Nothing’s hit

Sandip Ray’s Hit-List is an interesting case of a good story dealt with rustiness. True, it’s a break from the ungainly fare that paints characters in pure black-n-white, and the film doesn’t for once repose on the handed-down wisdoms of mainstream Bengali films. But all its efforts to entertain with a relaxed treatment of a crime story collapse for a shaky script and shakier performances.

But Hit-List shows Sandip wanted to spare himself the mechanics of Feluda-franchise. His camera makes his characters look more human, say, than that of his last non-Feluda film, Nishijapon. The story would have offered enough temptation for the camera to go edgy. But it rather moves as if on a vigil to register the psychological developments of characters, often putting to test the acting skills unflinchingly. Some come through, some don’t. Read more »

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Cinema etiquette – or the lack thereof

Warning – this is going to be a rant.

What, pray, is wrong with the movie-going public in Calcutta?? A people that pride themselves on their ‘culture’, friendliness, and warmth transforms into the epitome of bad behaviour when they’re placed within a mile of any cinema hall. People in Delhi annoyed me – and loads of others - with their obstinate refusal to turn their mobiles off, and their penchant for long conversations just at the most gripping moments - so much so that PVR actually made a funny short about irritating people yakking on their cell phones during screenings being abducted by aliens, to the mirth of others in the theatre. In Calcutta, though, I have come to the conclusion that people don’t quite get what movie halls are all about. For most, they’re either

(a) an extension of their very noisy, convivial living rooms;
(b) the setting for dreamy dates, the kind where you talk your hearts out to kindred spirits;
(c) one of the few spaces available for groups of dorky men to prove to the world just how obnoxious, loud and pathetically uncool they can be; and
(d) make-out zones. Of the noisy kind.

Notice anything about the list above? They have one thing in common – noise. Yep. I have, till date, been to only one film where I didn’t have to leave my seat and move much forward to the relatively unoccupied seats in front just so I could do what I had come to do in the first place – watch a film in peace – and that was during a Jodie Foster film that attracted only five people, my husband and I included. In fact, that’s the first thing we do in a theatre – mark out two seats with no one remotely close, which we could run to as soon as the movie – and the jabbering – started.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel this way. I’ve come across at least a couple of instances where people angrily shushed others around them; we’ve done so innumerable times. Seriously, though, WHY do people talk so much during films? I mean, if they’re not interested in the film, wouldn’t it have made better sense to not spend so much money on tickets and popcorn but spend it on sandwiches and coffee at the nearest coffee bar, where there wouldn’t be anyone objecting to their undoubtedly scintillating conversation? Or, if you’d rather catch a movie with a bunch of friends and have a blast laughing at all the serious moments, wouldn’t it be better, easier, and cheaper to rent a DVD instead? Or, if you belong to the dorky group mentioned above who cannot distinguish between Dev D and soft porn, wouldn’t you have a better time watching soft porn instead?

If any of the yakky types ever read this – could you keep it down? Or try one of my alternatives – trust me, we’d all be so much better off if you do. And if there’s anyone who feels the way I do, or can shed light on this curious phenomenon, please do so – and then perhaps we can figure out what, if anything, can be done about this.

When Delhi actually scores points over a city in the matter of etiquette, that city is in big trouble indeed.

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The mad world of subtitle censors

The face on the TV screen spat, “She’s such a pissy little high school c… .” The subtitle primly excised the “pissy little” and left in the “c…”. So, it read, “She’s such a high school c… .”

A few minutes later, an actor said, “My ass got so fat.” The subtitle read, “My got so fat.”

Maybe now someone in the Censor Board or the subtitling company in Mumbai will get stood up against a wall and shot. I’m hoping it’s the Censor Board, all of it. The subtitling company for films on TV was just doing the worst it could do for the undoubtedly huge amount that it was being paid by the Censor Board to do the best it could do.

I think I know that subtitling company but we’ll leave that for another blog.

The subtitles were from Knocked Up, which I watched yesterday on TV. It’s an Indie romantic comedy starring the ineffable Katherine Heigl and the very effable Seth Rogan. Since it’s about premarital childbearing, and how you flounder into that stage of rage and making out and mix-ups and making up, it’s got to have some searing language, or language that the government considers wicked. And it did, inasmuch as the production house suits in the US would allow in a romantic bumbledom. The rest of us call such language the language of common discourse.

But the suits cater to Middle American tastes. Indian tastes are more refined, and less shatterproof, and the Indian government knows it. So, these days when I watch films on TV, I get the feeling that the government has roped in the censors to turn me aphasic. Better a viewer who can’t repeat the crassness he’s heard on TV than a viewer who internalises it all to spew it out in – horror of horrors! – public.

Why does every film have to have subtitles in English? I can understand that some foreign films – not all, by any stretch of the imagination – need translation, although, equally, 90 per cent of them lose every bit of nuance and sense in the translation. I couldn’t understand, though, why all films in English needed subtitling.

This was till someone with deep contacts in a subterranean, unspyable, dark, mossy-walled, cold and utterly intractable hole in North Block told me that the government had a Plan on how to stop films – foreign films, for Indian-language films are more, well, governable – from sullying the pure hearts and minds of our populace: Subtitle the Life Out of Miramax and MGM. And Others of the Ilk.

It’s worked. They’re succeeding in buggering with my head.

