeps you guessing if she’s a miracle of reverse-aging, and nearly convinces you that it is good old Meena with a make-over and weight-loss, trying to reboot her career with a new name.
Overall, it’s a ride you won’t mind being taken on. But only because it’s Pasupathi who’s driving. And hey, Ajmal’s not bad company at all.
Oscar Countdown – 1: Go deglam, get naked
The Academy has always had a soft spot for women characters who have serious issues to deal with. The more deglamourised they play them, the more seriously they are taken. Maybe that explains why all the three women in Doubt have got nominations.
First, a quick look at the actresses in fray for the Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Amy Adams (Doubt):
Plays the inexperienced young nun, Sister James who reports the priest’s suspicious, inappropriate behaviour to the Principal. Adams stands her own against veterans Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman who play the Principal and the Priest respectively in this dialogue-intensive drama. But is her innocence alone enough to win her the award? We doubt.
Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona):
Smoking hot, Cruz plays an intense, obsessive, suicidal ex-lover who has a love/hate relationship with an artist in this Woody Allen film that has two gorgeous women (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) playing the titular roles. But Cruz steals the film away from them, despite making an appearance quite late into it. Yes, she has that famous lesbian scene with Scarlett but just watch her painting the canvas and you know you want a few of those wild strokes too. Beautiful. The Academy is likely to be seduced too.
Viola Davis (Doubt):
This comes as a surprise especially since the other three actors in significant roles in this film have got nominations and Davis has the least important role among the four, playing the mother of the probable victim of harassment. She’s quite solid and looks every bit the vulnerable pillar of strength but the role itself maybe a little too short to win her the prize.
Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button):
Absolutely fantastic playing foster mother who brings up the abandoned baby Button (an infant that looks frighteningly old), Taraji P. Henson is a well-deserved nominee in this category. But then, the epitome of motherhood has tough competition this year with Cruz and Tomei in the race.
Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler)
Playing a good-hearted aging stripper, Tomei is the girl the wrestler loves. Caught between her fading career and her attraction to a customer, she plays a woman confused and that’s dynamite material for heavy-duty drama. From the pole dancing, nude scenes to the emotionally exhausting break-down scenes, Tomei bares her heart to us and if it’s not Cruz, it’s got to be Tomei walking up that stage.
* * *
Now, here’s my take on the nominees for the Best Actress in a Leading role.
Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married):
Hathaway is so getting this award (Update: She didn’t!). Very rarely does an actress get to play such a complex role and Anne Hathaway is first-rate playing an addict out of rehab, nine months clean and visiting her family for her sister’s wedding. The role requires tremendous strength and is emotionally draining even for those of us watching it. Hathaway has to constantly shift gears all through the film – she has to be vulnerable, guilty, insecure, strong, caring, angry, calm, remorseful, violent, lost and completely messed up. She lives this role of a lifetime and makes you want to give her a long big hug at the end of it all.
Angelina Jolie (Changeling):
Honestly, she was much effective playing a similar role in last year’s A Mighty Heart. She waited for her missing husband to return last year and this year, she puts her resolve to test waiting for her missing son and takes on a corrupt system. Jolie also strips down for a torture shower scene and the effort here seems so overtly dramatic compared to the subtle classy portrayal last year. The only reason she even has a slight chance of creating an upset is because she was overlooked the last time around.
Melissa Leo (Frozen River):
Plays a strong mother trying to make ends meet after her husband leaves the family. She comes across a way to make quick money by smuggling people across the border, driving over the frozen river and forging an unlikely friendship with another young mother of a one-year old. This naturalistic tense thriller is as real as it gets in a film and Melissa is brilliant when the duo drives back in the dead of the night in search of the baby in a duffel-bag she unwittingly threw out of the car mistaking the contents to be explosives. Too bad she’s nominated along with Hathaway and that is a tough act to beat.
Meryl Streep (Doubt):
There is no doubt that Meryl Streep can make even the most mediocre roles come alive and this one’s a meaty dialogue-based confrontation film, tailor-made for an Oscar. Streep plays the Principal who has to confront the priest for his inappropriate behaviour towards a student and prove his guilt. Though it is a flawless performance, it would be really sad if she picks up an award because this year, Anne deserves it more.
Kate Winslet (Reader):
If Best Actress were an award given to the actress for the amount of good work put in during the year, Kate Winslet would get it for her performances in Reader and Revolutionary Road. But we are not sure if the Academy looks at it that way. (Update: Yes, they do!) Kate Winslet plays the older woman who has an affair with a boy half her age and she has a secret. The role demands her to bare her body and soul and Kate does it with conviction in this deglamourised role. Thanks to her twin performances this year, Kate sure looks like the one capable of robbing Anne of her Oscar this year. (Update: Yes, she did!)
