One Woman Fantasy

Now that summer’s here and everything good is either on hiatus or counting down to its premiere, I decided to catch up on Legend of the Seeker, a fantasy series based on Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. I’m not a huge Goodkind fan and I wasn’t able to really get into the books, but I thought I might as well give it a shot.

And perhaps because I didn’t pay the books much attention, I thought the show was good fun. I think it skews a bit lower demographically than the books but I didn’t feel penalized for not being an adolescent. Much.

However, leaving that aside, as soon as I saw the opening chase sequence, I began to feel that I’d seen Bridget Regan (who plays Kahlan the Confessor) somewhere before. At first I thought it must be the whole introductory beautiful-woman-in-white-on-a-horse-escaping-pursuing-soldiers thing that gave me a strong Lord of the Rings flashback (especially as the series is filmed in New Zealand) or perhaps I’d seen her on some other show. But in the middle of episode 3, I finally got it.

It wasn’t so much that she looked like Liv Tyler, it’s that she looked like almost every heroine in a sci-fi / fantasy movie that’s come out in the recent past.

Even Kate Beckinsale, who started out the Underworld series with a really short do that fell in short bangs across her face as befits a werewolf-hunting vampire, ended up looking like this:

Of course, Angelina Jolie is a big time movie star. She doesn’t have to follow the groupthink’s dictat. Therefore, in Wanted, she left out the ringlets and swept it off her face. So there!

No wonder Archie chose Veronica.

 

Movie Stars

They just don’t make ‘em the same any more.

More pics of The Great American Summer at The Daily Beast.

 

Why is This Happening?

Of course this had to happen.

Scarcely had I finished proclaiming my love for the awesomeness that is Nagin, when news comes of Hissss. According to this semi-literate blurb:

The movie is about the Vengeance of Naagin, the Snake Woman when the legend of the Naagin has been spreading for over 4000 years ago. Finally in 2009 George States (Jeff Douchette), a ruthless American travels to the jungles of India and captures her mate. She transforms into a stunningly attractive woman (Mallika Sherawat) with absolutely no clue about contemporary civilization or the ways of mankind, and ventures into the city in desperate search for her lover with vengeance on her mind and venom in her fangs.

What follows is a chase at breakneck speed, with horrifying deaths, narrow escapes and special effects never seen before in India, as Vikram Gupta’s (Irrfan Khan) Clarice Starling chases down a beautiful sexy killer more dangerous, powerful and terrifying than Hannibal Lecter. This is India’s WEREWOLF, VAMPIRE, and HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL, who has an axe to grind with the villainous human race who has dared to desecrate her environment and capture her mate.

(By the way, am I wrong or is that blurb making the case for cannibals as misunderstood victims of bigotry?)

You know what this reminds me of? Michael Bay’s planned remake of The Birds as an eco-thriller, specifically this classic quote by producer Cathy Schulman:

In the original, the birds just showed up, and it was kind of like, why are the birds here? This time, there’s a reason why they’re here and (people) have had something to do with it. There’s an environmental slant to what could create nature fighting back.

No words. Just… no words.

Except maybe this: Hisssss! Hissssssssssssss! Hissssssssssssssssss! Also.

 

I Met a Flying Ant

It’s a line they probably still use in hackneyed Z-list productions to this day: the hero does something marginally heroic, which pisses the villain off so he twirls his mustache and meaningfully enunciates, “Lagta hai cheenti ke par nikal aaye.” For the Hindi-challenged amongst you, that means “It looks like the ant has sprouted wings.”

Coz black ants sprout wings right before they die, see? Glad to have cleared that up for you. (Except for the part where it’s completely untrue but more on that in a bit.)

I don’t know how many times I must have heard that line and just let it slide over me, understanding it to be code for “bitch is gonna die” (ha! never happen, evil-doer! NEVER!) but just the other day a couple of ant things came trooping into my home and made me see it in a completely different light. Coz an ant with wings is horrible.

Have you ever really paid attention to those things? I’ve never seen an insect look more pathetic. A couple of minutes of watching them walk around like those emaciated old men you see working as rickshaw-wallahs or construction workers in the summer and even my cold heart began to feel sympathetic – and I hate every insect ever born with a passion. Including ladybirds! Which are cute! And butterflies! Which are beautiful!

