As the year comes to an end

Let’s sit back over coffee and reminiscence

Those difficult exams we tried to crack,

Those white lies we told our guardians that “we’ll be right back"

The chase behind the dog that ran with the only ATM card...

The cheese pasta at Hard Rock

The caffeine rush at Starbucks

The early birthday celebrations at the square yard,

Made this year one nice ride.

The long but fun lectures

The one or two rejections

The sweet dishes and flattery one liners...

The memorable dates at those diners

The emotion of a loved one going away

The missing of a lover-long distance!

The random crazy ideas

The begging for permission for a slumber party.

It was great this year; each and every memory was one in a million.

The joy of the tasty cup cake

The adrenalinerush of a new hand shake

The angry walk aways

The expensive shopping

The long conversations…that went on and on

I don’t know if I've covered all the events of this year…

But let’s wait for the next one with a smile and some light beer.

by Muf 11:27 0 comments

Anurag Kashyap…the name precedes his films. In the case of Ugly, even the trailers, promotions, the Kali-Katha clip and the artwork preceded the film’s actual showcase on the silver screen. Welcome aboard Kashyap’s signature moves- unusual frame compositions, low angle shots, saturated colors, plot dissecting non-linear editing style, coarseness of language and grotesque human desire. These familiar strokes of beauty are used and exhausted within the first few shots of the film. After that Ugly unfortunately begins to turn ugly! 






Here’s 5 Reasons why: 

It is impactful when Shalini (Tejaswene Kolhapure) holds the gun in her mouth in the opening scene; it is emotionally impotent when she aims the gun at her husband towards the end. 1 short monologue about her woes does not convince the audience of her mental and emotional evolution.

The police interrogation is heart-wrenching when acted out the first two times; after that even the threat and torture becomes repetitive a.k.a. non-intimidating. Action on screen loses impact when the audience is left guessing for the cause. Why is Chaitanya (Vineet Singh) repeatedly arrested? Why is Rahul (Rahul Bhat) recurrently threatened?
Expletives look gritty, they enhance the realism of the film, they add texture to the characters BUT what they CANNOT DO is REPLACE the dialogues. After a certain point in the film, the power of the words is seeped out of the frame.

Characters need to be consistent if the audience has to understand and relate with them. Their choices can change but their core essence cannot be confusing, which unfortunately is the case with the pivotal character of Shaumik Bose (Ronit Roy). After the unreasonable, aggressive and merciless beating of Rahul, he plays the good cop, the fine man, the caring father- and its stops adding up for the audience.

You cannot have contemporary, cutting-edge context with archaic, outdated content. This is with reference to the antiquated investigation processes the police employs to trace the suspects. IP address, unique identification number, credit card records, online phone calling services- they can be legitimate elementary processes but to the audience exposed to international law and crime TV series, it cannot incur intrigue and anticipation. A plot that moves on the threshold of a police investigation needs more meat than this.

The final revelation and discovery of the kidnapped child- now could there have been a more lame and hasty attempt at providing a denouement to the central issue of the narrative after several detours and digressions? The audience is bored and exhausted with the missing child at the end of two hours; only to discover that the writer/director has forgotten to offer even as much as an intriguing twist to the tale. 

by Muf 12:52 0 comments

Broken heart misses a few pieces,

The past haunts, its existence never ceases.

A silent knock settles upon the aching heart,

Will you help me make a fresh start?

If I bare my wounds to you,

Will you heal them, rejuvenate too?

Will my depth learn to laugh again?

Will you bear me crack lame jokes and go insane?

Will you leave me and walk away?

Or will you stay and find a way?

And if I open my heart to you once again,

Will you be there for me till the end? 

by Muf 04:26 0 comments

It would be too simple and too simplistic to garner critical praises for Rajkumar Hirani’s P.K. Instead, let us garnish some ingredients that every director must stew in order to boil the perfect broth of cinematic entertainment.