Oscar Countdown – 2: Who will have the last laugh?
In Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, a multiple-Oscar winning actor (Robert Downey Junior) advises a fellow actor on how to play eccentric to get the Academy’s attention:
“Everybody knows you never go full retard… Dustin Hoffman, ‘Rain Man,’ looked retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, ‘Forrest Gump.’ Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain’t retarded. Peter Sellers, “Being There.” Infantile, yes. Retarded, no. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don’t buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, “I Am Sam.” Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed…”
The Academy sure has a great sense of humour. Despite his tongue in cheek observation, Downey Jr. is one of the nominees for Best Supporting Actor for playing another of those eccentric characters that get Academy’s attention – an actor with an identity crisis who takes refuge in the characters he’s playing.
But, as Anthony Dod Mantle, cinematographer of Slumdog Millionaire observes, “He cannot beat a dead man.” Heath Ledger has won every other Best Actor in a Supporting role award this year for his portrayal of Joker in The Dark Knight.
Here’s a quick look at the nominees, nonetheless.
Josh Brolin (Milk): Plays the Dan White who’s been driven over the edge by Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) – the first openly gay man to hold public office – the man who has taken his place. His role requires him to get irritable and increasingly angry to the point of taking the law in his own hands and Brolin acquits it credibly with the intensity it deserves. Applause? Yes. Award? No.
Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder): Plays three-time Oscar Winner Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor who has undergone pigment alteration surgery to play an African American War Veteran Lincoln Osiris. He’s required to play an actor who’s always consumed by the characters he plays and Iron Man shows us his funny side and has us laugh till the tummy hurts.
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt): Plays a priest suspected of molesting an African-American student. The seasoned actor has no problems at all in keeping it grey. He convinces you he’s innocent one moment and the next, he has you wondering if he’s a slimeball behind the robes. Great acting, no doubt.
Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight): Lives on as one of the most deliciously wicked villains of all time. He almost had the audience cheer for Joker instead of Batman. It wouldn’t be too wrong to say that the role consumed him. May his soul rest in peace. Heath every bit deserves this Oscar.
Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road): Plays a role that would make Kirk Lazarus chuckle. As a young man released from a mental institution, he represents the insanity of dreams and ambition and acts as the conscience of the lead pair who are torn between their desire to go live in Paris to find out what they really like doing and their regular rut of monotony.
* * *
While we can safely say there would be no surprises in that category, the Best Actor in a Leading Role is a tough guess. Here’s a look at the men in the race.
Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button): As Benjamin Button, a man who ages in reverse, charming Pitt relies heavily on make up and visual effects. The acting though quite subtle and understated, is not his best work this year. Now, Burn After Reading was something else. Too bad he didn’t get a Supporting Actor nomination for that one.
Frank Langhella (Frost/Nixon): Plays Richard Nixon, the tainted President post-Watergate, who soon after his resignation strikes a deal with TV host David Frost for a series of interviews to clear his name and highlight his legacy. It’s a delight to watch Mr. Langhella play the tough-talking ex-Prez who turns out to be a hard nut to crack. Well, almost. And that ‘almost’ is the bit that makes him deserve the prize but he’ll really have to wrestle for it.
Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler): As Randy The Ram, a professional wrestler whose life changes after a heart attack and a bypass surgery, Mickey Rourke chokes us to tears when he tries hard to win his daughter back. “I’m an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone, I just don’t want you to hate me.” As a more disturbing and darker version of ‘Rocky Balboa,’ Rourke looks every bit and even literally breathes like a man that age and size would. I would put my money on The Ram.
Richard Jenkins (The Visitor): We’ve seen bitter old men with their quirks walk away with the prize before but this year, Jenkins has tough competition. He plays a boring old professor who likes to be alone, trying to get over his wife’s death until he meets an illegal immigrant who introduces a new rhythm into his life and falls in love again. But for one moment when he bursts into anger and yells his guts out at the heartlessness of the system, there’s nothing else in the film that demands histrionics.
Sean Penn (Milk): Penn has to be smooth-talking, charming, effeminate and aggressive at the same time, playing Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold public office. The role demands him to deliver serious speeches, kiss men passionately and showcase a sensitivity, tenderness and vulnerability seldom associated with leading men. Penn plays all of this naturally and if not for the veterans like Langhella and Rourke, he would have stood a good chance. But then, given the political content of the film, he still does. (Update: He did win)
Chinmayi: Miss Multi Media
What do you call a girl who’s made herself heard on every platform there is, except maybe the ones at the railway station?
