(This was published in the first issue of Rolling Stone India, cover dated March 2008)
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Kevin O’Neill
Publisher: DC/Wildstorm
What if the protagonists of the numerous novels of the nineteenth century co-existed in a fictional world? Writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill led this idea forward through two volumes of comics called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, each spanning six issues, in which Mina Murray from Stoker’s Dracula, the rugged hero Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo from Verne’s stories, Mr Hyde (with Dr Jekyll in tow) and Wells’s Invisible Man fought Oriental villains and Martians. At the end of the second volume, the League was disbanded, its members at odds with each other. The third installment, called The Black Dossier was released recently, and it differs from the previous volumes in three respects – one, it is a standalone volume; two, it is no longer confined to the setting and characters of the Victorian Era; three – and the most important difference of all, it’s not really a comic book.
The year is 1958, and a remarkably youthful Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain are in London after a file called The Black Dossier, which contains confidential information about all the previous incarnations of the League that were formed throughout history to carry out covert operations for England. They have to escape a posse of MI5 espionage agents led by a spy referred to as “Jimmy”, Emma Night and Hugo Drummond, and if you cannot identify two out of these three, you probably wouldn’t enjoy this book – and make their way to the fourth dimension. In the middle of the pursuit, they read sections of the dossier, and this brings out the real meat of the book, as Moore and O’Neill narrate the history of this fictional world in the form of letters, segments of literary works, maps, schematics, excerpts of autobiographies and comic book sections, including an example of Tijuana Bibles.
In every section, Moore writes in a style corresponding to the genre and content. For instance, Faerie’s Fortunes Founded claims to be a lost play by William Shakespeare written in the style of the Bard himself, The Crazy Wide Forever is a stream of consciousness ‘beat’ novel supposedly by Sal Paradise, the narrator of Kerouac’s On The Road, and the most hilarious pastiche of them all (and my personal favourite), What Ho, Gods of the Abyss by Bertie Wooster is a look at the Lovecraft canon in a Wodehousian vein. Kevin O’Neill’s artwork shines in all these sections - he is equally at home drawing dynamic action sequences , cartoony meta-comics and detailed ink etchings echoing early twentieth-century illustration plates. At the end of the book, when the duo reaches the Fourth Dimension, the sequence is represented as a 3-D sequence (yes, you have to wear cardboard glasses that come with the book) and even there, Moore and O’Neill make use of the technology to come up with stunning effects – a Lovecraftian elder god speaks in illegible runes, close your right eye, you see the English words form behind the gibberish.
The book is more of a framing device and less of a story, an ambitious attempt to map all of known literary fiction into a single coherent world, with the story leading in to the actual third volume due next year. Nearly every page of the main graphic novel contains references to fictional characters from British literature, TV series, comics and popular culture. And as is normal in a work of such ambition, the question here is this.
Would you enjoy it?
If you are a fan of comic books and comics alone, probably not - which explains the lukewarm response the book got from those who embraced the boy’s adventure spirit of the earlier two volumes. The Black Dossier is a different beast altogether, it requires you to come to the reading table with an awareness - if not in-depth knowledge - of pop culture, an ability to context-switch between different time-periods, storytelling devices and above all, with time on your hands. There is just too much going on in the book to take it all in at one sitting, and there is a high chance that the volume of content and information proves to be overwhelming. It took me nearly two weeks to get through all the segments, in case you’re wondering. That said, it truly is a tremendous piece of work, quite unlike any comic book that has come before. Not quite ‘the best thing since sliced bread’, as Moore mentions in his pre-release interviews, but definitely one of the best graphic novels of 2007.
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Essential X-Men vol 1
Essential X-Men Volume 1
Writer: Chris Claremont
Artists: Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin
Publisher: Marvel comics.
If you like the X-men movies and want to get into the comics without treading into confusing continuity, check out this particular reprint edition, that presents Giant-size X-men #1 and the subsequent issues 94-119, the 70’s stories that resurrected the classic X-Men team from a comic on the brink of cancellation to a best-selling title. Chris Claremont’s scripts laid equal emphasis on multicultural elements of our favorite mutants, space opera, inter-team friction and individual character development, while artists Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin brought in realism with their dynamic line-work. The first appearances of Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler, the death and subsequent rebirth of Jean Grey into Phoenix, arch-villain Magneto’s triumphant return, and Professor Charles Xavier’s romance with intergalactic Empress Lilandra - these are the stories that laid the groundwork for (arguably) the greatest Marvel story ever – the Dark Phoenix Saga. And who would have thought that a B-grade character called Wolverine would be catapulted to superstardom - becoming the poster-boy of the grim and gritty comics of the eighties - by virtue of being included in this title?
