Filmiholic

 Look at that lush cover.  Playing, indeed.

Today was the official release date of Melanie Abrams’ first novel.

When you read about it in coming days and weeks (my review too, soon), you will likely hear a lot about the S&M in the relationship between Josie, the American grad student, and Devesh, the older Indian doctor.  And yes, those parts of the book do often crackle, but there’s also a lot of heavy psychological issues going on too, and, most important, a well spun tale.

The filmi connection comes in two places: first, in the novel itself.  As the relationship between Devesh and Josie begins to grow, he introduces her to Hindi movies, even driving her miles away (the story is set mainly in North Carolina) to catch a movie at a cinema.  Another night, they watch RGV’s Company at home.

The other filmi filament between the author and the Maharashtra-based (ahem) movie biz is her hubby, Bombay raconteur Vikram Chandra.  The couple now both teach at University of California, Berkeley, when not writing or spending time back in India, in that salty, cinematic city by the sea, where Melanie and SRK have a hair stylist in common.

Some of her favorite Hindi movies:  Satya, Lagaan and Parineeta.

While she’s not crisscrossing the country right now to promote Playing, you folks living in or near San Francisco and Berkeley will have a few chances to see her during April. 

In the months after the first Abrams-Chandra co-production arrives (the baby’s due date is in May), Melanie will be out and about to meet her readers in the US and India.

Rajni, Kamala and Maddy have all joined forces on a one-day hunger strike.  They’re doing it to protest the attacks in Bangalore on cinemas showing Tamil films by people angered over the Hogenakkal water scuffle.  More here. 

 (Note:  This is a story I wrote for India Abroad that appeared in the Oct. 5, 2007 issue.  There’s nothing filmi about it, though a young life suddenly cut short has been depicted often enough on screen.  But I wanted to post this story here, in the hope that more people will learn about Navroze Mody’s life, and to counterbalance all that’s been written about his violent death.)

In 1987, I worked at the Argentine Embassy’s trade office in midtown Manhattan.  It was my first proper job while starting college, and it was fun.  Most of the handful of staff there were very young, and we were always laughing. 

I would come in from Long Island and catch the E train at Penn Station to the stop under the Citicorp building at Lexington Avenue and 53rd street.  I often noticed an intriguing-looking young guy, in a sharp suit and aviator-frame eyeglasses – it was the Eighties - who would get on one stop after me every day.  He stood out because he was completely bald, years before it was in vogue for men to shave their heads, and I assumed he must have been undergoing cancer treatment.  He looked about 30 years old, and he was Indian. 

He would occasionally be with someone he knew, chatting in a British accent.  We both got off at the same stop and headed in different directions.  I even commented to Alfredo, a co-worker, about this unusual guy I kept seeing on the subway, leading him to pester me often with “¿Cómo está tu hindue?  Did you speak to him today?”  I’d blush, saying “No way!  I’m not approaching some total stranger on the subway.”  And we’d leave it at that.  I never imagined that I would try to track him down 20 years later.

(more…)

Here it is, late Thursday night.  I’ve just put in a full day at the office, finished a novel I’m reviewing on the way home on the train, spoke to the author for close to an hour for the same article, made some pasta for dinner, chatted on the phone while The Celebrity Apprentice wrapped up in the background.  (Well played, Piers and Trace.)

And before turning in, I was in the mood for some light entertainment, some filmi song and dance.  Hey, where’s the stash I brough back from Bombay?  What will it be?  Partner or Jhoom Barabar Jhoom?  Well, I’d seen chunks of JBJ over and over on a long flight a few months ago, so I opt for ChiChi’s fedora-clad megahit from last year.

After I unwrap the cellophane, still bearing the Rs 399 sticker from PlanetM in downtown Bombay, where I plunked down a considerable amount of greenbacks on my last trip back, I open the silly cardboard cut-out flaps of the DVD box, and see the hot pink T-series DVD laying there.  I lift it up and - don’t ask me why - flip it over, and I don’t believe it:  the disc is SO scratched and dusty, it looks like it’s been left on the Juhu Tara Road and driven over by rush hour traffic.

Call me optimistic (anyone who knows how long I endured through a certain relationship can attest to that), but, after some gentle cleaning with an appropriate dry cloth, I pop the scarred disc into the tray of my player, hoping beyond hope that it will go.

But, alas no. 

Shame on you, PlanetM, for selling such damaged merchandise, and/or shame on T-Series for packing such crap to sell to the public.  I’ll be over to see you one of these days.

The Miami Herald reports that the KJo Dostana entourage has touched down in Florida and begun shooting:

The production is expected to have all the kitschy trappings that have made Bollywood movies such a hit worldwide, including a zany musical number to be filmed on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.

Filmi fans will get to see a rematch of Bluffmaster jodi Roy and Simmi (AB 2.0 and Priyanka Chopra).   

How could I let March 17th go by without some reference to the small island that gave us The Commitments, Into the West, The Pogues, and those guys who sang “Two Hearts Beat as One“?

The question is how to link the country where I spent all those summers as a kid (in the same neighborhood that was/is home to Neil Jordan, Phil Lynott and Gerry Ryan) to films from another one of Her Majesty’s former colonies?   Hmmm….

The two countries have so much in common (beyond the colonial past): green, white and orange tricolors, a love of story-telling, a history of people leaving home and settling thousands of miles away, a certain conservatism and insularity followed by the liberalism and social upheaval that accompanied an economic boom, and just see if the architecture in Belfast doesn’t remind you of Bombay (or vice versa).  We know who we both have to thank for that…

But filmi Ireland…..  Well, let’s see.  In ‘06 the Trib carried a story about a concerted effort that Ireland was making to court the Indian film industry and entice people away from the ubiquitous Old Blighty to greener shores for those song picturizations when a phoren location is required. 

