Soaps, Sex and Detergent: Upendra Namburi’s 60 Minutes

60 Minutes is a deceptively titled novel. So is the television series ‘24’. Except unlike ‘24’ which spans events that happen over an hour per episode, 60 Minutes stretches the time spent on it to what felt like an eternity to this reader. A thinly disguised account of the turf wars between two FMCG majors (BCL and Stark- clearly fictional stand-ins for HUL and P&G), 60 Minutes deals with the corporate rivalry between Agastya of BCL and Sailesh of Stark. Also casting a long shadow on the book is the character of Maithili, a demented corporate professional who becomes the textbook embodiment of ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ after a love affair with Agastya goes sour. Namburi spends page after page explaining the stock market portfolio of these characters and their promotional tactics to make their rival products a success but remains stubbornly uninterested in their actual being. He is clearly not a believer of the accepted test of good writing, which is ‘Show. Don’t tell.’  Characters are introduced randomly for no rhyme or reason. And then just as randomly, they are ‘fired’ or fall by the wayside. The women characters are especially embedded with streaks of disturbing misogyny and come in three molds: raging harridan, efficient secretary and long-suffering wife.

No matter how hard he tries throwing in car crashes (I counted 4. Surely a bit much even by Mumbai standards), deadlines and sex, Namburi is unable to infuse any life into his characters or his story.  If you have 60 minutes to spare, avoid this book at all costs and just sit and stare into space. It is likely to be a far more rewarding experience. Or watch an episode of ’24’ instead.

Why ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ Left Me Cold

Some films are destined to be symbols more than stories. For all it’s artistic merit, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is remembered most as the first Hollywood gay love story to  become fully entrenched in public consciousness. That is a polite way of saying that many people watched it and thought, “Oh! Gay people can have love affairs that are touching ALSO? In that case, this film must be really good.”

It’s been 8 years since Brokeback. And now it’s the turn of two women to fall in love on screen, with the kind of publicity that defines a cultural milestone. ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ (also based on a novel) won the Palm D’Or at Cannes this year. At which point the lead actresses promptly denounced the director of the film as being horrible. It was well reviewed AND had graphic sex scenes. Really, what’s not to like?

Sadly, there is much. BITWC is the kind of beauteous and fetishised rendering of lesbians that makes you wonder for a second if you are watching soft porn. It’s obsessed with hair, skin and pouts (Adele Exarchopolous’ in particular). Exarchapolous plays Adele  a high school student who falls in love with the older, blue-haired Emma after slowly realizing that she is not into boys. Adele is young, naive uncultivated ingenue. Emma is arty, out of the closet and experienced. On their first date, Emma quotes Sartre and Adele responds with Bob Marley. It’s all very cute.Their love story progresses over the years. The problem is that the only thing interesting about them (for about 5 minutes) is that they are lesbians. One may be a vocal LGBT rights advocate, but so rarely do we see two people of the same sex fall in love onscreen, that it has some specimen value for a very limited amount of time. Once that wore off, I was so bored that I launched into a deep analysis of Lea Seydoux’s amazing hairstyle and if I could maybe take a picture for reference for my next haircut.

‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ is indulgent to a fault of its dreary protagonists whose sexual identity is completely unrelated to how boring they are. It left me totally cold. As for explicit sex scenes, we have Lars Von Trier’s Nyphomaniac to look forward to in a bit.

Stoker (2013)

Stoker starts with India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) saying “Just as a flower does not choose its colour, we are not responsible for what we have come to be”.

India Stoker is 18 and looks like Samara from The Ring. Her father Richard died recently in a car accident (‘burnt to a crisp’ says the house help as she symbolically fries some chicken.) India wears odd clothes. Reads odd books. Her mother Evelyn(Nicole Kidman in her best attempt at botox denial in years) has always felt like the kebab in the father-daughter equation and the nature of their relationship is mostly accusations flung back and forth. Their uncle Charlie comes to comfort them in their time of need and from then on all bets are off. Evelyn wants Charlie. Charlie wants India. But why? And people die.