An ant, on the other hand, is not a beautiful thing at any point of its life. It’s fucking disgusting. I’m sure they’re fascinating from a biological viewpoint but that’s not what I’m talking about! It’s a creepy crawly that bites. Yech. Trifecta of horror right there. Add wings and it’s pretty much my every nightmare come to life.

But as it turns out, Bollywood screenwriters to the contrary, wings signal a very happy period for the ant – coz a worker ant with wings is an ant who might be getting it on with the queen ant (same principle as the queen bee). It’s one of those one-night-only kinda deal. I don’t think the queen is cannibalistic – can’t find anything to suggest it anyway – so perhaps the Metaphor Gurus got the whole cheenti-ke-par idea from the general demeanor of the ants. Which, as I’ve mentioned before, is miserable.

Maybe they’re just not used to having sex and it confuses them that the largest and bossiest ant in the colony is suddenly all up in their business or maybe the sprouting of the wings is not a pleasant process. Maybe male ants have a fear of intimacy. Whatever it is, I wouldn’t want to be one of them.

They were walking around in forlorn pairs, stumbling a bit like they’d been on an all night bender, hunched over in misery, attempting short flights somewhat unenthusiastically before giving it up, just silently studying the ground and apparently lost in deep thought. Occasionally they’d lose their balance or bump into something, try to react the way they probably would have with their normal bodies, lose their balance and end belly-up on the floor. Meanwhile the partner ant wouldn’t even look over, too lost in its funk to even care.

After a while I noticed that these beings were now attempting to colonize my bed. Now, the floor is one thing but my bed is strictly off-limits. Another person would have probably guided them gently off their chosen path or something, but this is me you’re talking about. Confronted by the prospect of spending a night in a room with insects evidently determined to hold a pajama party with me, I did what came most naturally – hysterically swatted them off with a rolled up magazine.

Which is when I realized the most horrible thing about these ant-sex-monsters. They don’t die like a normal ant on an average day. Apparently, during their flying ant phase, they’re really tough to kill. I guess Nature really wants them to get it on.

There then followed a sickening yet fascinating hour of me lying in bed, studying the death throes of an ant. (The second ant gave up the ghost rather more easily – or perhaps my aim was just better with it – and some other, smaller, ants came out of absolutely nowhere and nibbled it into nothing. Time to call pest control methinks!)

Unlike cockroaches, I found that the flying ant likes to wriggle around to the last. It was on its back with its wings clearly crushed, and its bottom half was paralyzed (well, it wasn’t moving at all – I’d call that paralysis). But the middle section and the head didn’t stop trying to correct its position.

I was then seized with a dilemma. Having placed it in its current unenviable state in which it looked certain to fulfill the predictions of lazy Bollywood writers, should I now just put it out of its misery? And if I did, would its bits and parts stick to my magazine? Hmm, maybe I could get up, walk the three feet required to pick up an old magazine and swat him with that instead?

Even as I hemmed and hawed, the ant righted itself and staggered off, dragging its bottom half with it. It didn’t give its fallen comrade a second glance from what I could tell. There was no, “There but for the grace of God, go I” business here. If ants have religion, it appeared this ant had better things to ruminate in the name of God than intra-species cannibalism.

I couldn’t understand it, frankly. Not the callousness of the ant, but that absorbed look on its face. Its probably silly to think that I could recognize the expression on the face of an ant, much less read its body language – but you weren’t there. You didn’t see what I saw. It’s like sighting an U.F.O. You either see it or you don’t.

And what I saw was an ant who was not happy. So not-happy was he that he didn’t care that he’d been swatted and kicked off an extremely comfy bed; he didn’t care that he got to shag the queen (maybe. I only really knew him towards the end of his life. Besides what am I? Us Weekly, Ant Edition?); he didn’t care that his fellow journeyman was being devoured right next to him; he didn’t even care that half his body no longer worked. All he could concentrate on were the wings he was carrying around.