In this part of the world, since there aren’t many, you can call her Chinmayi Sripada.
The Super Singer has treaded film, TV, radio, web and print, across multiple-languages (she runs a translation services company) and is one of the few eligible single girls in the city with multiple interests.
She’s just finished a set of interviews on Delhi 6 and says she was surprised to see her name credited in the soundtrack. “I had no clue I had sung for Delhi 6 until I heard the track. I coudn’t recognise the lyrics or the co-singers or the song. I was like how could I not recognise a song I had sung? And then it fell into place… I had sung some three lines when I had gone to Rahman’s studio to record something else.”
“Every song I’ve sung for Rahman has been different. You will not find anything common between Santhippoma, Deivam Thantha Poove or Sahana. A lot of people said Sahana didn’t sound like me and it sounded like a computer. I didn’t know if it was an insult or a compliment but for my own mental peace, I decided to take it as a compliment. It took a few live shows before people knew it was really me and not some computer altered sound.”
Mamma’s girl
Chinmayi has come a long way since her TV debut as a singer in Saptaswarangal, and considers her mother to be the single biggest influence in her life. “Born in Bombay, my father left us when I was one and a half. That was so long ago that I don’t care anymore. My Mom tells me it was karanakalyanam… it happened so that I could be born. She didn’ have to answer to anybody and had the complete freedom to do whatever she wanted to do with me. She’s my Guru.”
She pulled out of regular school after Class 10, learnt German, attempted learning French, began a long love affair with dance that continues till date, switched to Hindustani music after starting out with Carnatic music, learnt web designing as her singing career took off and as years passed, graduated in psychology.
But even when she was in school, Chinmayi became a tax-payer. “No big deal. I’m sure all these Johnson babies from the ads have PAN cards too… I hope,” she laughs.
She got her first break as a singer with Kannathil Muthammital. Singer Srinivas had noticed her in the singing contest ‘Saptaswarangal’ and had put her on to A.R. Rahman. She has been singing for him since.
Her German classes too paid off when her cousin gave her a 120-page German document to translate. Soon, she got a few more assignments.
“Blue Elephant, my language translation services company was formed as a via-media between the corporate and the linguist. I have never had to advertise it and word-of-mouth alone has helped me sustain it for four years,” she reveals.
At any point of time, Blue Elephant has 25 to 40 linguists working on different assignments. “We make sure that the linguists who are translating assignments are doing it in their mother tongue and have some knowledge of the material they are translating.”
As aggressive as she sounds, Chinmayi says that all that she’s got herself into is only a result of someone convincing her to try something new. “It was Manimaran, a friend of my Mom, who wanted me to participate in Saptaswarangal. It was blogger Kiruba who suggested that I should start blogging to connect with people who like my music and it worked. Super Singer was something I took up because I found the offer interesting and after that, Aahaa FM called me to give RJing a shot. So if you are asking me what’s my approach, I don’t have one. If I’m good at it, good. If I suck, never mind, I at least tried.”
In the last three years, her blog has had over five lakh page views.
“Blogging has been cathartic,” she says, talking about the experience of interacting with fans, strangers and anonymous trolls too. “Sometimes, I have been immature and have fought back. My Mom watches what I do and there are times when she has had to pull me back from a raging war. Ten years later, if I’m still around and worth being interviewed, I don’t want someone to pick out a comment and say how could you be so stupid? So there’s accountability and responsibility of watching what you say on record.”
To deal with trouble-makers, Chinmayi has made her blog a moderated forum. “Especially during Super Singer, everybody had an opinion but I couldn’t allow for it to go on my blog. No matter what the criticism is, reality shows do open up doors for singers. It’s another thing that I would never allow my children to get into a reality show type of a contest. As a host, I had to be detached. It was just a job.”
When she took up the said job, she was an introvert. “It brought out a dimension that I didn’t know existed. People who knew me from the days of Saptaswarangal could not believe how much I was talking.”
With so much on her plate, does she get to eat out on a date? Or is she uploading photographs onto an obscure matrimonial site for Iyengars?
She giggles explaining how she’s been fighting that off. “Well, see, I’m sure it will happen when it has to. I don’t have a plan. My mom is on the verge of giving up, saying ‘This girl is of no use. She’s not finding someone for herself.’ I don’t know what it is not to have a single life. I don’t know what it is like to be seeing someone. We’ll see how things work when someone else comes into my life.”