(To date, some seven or so films have touched down in Eire.)

On the non-filmi front, Madras-native-now-settled-in-Kildare Cauvery Madhavan has penned a novel several years back that told the tale of an Indian med school doing his residency in Ireland. 

The last I heard from her, she was working on a book about the Indo-Irish link, from the time period when the men of Erin touched down on Indian shores, boat tickets courtesy of HRH.

On a day like today, most people think of Ireland, and picture an image like the one at the top of this post (Yeats’ beloved Ben Bulben, in County Sligo), but the ones I have from home are more urban (and still make me as sentimental as the Irish tourism ads on TV):

But, oh, how far the country’s come since I went to see Maureen Potter in the panto and ate Choc Ices with my little playmates….while listening recently to a podcast of morning drivetime personality Gerry Ryan, I was amazed to hear him compare notes about Indian food with a man who called in to rave about a meal he just had in Cavan, of all places!  As the conversation progressed, I came to learn that Ryan’s place of residence, the Dublin suburb famous for the Good Friday battle between the Vikings and Brian Boru’s men, now was home to, not one, but two Indian restaurants.  Holy cow.  We didn’t even have Chinese food when I was growing up there, only the chipper on Vernon Avenue.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone.

In 2007, we saw Anupama Chopra’s SRK book released, which told of Khan’s bio and career trajectory, while also giving readers an intro to the Bombay film industry.

Later in the same year, Stephen Alter’s Confessions of a Bollywood Love Thief made its appearance.  (Try reading a book with that title on the subway and note the looks on the faces of fellow commuters pondering the meaning.)

Alter’s book takes readers behind the scenes of the making of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, while splicing in history and background information about the Hindi film industry (visits to Dev Anand, Shekar Kapur, Shyam Benegal, etc.). 

He takes us from the birth of the concept for the film, to the music composition, the casting, the location scouting and set-building, to the shooting, choreography and, the screening.  Along the way we - the filmi fans - will find many interesting details: there was great doubt until the first scene was shot as to whether Saif would go ahead and cut his hair short, Ajay Devgan is quite hands-on when it comes to camera set-ups and cut-away shots, that was real dung Konkona Sen Sharma was making cakes out of during the scene with Kareena and Vivek, and on and on.

I wish there were more books like this, to feed our appetites for the behind-the-scenes info without falling into baseless gossip.  My only complaint is that the non-Omkara chapters (while all interesting) don’t mesh that well with the flow of the story.  For anyone new, or not that new, to the B’wood juggernaut, those chapters are still welcome, but perhaps they would have been better suited to a separate book.

What Alter does have, in spades, is great access.  (His cousin, Tom Alter, an FTI Pune grad, has acted in over 200 Hindi movies.)    Through his eyes, we get to watch the Beedi item number being filmed for the Shakespearean hit, the crew setting up and working their magic so we’ll find it all credible on screen, and the actors doing a line reading at the Sun-N-Sand.

Interestingly, like Chopra’s book, this one was published by an American house (Harcourt).

When I signed up for a packet of channels from India a while back, my immediate favorite of the group was NDTV 24/7. 

In addition to the round-the-clock news coverage, they also offer a quasi-Entertainment Tonight show six days a week, every Sunday morning Barkha Dutt takes on some current topic of controversy and referees a panel and audience discussion of the same, on Friday morning Anupama Chopra’s Picture This gives reviews of the day’s releases, followed by segments on films of particular subject and actors interviews, and then there’s Srinivasan Jain’s Bombay Talkies, and Shekhar Gupta’s Walk the Talk.  So much to love, na?

But an additional sweet element in the mix was the TV ads from India: the stewardess schools, the stirring Amitabh Bachchan UP ad, Kajol flogging mobile phones, Irrfan doing likewise, the AMEX ad with AB 2.0 calling Bachchan père about being mistaken in a restaurant somewhere in East Asia as “The Big B”, and on and on and on.  It was a fascinating not-so-little pop culture window into contemporary Indian consumer society, and what people were buying and selling.

And then something happened.

First, I started to notice the same old ads for NDTV’s own shows running more frequently, soon, so frequently that I could recite the snippets of them in my sleep:  Saif saying “It doesn’t really matter to me if people think I’m cool”, Vasu saying “This is the true story of a fake encounter”, Vikram Seth: “If I’m gay, or at least partly gay, then it would be very cowardly of me…”, Sanya Mirza: “The dresses I wear are not exactly right”…

Ad nauseum.

And then it hit me:  Where were the goofy Javed Jaffrey ads for Maggi sauces?  The Om Puri voiceovers for that paint company?  SRK’s Compaq spots?  Saif and Rani racing their cars?  Saif selling Taj teas?  The housewife beaming because her hubby and kids were loving that Maggi soup she had made? 

They were all gone.

It’s definitely affected my viewing.  Before, if I were home on the weekend having a coffee and reading the paper, or tidying up around the house, I’d have the channel on, and if something caught my attention, I’d stop to watch.  Now, I Tivo the shows I like and I fastforward through the ads.

Like everything else, I’m sure there’s money behind this.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they’re on in Europe now too.

Whatever the reason, if you get NDTV 24/7 overseas and you miss the ads too, you can write to complain at feedback@ndtv.com

Available at C B 2, the hipper/younger/cheaper version of Crate and Barrel.

Though I picked up a mountain of books in Bombay and Madras last month, I’m holding them for the moment and returning to Stephen Alter’s Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief:  Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking.  I had just started it in November and left it home when I headed overseas.

It’s primarily a making-of account of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespearean hit Omkara, but it opens with an overview of the film industry and some history, and it promises to be both a fun and informative read.

More later…