The Socialized Salt

A single story can miss the goal, but a social story will never escape the collective net. P.K.hand picks its issues from the ground realities of religious hypocrisy, blind faith, communal conflicts and ritualistic practices, only to make it more palatable than the newspaper headlines on your breakfast table. Not that the Godhra riots and the Mumbai bomb blasts have not taught us our lessons but 24X7 news channels, reams of editorial columns and hundreds of tweets seem lacking and wanting when it comes to Hirani’s perspective on the fundamental conception of religion- a perspective, which comes, both literally and figuratively, out of space. Hirani goes back to the basics of religious anthropology- which establishes the genesis of religion in the primal human emotion of fear. It would take an alien to show us how religion has increasingly alienated us from the idea of God.

The Spice of Language

This is the filmmaker’s secret ingredient- to raise a theoretical and philosophical question that seldom orbits the planet of popular Bollywood- the spice called language and its relevance in and to human civilization. It is this spice that tickles the brain the most and raises hair raising questions- Does language really enable us to make meaning? Is language a trustworthy form of communication? Does language have an arbitrary source of formation? Are civilizations that have eliminated language more evolved than ours? The actor does not tend to the didactic but when P.K. (Aamir Khan) dishes out the varying contextual uses of the ubiquitous word Acha, you know he has provoked the intellect of its audience.

The Starry Meat

Speaking of Khan, we might as well add the meaty cast composition of stars like Sanjay Dutt, Anoushka Sharma, Boman Irani and Sushant Singh Rajput and star dazzle the spectators. When the actors within the frame are good looking and when the characters within the mis-en-scen wear their garb impeccably, you know that the silver screen is sure to shine through the hearts of the viewers. The cinematography captures still close-up moments like when Jaggu (Anousha Sharma) weeps at the memory of Sarfaraz (Sushant Singh Rajput) or the soft, subtle movements when Jaggu and P.K. dance on the roof or when Jaggu and Sarfaraz serenade to the Begian backdrop in a boat. These saturated coloured moments imprint its life on the memory of the audience beyond the darkness of the theatre.

The Screenful of Tadka 

A screenplay needs the right twang arriving at the right time in just the right proportion. The screenplay employs all its elements so as to either repeat it, sustain it or complete it. Jaggu’s fascination for poetry and her father’s whistling becomes the repetitive motif for her sensitive self, P.K.’s quest for the remote and Sarfaraz’s betrayal becomes the elements of sustenance in the plot and the minor character of the thief and Bhairon Singh (Sanjay Dutt) complete the narrative detour taken earlier with their emergence in the penultimate scene before the climax. A good cinematic chef is the one who selectively picks his ingredients and once added, ensures it dissolves with the rest for the frames should hold its unique tone, shade and flavor till the very end.

The Music Masala

That every successful and signature chef special requires the music masala is a well-established parable now. But, it truly takes a masterchef to dwell into the local, authentic accent and pronunciation of each of its character and then lend lyrics to their idiosyncratic personas. Waste of Time and Tharki Chokro are blazing emblems of excellence. Furthermore, to make the musical masala an inter-related side dish rather than a superficial dollop of desert is a mark of the master craftsman. Nanga Punga Dost resonate the protagonist’s identity and relationship with the humans while Bhagwan Hain Kahaan Re Tu capture the anguished resignation of the character’s hope. Thus, with P.K., music is the cinematic narrative set in notes and not stirred out of leftover scraps of a lyricist’s notes.

…And that’s how you brew P.K.- the Perfect Kurry from the Cult of Courage!

by Muf 11:32 2 comments

On the young and exuberant stage of Thespo, Sri Lanka’s Walking Path left an indelible theatrical trail to its Indian audience at Prithvi on Friday, December 19. This production whose central premise was the campaign to construct new parks and paths as a symbolic reconstruction of their nation; was designed without dialogues. The elimination of hitherto considered primal medium of communication was drastic enough. However, its foreknowledge gave the audience enough time to sharpen their senses.