You see people talking all the time about the superpowers they’d like to have – the ability to turn invisible, have immense strength, control objects with their mind… fly. But it’s always seen as something extra that falls into your kitty. Nobody wishes for a gift and then wonders about its price tag.

But what if you could fly except it wouldn’t be the way Superman did it, just blasting off into the blue sky whenever he felt like it? What if you spent your whole life on your two feet and then one day, for reasons you couldn’t really comprehend, your back split open and wings came out? And it messed up your sense of balance, brought with it a ton of attention to which you’re unaccustomed and you didn’t really know what to do with it or how it worked or how much you trusted it or whether it was permanent?

I think I would look like that ant. Metaphorically speaking.

 

*Yaaawn*

Oh, hello. Anything happen while I was at the beach?

 

Needed: A Title

So every few years, I end up asking people if they have, by any chance, read this book that I once stumbled across when I was about twelve. Things get a little silent and complicated when I explain that I can recall neither its name nor its author and I’m a bit hazy about the plot as well.

Hey, it’s been a while since I was twelve, alright? What do you want from me? If it helps any, I read it in one of those Reader’s Digest condensed works volumes from 1970-something. It could have been 1960-something too. I wasn’t paying attention to the publication details.

It was summer, I was bored, this book was funny, it was there. I would like to read it again. Here’s what I remember of it -

The story is set in America, in a rural town. It centers around this eccentric family that’s not too bright. There’s an ornery old patriarch who shows up occasionally to do things like refuse to sell the family farm so the town can put up something in the name of progress in its place (my brain says “hydroelectric dam” but I know that can’t be true! Shopping mall, maybe? But did they have those in the 60s and 70s? What was progress back then? That thing).

Then there’s his son, let’s call him The Cutie, who’s beefy and hunky and completely dimwitted in an interesting kind of way – you know, the kind of guy you’d sit and listen to for hours because you can’t believe what’s coming out of his mouth? But he’s also a nice guy. Which is why a psychiatrist and the schoolteacher both want a piece of him.

Those two ladies come in because of the twins. The twins are the younger siblings (?) of The Cutie. Pre-adolescents. And they’re quite sharp so they leave him puzzled.They might be fraternal or identical, I don’t remember which. They might also be his nephews/ nephew and niece. Definitely not a pair of girls though.

Things happen and the mayor or somesuch sees an opportunity to twist the arm of The Cutie and the patriarch by threatening to take the kids away because the father-son duo are clearly too stupid to take care of them. The district attorney sends a psychiatrist to evaluate the living situation and after flirting heavily with The Cutie without getting anywhere (primarily because he’s too dumb to see a come on when he sees one), she submits a report that says he hates the kids.

The schoolteacher then comes to his rescue (there’s an entertaining passage that hints at the courtroom drama to come when she asks him why he said “kidnap” when he and the psychiatrist played word association and she mentioned the twins – and he says that the twins are kids and kids take naps so he said “kid nap”. Groan). She’s dazzled by the fact that he’s so darn cute and so darn stupid and finally decides to take things into her own hands and seduces him.

Next comes a courtroom battle which, if I remember correctly, left me screaming with laughter and the presiding judge with a bad headache. Things end well with Authority being defeated by the power of good old fashioned stupidity and the judge tells them never to darken his court again.

Does anyone out there know what I’m talking about? *crossed fingers*

Update: Well, you lot were a fat lot of help! Not only haven’t any of you read anything like it, you made me wonder if I’d actually read it myself. The nerve! So an hour of intense and imaginative googling later, here’s what I found out: there is too a novel much like what I’ve described above (except for the part where I totally blanked on major plot points or otherwise messed it up) and it’s called Pioneer, Go Home!

A full eleven people have read it on Amazon and concur with my opinion of it (to wit: awesome!). You can read it too for the affordable price of $145. Ahem. If that breaks your budget, then Elvis Presley made a movie called Follow That Dream! based on it (all together now: “WTF?!”), so…

It appeared in Volume 40 of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books’ Winter collection of 1960. I’m sending out a big kiss and good thoughts to whichever clever person at RD thought it might be a good idea to publish a list of titles. Long may your tribe increase.