Reading this volume brings back a warm feeling of nostalgia at how straightforward comics were back then – villains indulge in bombastic monologues outlining their plans in detail, every fight sequence has characters talking nineteen to the dozen, and in different dialects too! But make no mistake about it, these stories are groundbreaking and classic – modern Marvel writers (as well as the scriptwriters of the X-men movies) are still borrowing the mythic elements Claremont and Byrne put in place in these initial issues. Consider your money well-spent.
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Lucky Luke: Jesse James
Lucky Luke: Jesse James.
Writer: Goscinny
Artist: Morris
Publisher: Tara Press, India.
All you Tintin and Asterix lovers, time to rejoice! The classic series Lucky Luke, written by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Morris is now available in India. Lucky Luke is a madcap adventure series about a fearless, resourceful and slightly loco cowboy his equally loony horse, Jolly Jumper as they travel through the Wild West, helping those in distress. In the first volume, ‘Jesse James’, the villain tries to be a modern-day Robin Hood – he robs a rich man, gives the money to a homeless vagrant, and when he finds out that his gift has made the latter wealthy, proceeds to rob him. He finally decides to keep the money for himself, to avoid any such moral quandaries in the future. With his Shakespeare-quoting elder brother Frank, and a witless associate named Cole Younger, Jesse James strikes terror in the West with his bank and railroad heists. Until one fine day, two Pinkerton detectives employ Lucky Luke to capture the James gang before they rob the bank in Nothing Gulch, Texas.
The book is, in one word, fun! Unlike other European cowboy comics like Blueberry and Tex Willer, Lucky Luke eschews realism in favor of humor, substitutes spaghetti violence with cartoon lunacy and is appealing both to kids and adults. I laughed aloud throughout the book, and look forward to reading the remaining four volumes as soon as I can. Thanks are due to Tara Press for bringing this classic series back into print, with a brilliant translation and an album-sized release.
Indian music changed in 1992.
It’s fairly obvious that every musical milestone since that year has had one man’s shadow looming large over it. From the sheer de-genrification of film music; the price of audio cassettes - it was Rahman’s Rangeela that pushed the price point to Rs 30, and then Hindustani to 32, and so on; the prominent display of the music director’s credentials in the publicity stills for films; a new generation of fresh, unconventional voices; an infusion of musical trends that were several levels above copying the latest Billboard Top 20 hit; even the move from cassettes to audio CDs, A.R. Rahman and his music has influenced Indian Film Music like no one before him. A lot of people would disagree - hey, individual opinion and all that - but if your ears cannot detect the difference between pre-Rahman film music and what came after Roja, our discussion is pretty much moot.
Over the years, Rahman’s contemporaries have picked up and internalized the superficial aspects of his musicmanship - the use of technology to layer sounds and to smoothen the harsh edges of any voice or instrument, the melding of a Western ensemble with a traditional lead instrument, employing sequenced bass and drumlines. The older guys - Anu Malik, Nadeem-Shravan ( when they were still around), Jatin-Lalit - they quickly came up to speed with the changing aural taste of the populace, employing the help of resident techmeisters - Tabun Sutradhar, Ranjit Barot et al- to polish their tunes and add that extra vim to their otherwise humdrum compositions. The new guard that followed - Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar, Pritam, Harris Jeyaraj - took the template that Rahman had perfected over the decade, and applied it everywhere. What this has wrought is - sometimes, these people can out-Rahman Rahman, using just the right kind of orchestral flourishes with saccharine-sweet tunes, perfectly blending east and west into a musical muesli. Music that is gelatineous, easily-digestible; tunes that run through your brain, find its pleasure centers, hit the right neurological spots; songs that exist for the few weeks they run on the telly, and are then vaporized by the next aural offering on the air. They are, and then they aren’t.
So that brings me to the question that’s been bothering me for quite sometime - what’s next?
Rahman’s obsession with aural perfection continues, his newer soundtracks going boldly where no Indian composer has gone before. On a good day, ARR’s musical skill is unparalleled, his proficiency at his craft, the way he is attuned to an evolutionary sound that must meet a particular standard he has set for himself - all of these are beyond doubt or question. The man has proved himself over and over again all these years, and it would nearly be criminal to assume that his well of creativity is about to dry up anytime in the future. But this unrelenting obsession with crystal-clear sound - what does it lead to? What will a film song sound like in ten years?