The costume was marked with the unadulterated white- the impeccably pure and clear- just as the message of the performance. White being one of the conventional choice for mime artistes, the actors were divided into three sets right from the start- the runners, the vigilant enforcers and the vibrant youth. While the runners symbolized the mindless following of the authority, the vigilante group was the emblem of repressive state watchdogs and the youth represented the spirit of individual freedom and expression that were time and again curtailed in one way or the other. The minute distinction between the groups achieved through all white costumes showed the dependence on subtlety to communicate to tis audience. Superimposed against the black ambience of the theatre, the actors and their expressions were only enhanced further by the use of white smoke on stage.

The props like bags, sandwiches, sunscreen lotions, balloons et al were incorporated into the white schema. However, more interesting was the artificial cardboard versions of cellphones and laptops that were used as important objects as part of the performance. The unauthentic shade given to these objects adds a layer of the fantastical. Thus, it convinces the audience about its symbolic value and stresses its function as a message rather than a mere prop. Due to the absence of dialogues, the violence and the oppression is not pinned down to a specific situation or culture or political group or country. This enables the audience of a cross-cultural composition to connect with it through their own personal and political vantage point.

The music migrated from the realistic- like the sound of traffic, the sound of the birds, the cellphone beeps, cries of the babies to the symbolic- the calm beats for the youth that kept recurring, the humorous beat for the lighter scenes and the ironically melancholic during a mock crying scene. When one is not hearing words, the ears, surprising within a short period of time, becomes tuned to capturing the wide minutiae of sounds used in the play.

The use of stage space and set design were exceptionally minimalistic in nature. The white benches of different sizes used were once again employed to function at two levels- the real and the symbolic. Coupled with the superlative acting, the benches helped in recreating in the minds of the audience a virtual setting and a convincing one at that. At the more symbolic level, they indicated the physical proximity and emotional distance that exist among people today.

The acting was the limelight of the performance, the showstopper, the penultimate weapon of mass appeal and adulation. What the seven lead actors and the wide array of auxiliary actors succeeded in doing is to outline the role of the human body in theatre. It stood as a reminder to the fans of the theatre that this art form is conducted through the body primarily. That the body remains the most powerful carrier of thoughts and ideas. The mobile phone scene where the director wanted to showcase the emotional saturation, alienation and insensitivity perpetrated by modern technology is the point in case. The actor who creates an emotionally charged moment of grief through his crying and struggling body induces pathos in the audience only to immediately throw in comic relief and anti-climactic laughter. Yet, the human condition has never appeared more pitiful where deep angst has to be artificially cultivated to secure the mandatory, obsessive likes and laughter on social networking sites. The behind-the-scene conductor of this show, the director, achieved a theatrical stroke of excellence with the supremely well-coordinated body movements and eye contact in the scene where the actors were portraying the perfect harmony and togetherness with each other. It also had one of those rare incorporations of the gay couple in a public park being under the scanner of the moral police. The actors had such prowess that they controlled their reaction to the presence of other actors on stage with as much panache as they created the feeling of love and sexual attraction towards their partners.

It is difficult to sustain the symbolic and the silent for an unbroken period of 75 minutes. But, Walking Path did exactly that and more- it sustained a continuum of critical thinking and emotions for an intensely moving period of 75 minutes. 

by Muf 10:50 0 comments

‘Boost’ can neither be created, nor destroyed. It can only be converted from

one form to another. The total amount of ‘Boost’ in the Universe, always

remains constant.  That’s Law of Conservation of Energy – because - 

“Boost is the secret of my Energy”

...until recently, was the only thing synonymous with the ‘Lil Master’ until he ‘Played it his way’ and openly criticized the former Indian Coach – 

‘He who must not be named’

All of a sudden, former cricketers, current cricketers and commentators alike joined the bandwagon, following suit. So, here’s faking news’ perspective on the future implications of  Sachin’s Autobio ‘greg’ phy –

‘Playing it Greg’s Way!’

 It wasn't me who slapped Sreesanth, it was the ‘Hand of Greg’

-  Bhajji

Greg Chappell introduced me to DLF.

               -  Damaad Vadra

Greg Chappell is an Ambani Agent.

