Check out the trailer for Mira Nair’s Amelia, a proto-feminist biopic about the pioneering aviator. The movie looks like an Oscar bid and has the blandest, beigest visual palette of any Nair film:
Earhart was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937, Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. [Wiki]
Nair will no doubt follow up with Boseand Air India 182. Fortunately, Salman Rushdie’s movie Gibreel and Saladin would not, in fact, be about flights lost at sea. The Satanic Verses characters were probably inspired by rare survival stories like this one:
On January 26, 1972, a 22-year-old flight attendant named Vesna Vulovic… [set] the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute, at 33,330 feet. [DamnInterestingI]
Before salsa, before bhangra, my Filipino college roomie taught me to dance, and the core of his moves was his M.J. impersonation. This one’s for you, Ariel.
And for you, Michael, you moonwalking, child diddling, skin lightening, cleft-chin-purchasing, extreme body moddingpatent hound. Patron saint of bedroom dancers. You’ll be missed among the sequin shirt tribes of Lokhandwala and Jabalpur.
Poor Mike. The president was black by the time he got done turning white.
After weeks of being unable to go to a movie-hall to see a film that I might actually have wanted to see, I get asked to review Paying Guests. This is how life kicks you when you’re down. Watching this rowdy comedy, I wondered if the producer-multiplex war had stretched on for so long that mediocre B-movies are now being hurriedly scripted and filmed within four or five weeks, just so they can fill the gaps before the (equally mediocre) big releases come roaring back.
Paying Guests opens with three bachelor friends – Bawesh (Shreyas Talpade), Sukhi (Javed Jaffrey) and Daljit (Aashish Chaudhary) – who live in Bangkok as tenants in the improbably large “Kiska” mansion (named purely for its punning utility) until one day they simultaneously lose their jobs and their accommodation (in both cases, their fault, though I think we’re supposed to root for them). Along with a new addition to the group, a bumbler named Karan who’s just flown in from India, they contrive to become paying guests in the house of a Sikh restaurant owner Ballu Ji (Johnny Lever in a performance that makes every role he has done in the past 20 years seem like an acting-class in restraint) and his golden-hearted but rust-brained wife Sweety. Since this traditional-minded couple won’t have single boys staying in their house, Bawesh and Sukhi show up in drag as Karishma and Kareena, the wives of the other two. Loud, forced, headache-inducing slapstick comedy ensues.
It’s a pity in a way, for there are traces in this film of a certain economy of storytelling – such as in the compact opening-credits sequence and the neat little scene where the friends tell each other that at least there can’t be any more problems headed their way and there’s a quick overhead swish to the plane that’s bringing more trouble (in the form of Karan) for them. In these and other moments, one sees an unfussiness about the direction and editing which suggests that a better script (or any script for that matter) might have resulted in an entertaining movie. But sadly the technical competence is at the service of some of the silliest attempts at humour you’ll ever see.
Actress Pia Glenn, who’s dating Salman Rushdie, does a comic burlesque in Will Ferrell’s Broadway show You’re Welcome, America. Playing Condi Rice in Dubya’s fantasies, she dry-humps his desk while Ferrell mimes doing to her what Bush did to the country (at 2:20). Rice, of course, once famously referred to Dubya as her husband before correcting herself.
When Rudi Bakhtiar and Christiane Amanpour are covering the Iran protests on TV, are they self conscious about it as nth genners? Do they resent being seen as cultural ambassadors? Do they see it as being niched into foreign stories? Or is it better having someone who’s at least heard of Navroz, the Revolutionary Guards and the nuances of calling it Persian vs. Farsi?
I often wonder the same when Don Lemon does Obama stories. And whether that soccer-mom-friendly, soporific tone is natural or an implant doled out when you join CNN.
It's bemusing to be writing this right after the last post. Since that post, I've been to a place that is a shortish train ride from the site of what many consider a civil war that is being powered by the ideological descendants of the Naxals. I ate biriyani there, drank some superb vodka and attended a posh art gallery opening where the exhibition befuddled everyone but no one complained because there was white wine being served. The exhibition is a rather idealistic one and it hopes to make a strong political statement (more on the art exhibit later) but no one at the gallery really spoke about the killing and mayhem taking place 200km away. It surfaced occasionally, like the bubbles that leak when someone tries to hide underwater. There was only one man who wanted to talk about Lalgarh and, continuing the glorious tradition of me attracting the adoring attention of the cuckoo-est drunks in a gathering, I found myself cornered by him for a good twenty minutes.
