Early this year, I thought of keeping tabs on which movies I see over the next twelve months, and how many times. In part inspired by adgy, and partly because the DVD buy/watch ratio grew to somewhat alarming levels in December. Eight months later, I get the feeling that certain tasks should not be undertaken. New Year resolutions suck. Yeah, I have been watching too many movies.

I watched 14 movies over the three-day weekend. Some of them were repeats, Jay and Silent Bob, for instance, and Akira, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Oldboy. Finally managed to watch it last week. Park Chan Wook is God. Now to look out for the DVD of Sympathy For Lady Vengeance. And watchJSA sometime this week.

The Rising. Maybe because I spent 200 Rs for a ticket (at Inox, night show, dunno why the bastiches charge 200 for night shows), and maybe because I missed meeting Aamir Khan because I was watching Stealth at five in the evening, the movie did not…I dunno….affect me the way I thought it would. No goosepimply moments, except at a bit towards the end. Aamir Khan rocks, Rani Mukherjee doesn’t. ( her tummy wobbles quite a bit throughout the movie, but that’s a rock of a different kind, I guess) Toby Stephen’s best lines are wasted, courtesy Om Puri’s bland-voiced commentary that pops up during any bit of English dialogue – Stephens also gets quite a bit of Hindi lines, which lose out on intensity and dramatic effect because it’s pretty obvious he is reciting them.

Some very interesting gaffes – an English lady mouths a very twentieth-century “Wow!” when she sees an elephant, one of the Indian villagers in one of the crowd scenes is wearing a pair of trousers and shoes.

Unfortunately, most of the songs do not fit into the narrative – except for the title song, which pops up at three different places, but again, the timeline is screwed up. I mean, the way the lyrics of the three versions are written – they evolve over a period of time. The closest analogy I can give is this. The first version, ‘Mangal’ is Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Wake Up’, beginning with an ear-grabbing refrain, and ending with an acoustic high – an appropriate background music for the birth of a hero. The second version, ‘Agni’, is like RATM’s ‘Killing in the Name’, sound, fury and the right amount of feeling throughout the song, echoing the call to arms. The third version ‘Aatma’ is calm, much like RATM’s ‘Beautiful World’ ( ok, ok, I know ‘Beautiful World’ is a cover, but I really cannot think of anything else that comes close to Quietly RATM), an ode to martyrdom, and tinged with a bit of poignancy. OK, so you see the setup, right? What happens in the movie is – the first version plays on the day Mangal Pandey is about to die ( and doesn’t, because of certain reasons you’ll discover if you watch the film), the second version plays during the flashback, very appropriate; and the last version plays on the next day, the day he actually dies. THEY SCREWED UP THE TIMELINE, GAAAAAAAAH!!!

(You know, it’s surprising how anal I can get about minor things, but that’s just me, I guess….)

And on top of that, I am lonely.

Oh, before I forget, is a Live Journal community for discussing AR Rahman, the man and his music. Join, people, join!

Riddle me this – who has made the best movie version of the Godfather so far?

My answer: your brain. And mine. And anyone else who has read the Godfather novel free of the influence of any of the celluloid attempts. Because the story that Puzo wrote in the Godfather cannot be condensed to two, or three, or six hours of cinema. Feel free to disagree, but hey, are you telling me that the Johnny Fontaine subplot is not relevant to the story? Or that Lucy’s life after Sonny’s death does not figure in the big picture at all? Or that we are not supposed to know about Albert Neri’s past life and how he became Michael’s bodyguard? Like I said, feel free to disagree, and I will feel free to shake my head and do hideous things to you in my mind. So let us not bring up the topic of adapting the Godfather novel to screen, and instead concentrate on the first film that tried, the Coppola version, and how Ram Gopal Verma tries really hard, like his predecessors before him, to make a “crime family” movie.

Coppola’s Godfather gave us – among other things – natural lighting, a hoarse-voiced Man of Honour (Marlon Brando, for the clinically brain-dead), and the Successor Guy Who Does Not Want To Do It But Does It Anyway, forgettable bad guys, and Nino Rota’s score, a musical composition that weakens the knees of fifteen-year old Indian boys and make them want to learn to play wind instruments.

