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Rey Bhaiyya!

Three years ago, I made a post about DVD pricing in India and how it was extremely brain-dead to charge big money for DVDs of movies which come with no special features and bad film transfers. I ended the post with a fingers-crossed comment about Lagaan not having come out on DVD yet and about how I trust Aamir Khan to “rock my socks off”.

I can uncross my fingers now.

Lagaan has just been released on DVD for the first time ever. And not just that, the documentary The Making of Lagaan ( which has two alternate titles – the Indian version is called Chale Chalo and the international version Madness in the Desert) by Satyajit Bhatkal has also been released. I saw the DVD, which has been called the ‘Anniversary Edition’, at Music World last Friday, and I bought it yesterday. Putting my money where my mouth is. I promised myself I would buy it THE MOMENT it was released. Late by three days, but yeah, I paid up. The single DVD set comes with deleted scenes, which I had already seen before, thanks to a pirated DVD I bought off National market. It also includes the song ‘Rey Bhaiyya Chhootey Lagaan’ , previously released as ‘Zin Kinak Zin’ in a double-cassette collection called The Spirit of Lagaan that had background scores, dialogues and the songs from the movie. ( Including the Sadhna Sargam version of ‘O Paalanhaare’, which I think is way, WAY better than the Lata version we are familiar with) Also picked up the documentary, though only the VCD seems to be available right now. Odyssey was offering a copy of the book The Spirit of Lagaan free with the DVD, and so I picked that up too, though I already have a copy.

Watched the movie again last night, with someone who hadn’t seen it before. Both of us LOVED it – c’mon, who wouldn’t? It’s Lagaan, after all. The transfer was perfect, the sound slightly schizophrenic – kept going high and low everytime the music stopped or crescendoed. I have a feeling it might be because we were watching it on stereo speakers. Rachel Shelley looks as beautiful as ever – wonder what she’s up to nowadays?

(breathless) ( gasping for air) (SQUEEEEEEE)

Just did a Google search for her, and…and…Rachel Shelley’s appearing on the third season of The L-Word. And in an episode of Coupling as well. What? WHAT?

It somewhat pains me to think that when I talk to kids today about Rachel Shelley, they will remember her as Helena Peabody from L-Word rather than Elizabeth from Lagaan. *sigh*

Ok, fanboy hat off. This is good news. I can now revel in more Rachel Shelley goodness with ease. Though I thought the first season of LW was pretty boring, hot lesbian women can only take up so much of my attention.

Back to Lagaan. Just when I was being very happy about my acquisition from yesterday, there came a bombshell, when I went to the www.lagaandvd.com website. You know, just to check out the press release and shit.

Turns out, there’s a 3-DVD Collectors’ set . That comes in a wooden box. With lots of additional goodies. Priced at a fairly decent 2000 Rs. GODDAMNIT, I knew I should have waited.

So far, I have – two pirated copies of the Lagaan DVD ( one with the deleted scenes that stops midway into the film, and the other with a bad transfer and audio, but works), the official single disc edition. I NEED the three disc edition, and I think I am going to have it. Soon.

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“The Journey Home is Never Too Long”

I nearly screwed up my journey home. I had assumed that my flight was in the night, just like my colleague’s was, a couple of weeks ago. The plan was to come to office on Monday morning and bid farewell to my colleagues. Happened to glance at the time on my tickets on Sunday night, and gah – the flight was at 2:15 in the day. Take into account the fact I would have to be present at the airport 3 hours before the check-in time ( I had excess baggage – yes, haha, I know ) and that Monday morning was peak traffic time on the freeway, getting to the office was out of the question. Took several deep breaths to calm self down. Man, if I hadn’t double-checked, I would have been stranded. Phew.

Check-in went by completely bereft of incident, major or minor. The person behind the counter didn’t even blink when I hefted the three pieces of baggage onto the scale – not even at the fact that all of them were on the higher side of the 32-kilo limit. I took out two of the heavier bits of my handbaggage, the mammoth Ode To Kirohito and the two volume Finder/Keeper collection before putting it onto the weighing machine, it came to 7.98 kgs. The limit was 7. The guy waved me in. Whew!

Again, fairly uneventful flight, marked by the successful reading and rereading of Ode To Kirohito, a 788 page medical manga that blows the previous Tezuka works I’ve read ( Buddha and Astro Boy ) out of the water. From what I had been hearing about it, this is more of gekiga than Tezuka’s all-ages stuff, marked by a lot of adult content and Christian symbolism. Turned out to be just that. What I had assumed was the way the book would end turned out to be addressed by Tezuka in the first 200 pages. It then proceeds in a direction that – goddamnit, I don’t want to ruin this for any of you, but rest assured it ends on a note halfway between upbeat and bittersweet.

Oh, and also read Finder and Keeper, Greg Rucka’s Atticus Kodiak novels, which The Flatmate got at the grand price of a dollar at a clearance sale. Effing excellent!

