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Random Nostalgia

It kind of gives me a kick to think that two years ago and a day ago, at this time, I was standing about eight feet away from AR Rahman. They were arranging the stage at Gachibowli stadium for the concert, and I was up on the top level of the three-tiered structure, holding a tabla in one hand, waving at the orchestra with the other, and trying very hard not to giggle/dissolve into hysterics/faint, as I thought of the two All-Entry Passes in my pocket.

Four long trips, one fight, and one heckuva concert, all in one evening. Man, that was a night to remember. And not just because of AR Rahman and the rest of the crew.

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BR2, Susannah Clarke, Bone and Cerebus

Battle Royale lovers be warned – Battle Royale 2: Requiem is to the first movie what Kisna is to Lagaan. Overblown acting, choppy cinematography, less-than-a-quarter-baked character developement, and a storyline that makes you want to gouge your eyes out and promise never to overestimate a movie sequel, even though it’s Japanese and claims to be “Asian Extreme Cinema”. To think I almost ordered this movie from cd-WOW a couple of months ago, and stopped myself because of this vague hope of finding it in National Market sometime. I did,on Monday night. Watched it. Yeaagh!

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And come to think of it, I have been watching too many movies lately. 26 movies in January, and 9 so far this month. Part of this is because of the DVDs I’ve been finding at National Market.

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England, London in particular, as visualized by Ms Susannah Clarke in the exquisite Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell haunted me for a week in January. It took me that much time to read the 800-odd page book. This hasn’t really happened before, my reading a paragraph and then rereading it. Generally, it is the story that takes me forward, rather than the prose. Susannah Clarke, however, made me pause and savour the rain-soaked, fog-swept streets and alleys of nineteenth century London, a world which has some shades of our world, and some of its own; the characters – quaint, unfantasylike names ( I absolutely hate fantasy stories have an overdose of z’s and x’s and q’s in the names of the characters) and demeanour. It’s not an action-packed magicfest, nope. Reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is more like a brisk walk on a misty winter morning – you know the chill isn’t going to last, and you know beautiful sights lie in store for you once the sun comes up. You shiver once in a while, wishing you were safely under your blanket in bed, but at the end, there’s nothing really like walking alone on a wintry morning. Call it English Magic, if you will.

Just when I was done with the book, I had the one-volume Bone, by Jeff Smith, delivered to me. Now I have read parts of Bone, mind you. Scattered issues towards the beginning, and a couple of story-arcs in the middle. But the joy of reading the complete story, end to end, is something that really cannot be expressed in words. Bone is funny one moment, touching the next, and the more I progress, the more of an epic heroic fantasy it’s trying to become. How can anyone not fall in love with the Moby-Dick loving Fone Bone, the guy whose hat bursts into flame the first time he sees Thorn bathing in the river? How can you not root for Gran’ma Rose as she races her cows? Yes, you heard that right, she races cows. She runs. I would kill to have a grandmother that can run neck-to-neck with a cow and occasionally pound those stupid, stupid rat creatures to a pulpy quiche.

And now that I am about to finish the Bone volume, I just got five volumes of the Cerebus trade paperbacks delivered to me yesterday. Three of them autographed by Dave Sim and Gerhard. Muhuhahahahaha.

Life is pretty much fun. I reserve the mornings for reading and the nights for movies, and I slog my ass off in the daytime. Suits me fine, I say.

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New Comics

I am really, really, really happy.

These are the new titles Gotham comics has brought out this month:

  • Astonishing X-Men #1 by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday.
  • Wolverine: The End #1 (of 4) by Paul Jenkins and Claudio Castellini.
  • Nightcrawler #1 (of 4) by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Darick Robertson.
  • Green Lantern:Rebirth #1(of 5) by Geoff Johns and Ethan von Sciver.
  • Identity Crisis#1 (of 7) by Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales.
  • Elektra: The Hand #1 by Akira Yoshida and Christian Gossett.
  • Planetary #1 ( of a possible 24) by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday.

This is of course in addition to the regular stuff, J Michael Straczynski’s Spiderman run, Ultimate Spiderman, Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Six, Superman: Birthright, The Ultimates, Teen Titans and The Flash. And of course, reprints of Kingdom Come and The Dark Knight Returns.

Why I am happy about all these titles coming in is that most of this is new, not reprints from a year ago. (Planetary is old, true, but the very fact that this is being reprinted shows that someone at Gotham genuinely likes comics, because this is hardly standard Superhero fare.) I was pretty sure that Identity Crisis would be reprinted soon enough. I am just waiting for when 1602 (Gaiman’s eight-issue miniseries that ties Marvel continuity to Elizabethan England ) is brought out in India.

The colour seperations on Astonishing X-Men are…astonishing.

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Warriors? Poets?

Kisna: The Warrior Poet, is rife with subtleties. You know, the Subhash-Ghai kind of subtleties, like showing a black horse and a white horse gambolling around together. That’s supposed to symbolise love – brown guy (Vivek Oberoi) and white girl (Antonia Bernaud). And when the movie begins with this sort of subtle imagery, you do not let that faze you. You sit down calmly, and think of myriad ways to painfully assassinate the director, the cast, the scriptwriter – basically everybody involved with this film. (Except Antonia Bernaud, perhaps. Poor girl must have hardly realised what she was getting into.)