Five things you didn’t know about Chinmayi
1. Mathematics is the demon in my life. I am glad I got rid of it.
2. I am a classical dancer. I do Odissi.
3. I am quite adventurous. I have always wanted to skydive but my mom always comes in the way.
4. I once jumped off a terrace to prove a point – that girls can do pretty much what boys can.
5. I like gifting books with personalised notes. People think I belong to the 12th century because I still write letters.
Oscar Countdown – 3: A look at Best Films/Directors
Slumdog Millionaire
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto
Director: Danny Boyle
Quick take: Two brothers find themselves on either side of the law. What’s changed from the seventies? The angry young man has become a system conforming consumerist, information has become power and people find escape through reality television, especially since life in modern-day India can be larger than film. Jamal Malik, a chaiwala from a call centre seems to know all the answers in the game show. Did he cheat? The most entertaining and only fast-paced film of the lot, Danny Boyle’s ode to Mumbai and Indian cinema, may not have set the local box office on fire here. But its unique texture, manic energy and inventive style gives the film an edge over the others nominees.
Pros: The kids – absolutely natural, Rahman’s peppy score, the recklessly wicked camerawork by Anthony Dod Mantle and the unique premise of setting a thriller in the backdrop of a game show. Also, the fact that Bollywood has never got its due at the Oscars may just go in favour of this film.
Cons: The unsettling shift from Hindi to English halfway into the film, the conveniently chronological order of flashbacks to suit the order of questions and the shameless sprinkling of Bollywood masala.
The Odds: Given its current record, clearly the favourite for Best Film and Best Director. Likely to take home the prize for Cinematography and the Best Original Score too.
* * *
The Reader
Cast: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Cross
Director: Stephen Daldry
Quick Take: A slow period film set in Germany about a fifteen year old boy who has an affair with a woman twice his age. They form an unusual bond over sex and reading. Kate Winslet is practically naked for half her screen-time and compensates by playing a deglamourised old woman for the other half of the film. The drama in this tragic romance does bring a tear or two but the brooding mood of the film weighs it down further considerably.
Pros: Kate Winslet’s presence, the suspense and the epic nature of the romance.
Cons: Sluggishly slow pace and if there’s anything between the lines, it’s difficult to read especially if you aren’t into literature or history.
The Odds: The only film that’s capable of creating an upset for the Best Director award over Slumdog Millionaire.
* * *
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond
Director: David Fincher
Quick Take: Nearly three hours long, this story of a man born old and dying as a baby seems like Brad Pitt’s desperate shot at the Oscars. If Forrest Gump’s Momma always said: “Life’s a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get,” Benjamin Button’s ‘Mama’ always says: “You never know what’s comin’ for you.” Like Titanic, an old woman on her death-bed begins to tell the story of her lover.
Pros: Great production values, some fantastic effects, meticulous make-up and Brad Pitt, of course.
Cons: The pace. And you can say that again.
The Odds: The film with the most nominations may not go home with the most number of Oscars.
* * *
Milk
Cast: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, James Franco
Director: Gus Van Sant
Quick Take: The biopic of America’s first openly gay man who was elected to public office as a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has Sean Pean deliver another fantastic performance that’s got him in the run for Best Actor. Gus Van Sant gives it a credibly authentic feel employing documentary techniques and lets Penn’s persona and portrayal take care of the rest.
Pros: Sean Penn, the speech-scenes and the sense of realism till the very end.
Cons: Too political and observational to be an entertaining film
The Odds: You can see why this has been nominated for Best Director and Actor but doesn’t seem to stand a chance for Best Film.
* * *
Frost/Nixon
Cast: Frank Langhella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon
Director: Ron Howard
Quick Take: The documentary-like film goes behind the scenes of one of the most watched television programmes in American history – the controversial series of interviews where David Frost finally cracked the tough talking Richard Nixon. If Milk only borrowed documentary techniques, this one’s a full-fledged documentary with supers, dates, quotes, newspaper clips, reports and multiple-accounts of the television event but it is the face-off between two fantastic actors that makes this film watchable.
Pros: Frank Langhella’s dominating persona, the editing that tightens up a film that could’ve so easily fallen apart.
Cons: Too academic to be taken seriously as entertainment.
The Odds: The nod for a Best Director nomination is understandable. Does not stand much of a chance in the Best Film category.
* * *
Billu: This barber needs trimming
Genre: Drama
Director: Priyadarshan
Cast: Irrfan Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Lara Dutta, Om Puri
Storyline: A poor hairdresser becomes the centre of attention when his long lost childhood friend, now a superstar, checks in to his village for a film shoot.