Ram Gopal Verma’s Sarkar gives us, in that order, natural lighting, a hoarse voiced Man of Honour, the Successor Guy etc , forgettable bad guys, and the most cacophonous sonic arrangements ever heard onscreen, courtesy Amar Mohile, last remembered as the man who screwed up Vaastu Shastra. An act that required much prowess, if I may say so, because to screw up something that was already screwed-up is a herculean task.

Verma’s bad guys in Sarkar are wannabe cool-dudes, all in their own way. There is the obligatory Middle-eastern Drug Peddler who wears sunglasses and acts so bad he makes Keanu Reeves look animated. Though in his defence, Hemant Birje still maintains the top ranking in the WAH! category. ( That’s Woody And Ham, for the uninitiated. The exclamation point is for effect.) The rest of the crew – which includes a sleazeball politician, a fat South Indian thug with an atrocious accent, a nefarious unHoly Man (played by Jeeva, who did the smashing role of the new Commissioner in Ab Tak Chhappan) and an ex-crony – who plot to bring the Man of Honour down are all greasy, distasteful bunch of crooks whose badness hits you with the subtlety of a jackhammer. These are people you cannot sympathize with, whose motivation can be summed up in three words – Do Bad Shit. People who look like they do Bad Shit and nothing but. And talk like they’ve had fifteen cups of black coffee in a row. (except for cool-dudish Middle Eastern Drug Guy)

Which kind of puts paid to the fact that this is supposed to be a “realistic” crime movie.

The music. The most atonal mess my mind has ever had to deal with. If you get rid of all the dialogues, all the expressions, everything in the film except for the background score, you would probably still figure out what’s going on. A south Indian guy comes into the scene? A mridangam begins to play. A holy man? A whiny tanpura. Even the “Govinda” leitmotif is taken too far – I mean, I can understand the semi-religious undertones of the Sarkar character, but having twenty people scream the same word at various bpm and decibel levels at EVERY moment of import in the film does make the word “overkill” sound like an understatement. The music is just there, every single moment in the film, like an uninvited, opinionated (not to mention loud) relative who plonks himself at your house and decides to stay on for a month without telling you in advance.

The assumption with which Verma directs the movie is that the moviegoer is familiar with Coppola’s Godfather. Which saves him the trouble of explaining who Sarkar is, how he came to power, what he really does, or why the teeming masses wave at him every morning from beyond the walls of his “fortress”. Which is a bad thing for someone who has *not* seen the original, because everything irrelevant to the succession-story is brushed off on the basis of that assumption. At the same time, for someone who has seen Coppola’s version, there is the more-than-occasional jarring note – the storyline deviates. A lot. Again, what’s so bad about it, you might ask. Just that most of the changes are pointless. Why not just have three sons and a daughter and kill the eldest son off etc etc? Why have Katrina Kaif and waste precious minutes that could have been spent on developing the main characters?

Why am I blabbering so much about this? Because I was honestly expecting something that would blow away Verma’s previous crime ventures, and establish this movie as The remake. Because RGV was the only filmmaker in India who understood what subtlety was ( and I assure you, I am talking about subtlety in a commercial context, and not about bare, stripped-down filmmaking) Because I was looking forward to seeing Kay Kay as Sonny Corleone, a character very close to my heart, and was kind of crushed when Sonny and Freddy overlapped.

But then, the movie did make me want to go and re-read Puzo’s novel. Which is never, ever a bad thing.

Ah well. psasidhar is off somewhere in the wilderness, so I can’t leech it off him, like the last time. moccacino writes gloating emails which proclaim that at about this time tomorrow, she will have read the book and I would be picking at my toenails in absolute desperation. Better sense tells me not to spend 640 rupees just for the heck of the First Day Read, because I would undoubtedly either get a copy in the mail, or buy a pirated/second-hand edition off the streets later.

But I can’t help wondering – shouldn’t there be a way out of this? Something like, I buy the book first thing tomorrow morning, read it, and sell it off to anyone who wants it, at a legitimate discount. What’s in it for me? The pleasure of the First Day Read. What’s in it for the individual who buys it off me? A sizeable discount on an already sizeable discount, and the pleasure of owning a hardcover first edition of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince for the rest of your life.

Go ahead. Bite it, fanboy.

A recent conversation:

“The panipuri here is really good, I must say.”

“Hmm, yeah, but I still prefer the streetside ones, rather than ones like these, where I have to crack open the puri, and pour in the curry with a spoon, and ladle some of the pani into it before I get to eat it.”