Park Chan-wook’s Stoker is an exercise in no-holds barred cinematic bloodletting. Chan-wook reaches deep into our cultural recesses, pulls out taboos one by one and demolishes it with fearless exhilaration. He expresses that which is unspeakably deviant with such control and empathy so that we are forced to confront the fact that maybe it’s not that deviant after all.

To that end, Park Chan-wook would like you to know that it is possible to masturbate in the shower immediately after one has been sexually assaulted in a forest. A mother’s greatest sexual rival is her teenage daughter. He would like you to remember that the nature of sibling rivalry is not the cuddly competitiveness of who papa loves more. And Park Chan-wook would if you permit, like to shake your faith in the belief that crimes are perpetrated by the simple minded and/or morally destitute.

Stoker is a film so comfortable with darkness that it’s almost a visual reprimand forcing us to be ashamed about our prim little lives. It moves along with this primal urgency that has no patience for introspection. We will never know why India and Charlie are the way they are. Because there are no excuses in Park Chan-Wook’s book.

If by the time of the end credits, you are not covered in goose pimples (Courtesy the use of this song by Emily Wells: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DUzIV2pqBY ), Lady Middlebrow is prepared to eat a small piece of raw octopus like Choi Min-Sik in Oldboy.

Amour (2012)

Anyone who has seen more than one film by Michael Haneke knows that one does not have the luxury of munching popcorn while watching a Haneke film. This rule also applies to Lars Von Trier. But Von Trier is an open provocateur who wears his genius for rattling people tattooed on his interviews and all over his films. Haneke on the other hand is a quiet one. His terrors are contained. 

Amour is his film about an elderly couple who are extremely attached to each other. How do we know this? Because of the way they have breakfast. Because of the non-threatening silences that fill their days. And because nothing one says surprises the other. They accommodate,  understand and live around each other with an almost clinical synchronization. They are played by Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour)and Jean Louis Trintignant (Z) with such truth that I started seeing thinking of them as my own grandfather and grandmother.

Anne (Riva) falls sick early on in the film and her slow deterioration into death is the most effective argument for euthanasia I have seen onscreen. But Amour is not about death. It was for me, about a kind of love that is so complete that it ceases to be just love. It becomes duty. It becomes habit. It becomes conscience. I don’t understand it. But I am grateful I could witness it.

Don Draper and Sardar Khan: Falling for the reprehensible, honestly.

 

As I wrap up Season 5 of Mad Men, it occurs to me that Don Draper is undeniably the cunt-iest man on television. He sleeps around, ignores work, is chauvinistic and forgets he has a third child. No amount of inspiring ad pitches, hair gel and good looks can hide how nasty he is as a person.

Similarly in Gangs of Wasseypur, Sardar Khan played by Manoj Bajpayee is also prick personified. Like an overgrown infant, Bajpayee kills and commits infidelity with great glee and is a walking advertisement for a vasectomy and a lobotomy.

But unlike cunty rockstars (all of them including fictional ones like Stacie Jaxx from Rock of Ages), Don Draper and Sardar Khan are not ultra talented. There is no tradeoff to their ugliness. If anything they become worse as the movie or the series progresses.

Yet they are arguably the most interesting male characters I have seen on a screen recently. They are not even the bad boys we were warned about. Sardar Khan is no James Dean. And Don Draper is one bald spot short of a very unattractive mid-life crisis.

Why then are so likeable, interesting and less importantly, fuckable? I think the appeal of a Sardar Khan and a Don Draper is the same as that of a nudist camp. The joy of letting it all the flab hang out, warts,spots and cellulite included.

Look at us, we have been told to cherish the six-pack but all we really crave is some lumpy subcutaneous fat to grip.