It was written by Richard Powell who also wrote The Philadelphian which I vaguely remember reading. It’s a lot more memorable as the Paul Newman movie The Young Philadelphians though. The other book written by Powell that I can recommend is Don Quixote, USA which was almost as funny as Pioneer, Go Home!

 

Nagin: Don’t Mess With the Ladies

Nagin is the story of a pissed off snake (Reena Roy) out to get some good old-fashioned revenge on the bozos (Sunil Dutt, Feroz Khan, Kabir Bedi, Vinod Mehra, Sanjay Khan and Anil Dhawan) who pumped her soulmate (Jeetendra) full of bullets after he went out of his way to be nice to them. Chills, thrills and boatloads of (unintended) hilarity follow. Enough to make this my favoritest Bollywood B-movie ever.

The legend of the snake woman is one that is familiar to Indians everywhere, if not through religious texts like the Mahabharata and folklore then through movies like this one. According to it, there are certain highly evolved snakes out there, usually extremely venomous cobras, who can take human form thanks to a “jewel” they carry deep within themselves (hence the scene from Nagina in which Sridevi appears to vomit yesterday’s lunch into Amrish Puri’s hand – she was handing him her highly prized shapeshifting powers). Although male snakes also have this ability, it’s the female of the species that appears to really excite the imagination. Nagin is no exception.

But while it would have been easy to just straight up make a movie about a murderous snake woman luring susceptible men to their deaths, Nagin decides to take a more scenic route to the finish line and starts doing all sorts of interesting things.

For one thing, the so-called villain of the piece is actually quite a sympathetic character. There she was, minding her own business, looking forward to a night of glorious nookie after a wait that lasted a 100 years, and half-a-dozen humans come lumbering into her bedroom and shoot up her lover. It’s a brutal home invasion – jungle style! Obviously she becomes a little unhinged and isn’t all that interested in the whys and wherefores.

She might be in human form, but she’s still a snake. What’s she going to do? Call the police? No, she’s going to take care of it on her own, thanks. Girl-power before it had a name.

But who are these idiots who destroyed her happiness? In a lesser movie, they’d be horrible douchebags you’d want to personally throw down a deep hole or else saintly, lovely men who didn’t deserve all the bad stuff slithering towards them. Happily for us, Nagin is much better than that.

For one thing, they’re all in this mess because the male snake has more than a bit of a woodland sprite in him (hint: Jeetendra in interpretive dance mode fluttering through the forest in a skirt) and his idea of a good deed is to invite some guy poking his nose in where it doesn’t belong to come watch him getting it on with his girlfriend. Snake society must be much more naive than the human one because out here that’s called asking for trouble.

And when he does get in spades, it’s a case of mistaken identity – the guy with the gun saw a sexy lady being attacked by a vicious snake and his itchy finger did the rest. But then the movie suggests he wasn’t reacting entirely out of chivalry – he was just so turned on by the sexy snake lady, he forgot everything his friend had told him about how they were headed into the forest to see a couple of snake-humans get it on. So when the Nagin shows up at his house to play on his attraction and chew him dead (whoops! did I spoil that for you?), nobody is really all that bothered. It’s when she makes it clear that she isn’t differentiating between the killer and his BFFs that people get sweaty.

This then sets us up for a number of fascinating subtexts:

For instance, the nature of love and trust in a relationship. The Nagin’s preferred method of offing her enemies is to take on the form of the women they love / are attracted to and seduce them to a point where they’re no longer thinking with their brain so she can sink her fangs into them (and boy, does she have a bite on her!).

When the men catch on to her little plan, they’re then forced to spend all their time peering suspiciously at their wives and girlfriends, wondering if they can trust them. In one hilarious episode (with subtitles!), Feroz Khan opens the door to a bootylicious Mumtaaz with her foot inserted firmly in her mouth, holding a boombox. Yes, it’s just as bizarre as it sounds. It’s also quite possibly the most entertaining yet dire PSA ever created against hooking up with strangers: they might force you to dance to “stupid music” and try to shoot you!

Mumtaaz is also an excellent example of how Nagin constantly plays footsie with Bollywood’s Madonna-Whore complex. On the one hand, she comes to his door because their mothers think they might make a go of it, like a proper Indian girl should. But what sells them on each other is a shared taste for liquor, shaking a leg, living dangerously and that they find each other hot (also, a combined IQ that barely makes it to the double digits but that’s another matter).