Isha Sharvani, that lady you’ve seen twirling around a rope and doing those eyepopping leg-splits on those trailers? Guess what, that’s all she does throughout the movie, so you better get used to your eyes popping out for 2 hours and 35 minutes. You would love to have this kind of girl around the house – she gets happy, she twirls on ropes; she is dejected, she twirls on ropes; she’s angry, she twirls on ropes some more. And when she finds her homegrown loverboy in the arms of a firanghee and is spurned by him in the name of karma and dharma and karma-dharma and dharma-karma and all those B-movies of the eighties? She twirls on ropes atop a burning tree . Get it? Get it? Burning tree. Symbolism.

The events unfold in this quaint little village called Dharmaprayag, which is where the rivers Alakananda and Bhagirathi meet. ( How do I remember this bit of information? There’s an Odyssey quiz coming soon, buddy, and you never know where these quizmasters get their questions from.) So, the first half of the movie, Dharmaprayag’s where all the action is. You have a distinguished English lady coming to this village, where everybody behaves like B-actors trying hard to come to terms with acting in an A-movie, and getting regaled by Banjaran dancers from Rajasthan, and being snubbed by some yo-dude-checkisout-type reporters about her ignorance of India and Indianness. Surprise, surprise, the lady turns out to be fluent in Hindi, and also turns out she has a story to tell. That, of course, is the story of Kisna, which was supposed to have happened in 1947. Why did the lady delay her return to India and her meeting Kisna again? Because she watched Titanic just last year, and if Gloria Stuart can do it, so can she.

I would love to say some more about Ghai-saab’s refined tastes, like shooting a song against a blue sky with dancers wearing blue inside a blue-crystal cave-ish kotha. ( Blue. Kisna. Blue. Get it? ) And amidst all this bluescreen shooting, the poor man forgot that to have an item number, ( Ssshhh. Never mind the fact that this is 1947 and item numbers didn’t exist then. Dude, you had item numbers in 53 BC, when Emperor Ashahrukha was around.) you need an item. Not Sushmita Sen. I don’t remember seeing any part of her body moving, other than her eyes. Yes, she was that bad.

Then there is a scene which is Subhash Ghai’s tribute to Raj Kapoor. You have the river Ganga flowing by, and you have two lovers, and you have Raj Kapoor to pay homage to, so what do you do? Kick yourselves if you didn’t get this. You have the babe call herself Gangotri, dress up in flimsy white clothes, and then go have a dip in the Ganga. Dude, I love this homage-shit, man. I haven’t seen…you know…the goods on a babe in a Hindi film since the last time Ganga was unclean, hey Ram. ( Yes, I haven’t seen Shaque and I suggest you don’t, too. )

What a dump of a movie. This is the last time I go to see a film just because it has Rahman music in it. Humph!

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Narumugaiye.

On Sunday evening, I saw Sonali Kulkarni in Maymadham, singing about December flowers falling in her lap. Manisha Koirala and Arjun in Mudhalvaney, wrestling with computer-generated snakes. And the songs from Iruvar, Narumugaiye in particular.

All because of this pack of Tamil DVDs I borrowed from al_lude on Sunday. Some of them did not have subtitles. No matter. What was important was that this made me feel really nostalgic and gave me this glow of self-satisfaction that said – “There. One more hurdle crossed. Happy now?”

Did you know that Iruvar was originally titled Anandam? It was hyped a lot because of Aishwarya Rai. Because AR Rahman had gone on record about his “minimal acoustic” orchestra in his compositions. Because Vishwamohan Bhatt was supposed to play the mohan-veena for the album. I spent quite a few months hounding the few music stores in Guwahati that bothered to get Tamil cassettes about Anandam – but nobody knew anything about it. They tried to palm off Aasai, which was produced by Mani Ratnam and had music by Deva, as Anandam. Nothing doing, sir.

Then Siddharth Basu, in one of his Quiz Mountain episodes, played a song clip that had a menacing voice chanting in Tamil, with an outrageous violin-scrape in the background, and asked the participants to identify the film. The answer ( which nobody got) was Iruvar, and Basu mentioned that it was Arvind Swamy’s voice, and oo-la-la, Aishwarya Rai’s first film.

Bingo.

So when I finally found Iruvar , I was in Delhi, rummaging through a tiny shop in Palika Bazaar. I was there after my twelfth boards, but that’s another story. It took quite some time for me to listen to it, mostly because –

  • New ARR albums were tough to come by, so you would generally “save” an album for later.
  • I also bought Muthu and Minsara Kanuvu and the telugu version of Kaadhal Desam along with Iruvar
  • There was only one walkman being shared among three individuals of varying musical tastes.

“Narumugaiye” drove me crazy. For one, it had Unnikrishnan, who I was enthu about ever since “Ennavale“; what was more important was that it also had this female singer with the odd-sounding name Bombay Jayasree, and a voice that gave me this idiotic grin everytime I heard it. I cannot deconstruct the song and the flow of words and music that make it up. No one can, it’s that good. I associated my own visuals with the song – when it played, I could really see an ancient temple, a tranquil place where no one is around. The sound of the mridangam would echo as the camera wove its way around the ancient pillars. And then the statues would come to life and dance to the Mohan Veena. (Aishwarya Rai used to fit in somewhere in that scenario, but no more, I am afraid)

The way Mani Ratnam finally shot the song differs a lot from the way I envisioned it. It’s in black-and-white, and near a waterfall, and with Madhu ( the lady from Roja, I never knew she was in Iruvar) dancing to it, along with a lot of other bathing beauties. I believe the setting is a recreation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, where the king visits the ashrama where Shakuntala stays, and sees a bevy of nymphets. One can hardly blame him for breaking into song.

And I still don’t know what the lyrics mean.

This is where you can listen to Narumugaiye, and the rest of the songs, if you haven’t already.

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