Bottomline: Stay far away if you’ve seen the original or even the Tamil remake
Warning: If you’ve seen the earlier versions (Katha Parayumbol in Malayalam and Kuselan in Tamil), and haven’t had a hair-cut in months, watching Billu may make you pull your hair out.
Apart from Irrfan Khan’s magnificently subtle performance and Shah Rukh Khan’s larger than life onscreen persona, there’s not a single strand of sincerity in this lazily made patch-work production that’s looks so obviously staged.
The film’s fake as a synthetic wig.
Not that we are looking for realism in a story based on folklore (the Krishna-Sudama friendship), but right from the setting, nothing seems genuine – it is difficult to imagine locations seen so often in Tamil Cinema (the kind you usually associate with Chinna Gounder movies) inhabit the same world as the horribly kitschy North Indian set. The villagers talk in a curiously old-fashioned filmy dialect and the cast (but for the Khans) goes gloriously over the top.
Lara Dutta personifies everything wrong with this film. First, it’s an over-dramatic portrayal that’s clearly artificial. Second, she speaks a language she can’t speak well enough. Three, she sports a backless choli that’s a little too sexy for us to believe she’s a goat-herd/milkmaid. Four, she’s got kids that don’t look like her or their father. Yes, the only thing that looks 100 per cent poor is the casting.
Ironically, the superstar’s larger-than-life world looks considerably realistic, even if he’s shooting for a lost-and-found Matrix-meets-Star Wars film, flashing a light-saber. But for that one grin and a maybe couple of SRK quips, the film fails to evoke any response, until the last fifteen minutes – the famous speech scene in the end.
Shah Rukh does reasonably well, probably getting emotional a tad too early in the speech compared to Mammooty or Rajnikant who kept it together for most part of it and broke down only towards the end. Irrfan on the other hand, delivers another one of his masterfully controlled and finely nuanced understatements, letting his body language speak more than any dialogue could. But then, whoever did the score, underscores the sentimental scenes to ridiculously soap operatic levels that after a while it is difficult to appreciate Irrfan.
Billu is ‘Filmed by Priyadarshan,’ the credits tell us.
High time a filmmaker of his experience actually directs his actors and the flow of the narrative instead of just filming it (simply translating it from paper to film). It is impossible to believe this is the same director who made ‘Kanchivaram’. The lack of direction in Billu is shocking to say the least. Sample the scene when a riot breaks loose on the sets of the superstar’s film after someone randomly slaps a policeman at the barricade when they are refused permission. Priyadarshan films it exactly as it reads and makes P.Vasu seem like Spielberg.
Billu may still work for those who haven’t seen the earlier versions of the story and kids who are Shah Rukh Khan fans.
But for those of us who like our hair, the film once called Billu Barber ought to be trimmed. By an hour and a half please.
Dev D: De-Generation Next
Genre: Drama
Director: Anurag Kashyap
Cast: Abhay Deol, Mahi Gill, Kalki Koechlin
Storyline: Modern day Devdas with sex, drugs and rock ’n roll
Bottomline: A coming of rage interpretation that demands to be watched
Whatever Anurag Kashyap’s been smoking all these years must be some stuff. What else can you say about the audacity of thought and the psychedelia of vision as presented in his Dev D.
Paro (Mahi Gill) goes down in Hindi film history, even if it’s just off-camera, as the sexually liberated lover taking her Devdas to the third base in the fields of Punjab, the sort of location where Chopras and Johars would usually orchestrate innocuously chaste love songs.
Because, Anurag Kashyap and Abhay Deol have decided that Generation Next has a new favourite four-letter word and that it certainly isn’t love. Dev D is wildly about lust, the hormonal rage of youth and sexual expression than just candy-floss sugar-coated love we’ve been shown in Hindi cinema. It’s also about the politics of sex, the volatility of modern day romance and the avenues of escape when a relationship fails.
The references to Devdas are just an excuse for the makers to explore the refuge of the modern day loser because this isn’t a story of a man who everybody shut their doors on. This is a story of a lover responsible for his alienation.
The definitive difference in Dev D is illustrated when, early on in the film, he nearly gives in to his animal instincts and stops halfway out of guilt. He seizes the first opportunity to suspect his girlfriend of infidelity and that’s more than enough for him to finish what he started out – bed the seductress.