My aphasia goes like this: I watch an English film, or I watch that part of the film that my eyes can see when they are not busy reading the subtitles – which are scrambled into alphabet soup. Sometimes, I catch the actors’ lips say something and the subtitling saying something else.

Often enough, I catch the subtitles saying something that the actors entirely never intended. Films end up having parallel but asymptotic communications tracks separated by a dimensional divide. In today’s India, I’d hate to be aurally challenged and watching a movie on TV, because when the movie ended, I wouldn’t have the faintest notion of what it was all about. Contrary to living myth, not all deaf people are lip readers.

The subtitling company – here we go again – operates within very firm, knowledgeable parameters set by some hammerheaded bureaucrat: subtitles must leave margins of this width from the edge of the frame, and must be restricted to two lines. No, I don’t care if the actor is an autodidact or a motormouth with a tall-geared fifth. It is the director’s business to fall in line with this regulation.

Meanwhile, no more films on TV for me. I’m going back to buying bootleg DVDs or downloading movies using BitTorrent. This is how pirateheads grow in power. And the government hasn’t got round to subtitling cyberspace yet.

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Prosenjit and the attitude shift

The other day, I was talking to Prosenjit Chatterjee in a surrounding that has, as of now, been largely unfamiliar to the Tollywood-based scribe brigade.
It may be a purana practice in Bollywood, to have your personal PR, but over here it’s a direct contact between the scribe and the star. The basics are simple. You SMS the star for an interview, he/she SMSes back to give you a time to call, you call and fix up the interview date and time. The bottomline—the journo needs to ensure that his/her cell number is stored in the star’s cell. And that it rings often.
With a PR or a secretary to handle the media, it becomes a tad easier. Interview requests are rooted through this go-between. And unlike stars, this person makes it a point to generally take all calls coming his/her way. So in order to fix an interview with Madhuri Dixit, you call up her secretary Rikkuji, you sms Mr Bachchan for an interview and if he agrees you send the questionnaire to Ms. Rosy, his secretary.
More professional, but mostly devoid of the personal touch.
Prosenjit, by all means has been the first in Tollygunge to appoint a profes-=sional agency to handle his media affairs. And I was interviewing him in the office of that agency.
Why this, after twenty-five years in the industry? I asked.
‘’Something new. It becomes necessary at times. You change with the times,'’ he answers.
But doesn’t this take away a bit of the personal touch that Tolly-journos shared with the man they generally addressed by his pet-name, Bumba– with the younger lot suffixing it with a ‘da’, I wonder.
” But you need to give new experiments a chance. Dekhai jag na byaparta kemon hoy,” he answers.
Give the new a chance. That coming from Prosenjit says a lot. After all, these days he doesn’t mind sharing almost equal screen and poster space with the likes of Jishu Sengupta and Tota Roy Chowdhury. That too in a mainstream venture.
Shift of attitude. And a more professional one at this point of time. Perhaps….

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Poor Boy, he won’t survive this Game

Talking of DVDs, this one just fell into my hands. In the most literal sense. I was shifting through the stacks of my local DVD library. Mine, situated deep inside a winding lane that opens into one of the busiest crossings in old North Calcutta, stocks an interesting collection. You will get X-rated movies (hard-core and softcore), Hitchcock and Chaplin classics, Hollywood blockbusters with an odd Godard or Renoir all together, with an equal share of reckless reluctance. All stacked one on top of the other in flimsy plastic covers, equally dust-ridden.

Of these, the X-rated ones have the appearance of well-thumbed paperbacks. So much for English movies in a good old North Calcutta. But that’s beside the point.

So how did this one fall? It fell as I was thumbing through the titles. The title read— ‘Poor Boy’s Game’. I had heard about it. This one was making rounds in the film festivals last year. And it was released just this year in the US, last month. That above all, was the primary reason to borrow the DVD. After all, I will be one-up among my peers, having seen at least one movie – an English one at that, made by a Canadian director with a Canadian cast, yet to be released in India— before any one of them.

But it was a pleasant surprise. Because I haven’t seen a more violent and yet so sensitive a movie in years. And I also haven’t seen a better made sports movie recently, which has so much to say in such undertones.

This, despite a ‘Chak De India’—which was supposed to be a watershed of sorts among recent sports films. At least that’s what the Indian media would have us believe. Because at the end of it all, this one had the courage to deal with a racial issue—something that Chak De and Kabir Khan had harped on right from the beginning—and yet bring about a reconciliation between the warring individuals, without the dream of a win. And under-acting as an art form—that was an added. Also the fact that despite the large screen format, the huge close ups and close shots– alomost giv-ing the sense of a TV camera at work, gave added impetus to the theme of claustrophobia, that’s central to the theme.

Hope Mr Shimit Amin has also seen this movie. Next time he makes a Chak De-like movie, he would think twice, whether he should make a sports movie at all.

Because there is no point in making a sports movie, once you see this Clément Virgo piece and feel you can’t or won’t be able to, better it.

Because, if you better it, nobody will go to see your movie in India, becuase nobody goes to multiplexes to see relentless violence and hear swearwords. They go there to laugh and cry, and if they have that extra money, cuddle into a blanket on limo-like convertible chairs at the Gold Lounge and enjoy a sump-tuous meal.

Because, ‘Poor Boy’s Game’ won’t even survive a week in India. May even not get the Censor nod.
Because, my DVD librarywallah had decided this was a good X-movie without the X-rating. That was the reason he ever stocked it. He is the typical Indian viewer.

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