In some ways, the fall-out of the Rahman Age of Music is the antiseptic nature of the musical package we hear around us. I hear the sheen of the voices, the precise cutoff of the violins, the perfectly looped beats, the synthetised warmth of the pads embellishing the music with pleasant chord progressions in the background. An example - listen to the title track of Rang De Basanti, where Daler Mahendi’s robust earthy voice is jostled playfully by Chitra’s tinkly pitch, punctuated with a multitude of Punjabi-sounding “aha”s. But listen again, a little carefully. The beat of the dhol is incessant, yet non-intrusive. The notes on the thumbi are flawless. The pads, when they come in, round off the song excellently.The song is bubbly, it makes you want to dance, but it’s manufactured in such a way that it evokes the spontaneity of a Max Martin number. Martin, for the uninitiated, is a Swedish music producer who provided the trademark sound for a number of Britney/Backstreet Boys/NSync albums in the early nineties.
One of the Ramones ( just went and checked, it was Tommy, the drummer) once made a comment in an interview about how, following the musical innovations of the 60s, the scene was inundated with a number of wannabe Jimi Hendrixes, none of whom could match up to the legend. What they ended up with was endless guitar solos - and punk rock came out as a reaction to that, the need to have pure, stripped-down version of rock n’ roll. This new music did not just distance itself from the Hendrix-Beatles-school of virtuoso guitar-and-word-play, it pissed all over it and created something completely new.
The more I think about it, the more I see Amit Trivedi, member of a little-known band called Om and a new entrant to the Indian film music scene as the next logical progression of Indian film music. He’s just two films old, but those two - and a couple of stray songs in private albums here and there - are enough for me to arrive at that conclusion. The first time I noticed Amit Trivedi’s music - without knowing it was by him - was when I heard a song sung by Indian Idol-winner Abhijit Sawant. Sawant had previously released a generic, yawn-inducing album as part of his Sony/BMG contract, and when the trancey Junoon’ began to play on TV, it was like hearing a different person altogether. There was a husky undertone to his voice, and a feel hard to describe in words - like the guy knew how good the composition was, and was giving it a personality that it deserved. The song made use of the distortion guitar as a new-agey, post-rock-flavored instrument; the 4/4 beat, played on a classic drum-kit, was almost classic rock n’ roll, and the intoxicating, rhythmic lyrics pushed it into squarely into the genre we call Sufi rock. I assumed that the composer was Mithoon, an up-and-coming composer specializing in importing Pakistani music into the Bhatt camp by the barrel, and almost concluded that it was another of those imports.
A friend went and watched Aamir, a film that ran for a long time in local theatres, getting good crowds and favorable press. To my surprise, she went to Music World during lunch the next day, and bought the soundtrack. “That good?”, I asked, and borrowed it off her after she ripped the music to her laptop. After forgetting all about it for a few weeks, I finally took the CD out of my bag and gave it a listen. And another. Brilliant, unconventional songs. Voices rawer than sushi in an authentic Japanese restaurant. ( I suck at analogies, thank you ) That’s when I was first astounded by Amit Trivedi and his musical choices. ‘Haara’ and ‘Chakkar Ghumyo’ are songs that Trivedi sang himself, in a voice that, I shit you not, oozes with unselfconscious chutzpah. Make of that what you will. I saw the film, my respect-o-meter went all the way up to eleven. The slightly irritating tics in the music - like a particular drum riff in the song ‘Haara’ that got on my nerves - actually made sense in the way they were introduced and used in the songs in the context of the visuals. - ”Haara’ ended up giving me the goosebumps. Obviously, the low-budget trappings of Aamir ensured that both the film and its music were little-known gems of 2008.
