Another sign that things are not as bleak as they seem. The soundtrack to Black Friday, Anurag Kashyap’s second film ( technically speaking, his first, because the first film he made is….well, let me put it this way, if I am really lucky, I might just get to see it before my grandson is born) has just been released. The film itself will be in theatres on Jan 28th, and there are plans to make it a five-episode TV series after it has completed its theatrical run.( Information courtesy rediff) Pretty good, I must say, especially if there is a well-packaged DVD release in the offing.

And why is it a good thing that the soundtrack has been released? Because the score is composed by this group of gentlemen who call themselves Indian Ocean. Yes, Yes, Yessssss. The CD is priced at 195 INR, I have already bought it, yes, and the first three tracks are original songs ( though the third song, I suspect, is a redone track from their first album ), and the rest are instrumentals. Paresh Kamath, lead guitarist of 90’s bands WitchHammer and Krysys, plays the electric guitar on the album, and boss, let me tell you, an Indian Ocean song takes on a different dimension altogether when the electric guitar kicks in.

The lyrics to the songs are by Piyush Mishra, and it took me quite sometime to figure out whether the lines have a communal edge. Apparently they do not.

I haven’t listened to the instrumentals as yet, but the fact that it’s not just the standard IO-lineup ( vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, tabla and drums is augmented with the saxophone, recorder, the electric guitar. Thankfully no electronica) makes me very gung-ho about the pieces I shall shortly hear.

Find of the Day: the score of Bulworth, by Ennio Morricone. Bulworth was a political comedy of the late nineties which I remember solely because of the Pras D/Wyclef Jean song “Ghetto Superstar” that aired on DD2 for some time, and which, I later found out, was a reworking of the Bee Gees track “Islands In the Stream”. The movie soundtrack features the track I mentioned above, and loads of hip hop tracks by the likes of Dr. Dre, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and the Black Eyed Peas ( I didn’t even know the Black-Eyed Peas were *this* old). However, the score, the one I bought, has two tracks, each spanning 20 minutes, and with music composed by Il Maestro, and with vocals by Edda Del’Orso, the lady with the operatic vocals in the Once Upon A Time In America and other Morricone tracks. The best part, I got this CD for just 125 INR. Yeah, baby!

Woo hoo. Last Friday (which I have christened White Friday, just to make up the snazzy title of the post), I found and bought my first Takashi Miike movies. Audition and One Missed Call. Also bought DVDs of House of Flying Daggers, Hero(finally!), Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and 2046. Picked up a DVD of Lagaan which turned out to have a seventeen-minute long deleted scene.

Certain people I know turned out to be right, after all. Francois Ozon’s See The Sea ( Regarde le Mer) was really good. A film with a screentime of less than 50 minutes! The DVD had a bonus short film by Ozon called Summer Dress, which has this outrageous sequence featuring two guys doing you-know-what with someone singing a French version of “Bang, Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down”. Though I didn’t like Sitcom too much. Ozon’s Swimming Pool is up next, most likely this weekend.

The last book I read last year was Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and The Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones, a splendidly written, very unbiased look at the foundations of the Comic book industry in America. It’s the perfect real-life counterpart to the world Michael Chabon wrote about in Adventures of Kavalier and Klay.

The first book I read this year was Andrew Vachss’s Batman: The Ultimate Evil – and I must say I did not enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would. Personally, I found it very hard to equate Vachss’s morally bleak, take-no-prisoners-and-shoot-to-kill attitude with Batman’s black-and-white world.

[A lot of people might think that Batman is this tortured character with shades of gray, but I disagree. Bruce Wayne might be a driven individual,obsessed with his crusade against crime, but sixty years of corporate emasculation (It’s DC Comics I am referring to, folks, not Wayne enterprises. A corporate entity that refuses to tamper with the status quo, and paints anything controversial and un-Batmanlike as an Elseworlds story) has finally convinced me that there cannot be anything grey about a character who refuses to kill, regardless of the ramifications his coda brings to the people around him. Batman, unless something radically different is done to the character’s personality, is the embodiment of a man who spends his life hitting his head against a brick wall. ]

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Superman, and Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s Batman and Robin.
About Frank Quitely

So I have a 750 rs book coupon for Premiere Book Store, and for the life of me, I can’t think of what to buy. I thought of getting Shantaram, but not only was the book out of stock, but I sincerely doubt if adding to my backlist is going to do me any good right now.

I was actually thinking of buying The Never Ending Story, which I remember seeing the last time I was at Premiere. Unfortunately, that was about a month and a half ago, and that book seems to have disappeared.

There’s also Anita and Me, but again….*sigh* reading Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries has spoiled me silly, and I doubt if I would enjoy teenage reminiscences of someone who is NOT Amelia Thermopolis.

Wolves of the Calla is buyable. But I would rather wait for Best Book Stall to come up with killer discounts/second-hand stock. And I need to read at least part of the first four books again before my fantasy-trilogy-quadrology-pentalogy-addled brain makes any sense out of the storyline. Come to think of it, I still haven’t read Black House just because I want to read The Talisman again.

