tag, i’m it. apparently.

Back after a hiatus. Have been tagged (damn you Navin Mangalat). Yeah, so i’ll make this as short and boring as possible.

Three things that scare me:

• Change (the phenomenon, not coins)
• Bovine Beasts (as a kid my ayah narrated to me an incredibly graphic bedtime tale of how she saw a man on the street outside our house get trampled to death by a raging bull. Needless to say, i didn’t sleep particularly well that night)
• Flight turbulence

Three people who make me laugh:

• Navin
• My 4 year old niece – Tarini (“The lion in the jungle eats rabbits, foxes and hyenas. All junk food.”)
• Bill Waterson (Well, Calvin isn’t really ‘people’, now is he?)

Three things I love:

• Daffodils. Well, Narcissi, to be accurate.
• The smell of a new book.
• ……… (oh come come, a decent boy doesn’t kiss and tell)

Three things I hate:

• ‘Slimy’ vegetables (brinjal, gourds, ladyfinger etc.)
• Dirty loos.
• Spiritual Gurus

Three things i don’t understand:

• Cricket mania
• Why Mark Wahlberg got an Oscar nomination for The Departed (Oscar Nominee Marky Mark. Really !?!)
• Love, life and everything else (profound?)

Three things on my desk:

• Lucy the Laptop
• A mug of steaming, black coffee
• Ermm, thats it. I have a pretty small desk.

Three things i am doing right now:

• Typing this (is this a trick question?)
• Drinking coffee
• Listening to Ella Fitzgerald belt out Mack the Knife.

Three things i want to do before i die:

• Earn shitloads of money. Get plenty of people to do stuff for me by making a promise to leave them all my wealth. Then give it all off to charity.
• Visit Japan. Dont ask, it’s just a thing that i have.
• Cure cancer…AIDS…whatever.

Three things i can do:

• Wiggle my ears
• Feign interest, in pretty much anything
• Drink and make merry

Three things you should listen to:

• Madonna’s Confessions On A Dance Floor album. Fabufuckinglous.
• Your conscience. It’s usually right.
• Satisfaction by Salil, Navin & Dhruv (thats me)

Three things you should never listen to:

• Liars (duh!)
• Your heart. No matter what Roxette tells you.
• Satisfaction by Britney Spears

Three things I’d like to learn:

• Parallel parking
• Japanese
• The saxophone

Three favourite foods:

• Cow
• Pig
• Goat

Three beverages i drink regularly:

• Water
• Coffee
• Cola (yes, i’m bored of this exercise now..i’ll make it quick)

Three TV shows/books I watched/read as a kid:

(wasn’t really a TV person, lets go with books)

• The first proper book i read was an abridged version of Around The World In Eighty Days

• The William Series by Richmal Crompton
• George’s Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl (this one really cracked me up)

Three people I would like to tag:

• Nobody actually. I dont have much of a social life on the blogging circuit. I prefer to…’keep it real’.

Peace & Love… Man!

Ebert on Volver

So, he’s a little late but he’s finally reviewed Volver. This is his review, he liked it! This post is to make amends for the sad excuse of a review i posted a while back. Its also my way of showing how glad i am that he’s back in action.

(I’d like to add that i’m very disappointed that the Chicago Sun-Times review of Casino Royale is by Roeper the Lameass and not Ebert the Eloquent. I do hope he’ll review it eventually.)

(This post is also another pathetic response to writer’s block.)

——————————————————————————————

Volver
Ghost, murder are all in the family

Ebert Rating: ****   

by Roger Ebert

How would you like to spend the afterlife? Hanging around in a tunnel of pure light, welcoming new arrivals from among your family and friends? It seems to me a dreary prospect. You’d run out of customers in a generation or two. And how boring to smile and beckon benevolently all the time. My Aunt Martha would more likely be cutting the cards for a game of canasta.

In Pedro Almodovar’s enchanting, gentle, transgressive “Volver,” a deceased matriarch named Irene (Carmen Maura) has moved in with her sister Paula (Chus Lampreave), who is growing senile and appreciates some help around the house, especially with the baking. They live, or whatever you’d call it, in a Spanish town where the men die young, and the women spend weekends cheerfully polishing and tending their graves, just as if they were keeping house for them. In exemplary classic style, Almodovar uses a right-to-left tracking shot to show this housekeeping carrying us back into the past, and then a subtle, centered zoom to establish the past as part of the present.