Obviously, it’s the eighteen-track genre-mashup called Dev D that has brought Amit Trivedi to the forefront of the music scene, a universe removed from composers churning out disposable Soni-mahiya pap. Dev D has its own share of Punjabi numbers, but it’s a far cry from the pop bhangra that tries to pass off as the real thing in film music. Trivedi has Labh Janjua, a singer primarily known for the chartbusting Mundian Toh Bachke Rahe and a number of stray songs in Hindi films in 2007-08, sing a rollicking bhangra number (’Hikknaal’ ) and a song (’Mahi Mennu’) that has two versions - a primarily vocal track, and the other a raucuous beatfest that throbs with a primal energy of its own. Shilpa Rao’s dulcet vocals glide over ‘Dhol Yaara Dhol’ ( the song apparently got Trivedi his gig with Anurag Kashyap, who in turn introduced him to Rajkumar Gupta, the director of Aamir ), and a multitude of unknown voices - Aditi Singh Sharma, Toshi, Joi, Anusha Mani - proceed to shower your aural senses with a plethora of musical wonders. Trivedi and his voice take centre-stage in some of the most entertaining songs I’ve heard in a long time - ‘Duniya’, ‘Aankh Micholi’, ‘Saali Khushi’ and ‘Nayan Tarse’ are not songs that hit your pleasure-centers immediately. They sound and feel rough, woven out of homespun cloth; the very antithesis of your typical Rahman song that evokes satin and velvety down. The beginning of ‘Duniya’ in particular is a complete assault on your average film-music mind, where Trivedi mixes the sound of an accordian ( or is that the much-maligned harmonium?) with a caterwauling chorus. The drums kick in with the frenzy of a demented 12-year old, tripped up on crystal meth. Trivedi layers his voice over and over in his own songs, adding interesting - often debauched - counterpoints to the lines he spits out. (Note for instance, how the second disembodied voice says “Zindagi” after every line in ‘Aankh Micholi’, almost as if it’s struggling to find the correct scale to latch on to, and manages to, but just barely) Bereft of slickness, artificial sweeteners, or familiar musical cues. Raw.
It’s not as if Trivedi’s music is completely rough and earthy, far from it. The two Dev-Chanda themes, one a whistling melody backed by delicate piano tinkles, the other a playful scat with the male and female vocalists complementing each other, as a mandolin trills in the background - are examples of how ethereal the soundtrack becomes at times. The first of these themes beautifully segues into ‘Dil Mein Jaagi’ by Anusha Mani, with shades of orchestral music and the opera. Much has already been said about the two versions of the song with possibly the catchiest title of the decade, and everybody and his uncle has seen and heard the surreally-shot ‘Pardesi’. The one track that hits the pleasure centers from the first second is Shruti Pathak’s ‘Paayaliya’, its vocal percussion gelling splendidly with the veena, the song a brilliant blend of east and west.
With two films down, both with directors who seem to know exactly what they want, it’s probably too early to make a sweeping statement about Amit Trivedi’s career. So far he’s been in his comfort zone, working in close collaboration with lyricist Amitabh Bhattacharya, experimenting with fresh voices, doing his own thing. It’ll be interesting to see how his style - if you can call it that, at this stage - evolves with his subsequent offerings. Will he sustain the manic energy in his sophomore album? A lot depends on the films he signs - I can see him carve a niche for himself with gonzo directors like Kashyap. A true test would be a Yashraj Productions film, a cinematic house that has reduced S-E-L, Vishal-Shekhar and Salim-Sulaiman to interchangeable drones.The Next Big Thing in Indian Film Music? Rahman 2.0? Only time will tell. He’s the only composer after AR Rahman who’s excited me so much ( Vishal Bharadwaj, technically, is not just a composer) and hopefully I’ll be following his career with interest in the years to come.
The glut of movies based on comics, in recent times, has added substantially to my View Queue. Reminds me of times I would scour second-hand magazine shops for the odd Cinescape, Cinefantastique or SFX for tidbits about the possibility of this actor playing that superhero, if this comic ever came to screen; which storyline would make for the greatest adaptation ever; would this little-known indie title fare better if it made a silver screen debut. And now it looks like every other 2 or 3-issue-old title has either been optioned, or is in pre-production already with the writer having banged out a first draft in two months and the artist involved in production design. Fuck, I realized that nearly every comic I know is being made into a movie.
One of the biggest changes in Hollywood dealings in recent times is the greater emphasis placed on the creator’s vision ( in case of non-corporate comics) and on the reliance on the overall back-story with the old-school mainstream superheroes. Sharp contrast to the times when auteur vision would take over - yes, Ang Lee, I am looking at you - with occasional scraps thrown in for the geek crowd, and the final product would leave me on the verge of tearing out my hair in rage. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City did unbelievably well, and suddenly Hollywood woke up to the joys of the templated comicbook movie - the precise translation of panel to screen.
So, coming back to the deluge of newer and newer film productions devoted to adapting comics, it is evidently still not clear what will succeed and what won’t. Why does an Iron Man and a Dark Knight work at the box office, while a Punisher War Zone and a Spirit die ignominious deaths? Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X-Men 2 made mutants epitomise comicbook coolness, so why did Superman Returns explode like a planet near a red sun? I have some thoughts on those - maybe they’re not all the points that contribute to the success of an adaptation, but I think these are the most obvious.