The modern-day loser is more chauvinistic and conservative than all previously seen Devdasses. But the best part about Kashyap’s Dev D is that his women wear the pants and know their way around it too. They are all messed up and products of dysfunctional relationships. The complexity of characterisation and the non-linearity of the narrative (Kashyap uses chapters like Tarantino – Paro’s story, Chanda’s story and finally Dev’s – the cause, the effect and the journey of escape) certainly makes it the most interesting of the Devdas movies.
The actors deliver these characters and that’s half the battle won. Abhay Deol is dormantly explosive and intense, getting increasingly moody and consumed by character deeper into the film. Mahi Gill’s graph has her shift from being the hyper-emotional drama queen to portraying an unsettling amount of calm and Kalki Koechlin’s lucky to let her physicality do most of the work demanded of the role. From being a picture of innocence to a sassy sex worker who chooses her clients, Kalki acquits herself credibly in this feminist take on the tragedy.
Anurag makes this character-study richer opting for stylisation over realism, letting the camera (Rajeev Ravi) trip and music (Amit Trivedi) take control of the proceedings and the second act of the film is inventive storytelling at its best.
Where the film fumbles is right at the start. Dev D employs a tone that seems to be screaming for your attention – like Paro photographing herself naked and getting it printed (hasn’t she heard of email?) or the slutty seductress following up “Do you have a girlfriend” with a line that’s desperately trying to win the frontbenchers over with: “So have you guys done it yet?”
Half a movie later, she decides to replace ‘it’ with the actual verb while telling him that’s all that he wants to do and our Dev D shoots back: “Don’t you?” much to the excited cheers of the crowd that’s not used to such language in a Hindi film.
But for such cheap tricks (and there’s plenty of stuff to just shock the pants off the prudish in the hall), Dev D is a fairly classy film. Hell, it’s a classic and a cult one at that, if you pardon its juvenilia.
Black Friday was too academic. No Smoking tried a little too hard to trip. But with this mix of intriguing entertainment, he’s arrived. You can take a seat right next to Nagesh Kukunoor, Mr. Kashyap. It’s not everyday a filmmaker gets away changing the end of an epic tragedy and still explores the idea behind it, perhaps even more than the original.
Beeban Kidron: Five years after Bridget Jones
After wrapping up production of the Cillian Murphy-Sienna Miller starrer, ‘Hippie Hippie Shake,’ the British filmmaker who helmed ‘Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason’ was cooling her heels in India like any other backpacker, travelling by bus, going from one little town to another.
Last weekend, Beeban Kidron was in Chennai. “It’s a private visit,” she begins the interview. “I just got back after visiting schools around Belgaum and Mangalore, Karnataka.”
So, did she find material for a film based in India like her countrymen did with Slumdog Millionaire?
She laughs. “I’m a friend of the writer Simon Beaufoy. I am very pleased with its success. I am very interested in the debate going on here about the film. You know, in a year when there have not been too many entertaining movies, it is fantastically entertaining as a movie. So whatever smaller issues there are, I think we have to celebrate Slumdog. I am a filmmaker, so I am always looking for material.”
Her latest film ‘Hippie Hippie Shake’ is based on the memoir by Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, who along with his staff was put on trial in the sixties for bringing out a sexually explicit issue, after the radical Australian satirical magazine launched in London.
“The film is in post-production. Most of the characters shown in the film are still alive and the producers are keen to show them the film and sort everything out. Which is why I am suddenly free and had a month to do something very, very different,” she says explaining her Indian holiday.
Beeban Kidron strongly believes in education that delivers inspiration rather than just literacy. That’s the reason she founded FilmClub along with her friend Lindsay Mackie. “People communicate through the telling of stories, not through literacy. There’s a lack of aspiration, a big problem among children. Hundred years of cinema from around the world is a great tool. The idea behind the FilmClub is to share stories. From Duck Soup to Hotel Rwanda, movies that are not on anybody’s radar are changing their lives. I have 30,000 to 40,000 children in these clubs and I am going seven times that number in two years from now. When someone has something to dream of, something to aspire for… if they can imagine something, then they can work towards it.”
Five years after the Bridget Jones sequel, how does she look back at the film?
“You know it’s great to make a movie that’s so enormous. I love Renee Zellwegger. She’s a fabulous person but more than that, she’s a really, really talented actress. I do feel that if movies were made they were in the 1950s where we had fantastic roles for women and they banged them out instead of rolling out one every two years, she would have been our Betty Davis, she would’ve been one of the women who would’ve dominated our cinema.”
The film opened to scathing reviews but the $70 million on to gross over $262 million.