People make contacts, expand their network and generally emerge with cards and new acquaintances that will help them advance in life. I meet a man who is a Japanologist, a specialist in conflict studies and generally weird. What I have at the end of meeting him is an email that reads, "You are a very interesting person. I don't have many friends. Please be my friend." At the gallery, he said he wanted to visit Mumbai and speaks about the city as though it is in another country. His home is "up north" and he wouldn't talk about what brought him "down south". If I had to take a stab at where he's from based upon his accent and appearance, I'd say Tripura. He has "friends" in the Chinese army and he can't understand why when he writes to the emails they've given him, he gets a mailer-daemon notification. To him, this is proof of the nefariousness of the Chinese internet policy. To me, this is proof that Chinese army officials are way smarter than I am because, unlike me, they don't have an email from him, written in fuchsia, 16pt Times Roman font in their inbox. Maybe he picked fuchsia for me in an effort to appeal to my feminine side. If there is some way by which I can reply with a mailer-daemon notification, please let me know.
Shah Rukh Khan is shooting My Name is Khan in San Francisco, precipitating a wave of fan photos on Facebook. Poor guy. Billu Barberwas real, people!
But not for my friend:
That reminds me of the time my buddy was working at McKinsey in Delhi and caught a foggy morning flight in business class with an ethereal beauty in a pale sari. She was guarded by one of the three-headed watchdogs of Hades, i.e. Vrinda Rai, and he didn’t know who she was until a flight attendant pointed it out on a passing billboard.
The second Twenty20 World Cup comes to a conclusion today after two thrilling weeks in the cricketing calendar. The newest and shortest form of the game has won over thousands of new fans who once found the game boring.
I should be depressed. Having drunk myself into a stupor at Lord’s watching India crash out to England, I switched shirts like the true mixed race turncoat I am only to watch England get dumped out the very next day.
Yet as an international citizen, I am overjoyed to see Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the final. Both countries have endured a rocky time in 2009. Their citizens deserve the unifying fervour an international final brings. The hope that sport and politics should not mix was smashed with the dark attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team’s bus on the 3rd of March, when gunmen opened fire on Sri Lankan players as they arrived at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. Seven players were injured and five policemen were killed.
Kudos to Pixar’s Up for featuring an Asian-American lead, adorable and suitably annoying young Jordan Nagai. His character’s ethnicity is subtle in the visual design and never referred to in the script. The rare bird in the movie is based on the brilliantly-covered Himalayan monal pheasant, though afflicted with gigantism. Its cry sounds like that of a peacock.
As many critics have noted, the movie’s opening couple montage from start to finish is heartbreakingly beautiful. Disappointingly for science buffs, Pixar fudged the number of balloons required to lift a house clear off its foundation
No love to comedian and doc Ken Jeong for his lisping Asian gangster character in The Hangover. Really, you’re going to go with effeminate and can’t speak English? What year is this?
The random effeminate Asian villain is also trucking in one of pop culture’s oldest and most damning stereotypes… [Hitflix]
I got back home and remembered it was Friday, so here we go.....
I've been searching for this movie for a while now after I saw a short clip online. My new BFF finally pointed me in the right direction. Helen is killing it in this one.....
This video is a HUGE HUGE influence on *PMH! One of the the best dance battles in film history!
Thanks so much!
Let me know when you're ready for that roadtrip, ok?
Film: Prince
Year:1969
Composers: Shankarsinh Raghuwanshi & Jaikishan Dayabhai Pankal
Haunting Bombayisn’t just about mangoes, sandalwood and henna. You also get the wet sari, the dancing around trees, the curse by a blind gypsy*, the magic spell which makes animals howl, the dark menstrual powers and the bodice ripping. And that’s just the first few pages.
Today’s first archive dive: Coke Studio, the Pakistani music show with the most obnoxious visual branding. Someone’s uploaded their archive in high dev, and it’s gorgeous. Zeb & Haniya sing ‘Paimona Bitte’ (click the maximize video button at bottom right for full effect):
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