1. Getting the Pitch right - This is, I believe, the most frequent stumbling block for a movie studio swayed by a director and overpaid, image conscious stars into bankrolling a movie that resembles the original comic in name only. Ang Lee’s Hulk is the most perfect example - a character primarily known for smashing things could not - and did not - work well as a psychological study of father-son relationships. The first two Superman movies were successful because they got the square-jawed do-gooder image of the character perfectly, the later ones made Superman the straight man, and boy, were they bad or what! One of the most jarring films I’ve seen of late was The Spirit. Yes, the one that featured Will Eisner’s character as interpreted by Frank Miller - and the movie just could not make up its mind about whether it was a noir take-off, a goofy take-nothing-seriously caper, a sex-violence-gore-filled piece of exploitation cinema. It was possibly Miller’s inexperience at work, but here’s a textbook example of how to NOT make a film. Sure, you can interpret characters your own way - but you cannot have a violent, bone-crunching fight sequence followed by a goofy Loony Toonesque show-off between the two characters.
2. Obscurity works. I will admit that I hadn’t heard of Daniel Clowes before I saw Ghost World. In fact, I will even admit that I had kind of assumed Ghost World would be about a world full of ghosts where a lone warrior, accompanied by the two hot girls on the cover of the VCD will wage a lonely war against supernatural beings by day, and totally do the girls at night. The movie of course had nothing to do with the scenarios my wretched mind had cooked up. It was a neat story about growing up in the suburbs and teenage alienation, and the fact that it was based on a little-known graphic novel worked in favour of both the film and its source - people like me went and discovered the sweaty, underground genius of Dan Clowes and the indie crowd loved the movie. What I am trying to say here is - a lesser-known graphic novel might just beat every other rule that I’ve laid out - it could include stars, it could manufacture its own interpretation of the source material, take tremendous liberties with the storyline, and could still win accolades. There’s no pressure to live up to the demands of the true believers - hell, did anybody know about A History of Violence before David Cronenberg made a movie out of it? Or Road To Perdition? When there’s no fan following in the first place, it gives the film-makers the liberty to make a film that stands on its own. If you read the original graphic novels, you’ll be shocked at the way the movies diverge from the books - not only adding characters and situations that weren’t there in the comic in the first place, but in both cases, changing the structure of the storyline to match the point Mendes and Cronenberg tried to get across. And they still worked, earned awards and created new readers for the books - in both cases, forcing DC Comics to reprint the books in newer editions ( they were originally published through Paradox Press, an original line under Warner that published mostly standalone crime comics).
3. Contemporary Relevance Comics have always reflected contemporary trends - Miller’s Dark Knight Returns is largely a reaction to the Reagan administration, a lot of anti-Thatcher sentiment appears in the 80s works of British writers like Pete Milligan and Alan Moore. But while backstories make sense to the followers and action sequences bring in the early weekend box office returns, the smart filmmaker knows how to add a layer of subtext that strikes a chord with the casual movie-goer and elevates his film beyond a generic popcorn fest. V For Vendetta was a comic set in a Thatcherian England gone fascist, while the Wachowski brothers, in their adaptation, made it more reflective of the prevailing political climate in 2006. Zack Snyder’s version of 300 also had a set of themes tacked on to its generally-straightforward storyline. The plus point of adding contemporary relevance to a comic book movie is that it gives the critics a hook to watch and review the film at a different level, and it leaves the current-affairs-savvy viewer happy that he “gets” what the movie is really about.
4. Stars don’t matter, actors do - There is this famous anecdote about Sir Alec Guinness, who could not stand the fan adulation about his character Obi-Wan Kenobi - and refused to attend Star Wars conventions. Probably Sir Guinness could not stand how Kenobi overshadowed every other role in his illustrious career, but this is a telling example of how a role brands an actor for life. All the more relevant with comic characters - fans have a tremendous emotional investment in characters they’ve grown up with, and if actor Joe Shmoe plays WhamPowBiff-man, he will always be identified as such. Christopher Reeve was a wonderful actor - look at his deadpan role of a theatre actor in Noises Off, but hey, he’s always remembered as Superman. Ditto Hugh Jackman. Non-stars have the ability to invest more fully into the character, rather than their own personal tics taking over the story. Jack Nicholson did a smashing job as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, but at the end of the day, the character you saw onscreen was Nicholson playing a deranged lunatic, not the Joker. Tobey Maguire as Spider-man works in the first movie, but by the time he takes off his mask for every other scene in Spider-Man 3, it’s almost farcical - seeing Maguire the star try to assert his presence in the frame. In sharp contrast, look at Hugo Weaving as V or Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, and you will be hard-pressed to believe these characters were overshadowed by the star-power of the actors involved.