All the women in this movie, in fact, are Madonna figures – there’s the devout wife who prays her way into her atheist husband’s heart; the chaste girlfriend whose purity is so bright, death is pretty much assured to the man who looks at her with lustful eyes; and of course, the ever-fabulous Rekha who isn’t afraid to break a few nails for her lover. The movie takes great care to explain that the slutty side of their personality isn’t actually their own (except for Mumtaaz, her boombox and her head for hard liquor, all of which are portents of doom from the word go) – it’s the demented snake trying to act like them.

But the Nagin herself fits the criteria for a good, faithful woman. She isn’t doing all this for the fun of it – there’s nothing to suggest she’s intrinsically evil. Even when she’s writhing around with the men she plans to kill, it’s nothing more than a means to an end. Snakes might be an iffy lot with their free love and what not, but at the end of the day she’s a faithful mate exacting revenge for the murder of her soulmate. What’s so wrong with that?

Ah, that leads us to the philosophical implications of vengeance. In 1976, Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man was marching through the nation, righting the wrongs done his mother, his father, his sister, his brother, his lover, his neighbor, his best friend, his adoptive parents, his crew at work, anyone and anything he could find really. And he would continue to do so for the next many years to great acclaim.

Slap bang in the middle of that comes this movie suggesting that even (female) animals know better. Excellent. So why am I the only person who loves this movie?

 

No Camera ki Kabaddi Here

So Prakash Mehra has passed on to that great big filmi party in the sky. Raja Sen compiled a best-of list, which reminded me that even though they weren’t all my cup of tea (mostly for nit-picky things like casting decisions), they’re not movies that are easily forgotten.

There is, of course, Zanjeer – the movie that properly kickstarted Bachchan-mania. And with it came a bunch of other things like fodder for a million Ajit-jokes and the sheer fabulosity of Bindu who could even make a chrysanthemum drip oomph.

I mean, she has a big orange mum on her head, people! And still works it.

And how about Laawaris, a movie that’s still being ripped off all over the place and featured Mere angane mein, a song that’s turned into something of a Bachchan trademark alongside Rang barse. Me? I’d much rather watch Amitabh shake a tambourine – with the burning anger of the oppressed!

Justice. I wants it. I sings for it!

Talking of which, one of my favorite Mumtaaz songs is the relatively little-known Kya soch raha re from Mela. How can you not love a song in which she effervescently tells a pouty Sanjay Khan (oxymoron alert!) that she’ll be waiting for him once he’s satisfied his need to go act the bumblebee amongst paper flowers? Ha.

Hera Pheri is again one of those “Was the casting director on crack?” movies and whenever I watch it, I spend considerable amounts of time trying to figure out who thought Saira Banu was just the woman for a tasty Amitabh / Vinod Khanna sandwich. But look! It’s Padma Khanna and her pleather mini-dress!

And the world is magically a better place.

In Muqaddar ka Sikandar, however, I was much more entertained by the romantic Dil to hai dil than Rekha’s mujras. Anytime you show me a tough-guy actor like Vinod Khanna or Amitabh bachchan fantasizing about a girl with a Hallmark dream sequence, it goes straight to my tickle bone. It only got worse when Bill Maher cracked a joke about the impossibility of a shared romantic fantasy between men and women. I forget his exact words but it mentioned how nobody dreams about a man riding up on a shining white horse, gathering a woman up into his strong manly arms to make gentle love on a field of flowers – before coming all over her face.

Inappropriate, hmm? I apologize. Moving on.

To Namak Halal – I had half a mind to just post songs from this movie because I love them all. So the question becomes, do I play my favorite Parveen Babi song or my favorite Smita Patil song? Oh what the hell, no power on earth will make me play anything from Sharaabi, so here’s two from this one:

First up is Smita Patil and AB celebrating the fact that all she has in the world is one blind brother.

And second is Parveen Babi as the golden huntress stalking Shashi Kapoor who doesn’t have a snowbunny’s chance in hell.