                                           -  AK49 (If you know what I mean)

Greg Chappell and I, are just ‘Cricket Enthusiasts’

                       - Dhoni Pitamah ‘Srini’

Greg Chappell ko ‘OLX’ pe bech do.

-  Flipkart

Greg Chappell took my Father away!

-  Haider

 Greg Chappell taught me how to speak.

                      -  Dr. Manmohan Singh

                                       

Bhaiyya ko bachpan se ‘banane’ ka shauk tha, aur mujhe ‘girane’ ka!

          -  Greg Chappell

Greg Chappell is a stupid ‘Boron’

    -   A Chemist

                                        

Nevertheless, wishing you all a ‘Merry Christmas’and a

 ‘Phosphorus’  New Year!

                                                                                       - Sushant Singh Bhatia

                                     

         

by Muf 08:50 0 comments

You were sprouting

in my blood.. in my heart!!

The way you make me express

The way you make me smile

Oh it's splendid, the way you drive me crazy!

just a beat or two

into my ears

And all I need to do

is close my eyes

and I feel you.. flowing in my blood!

You give me a high, a real mad high..

For the moment you take me away

to a completely different world

And I don't feel like coming back

till the flow you give me remains!

But then..

just in a moment

you disappeared.. saying you'll take long to come back...

Just in a moment

all dreams shattered, everything around turned dark

But hey.. I won't let you go, no no!

I will wait for you to be back

I'll do everything to bring you back

and then again

You'll take me to that other world..

Till then, I would just say

oh dancing.. I miss you!!

~ Plabita Borthakur

by Muf 08:37 0 comments

I went to meet myself in another world,

in a time where magic unfurled..

The course of events took an unnatural swerve,

the nature of which was filled with verve..

I was a part of me and yet transcendent,

attached yet independent..

Flowing through me, a crimson tide,

to the tune of a drumbeat inside..

Forests within,

darken the given..

Afraid of the shadowy distance to cover,

I try to calm my insides till its over..

But the road is long and muddy,

right about now I need a buddy..

In the face of fear I stand,

silently falling apart in a way I cannot understand..

Crumbled to the floor, I lose myself to the reign of darkness,

the lights are all out, its a truth in all its starkness.

The only sound is the thunderous beating of my heart,

against the painful silence of a new start..

Brought together by a glimmer of hope,

for me to be myself again, there is some scope..

And slowly I am joined crease by crease,

by an absent force making my sense of self increase.

Taking over is a sense of vengeance,

with a fuming flagrance..

To rise and be strong,

a process that wont take too long..

Forming an exterior of cold steel,

is somehow the best way to feel..

Off I go fighting with a drive aglow,

the wounds will show..

When I travel from where I am, to where I belong

I cant be waiting for opportunities to come along.

I am the opportunity,

no slave to importunity.

I must be where I can be me,

not where I crumble like the earth below me..

With each stride, I lose the land I once tread,

with every step I lose some more dread..

In this transient phase, caught in a vortex,

nothing to comprehend, its all too complex..

I'm losing memory of where I was, no time to pause,

and to go back to them is a lost cause..

Traveling back or forth, I cannot tell,

a feeling of anticipation I quell..

Moving on there's a light in the end,

along the slope i begin to descend..

Increasing familiarity,

confusing peculiarity..

A figure standing in the distance,

fear becoming a persistence.

It face I know, all to well,

it shares the same story I tell.

Word to word, there is no change,

it is not strange.

It is essentially who i wanted it to be,

I have finally met me.

by Muf 05:50 0 comments

With a title that loosely translates into “Pain in the Ass”, one expects the defiant and the irreverent. Thankfully, director Amit Masurkar is protesting against both the money-spinning mindless Bollywood blockbusters as well as the pseudo-intellectual aesthetic world cinema. The movie is filled with allusions to the homegrown brands of directors like Anil Sharma, Mahesh Bhatt and Aditya Chopra as well as the film auteurs like Tarkovsky, Truffaut and Bertolucci. But while it alludes, it also evades the traps of either. What it does attempt and achieve is far simpler- a realistic cinematic capture of life as seen and felt by the subjective experience of the filmmakers.