5. Slavishness does not equal “Faithful to the source” Yeah sure, so the movie resembles the comicbook, the plot is directly from a memorable story arc and even the actors stand around just like the original panels. So why am I watching the movie in the first place? For that matter, why call it a movie at all - just call it a role-playing comic or something. It was Sin City that began this fad of panel to screen recreation, and while it was a bold visual experiment that worked really well - actors in stilted poses pretending they look anything other than dumb when emoting to the specifications of a printed page? Newsflash - they look very dumb. Voice-overs that echo narrative captions, excessive green-screen sets - I predict that in 10 years, all this will look as dated and groan-worthy as music videos from the 80s. And then we’ll all snicker about how we called Zack Snyder a “visionary” director.
6. Ignore the fans Yeah, you heard that right. Sure, fans weep and wail about every single detail, but here it is - they will always find flaws with the finished product, regardless of how good it is. So why bother at all? Keep the fan-service to a minimum, stick to a solid concept, make the changes that will translate the film properly onscreen - never mind the complaints about not being faithful to the source. The source comic exists as the template, but it’s moronic to think it’ll look or feel the same when real people are mouthing those lines or wearing those exact same costumes. Sam Raimi took liberties with quite a few aspects of the Spider-man mythos while making his movies - did anyone hear the howls of frenzy when the term “organic web-shooter” was bandied around? - but it paid off. The whole Harvey Dent/Two Face origin was reworked in The Dark Knight, but the brilliance of the overall package bulldozed over all fan-grumbles.
7. Stick to the same team for the sequels This one’s pretty much common sense coupled with a rudimentary knowledge of film production. A movie works not because of a concept, a script or a strong character, but because of a solid combination of the above with the vision of the principal crew, along with the equations that are shared between them and the cast. Your movie is a success, and then you decide to make the sequel, but with a different director - you’re effectively starting from scratch. Too many examples to mention here - consider the Batman sequels after Burton, X-Men 3, or even Punisher War Zone. The caveat: if your franchise tanked, feel free to reboot the franchise with a completely new team. Worked for Hulk and Batman, didn’t it?
8. Throw Joseph Campbell out of the window The classic “journey of the hero” bit that Campbell expounded has, quite frankly, been done to death by monkey-hordes of screenplay writers hacking out three-act scripts. It’s time to move on, already. Scripts that work beyond the usual good-against-evil spiel that’s been around, scripts that go beyond telling a basic vendetta tale that could be a generic action movie. One of the most telling examples of this is Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil, even though the movie was true to the spirit of the original comics, the pedestrian script let it down. Add to it the insipid writing in Constantine, the Punisher movies, the Fantastic Four movies, and others too numerous to mention - the ones in which you can predict in detail where the movie is going because you’ve seen hundreds like them before. All with the same cliched punchlines, the clipped dialogues, the juvenile foreshadowing and the soaring strings.
9. Avoid Alan Moore You would think film-makers would learn by now, but apparently not. So here’s the thing - Alan Moore writes comics. Comics, see? Not storyboards that can leapfrog onto the screen and make you pots of money. He writes his scripts with an eye on the artistic team he’s working on at the moment, and he writes stories that could probably be told on the screen, but not the way he wrote it. You can make a movie on Jack the Ripper, and it could be a thrilling look at a serial killer in Victorian England, but you cannot adapt From Hell. Call it something else, distance yourself from Moore the writer, and you’ll have a film that might work on its own, and you’ll have your dignity intact at the end of it all. Why expose yourself to an impossibly high standard that you know you are never going to attain anyway, when you can safely - y’know - write your own story and bring it to life? So the next time you want to adapt an Alan Moore comic, do yourself a favour. Watch From Hell, Constantine, LXG, V For Vendetta and Watchmen - and weep with disbelief at your own temerity. Quit it, there are better things to do that trying to adapt a Moore comic.
1. I was born in a small town known for a matchbox factory. We moved out a year later, and I have visited the place just once later in my life.
2. I know how to speak, read and write four languages, and can understand and read one more.
3. My earliest coherent memory is walking with my father to the hospital one morning, to see my newborn sister for the first time.