Premiere does not have any movie/music related books. The only ones I saw were Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol 1 which I am not remotely interested in, and Bunny Reuben’s biography of Pran. (Because of reasons too strange to delve into, the book is named “…and Pran”. Something as monumentally weird as “…aur Pyaar Ho Gaya”, which translated into English means “..and Love Happened”, which at least makes an iota of sense. )

eBay.com, on the other hand, tempts me, with a cornucopia of graphic-novel-related Items for Sale, even during low-seller-ridden Holidays. ( Did you know that Sidney Sheldon uses the word “cornucopia” at least once in each of his books? Erm…books?) There was someone selling The Complete Baby Cart Series ( you know, those six blood-and-gore cinematic renditions of the Lone Wolf and Cub books) for very cheap, and I was about to click on on the buy-it-now button, when I noticed the small print. “Only French/Chinese Subtitles”. Great. A little more brain-addledness on my part and I would have sworn off eBay for …I dunno….at least three months. I don’t think that would have been too bad, either.

This reminds me of this incident a couple of days back. I was browsing through baazee.com, and suddenly came across this listing of a near-complete volume of Harijan. The newspaper that was begun by MK Gandhi sometime in the forties, there were about four hundred issues on sale, and the quick-buy option said “rupees one thousand only”. Saying that I was excited would be an understatement. But the listing also said that this gentleman was based in Chennai and he would be selling them only after he met the buyer personally. A phone number was included in the listing.

I called him up. Enquired about the listing. He said they are all in Mint condition. Carefully stored in four Bound Volumes ( My heart sank a little at this. I am not a fan of Bound Volumes )

Then, there is a thud, which is the sound of my heart that breaks when the person clarifies the price. “A thousand rupees”, he says, “Per issue.” The total would have come to 4.5 lakh rupees, but “I am willing to bargain. I am not expecting more than three lakh.”

Gulp. I didn’t explain why my interest level in his collection dipped all of a sudden, but I managed to cough up some apologetic phrases and kept the phone down. Whew. Collectors are scary people.

Back to the point. Seven fifty rupees. And no idea what to buy. I hate myself.

Chasing Amy was different from the other Kevin Smith movies I have seen. For a change, the story places emphasis on human emotions other than comicbook jokes and the one-man motormouth that is Jason lee. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jason Lee, I love comicbooks, but yikes, Jason Lee in a romantic comedy? FYI, bet Ben Affleck can beat Hemant Birje as far as wooden acting is concerned.

Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus was fun. Zombies, Japanese Gangsters ( I refuse to call them “yakuza” just because they were wearing business suits), martial arts, bad moves, five-hundred-year old curses reincarnated warriors ( I refuse to call them “samurai” just because they fought with katanas). I know most people woul sigh and shake their heads sadly if I pass this DVD to them, but please, there is a reason such movies are made, you know.

Tim Burton’s Big Fish was something I had wanted to see a long time. Amazing how this guy comes up with such storylines. Ewan McGregor’s cartoony earnestness, the wacky storyline, the emotional ending- truly well-made. Somebody give Billy Crudup a raise!

Almost Famous – The Bootleg Edition. Superb, just like the first time.

Ocean’s Twelve – Yikes. Soderbergh trying too hard to be gripping and witty? I know, I know, these are the coolest stars around, and I know they are supposed to be master-thieves, but can’t they talk and think like normal people some time? And was that laser-thingie supposed to be a spoof of Entrapment?

The Incredibles – Brad Bird added to Personal Pantheon. I dunno why, but this movie made me want to run and reread Watchmen.

Identity was decent. But it takes the whole MPD/DPD-thriller genre to the furthest limits of viewer-patience.

Kurosawa’s Sanjuro was hilarious!

Dead End was a really well-scripted movie. A horror movie that has genuinely funny moments, and oh-whoa-what-just-happened sequences. I want to watch it again.

Shaun of the Dead. Funny as hell!

Caligula was tolerable. I think I would have enjoyed it more had I seen it when I was in college.

Among other odds and ends, finally saw Jism – about two-thirds of the film on some random channel. Also a very funny movie starring Dharmendra as Agent 116 and Rekha in dresses that would put Mallika Sherawat to shame. Prem Chopra has a role that consists of maniacal laughter and a few lines here and there. Damn, I want to buy this one.

Bjork’s Volumen, a collection of her early videos ( no, vrikodhara, I am afraid that does not have the Pagan Poetry video, which I would have loved to watch myself ). Very surreal videos, all of them, and I was trying to keep an eye out for the Michel Gondry video that was supposed to be the precursor of Bullet-time Photography. I think it was Army of Me, but I am not too sure.

Also catching up on episodes of old Batman Adventures episodes. I seem to have bought a DVD which has about thirty-two episodes of the TV series that ended my budding violin-playing career. ( details later)

Watched Today: Castle of Cagliostro. Early Miyazaki, though I doubt if it was him directing. I think he was just the scriptwriter (Just amazon-ed, and whaddya know, it’s really him directing. It’s a 1979 movie, and his first! )

Additional note: Need to find more info about the Maurice LeBlanc novels on which the Lupin character is based.

As part of my one-and-a-half-movie per day binge, I saw Ju-On and Ju-On 2 last week.