“Yes, the critics weren’t kind. There were some things I wanted in the movie that came out and there were things I didn’t want that went in but when you make a big movie, you don’t control the last mile. It’s a deal you make with the devil. As a director, when you make a film at that level, you know there are a lot of vested interests. But millions of people saw the film, millions enjoyed the film. The critics were bound to hate a film that was going to cash in on the success of the first film. How could they not hate it?”
The big films she does give her the access to do the small things she wants to do – like the FilmClub or her last documentary project, Antony Gormley: Making Space. “It took me nine months to make that film about a sculptor who wasn’t known and had a thin audience. Hippie Hippie Shake is more mass-based. It’s about freedom, about the sixties, about standing up… the accidental hero sort of a thing. It’s Cillian Murphy’s film really. But I like doing both.”
So films like Bridget Jones are necessary evil?
“Thank you very much. You want to end my career? I’m on holiday,” she laughs. “It was a privilege and a pleasure to do Bridget Jones. Being in the mainstream gives me the opportunity to open another door.”
She doesn’t believe in the notion of cinema being different in the West and here in India. “It’s just that Bollywood uses a language alien to us. Danny Boyle took the Bollywood idiom and gave it to us in a language we understood, made it more sort of naturalistic and look at the response. Also, the idea of that film is very strong. You measure your population in billions. Imagine the competitiveness. The notion of the competition holding you back is very political. I saw Mother India a few years ago. And it was one of the greatest films I’ve seen in my life. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that again.”
She begins another anecdote about Gordon Brown talking to the students of the FilmClub when he was the Chancellor. “He gave them the normal politician speech and told them he had just been to India and had met this huge Indian star… I forget his name (probably Amitabh Bachchan) and suddenly, the room went ‘Woohooooo’. It was amazing to see that kind of response. Bollywood may not be the dominant thing for the chattering classes in London but in that place, in that classroom, on that day, there was no “West” in that sense. We are all closer than we know.”
Luck By Chance: Rock On, Akhtars!
Genre: Drama
Director: Zoya Akhtar
Cast: Farhan Akhtar, Konkona Sen, Rishi Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Isha Sharvani, Sanjay Kapoor, Hrithik Roshan
Storyline: Two struggling actors try to make it big in Bollywood and discover a few truths about life at the dream factory.
Bottomline: One of the best films of our times.
First, thank you God, for letting Zoya make this movie before Bhandarkar got a chance to apply his formula of realism and show us his take on the film industry.
Luck By Chance, from the house of the Akhtars, is one of the best macroscopic films of all time. And, a fantastic ‘micro’ film too that goes behind the scenes of industry-associated clichés to give us an insight behind common myths and machinations of the film industry.
It works magic simply because this is not just an exercise to simply critique the business (the Bhandarkar brand of innocents eaten by the big bad wolf of an industry – Chandni Bar, Page 3, Corporate, Traffic Signal, Fashion, Jail and so on) but it does make some earnestly solid points while painting us the larger picture.
This isn’t just a spoof or a parody (like Bollywood Calling or King of Bollywood), though the subtlety of the satire is too delicious to ignore. This isn’t a shameless celebration (like Om Shanti Om or Jaaneman) but it still pays tribute to the workforce. This isn’t an overtly indulgent, romanticised look at the people behind the scenes either (like Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand).
Zoya does to our cinema what Cameron Crowe did to rock with his largely autobiographical ‘Almost Famous’. And, this is no less a film than Crowe’s masterpiece while giving us a ringside view of the dream factory and the beauty of Zoya’s effort is that she also takes us intimately close and deep into the minds of all those who are a part of it. She sets up her characters as a silent observer, reveals their dilemmas and lets character come out of actions and decisions than just dialogue.
Zoya refuses to judge them – whether it’s the producer who sleeps with his starlet or the struggler who gets seduced by the newfound glamour of the business – and it’s these shades of grey that always make characters fascinating and seem so real.
Right from writing and casting, this film is one stroke of genius after another, especially with the way the filmmaker has chosen to employ her guest artistes from Aamir Khan at the start to Shah Rukh Khan at the end. Hrithik needs to be lauded to play a role so close to his real self that many a time, the lines between Hrithik Roshan and Zafar Khan seem blurred.
But it is Zoya’s eye for detail and sensitivity as a filmmaker that sets her apart from the rest of the Bollywood brigade. Sample, the quick glance of a worn-out shoe sported by a struggler at the audition or the ease with which the protagonist lies that he does not have a girlfriend with a nubile star-daughter in his bedroom and his subsequent encounter with his girlfriend.