4. The first time I fell in love was with two girls at the same time. They were twins. We would go to pre-school together, and I would occasionally confuse one for the other.
5. My earliest concern about the English language was trying to understand the difference between the words “agree” and “angry”.
6. I used to draw a lot when I was little. Even went to “art school”, which was a euphemism for a shed where a lot of children were made to copy whatever the teacher drew on the blackboard and then colour them in. Won a few art competitions, but never really did anything much about it.
7. On my sixth birthday, my father gave me a coffee-table book. “Indira Gandhi” by Swraj Paul. I have no idea why.
8. I used to be bored very easily until I came to college. Then I figured out that I could hear complete albums in my mind during boring classes, meetings or dinners - music interludes and all.
9. I am a bad conversationalist. I zone out in the middle of conversations when there are too many people around, and tune back in when someone says something that’s of interest to me. Most of my one-on-one conversations tend either devolve into pop culture discussions, or become one-way talk-fests where I am nodding my head, grunting and thinking of something completely unrelated to what the other person is talking about.
10. I occasionally flex my wrists when I am alone. In my mind, I go “snikt” as razor-sharp adamantium claws pop out of my skin.
11. With a few exceptions, my relatives and I don’t get along too well. I find most of them a bunch of two-faced weirdos and they think I am weird.
12. I made up a new game when in school. It consisted of two teams throwing mud balls at each other, but your team won only if you did not hit anyone in the other team and instead, made your mud ball explode near your opponents. I thought it was a cool game, until somebody figured out that it was cooler when they exploded on your body.
13. One of the biggest joys of my childhood was reading Enid Blyton’s books. It took me a long while to figure out that Enid Blyton is a lady, and her name is Enid and not Gnid as I had assumed from her distinctive signature. My favourite Blyton series was the Magic Faraway Tree books, about a magical tree on the top of which you could visit different, wonderful worlds that parked themselves for short periods of time. Then I grew up and found out that we have a magic faraway tree of our own, called the Internet.
14. I make it a point to not break eggs on the larger or smaller end, but hit it squarely on the middle. Not only does it make peeling the eggshell easier, but it also gives me great pleasure to know that I cannot be executed for treason either in Lilliput or Blefuscu.
15. Occasionally, when I am watching a movie or reading a book, I want the villain to win.
16. I am fanatical about having zero unread messages in my email inbox.
17. Around 1990 or thereabouts, I read a book on international spies and found out that every single one of them had their identities compromised because of photographs taken during their high school and college days. For the next three years, I refused to let myself be photographed. I would go out of the way to avoid family pictures and also tracked down my photographs in relatives’ albums. All because, y’know, just in case I was drafted as a spy later on in life.
18. I refuse to read certain books or watch certain movies or listen to particular bands because some people are too enthusiastic about them. Case in point: The Fountainhead. Pink Floyd.
19. I am bad at debates. I tend to see both sides of an argument, and can come up with pro or counter-arguments that are equally convincing.
20. Religious rituals piss me off. Mostly because they consist of people doing something without understanding or trying to figure out why they’re doing it.
21. I beat up a guy in school once because he was trying to snatch a comic away from me and wrinkled the cover when I wouldn’t let him take it. There was blood. And multiple screaming teachers.
22. I learnt to play the violin when I was little, mostly because of my parents and a violin-playing neighbour who impressed them a lot. Six years and two different violin gurus later, I stopped. Because of the Higher Secondary Certificate examinations which, in my part of the world, is a rite of passage equivalent to the Japanese Genpuku or the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. Later, I taught myself to play the keyboard by ear.
23. I rarely bother about lyrics when I am listening to a song. When humming a song I like, I tend to use a lot of gibberish, instead of the actual lyrics. I listen to the words only if somebody points them out to me and that could happen years after I’ve known the song.
24. Strangely, I learnt two songs - Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby - before I heard them. It was because I had an older friend who would sing these songs and I memorized the words from his diary.
25. It is not humanly possible to keep count of the number of umbrellas I’ve lost over the years.
26. I am very bad at buying gifts. When I buy a gift for someone, I get confused between buying something that’s meaningful and something the other person would want but I personally consider flippant. It’s a constant battle.
27. I collect original comic art, among other things. To the best of my knowledge, I am still the only person in India who spends gigantic portions of his salary buying (mostly) inked 11 inch by 17 inch bristol boards. Fuck, I love it.
28. I am a lapsed quizzer. It’s because I’ve lost faith in people who watch movies and read just so that they can come up with questions and answers for future quizzes.