The casting and the acting is kept close to the plane of realism to the extent that the acting looks unrehearsed. The deliberate pacing out of the background score lets the audience to believe that the film was recorded like a documentary rather than shot like a silver screen fictional film. The actors seem so natural and spontaneous; as if the director had set out to look for non-actors. Touted as a bro-mantic comedy, in parts it is acts as a powerful mockumentary on the phony film industry as well as the backyard realities of aspiring script writers. Masurkar reiterates his directorial vision in the dialogues, which are not imagined but rather revisited from personal or observed memory. Seldom does one hear the natural rhythm of human speech reflected in a cinematic projection of life. The tone and diction, expletives and naiveties all encompassing!

The film seems to drive home a simple truth about life- that we do not live life larger than life, we live life in all things, small and beautiful. Out in the company of Dulal (Naveen Kasturia), Ruma (Aditi Vasudev), makes conversations like reading the names of lovers etched in the stone walls of a decrepit. On the other hand, a dialogue espousing the profound philosophical conception of the futility of life is comically delivered through the caricature of a director and through the metaphor of a white handkerchief. The significant split between the two bros is shot amidst the ambient sound of the outdoor location with the innocuous backdrop of pigeons. There are more mid shots and long shots and the use of wide angle lens to shoot a scene dripping with emotional tension and internal and external conflict. The inversions and subversions are myriad and these scream out the contemporary lens view on life – the simultaneous thirst for the future and the need for fulfilment in the present, the simultaneous quest for fame and the need for the possibility of freedom.

The young is often distinguished by their ability to experience time and space in ways that are significantly different form their successors. The transience and transition of time and the transfer and texture of space both carry a refreshing flavor, in the film. Consider the juxtaposed scenes of Dulal at Ruma’s place enjoying the classical tune played by a guest and of Mainak (Mayank Tewari) serenading Oona (Rukhsana Tabassum) on his bike on the way to her house. The rapid editing pattern, which superimposes one scene and character over the other is one of the most powerful visual medium of communicating the contrasts in the two characters- the contained grief of Dulal and the fleeting fun of Mainak. Ironically, the fast paced bike ride ends in an abrupt anti-climax while the serene stillness in Ruma’s house becomes the new avenue for romance. Then there is the comic book-meet-stock motion photography-meet psychedelic manifestation of a drug-induced state of mind in the animated sequence that narrates the death of Gonzo’s (Karan Mirchandani) cat Fellini. The incredulous part is this: art and experiments with its form has been employed for the sake of it. There is no symbolism, no metaphors, no implications. It is a cineaste’s tryst with his art, a creator’s truth with his subject. It is this energy and “un-intention” that creates mis-en-scen like the one with Dulal at the fun fair with headphones peppered with disco lights. The darkness of his inner emotions against the intense lights around him, the stasis of his life versus the movement of the city, the mechanical construct of the street gizmo identifiable with the mechanical persuasion of life by the character. It is due to the bold and fearless spirit of the debutante that constructs frames through thin plant stems and pink flowers, through hanging handles in Mumbai’s local trains and through between the spread legs of the hot girl in the bookstore.

The camera finds its corners just as the creator seeks out his niche. The film finds its appeal just as the audience roots outs its conventionality. Sulemani Keeda definitely sows some tough seeds for the new age viewer to consume and crave for more. 

by Muf 07:37 0 comments

One day I would surely meet you,

Your smile would do to me, what nobody could do!

Butterflies in stomach, the lump in my throat,

We shall cross this distance, my Soul Mate, in the fancy love boat!

Your eyes that'll embrace me, your touch that would care,

The lame jokes and little moments of joy that we would share!

When things go wrong, we would do the best to repair,

I dream of you, my Soulmate, who would never leave this pair!

Romance in your heart, your cheesy naughty ways,

The moonlit beach nights, the rains with Maggie days!

In whom can confide my hazy dreams, such a Soulmate I crave,

Mate with me, my Soulmate, till my soul stays!

by Muf 12:56 0 comments