Farhan Akhtar is a class apart and establishes himself as one of the finest actors around, employing intensity and understatement to make up for projection and energy demanded of the job though it would’ve been nice to see him go over the top in the film within the film. It’s a delight to see Rishi Kapoor revel in his role of an old-fashioned, good-hearted superstitious producer and the ever-fantastic Dimple is borderline self-deprecatory, playing the star-mom and bringing the house down with her ‘Oh-I’m-still-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-the room’ antics.
Isha Sharvani’s innocence, radiance and sex appeal make her instantly edible and the girl’s come a long way from the ‘Tarzan-dance’ days of Kisna. Konkana’s performance makes us want to give her a long, warm hug and strangely, you even feel Sanjay Kapoor is capable of being a decent actor, given the right filmmaker and role.
Right from cinematography (Carlos Catalan) to Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s music to art direction (Abid T.P), Luck by Chance seems to be put together by a dream crew. Maybe it’s destiny or just pure luck that everything comes together so well.
This ode to Bollywood is the must-watch film of the season.
And, Javed Saab, thank you for giving us your kids. They continue to rock on.
Tammannah: Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon
Happy Days are here for Miss Padikaathavan, who did her Kalloori when she was still in school.
Soon, we will get to see this Ayan actor opposite Suriya do her Ananda Thandavam. We will then see her with that Paiyya, Karthi.
Tammannah is also doing the Jab We Met remake with Bharath, Raja Rani. The teen will soon turn Queen, backed with a little love and a little hard work (Konjam Ishtam, Konjam Kashtam in Telugu). She has no dates till July, we learn.
“When I began, I had hoped that someday, my schedule would be this busy. I am enjoying the pace,” she says.
No surprise considering that’s a quick learner. “For my 12th exam, I got 64 per cent. People spend a whole year studying for it. All I had was barely 15 days to prepare. So yeah!” she grins.
Having made her debut at 13 and a half (no kidding, she played the leading lady) in Hindi, this child prodigy has been living out of suitcases at Hotel Green Park for four years now. And now, she’s doing B.A. Economics by correspondence.
“Yes, I don’t get to attend college like the other kids. But I think I am doing something more interesting, something I am very passionate about. Beside since my Mom’s or somebody from my family is always with me, the emotional support has been great.”
Growing up, whose shoes did she want to get into?
“Madhuri Dixit was somebody I always looked up to,” she says flashing that 1000-watt smile she seems to have perfected from her role model. “Some people say that I look like her. When I was 13-14, I didn’t know I was going to look like her someday. But now, I feel that I have to be me, I have to search within and find myself.”
Girls from the North have always made it big here.
“Maybe because there are many more girls in Bombay and Delhi who have grown up on Bollywood and they see it as a career option. Here, I am not sure if people see acting as a career choice.”
Tammannah realises that in a male-dominated industry, she has to strike a balance.
“I can say I have been fortunate to get films like Happy Days, Kalloori, Ananda Thandavam, Paiyya, Konjam Ishtam Konjam Kashtam and commercial films like Padikathavan and Ayan. I want to do a little bit of both… Like the ‘Jab We Met’ role in Raja Rani. Indian cinema is male dominated. I understand that, I am OK with that but I want to do my own thing.”
Which is why though her Dad manages her career and Mom accompanies her to shoots, she’s the one who chooses the scripts herself in an industry where nothing is hard-bound.
“I’ve always been a given a pretty decent narration about what the film is about. That gives me a more instinctive view. Sometimes, the narration is too vague and sometimes, it is vivid.”
What if the script changes as they shoot, a common phenomenon in Tamil cinema?
“As for any actor, it all depends on how grave the change is. For example, I don’t do kissing scenesI it’s there in my contract. So, all of a sudden the director can’t decide to add a kissing scene. But, my directors have been very professional. I understand when my scenes have to be taken out when they are killing the pace of the film.”
She believes that learning on the job is the real thing.
“I was into theatre for eight to nine months when I started out. I did experimental theatre. I have performed on stage and I am sure trained actors do more than that but I’ve been lucky to work with fantastic directors like Sekher Kammula, Balaji Sakthivel and K.V. Anand early on in my career.”
Being young, does she ever feel intimidated?
“When I first acted with Suriya, I was very nervous during the first two or three days. I am a huge fan. I could not believe I was working with him. But when the camera starts rolling, you even forget who you are. You have to become someone else.”
Tammannah doesn’t let criticism bother her either. “A review is a perception of one person. Films are meant for people and different people have different takes. My critics are Mum and Dad, I take them very seriously and they give me honest feedback.”