29. I once hit a girl with my bicycle when I was coming back home one evening. It was her fault, honest, she ran to the middle of the road and then ran back again. That was possibly the only road accident I’ve been involved in.
30. I’ve worked in the engineering division for the same company for about seven years now, and I am still more than a little under-confident about my technical skills.
31. If I hadn’t gotten my first job, I would have probably been a struggling musician. I ignored academics in college in favour of the college band. Sang, played the keyboard and was generally full of it. Now, I consider myself a victim of real life - kind of like the Farhan Akhtar character in Rock On, only a little less sullen and with not as much money.
32. I loathe most sports. I used to play cricket in school, but one day, some guy hit my right shin with a leather ball and I wound up bed-ridden for a week. I still have a dent in my shin. My parents made me enroll in a table tennis class at the local stadium, and I used to go there in the evenings, after school, spend 10 minutes sitting on the spectator benches and then sneak out to the library opposite the road, which had an awesome collection of comics and James Hadley Chase novels.
33. I know how to swim, but people look funny at me when I am floundering around in the pool because I tend to splash a lot.
34. I don’t like social networks because there does not seem to be anything much to read. Or do. Other than seeing people change statuses and take quizzes and write badly-spelt messagesto each other.
35. A recurring dream I have is about my life as an undergraduate student. In my dream, there is an exam the next day and I have to prepare for it because I hadn’t appeared in the mid-sems, but something or the other keeps turning up and I just can’t seem to study. I don’t even remember what books/chapters I need to read and struggle to find my pen and admit card until the last minute. It would not be as scary if I hadn’t really been through such a situation in my undergrad life.
36. I’ve been an A.R Rahman fan ever since I heard Roja. I occasionally frustrate people by raving incessantly about his music, and there are times when I just cannot bring myself to listen to some Rahman albums because I know they’ll disappoint me.
37. All cars look the same to me. I can probably broadly distinguish between three kinds of cars, but I can never understand how people can point out the make and model of any car passing by.
38. I am more than a little obsessed with Japanese culture. It all started when I read Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja and Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings back-to-back, and then discovered a manga called Mai The Psychic Girl.
39. When I was 13, I got my first and only enema. It was at an ayurvedic camp in a small village in Assam, and the quack that headed the camp prescribed an enema for every affliction that came his way. Having warm water and oiled stuffed up your anus when you’re standing on your hands, face-down in a wretched latrine tends to do things about your worldview, I tell you.
40. Until very recently, I suffered from a digital magpie complex - the urge to back-up every bit of digital information on multiple data repositories. I’ve created backups of backups, resulting in a house filled with CDs and DVDs. Now, I just don’t give a shit.
41. I tend to tease my friends mercilessly about things they like. I get very insecure when they tease me about things I am interested in.
42. The only time I’ve been happy in love is right now.
43. One bad habit I would like to give up - procrastinating. Another bad habit I want to give up - swearing when I am upset.
44. For a very long time, I considered eating food as something that interferes with my waking life. I could not sit for lunch, dinner or breakfast without doing something else - reading, watching TV, anything at all that would help make the tedious job of chewing my food a little better. Enjoying my food is something I learnt very late in life, maybe a year or two ago, just when I began to cook properly.
45. When I am in office, I like going for lunch alone. That one hour feels like an oasis of sanity during the day, the only time I exist for myself.
46. The only time I had a fracture was at the end of last year, when I missed a step and broke my leg. Luckily (or not) that was two days prior to my scheduled annual leave to visit my parents, and everything worked out. Except for the part where I spent my vacation cooped up in a room.
47. I consider myself a wannabe gamer. I’ve been hooked to computer games ever since I tried Quake 2 on my first PC in 1999. I currently own a DS and my girl has a PSP that I use far more than she does. I was primarily an FPS-lover but thanks to the DS, I am a fan of puzzle-based adventure games and classic side-scrollers. I don’t think I can ever, ever play RPGs and strategy games.
48. I can’t stand beer.
49. Quite a few of my close friends are folks I’ve met online. Some I’ve met in real life, and some, I probably will someday.
50. I am very particular about finishing a book or a series I’ve started, regardless of how good or bad it is. The only exception to that would be Ashok Banker’s Ayodhya series, which was so badly written it made me ill after I read the first 15 pages of the first book.
51. If I ever made it to the finals of Mastermind, my topics would be the Batman mythos, the music of AR Rahman and Indian songs in Aramaic. The third is obviously a topic heavily weighted in my favour.
Obviously, to be continued.