We meet Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Duenas), Irene’s daughters; Raimunda’s daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), and Paco (Antonio de la Torre), Raimunda’s beer-swilling, layabout husband. Two deaths occur closely spaced to upset this happy balance: Aunt Paula keels over, and young Paula repulses an advance by her stepfather Paco using a large, bloody, very Hitchcockian knife. Paco ends up on the kitchen floor, his arms and legs splayed in an uncanny reminder of the body on the poster of Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder.”

Where will the ghost of Irene go now? Why, obviously, to the one who needs her most — Raimunda. This is the setup for a confounding gathering of murder, reincarnation and comedy, also involving Raimunda’s almost accidental acquisition of the restaurant where she has one of several part-time jobs.

Almodovar is above all a director who loves women — young, old, professional, amateur, mothers, daughters, granddaughters, dead, alive. Here his cheerful plot combines life after death with the concealment of murder, success in the restaurant business, the launching of daughters and with completely serendipitous solutions to (almost) everyone’s problems. He also achieves a vivid portrait of life in a village not unlike the one where he was born.

“Volver” is Spanish for “to return,” I am informed. The film reminds me of Fellini’s “Amarcord,” also a fanciful revisit to childhood which translates as “I remember.” What the directors are doing, I think, is paying tribute to the women who raised them — their conversations, conspiracies, ambitions, compromises and feeling for romance. (What Fellini does more closely resembles revenge.) These characters seem to get along so easily that even the introduction of a “dead” character can be taken in stride.

Women see time more as a continuity, anyway, don’t you think? Don’t you often hear them speaking of the dead in the present tense? Their lives are a continuity not limited by dates carved in stone.

What a distinctive filmmaker Almodovar has become. He is greatly influenced, we are assured, by Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s (especially if that decade had been franker about its secret desires). But he is equally turned on, I think, by the 1950s palette of bright basic colors and cheerful optimism that goes without saying. Here the dominant color is red — for blood, passion and Pedro.

In this connection, some mention might be made of Cruz’s cleavage, including one startling shot also incorporating the murder weapon. It seemed impossible not to mention that shot in an interview at Cannes Film Festival (where the film won honors for best script and ensemble cast). Almodovar nodded happily. “Yes, I am a gay man,” he said, “but I love breasts.”

What is most unexpected about “Volver” is that it’s not really about murder or the afterlife, but simply incorporates those awkward developments into the problems of daily living. His characters approach their dilemmas not with metaphysics but with common sense. A dead woman turns up as a ghost and is immediately absorbed into her family’s ongoing problems: So what took her so long?

It is refreshing to see Cruz acting in the culture and language that is her own. As it did with Sophia Loren in the 1950s, Hollywood has tried to force Cruz into a series of show-biz categories, when she is obviously most at home playing a woman like the ones she knew, grew up with, could have become.

For Almodovar, too, “Volver” is like a homecoming. Whenever we are most at ease, we fall most easily and gracefully into our native idioms. Certainly as a young gay man in Franco’s Spain, he didn’t feel at home, but he felt displaced in a familiar way, and now he feels nostalgia for the women who accepted him as easily as if, well, he had been a ghost.

shall we dance?

this dance…

inspired this one…

goes to show, you never can tell.

(note to self: youtube.com is BRILLIANT for writer’s block. use more often.)

the rainbow, unwoven

do not all charms fly

at the mere touch of cold philosophy?

there was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

we know her woof, her texture; she is given

in the dull catalogue of common things.

philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,

conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –

unweave a rainbow…

– John Keats, Lamia

 

un cafe, por favor

Twentysomething angst: such a cliche. Bah! I shall not succumb.

Have you ever made yourself a cup of coffee? Well of course you have, and if you haven’t then you have no business being here. I wish to have nothing to do with you. So, coming back to coffee, I like it strong. I’m not talking can-i-have-an-extra-shot-of-espresso-in-that strong. I mean a real toxic, industrial strength concoction. You may want to put some sugar in there, but not too much mind you, the bitterness must shine through. A dash of cinnamon can be refreshing, but that’s mood-dependent. And for godsake, no chocolate please! What’s all this café mocha nonsense? Kids these days, I tell you. Tut tut. A healthy dose of caffeine in the morning is just what the doctor ordered. Not only does it exorcise any residual onebeertoomany demons but also quells potential wrongsideofthebed tempers.  Ah, coffee.