Marley (2012)

Our fascination with artists as human beings sometimes trumps our interest in their art. I know exactly 5 Bob Marley songs. But it’s not the songs that made me watch Kevin MacDonald’s documentary on Marley. It’s the pot-smoking, dreadlocks sporting, peace spouting personal cult around him.

Marley, is a straight forward, balanced and chronological assembling of Bob Marley’s life. It’s full of information and strangely devoid of insight. As if the director took a wrong turn on the road to impartiality and ended in boring land.But you could do a tape recording of the Wikipedia page on Bob Marley and it would still be fascinating because the man is, as we say ‘an item’.

Quite like Che Guevara, Bob Marley is the product of brutal class and (in his case) race oppression whose identifying symbols were ironically hijacked by the same upper class that he was singing against. We (yes, we are complicit) took all his angst and by tapping the need to be heard that afflicts all artists of caliber, made him into an ‘other’. Someone who lived in an exotic land far away with many wives, smoking bamboo bongs and talking about peace and freedom.

Yes, all his songs sound the same (to me). And yes the Jamaican accent is adorable. But there is a hardness to the man and his circumstances that clearly makes us uncomfortable. Always easier to wear a Rasta cap and say ‘Ya Man’.

As the movie ended, I realized that Bob Marley didn’t self-destruct. He is not a Kurt Cobain or a Jim Morrison or a Jimi Hendrix. Neither does his story have the pot of redemption at the end of the addiction rainbow, like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. His case is a little different.

You Don’t Know Jack and You Also Don’t Know Sean Penn: In Defense of Scenery Chewers

There are actors around whom there are whispers of greatness, which we hear long before we ever actually see them on screen. Much before I saw Godfather or Serpico or Dog Day Afternoon, I knew Al Pacino was the shit. And I had heard so much of Sean Penn walking as a dead man that by the time I got to the movie, it felt like an affirmation, instead of a revelation.
I think it’s a worse fate to be consecrated for being brilliant before you die, than to be eulogized incessantly if one has the misfortune to die young. At least Jim Morrison, James Dean and Kurt Cobain have escaped the clutches of millions of fawning fans who no doubt, would have accused them of A) Selling Out B) Burning Out or C) Losing Touch had they actually continued to live and work till they were grey.
The niggling doubt of having one’s best work behind one must haunt Pacino and to a lesser degree Penn. Maybe they are not the greatest living actors. But they have great mythologies built around them. And mostly that means the same thing. That sooner or later, they will be channeling their erstwhile awesomeness into crowd-pleasing parodies.
To hear Pacino go ‘Hoo Ha!’ in Scent of A Woman is to me, the perfect cue for a wince. And as Penn went (in Tropic Thunder terminology) ‘full retard’ in I Am Sam, a powerful urge to squash Dakota Fanning danced a brief ballet in my head.
There are many nails that have been struck into this coffin of greatness. Pacino recently did a role in Adam Sandler’s ‘Jack and Jill’ a movie that was nominated for a record 11 Razzies. Penn has yet to something similarly distasteful, but there is no telling with these artistic types. However, let’s not judge Pacino. Maybe he was just bored. Maybe he wanted to buy another house. Or maybe he’d won every award there is, and thought a Razzie would be a lovely addition to his shelf.
But in two recent films ‘You Don’t Know Jack’ and ‘This Must Be The Place’, both Pacino and Penn successfully put aside, what I call the ‘Look Ma Lots of Acting’ method of playing roles. If you can put aside your belief that they are 1) The gods of acting or 2) They overact like no one, you will find that sometimes, indifference is the first step to being gobsmacked. I was.

The Iron Lady (2011): Margaret and Meryl- A Poem

MARGARET AND MERYL

Meryl Streep is a mimic profound

(Remember she  passed off as Julia Child?)

But why must Meryl

At her own peril

Always change her hair and her sound?

 

For Meryl’s  is a talent so rarely found

That her Sophie’s choice is clear

If she didn’t resort to mimicry

She’s be playing grandmoms for years.