Born Under A Lucky Star Department: The Asian Art Museum in San Franciso was the exclusive US venue for an Osamu Tezuka retrospective exhibit. It started on June 2 and I went there on June 9th. Pictures were not allowed inside the exhibit, so instead I hung around the exhibit for about 5 hours. Amazing, amazing experience. Sample black and white pages from all of Tezuka’s major series, Phoenix, Melmo, Buddha, Blackjack, Kirohito, Astro Boy ( obviously! ), Apollo, Metropolis, Vampire, Crime and Punishment, Princess Knight. Coloured endpapers and chapter frontispieces from some of them, and gigantic facsimile pages ( which I didn’t particularly enjoy). The best part about the exhibit was the way it gave an insight into Tezuka’s growth as an artist – the creative use of the splash pages in works like Melmo, the detailed crosshatching in his later works, the increasingly adult-oriented stories he did as he progressed from being the pioneer of Japanese comics to The God of Manga. I also spent an agonizing half an hour in the museum store drooling over Tezuka prints. A day well spent.

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Mama I’m coming home!

I leave the US of A on Monday night.

In the last one and a half months, I have –

  • been part of a team that’s delivered a feature-complete product a day ahead of deadline.
  • seen my first Monet, Titian, Manet, El Greco and Gainsborough. And these were names I remembered off the top of my head.
  • visited my first comicbook shops.
  • bought out full runs of comics and manga and exceeded my weight limit by 20 kilos.
  • been to my first Comic book convention. Woo Hoo!
  • indulged in Major Comic art acquisitions, 32 in all.
  • managed to buy Perfect Gifts.
  • visited 5-level used record/CD/DVD outlets, each of which made me want to sit in a corner and whimper to myself.
  • held original first printings of the first three Dark Tower books in my hands, caressed them for about twenty minutes, put them back gently in their display cases and cried on the way out.
  • eaten The Crappiest Biryani Evah, and priced at 8.99$ to boot.
  • had surprise packages mailed to me from Spain.
  • become part-time Web Elf for the coolest Electronic Dance Music site ever.
  • not had the time to write about all these. Mostly because of point (1), but that will soon be remedied.
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Hitman is back!

F**K YEAH!

And the comic shop owner quoted too much on that Hitman cover. Higher than my initial estimate. Goddamnit. I will try to bargain him down, but…erm….I don’t think it’s happening. Sucks.

But I picked up a complete run of Michael Zulli’s Puma Blues ( 23 issues) and a complete run on Ted McKeever’s Metropol ( 2 volumes, 15 issues), both for a cumulative price of 20$. And two old Heavy Metal issues for 2$ each. Cheaper than in Best Book Stall, and in better condition at that.

I have earmarked quite a bunch of stuff for the upcoming sale. Most likely I will be cleaning up their stock of complete runs. There are sets of Sam and Twitch, The Human Target ( the Vertigo series by Peter Milligan), a complete run of Longshot, and all the issues look like they are signed by Art Adams ( I am greedy, so I didn’t buy that off immediately because they were 15$ for 6 issues, but 50% discount next week – yum! ). Quite a bit of other stuff too, I don’t remember for sure. And seems like there’s more full runs coming in.

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Update

So I am in Palo Alto, California right now.

Right opposite my hotel, there is an Indian Chaat place, where you get thaalis and panipuris. I am not interested in either. ( “Panipuris? You are not interested in panipuris??” “Well, not when they are $3.95 for six pieces. It’s un-Indian that way.”) But. But. There’s a comicbook store right next to that eatery. Unfortunately for me, the time it closes is much before the time I get back from work, except on weekends.

Luckily enough, yesterday I came back from work just about half an hour before closing time.

And went inside My Very First Comic Book Store.

It was a cool experience. The salesman really knew his stuff, and pointed out the stacks of Asterix and Tintin they had right next to the door, because of the Indian population who inquired about them frequently. Because I did not have too much time, I decided to ask him about the art collection they had advertised outside, and he came back with two huge folders. Yum. Got to looking at the pages. Saw some nice Buscema/Severin Weirdworld pages, a couple of excellent Thor splashes, a Son of Satan splash by Ed Hannigan and Sonny Trinidad that set my heart a-flutter, especially when I saw the low price marked onto the pages. ( The salesman explained that those were the prices the owner had paid for them when he bought the pages himself. Damn.) And then, just at the end of the second folder, I saw…

A Hitman cover.

There was a Hitman cover for sale at the store.

Ok, let me set this straight. There are 60 John McCrea Hitman covers in existence right now, 61 if you count issue 10 Million. I own one of them, I have reserved three more, there’s one on sale right now on Comic Art fans, Romitaman.com has the cover to #34 marked at an exorbitant price because it won an Eisner award, and I have accounted for about six or seven more of the covers.

That leaves us with about 40. And I just found one opposite my hotel room.

I would probably preen a little, but let me figure out how much the owner quotes. Fingers crossed.

And did I tell you about the sale that begins May 20th, which involves a 50% discount on all back issues and 25% on statues?

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