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Another morning

So I woke up today morning and decided to wash the dirty clothes lying around at assorted places in my room. Sleepily walked around, brushing my teeth with one hand and gathering up clothes in the other. Started washing machine, put clothes in, failed to notice errant wire-hanger that was part of the pile.

The almighty clatter of a hanger inside a washing machine when it begins its spin cycle, is kind of hard to describe. I remember tasting something wet and sweet in my mouth (which happened to be the toothpaste) and a clenched feeling in the tummy at the thought of having to pay for damaging the machine ( which the company pays for) as I ran towards the source of the emanation. Retrieved hanger. Everything intact, except for peace of mind.

And the kind psasidhar has finally sent me the picture I took of my old room after part of the packing was over. The guy in the picture is me, of course, and I am showing off my new haircut. ( Not really. I was just picking up Sasi’s helmet and trying hard not to over-balance and fall on the beanbag.)

My Room, on its not-so-last day.

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The Adventures of Rakesh and Vimmi Trivedi

otherwise known as Bunty Aur Babli.

Caught a show on Sunday morning with Mons. Enjoyed every moment, really. The film walks the line between fun and outright goofy. There has been this continuous comparison with Catch Me If You Can and Bonnie and Clyde – very unwarranted, because Bunty Aur Babli is not about the mechanics of conning people or violent gunplay, it’s about, duh, Bunty AND Babli, two small-town crooks people who get a kick out of working together and have fun all the way. The dialogues are awesome, and I will say that Abhishek Bachhan and Rani Mukherjee fill out their roles with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek. The movie is chockful of references to Hindi movies, from Sholay (Bunty and Babli recreate the famous motorcycle scene) to Devdas (think candles and Aishwarya Rai )

Guest appearances by Prem Chopra, Ranjeet, Ravi Vasvani, Kiran Juneja, Puneet Issar ( trivia: What’s the significance of the last film in which Puneet Issar and Amitabh Bachhan acted together?), Rajesh Vivek and Raj Babbar.

Truth be told, I did NOT go to see it for the music, but it was just a coincidence that the songs “Dhadak Dhadak” and “Kajra Rey” were stuck in my head all of last week. Loved the way the percussion in the chorus of “Dhadak Dhadak” was synchronised to the sound of a train. “Kajra Rey” was wasted, in a way. The song is a funk-qawwali, the kind of energetic stuff that had Rishi Kapoor tearing curtains onstage and ladies clapping to the beat of glittering lightbulbs on their blouses way back in the seventies. This being the post-nineties, any song that has item-number potential has to happen in a bar with the same generic wiggling of assorted body-parts. The song had potential, man, and they screwed it up onscreen.

And yeah, as Mons pointed out, the choreography of Chupke Se had a Mani Ratnam influence lingering throughout, influenced by the collage of the songs in Dil Se.

Thankfully, the Blaaze song did not turn up anywhere, even in the end credits. Amitabh Bachhan lip-syncing to Blaaze? *Shudder*

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Steve Englehart wrote Batman in the seventies, with illustrations by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin, and they are considered to be a very definitive run on the character. He (and his team) are generally ranked very high on the Batman-Guru rung, just one notch below the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams/Dick Giordano team that revitalized the character in the early seventies.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com But honestly speaking, I have NOT read too many of his Batman stories. What I have read are his Green Lantern Corps stories – the run that began sometime in 1984 in Green Lantern, which later morphed to the GL Corps. I was absolutely blown, I tell you, by the premise of not one, but TEN Green Lanterns who come to Earth ( I mean, one GL is supposed to monitor a galaxy – what are ten of them doing on a Mostly Harmless planet as ours?) There was this cartoon-animal story of Ch’pp, a chipmunky Green Lantern who’s the last survivor of his planet along with his arch-enemy, an old villain whose name I forget, but I remember getting extremely emotional about the story. Things start getting interesting when Kilowog, the biggest and toughest of the alien GLs begins to take an interest in Communism and permanently emigrates to the USSR. Which gave us this iconic cover by Joe Staton, who also did the rest of the artwork on the series.

By the way, I never did find issue 209.

Well, a couple of days ago, thanks to newsarama.com, I got to know that Steve Englehart is coming back to work with DC on a new Batman series called Dark Detective II. The site also linked to his website, www.steveenglehart.com, where Mr Englehart had a sterling offer to make –

“ If you’d like a postcard-sized, uh, card, commemorating Dark Detective II and signed by Marshall Rogers, Terry Austin, and me, send a self-addressed, stamped, letter-sized envelope to Inky Fingers Press, PO Box 894, Woodstock NY 12498.”

To cut a long story short, I mailed him, and explained that I was in India and whether the offer is open to us comic-starved Indians. And he agreed. Not just that, he said he would send me the postcard without me having to send in the S.A.S.E.

So my mother got the postcard today in the mailbox, and I am mighty pleased. And grateful. I hope Gotham Comics reprints Dark Detective II in India.

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braggadocio

Movies watched so far this year: 112.

Not counting repeat viewings of new movies and re-viewing of old ones, complete or incomplete.

The First Movie watched this year: The Polar Express, on IMAX 3D.
The Last Movie watched before this post: Man Bites Dog.
Movies Watched Most Number of Times This Year:

  • Sin City (7)
  • Kill Bill Vol 1(5)
  • Kung Fu Hustle, House of Flying Daggers(4)
  • Honorary Mentions: Noises Off (3), Ghost In The Shell(3).

Total number of days in this year so far: 146.

Not bad, eh?

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