“So, what is it that you like there? The added taste of the vendor’s hands when he dips the puri into the concoction?”

“Not really. Part of the experience of eating panipuri is the urgency, I guess. ”

“Explain.”

“I mean, you are there, in a queue, and the vendor is in a zen-like state of panipuri-distribution, his hands working purely on instinct. He does multiple things at the same time, juggle preferences – like one customer wants only sweetened pani, one wants more of the filling, another wants more onions , keep a count of how many of the gobblers around him have gobbled how many panipuris. You are part of the system. You lift the panipuri from your plate in one fluid motion, taking care not to spill the water on your clothes or your shoes or ( sacrilege!) the ground. You gulp it down, making sure that you do not breathe when you do so – lest you cough up the puri on your neighbour and cause all the devotees considerable distress. And you also ensure that you’re done with the panipuri that was assigned to you before the next one lands on your plate – otherwise the older one will get soggy, and the newer one will unbalance, and that causes a disturbance in the Force. And that, my friend, is the Panipuri Experience, and not this – sitting at a table and using spoons and having to crack open the puri yourself…nossir. This is HEY, hands off my plate!!! ”

Unfortunately, no one can be told about the Panipuri Experience – you have to eat it for yourself. There do exist sites that tell you how to make panipuris at home. Do I care? Not really. There is this brilliant Wikipedia entry ( sarcasm intended) which says this of the mechanics of eating panipuri: ” You and others will be given a small plate and have to stand around the server. The server will then tart serving you all in a round-robin fashion. The servers are renouned to remember your choice of the combination of sweet or hot even when serving an entire croud(sic).”

This description, I am sorry to say, reminds me more of Andrew Tanenbaum’s book on Operating System fundamentals than anything else.

July 16th. New Harry Potter book. Big hullaballoo. Midnight parties. Kids going wild. Adults going wild. “Who’s going to die this time?”

Excuse me, did you just say “Who’s going to die this time?”?

Yesterday I was sitting on my bed, reading the latest issue of this weekly Indian newsmagazine whose name I forget because they all look and feel the same. The cover-story happened to be – you guessed it – Harry Potter. Never mind that the cover shows Danny “I am tough n gritty cos I am growin up” Radcliffe, surrounded by what the cover-photoshopper decided was angsty Potter-like fire. Never mind that the so-called cover story was more of the same vaguely fandomish remarks like “I love Harry Potter because he wears glasses.” from assorted kids, one of whom was Om Puri’s son. There was a two-page synopsis of all the five books so far – loads of name-dropping and all, and a side story about this psychiatrist who refuses to believe that Harry Potter encourages witchcraft of any kind. Oh yeah? What about those dead chickens I saw near the bookstore, lady? And yeah, the writer of the article even put in a spoiler that was pretty much obvious anyways. The answer to the question that floats around everytime a new post-Goblet Potter book comes around.

“Who’s going to die this time?”

What worried me a little was this – after reading the whole article through, I lay back and began to think of my experiences with Harry Potter. And I found that I could not remember anything at all about Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book, the one which Sasi bought on the day of its release and I read before him.
Things I remember:

• a couple of Fred and George’s misdemeanours
• the Fredric-Werthamish Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher
• things in the magical world falling apart because Voldemort is back
• why the book was called OotP
• the answer to the eventual “Who dies at the end?” dilemma.

Did anything actually happen? In all the other books, the name is enough to give me an inkling of how the story went. Ootp might have been the hugest of the books, but it seems to me surprisingly devoid of any content, other than isolated episodes leading to a random death.

Rowling claims that the ending to the Half Blood Prince is so shocking that it left her unable to write any more. ( well, there is nothing left to write after the ending, so it doesn’t really make sense ) Before the last book, she said the ending made her sit and weep for quite sometime. Granted, all these proclamations might be nothing other than hype – but it seems to me more like a desperate attempt to make things gritty and “serious” than is actually required. I know, I know, Rowling has always said that the books might not end on a happy note; I just don’t like the way the series seems to have become an exercise in guess-who-will-die-next type endings. I have a very strong feeling that I might take to ignoring books 4-7 in the future, and stick to the first three, which were fun to read, and are also good gifts. I mean, you can’t give away books whose endings leave you flabbergasted with random character deaths, can you?

Though there is a strong chance that I might be getting a Rowling-signed copy of The Half Blood Prince when it’s released.