But the crowning glory has to be Shashi Kapoor rather violently getting his Shammi on in Haseena Maan Jayegi. Groovy, baby!

Not even Babita and that dead animal on top of her head can ruin that for me.

 

Writing to Read

It’s been a while since I wrote anything that I would want to read aloud – the hope is that someday I’ll be able to reach that happy state where I can write literary prose that doesn’t strike me the next day as overly self-indulgent and cringe-inducingly sentimental but in the meantime I’ve been happy to continue my experiments with dialogue and what you might call commercial prose. But there are times when I really, really miss it.

I enjoy writing for the blog, of course, but it’s a very personal thing; the internet version of thinking aloud. Some have called it a defense mechanism – the more I blog about what’s going on in my head, the less need I feel to share it with people offline, allowing me to stay happily inside my head rather than open my mouth and, you know, talk to people. A thing that I’ve grown less and less fond of, the older I get. It’s nothing personal, and it’s not like I run away and hide under the bed when I see you coming – I just enjoy resting my vocal chords when I can.

Point is, I have no idea what all the writing I’ve done over the past three would sound like if read aloud. I do like to play around with words and structure from time to time but it’s all in my head. However, in the old days, when I was writing tortured passages about being afraid of the passing of time or the physical representations of the moral decay of households or whatever, I spent considerable amounts of time polishing, revising and restructuring the prose that I then read aloud to double-check my pacing and rhythm.

I don’t know how to explain it to people who don’t have a craft of their own but there’s a deeply absorbing joy not just in the act of writing, which is pretty neat by itself, but in absolutely nailing it; a joy that is not dependent on getting published or public appreciation (although both are obviously welcome). The blog on the other hand, while being fun and interesting, is the equivalent of… let’s call it an exercising bowl of macaroni. It’s comforting and delicious but it keeps the writing part of my brain disciplined and in shape, see? That’s its primary purpose.

I was thinking all of this as I read Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times:

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body… The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

And just like that, I wanted to write something literary again. Because it’s true.

You’d think it’s easy because, hey! reading aloud. If you can read and you have a voice, you should be able to do it. Which is like saying if somebody would just hand you a brush and some paint you could soon shame Monet. Right.

Funnily enough, the worst piece of advice I ever got in this connection shows up in Klinkenborg’s article – throughout school I was told to read as though I “meant” the words. I’d do my best but it all just came out sounding as though I was Dilip Kumar circa 1985 enacting yet another death scene. If you put me in between two slices of bread, you’d have yourself a tasty ham and cheese sandwich is how bad it was. And this was to my own ears. I can only shudder when I think about how it must have sounded to all the poor people who had to sit through my performance.

But apparently I wasn’t the only one told to read like this – or else people are just weird and came up with it on their own because Klinkenborg writes of her students:

They are smart and literate, and most of them had parents who read to them as children. But when students read aloud at first, I notice that they are trying to read the meaning of the words. If the work is their own, they are usually trying to read the intention of the writer. It’s as though they’re reading what the words represent rather than the words themselves. What gets lost is the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language.

It is so hard to get to that point where you recognize that. At least it was for me. To understand that the prose has a certain rhythm and life of its own and it is up to you to uncover it instead of trying to create it, was probably my biggest eureka moment in writing class. The knowledge was probably already there but the moment I could consciously see it in other people’s work, I knew how to use it in my own.

Then of course, the struggle becomes to learn how to control it instead of playing with it like a five year old with a new toy and use it in season and out season until you have the dreaded Writing Class Voice.

Which was where I saw myself headed three years ago. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve finally grown up enough to take another stab at it. God knows I want to.

 

It’s a Wonderful World

… that gives you the opportunity to watch Gary Oldman as Matthew McConaughey’s dwarf twin brother.

No. It’s not a hoax.

I’m incredibly cheap and the one time I went I got a terrific headache and nausea so I never went back, thus it’s not like IMAX should be worried about losing my custom – but in gratitude for this bounty, I think I might just follow the angry IMAX Gandhi in his struggle against the colonization of multiplex screens.

Oh, who am I kidding? Like I’d choose IMAX over a guy who taught Vanity Fair to say kussuu and chundi. Team Ansari.