 

See, she tried her hand at dancing

And even a rom-com was tested

But even though she wore a Prada

Mama Mia! It was complicated

 

But Margaret is more than Meryl’s equal

And the film is not a biopic

It only begins at Margaret’s end

(So there will be no sequel)

 

Margaret was once the Iron lady

(Now she has turned a little rusty)

She feels displaced but can’t erase

The memories of her so-called crimes

 

Because to be a woman and also be old

The difficulties are just manifold

Granny be cuddly! Granny be kind!

But Granny please don’t speak your mind.

 

Margaret lies alone

Convinced that she need not atone.

To not care much if one is hated

Is  an end to which most leaders are fated.

 

Tabloid- A documentary by Errol Morris

In the 1970s Joyce McKinney was a Wyoming beauty pageant winner who fell in love with the Mormon Kirk Anderson much to disapproval of his family. One day Kirk Anderson disappeared from the town and Joyce embarked on a trip to Britain to track him down, believing he had been brainwashed by his Mormon cult. She finds him and they spend a day together where they had according to Joyce ‘fun food and sex’. Anderson however was more conflicted about the enforced vacation and was ‘rescued’ by the police who charged Joyce with kidnapping and raping him.  The tabloids went crazy with the ‘manacled mormon’ story and started uncovering some unsavoury details about Joyce’s life.She fled the country and went underground. Decades later, she emerges in the public eye again by having her dead dog Booger cloned.

It’s a remarkable chain of events and Joyce McKinney is the human incarnation of Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire, who gently sandpapers and sanitizes all the lumps in  her life  till it resembled a rosy picture.  You know she is lying, but you wonder if she knows she is. That’s how convincing her denial of reality is.

But director Errol Morris is so intent on demonizing Joyce that after a while there is some serious misogyny in the air.  All other men(Joyce is the only woman featured) in the film are so smug about their encounters with Joyce that you really want to shout ‘Hindsight!Hindsight’ into their ears. Tabloid is ultimately reduced to being a juicy story told without empathy. True to its name. Which is a pity because it was compelling without the window dressing that Morris  furnishes it with. Morris has a bit of a Michael Moore hangover but thankfully chooses to keep his face out of the frame and only lets his voice be heard. If you want to check out more balanced documentaries on individuals who are widely considered to be criminals, do watch Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans or Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

A Dangerous Method (2011)

A Dangerous Method is the black swan of period films because its deeply unsettling till the very end. Aren’t period films supposed to comfort us with their velvety quaintness and tell us that, all of what has happened in this story is in the past and the present is a tidier placer now, far removed and wiser? Or have I just watched too many Jane Austen adaptations on screen?

David Cronenberg directs the film and he brings to the movie his interest in the beauty behind what is generally considered grotesque. This is a director who made a movie about a  human being that accidentally cross breeds with a housefly  and then later made a film about people who were sexually aroused by car crashes and its victims. Nothing is off limits and with Freud, can anything be?

As a hysterical Keira Knightley, playing Carl Jung’s(Michael Fassbender) patient number zero Sabina admits to finding pleasure when her father thrashed her as a 4 year old, Cronenberg shows us a glimpse of how Freud and Jung first showed us the  complicated nature of our desires. And that most of us even today would be hesitant about openly confessing to visiting a therapist professionally, is some indication of how truly radical these ideas were then.

Freudian is now a word, like Kafkaesque and it’s a measure of the man and his ideas that even people who have not read a single text of his, know the gist of his legacy. Set in the early 20th century, A Dangerous Method is the story of Carl Jung , Freud’s brightest disciple, who broke rank when he felt the restrictive clasp of his teacher’s theories on psychoanalysis.The movie is filled with deeply intelligent characters like Freud, Jung and Sabina, all clutching their own neuroses and trying to show others a method of reinventing themselves. Watch it if you think you have the stomach for it.