But I digress.

Where was i? Ah yes, the coffeemaking process. And before that I mentioned angst. I swear there’s a link, which I’ll get to soon.  So – coffee, sugar, milk, cinnamon (optional) – then we add the water. At first what you get is a disgusting, milky solution. Quite horrid. But as you stir it it gets darker, uglier, browner, more bitter – terribly bitter, richer, fuller, more satisfying, delicious. Like life, no?

Or so ‘they’ would have us believe. No, no. I will not succumb to this monstrous angst. I will believe ‘them’. ‘They’ have never let me down before.

Bah! Yes ‘they’ have. ‘They’ always do.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage Monsieur Angst who shall perform for us his famous Victory Dance.

*bright neon sign flashes APPLAUSE*

 Sigh.

Volver

Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!, All About My Mother, Talk To Her, Bad Education. These are the few ‘films de Almodovar’ that i had seen earlier. Frankly, i never quite got this chappie, or rather i never got why he was such a big deal. Don’t ask why, it’s just one of those things. Saturated primary colours, transvestites, sexual perversity – i mean its all very good, but the way he handled them did absolutely nothing for me. Too bizarre, too obscure, too pointless for my taste. In fact, my sister insists that the DVD of Talk To Her I gave her has a couple of missing scenes because there is no way the film can end like it does. Well, it shouldn’t, but sadly it does. I’m sorry if i’m stepping on any filmsnob toes here, but i just don’t get it.

Last night I saw Volver, his latest offering, and I let it blow me away. He shows marvellous restraint and control, and that makes the film a must-see (along with Penelope Cruz in push-up bras a la Erin Brockovich). Usually, before watching a film I’m not too sure about, I equip myself with preconcieved notions as supplied by my cineguru Roger Ebert. Unfortunately, guruji is currently recovering from surgery of some sort and hasnt reviewed several recent releases. So, unarmed, i went. Pleasantly surprised, I was.

A woman desperate to forget her past and start afresh. A mother waiting patiently to make amends. An unassuming sister, efficiently juggling the women in her life. A daughter with blood on her han…whoops, have i said too much? Worry not, this barely scratches the surface of the intricate and seamless plot. Throw in a vibrant pallette, a haunting melody, incisive wit, a village driven to insanity by a treacherous easterly wind and the best post-murder cleanup scene ever shot, and you have a masterpiece. I like? I love!

A lot of films that claim to be women-centric actually have characters who, with minor alteration to the plot, are easily replaceable with men. In that respect, Volver is truly a film about women. Mothers, daughters, sisters, friends – all as woman as they come. And as far as performances go, they’re all good, but Penelope Cruz truly sparkles. I’ve never thought she was much good but after yesternight….wow!!!

I haven’t said much about the film, i know. Go to imdb for more info and useless trivia. All i wanted to convey is that this one’s definitely a must-see. I cant wait to find out if guruji agrees (although, age seems to have made the old man somewhat soft. Sigh). Incidentally, did anyone actually understand the end to Talk To Her? Or is it one of those annoying open-ended things? Bah!

a wheat field, with cypresses

 

Creativity is a tricky little bitch that has eluded me lately. I know not whose bed she warms these days, but I haven’t seen her in a while. This rather desperate attempt at wooing her back may seem somewhat contrived, but bear with me; I’m still trying to regain my bearings.

December past saw me roaming the bustling city streets of London. Lonely Planet held in a tight grip, I marched upstream, against the frenetic herds of Christmas shoppers on Oxford Street, making a beeline for Trafalgar Square. No, I wasn’t there for the pigeons. Nor, for that matter, for that hideous new statue they’ve erected there. Art, it seems. Bah! These days anything goes. I was there to pay homage to the masters at the National Gallery. This one building contains an astonishing collection of European artwork, including some of my favourites which I’d only seen in expensive coffee-table books and heard discussed at art-appreciation classes. Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, Monet’s Water-lily Pond, The Arnolfini Portrait. All the greats, all together.