Takeshi Shimuzu made Ju-On as a low-budget, TV movie. Then he made the sequel. Somebody decided that the TV movies had immense potential, and gave him a cartload of money which he used to make Ju-On: The Grudge and Ju-On 2: The Final Grudge, which were remakes of the first two movies. And then someone from across the ocean ( Sam Raimi to be precise) saw the Japanese movies and gave Mr Shimuzu twenty cartloads of money and a busty babe ( Sarah Michelle Gellar) and the director decided to do what he does best – he made his own movie again. Man, this guy sure likes his job.

But that’s beside the point. As I was saying, I watched Ju-On and Ju-On 2, which were actually the third and fourth movies ( see above). I watched it the way horror movies are meant to be watched, at night, with the lights switched off, and I would have seen it alone had it not been for my movie-loving colleague (prashantr )who insisted we see it together. “Damn”, I thought, just before we began, “I hope I enjoy this.” This was because some fine Factory-going folks had liked the idea of an eerie-looking kid staring at the camera with his legs curled up to his chin, and had proceeded to make everyone in a fine Factory-produced movie look eerie and stare at the camera. (Vaastu Shastra, for the uninitiated)

Half an hour into Ju-On, I was glad I wasn’t watching it alone. I was also shit-scared.

The way I tackle a horror movie is this – whenever there is no background music to be heard, it means someone’s behind the camera and the pretty young thing/thang is going to have his guts chomped out. Whenever there’s scary music coming by, it implies that there is a cat making that scary sound the PYT is trying to find out more about,and the music is playing you for a sucker. Whenever there is gore/blood/angst, you just think of the make-up man who’s worked hard to get the product you’re seeing on screen. You think of the director who’s probably grinning in the chair, thinking of the moolah his scary movie will make. You think of what probably happens once the shot is over, the protagonists sharing a cup of coffee and a good laugh about the scare-shots of the day. And most of the time, everything’s dark and hazy, and you know the real scary part is going to come at the end of the movie, when ( if you’re lucky enough, and the crew has a good team on prosthetics and make-up ) you come to the Big Scare, the orgasmic moment you’ve been waiting for.

With Ju-On, I was caught a little..off-guard.

I know there is a scary-looking kid involved. I know it’s about a curse. But man-o-man-o-man, I was not prepared for this. The opening sequence, shot in grainy filters. The non-linear story. What happens to you when you try hiding under a blanket. How creepy the sight of a silent old woman can be. The effectiveness of a no-holds-barred scream. (it’s tough to find an actress who screams out loud without you silently urging her to die quicker and scream a little less) The sheer effectiveness of minimal music, or no music at all. Methinks Amar Mohile and the rest of the noisy synth-mongers in the Indian Horror Movie scene can learn much from Ju-On.

When the movie was over, we decided to watch a little bit of Caligula, to get over the freaked-outness. The movie didn’t really gel, not even the sight of Roman nymphets in innovative positions and the brother-sister romp in the woods. Off to bed we went.

The next night, there was a decision to be taken. Do we go ahead and watch a sequel, which, going by the law of averages, would be trashier than the original, and far less scarier, thereby nullifying the nice memories of the previous night? Or do we go for the safer Big Fish? Or something more sedate, like American Chai? “The heck with it, let’s watch Ju-On 2”, was the decision. Fifteen minutes into the movie, we nearly gave up – the knot in my tummy was actually unravelling to that semi-annoying, semi-bored state which says – “oh get it over with already” – because the buildup was a little more convoluted this time.

Well, the movie turned out to be scarier than the first one. And weirder. Gave a whole new meaning to the concept of parallel storylines. It was really two things happening to the same two persons at the same time.

Right. The movie ends. We say – “Another movie.” I go to the DVD player and take the DVD out. Cover in one hand, disc in the other. I sneak a peek at the cover, at the kid with the eerie stare, and blink, allowing the goosepimples to subside.

Powercut.

I am not really proud of my jittery reactions that night. It was dark, and we didn’t have a candle, and as we sat in the darkness with our cellphones clutched in our hands ( with their reassuring glow), we talked about things too asinine to mention here, to take our minds off the movie. Weird sounds, magnified a hundredfold because of The Ju-On Effect came floating from the kitchen. (Prashant: “The rats are really acting up tonight”. Nervous giggle. Me: “Yeah.” Gulp. “They sound a little..different.” ) There was a skitter, just like the way the dead girl made when she slid down the stairs. A thump, like that of the girl and her boyfriend who ended up swinging in the living room. Finally, as a dish crashed to the ground – we could take it no longer, and went out for a walk in the garden, where it was considerably brighter than in our living room, and yakked a bit until a grumpy lady from the flat above shouted at us.

I did manage to fall asleep, and there were no nightmares, and we laughed over it the next day. But you know what – we were really scared that night.

Ringu didn’t affect me a lot, maybe because I had seen the English version before the Japanese, and was prepared for the story and its twists ( the shock-effects in the US version were predictable, except for the flash of the dead girl with a horrified expression in the cupboard) Ju-On did. My record as unscaring movie-goer is thus laid to rest. How’s that for a confession?