And then, of course, there’s Van Gogh. Ah, Vincent. If you listen hard enough right now, you can hear Don McLean crooning somewhere in the distance. Well, Starry Night isn’t housed at the National Gallery but there are others. Once inside, you don’t need a map to tell you where the Van Goghs are. All you have to do is look for paintings with the most tourists surrounding them. Human psychology is funny that way – whether or not you appreciate art, everyone wants to know what a deranged genius who chopped his ear off for a nubile hooker can do with a canvas and some paintbrushes. So there you have it, Vincent is a star!

I forced my way through the mob to get as close as possible to that hideous ‘masterpiece’ of his – Sunflowers. There it was, a mess of violent yellow and brown brushstrokes bordered by an ornate golden frame, probably fitted with a million security devices. The painting is very, um, large. And yellow. Basically, it looks better in books, and not really good there either.

But as I stood there, surrounded by throngs of Chinese tourists (guidebooks and dictionaries in hand, and dictionaries for their dictionaries, and even more dictionaries) I looked to the right and noticed a much smaller painting that everyone was ignoring. One I hadn’t seen or even thought of in years. Also a Van Gogh, but not as celebrated as some of the others. ‘A Wheat Field, With Cypresses’, a name I learnt many years ago when I fell in love with it. When I joint school, I noticed a print of ‘Wheat field…’ hanging in a corner of our common room in a humble wooden frame. I spent my first evening in school sitting and staring at it hanging there from a scraggy nail. I wasn’t particularly interested in the painting, I was 12 for godsake! I was just incredibly homesick and didn’t feel like talking to the other kids who all seemed so happy and settled. So I just zoned them out and looked at the pretty colours hanging from the wall. Strangely enough, it made me feel better, maybe because it successfully managed to take my mind off the now seemingly absurd feeling of abandonment. Closer examination showed the name printed fine-print italics at the bottom – ‘A Wheat Field, With Cypresses’. Soon I settled in, life was good and the painting easily forgotten, until that day in the National Gallery when it all came racing back.

I left the crazy Orientals and made my way to this potential nostalgia trigger, but someone beat me to it – an old lady on a day out with her precious granddaughter. The child strained to look up at the painting and I watched as grandma bent down, whispered something in the girl’s ear, and lifted her so that she was eyelevel with the painting. For a few moments the girl just looked at it with apparent confusion. And then she just spread her arms wide apart, shut her eyes tight and flung her head back. I stood there puzzled as I watched her take a deep breath and then suddenly snap out of it as the duo broke into a giggly fit, delight just pouring out of them. Mind you, this all took place in a matter of a few seconds and was very cute and childish, and not some theatrical slo-mo thing that I may have led you to imagine. But, what was it that the girl was doing? What did Grandma whisper in her ear? What made her so happy after she did that?

I stood for quite some time, after they left, just gazing, trying hard to discover what was so special about this particular work of art. No matter how much I tried I just didn’t see what it was that the little girl saw. I mean, it’s truly a beautiful painting and all but it didn’t really make me feel any physical sensation. I walked through the rest of the gallery feeling like a bit of a fraud. What was it that I was missing? Did I not truly appreciate art? What gave the little girl such pleasure, but not me? Bah!

I still don’t know what it was, but here’s what I like to imagine. Grandma told Little Girl to look at the painting and feel the wind blowing through the trees. And so, when the girl shut her eyes and spread her arms, she actually did feel the breeze, and that made her happy. Sounds a little filmy, I know. But if I’m ever in the National Gallery again, I’m gonna try it. I bet it works.

yet another blog, so sue me.

I find that each time i leave something with the intent of coming back to it later, i can never start where i left off. I always need to start afresh. That’s why I’ve read the first half of Orwell’s 1984 six times (it’s a different matter that i later read the entire book thrice)! Which is why i now have this new blog. I was going through my old one and there’s no way i could carry on writing on that space. I didn’t like the way it looked anymore and the stuff i wrote then is definitely not the kind of stuff i wanna write now. So here i am with yet another feeble attempt at blogging. I swear, if i tire of it this time, I’m done! No more blogs, ever! I’ll pack my bags and hop on the next bus out! Goodbye Kansas, its been nice knowing ya!

You! yes, you! i can see you now shaking your head and going ‘yeah yeah, thats what they all say…’. Well, maybe. We’ll just have to wait and see, wont we?