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‘It’s running itself’

Jeffery Comb playing the poor and unfortunate Crawford Tillinghast channels from the high camp of the horror classics of Hammer, Castle and Whale pedigree as he unleashes a scream of pure terror into Stuart Gordon’s astutely judged close up.

‘Something’s Coming’

Ted Sorrel’s Dr. Pretorius, grins a malicious grin in reply that only a mind warped beyond depravity will sport with such élan amidst the terrifying chaos of The Resonator- a machine that like so many outcomes of a lifetime spent in trying to play God and challenge nature will only wreck havoc on all who knowingly or unknowingly come into contact.

‘To a new world of Gods and Monsters’

Famous words uttered by Ernst Thesiger‘s Dr. Pretorius toasting his collaboration with Colin Clive’s Henry von Frankenstein in James Whale’s 1935 subversive sequel ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ to the original monster classic.

…

The night before was the one everyone had feared they had coming for quite sometime now. Global warming, atomic holocaust, communal violence, civil strife… the reasons had multiplied and there was some awareness and intuitions but nobody wants to the spoil the show when the going’s great. “Look here,” said the clown,” How would you like a hamburger?” The clown isn’t laughing anymore. Maybe it is. You’d never know with the head missing. Blown clean off. As the turbulent night collapses into the unnatural quiet of the new day, the city sees itself for what it has become. It has turned into a bum- a washed out, ramshackle, good-for-nothing. Cars turned upside-down-inside-out, concrete structures gone hollow and charred, garbage everywhere and everything garbage. One figure appears among the desolate, rancid cityscape. Her chic stilettos crunch the broken glass and ruffle the paper and plastic. Whatever is left of the city …

It was one of those schools that managed to tick about just enough boxes that’ll get them a license/grant/sanction to keep the institution running, teachers and staff employed and kids educated enough to sign their names, recite ‘Babes in the Wood’, do the origami, know their Gandhis, Nehrus and noble gases and pass out of the standard 10 with (as the school liked to put it in aptly multi-colored chalk on a blackboard outside the main gate on result day) “flying colors”. While there were exceptions, the atmosphere was one of general apathy and mutual disinterest and the (these days) much touted, encouraged and brochured student-teacher relationship was more like that of a comatose patient having a sudden cardiac seizure and the middle aged Malayali nurse sitting next to him engrossed in this week’s installation of sordid magazine pulp. …

This one’s for ‘The Birds’, Hitchcock’s Daphne Du Maurier adaptation about a svelte blonde terrifically essayed by the director’s muse and sometime tempestuous obsession Tippi Hedren who visits a small sealocked town which suddenly finds itself under siege from the local birds who inexplicably go on a blind and murderous rampage. Under its apocalyptic nature’s fury plot and genre shocks Hitchcock plumbs deep into the female psyche, tense claustrophobic relationships and drew from Freud to lay a sharp context of jealousy, personal conflict and an individual under siege from outward forces that one cannot explain.

So, how Hitchcockian is M. Night Shyamalan, purportedly the Hitchcock of the generation and how much is pure PR drivel? Genre revisionists, unashamedly manipulative, self-styled auteurs who operate in the mainstream, inclined to cameos in their own films, egoists, brandnames… end of comparison. Where Hitchcock delights in subverting middle-class values and exploring the concealed or …

A typical Ram Gopal Varma interview is always banal. Even as the media taxes its imagination trying to serve it up with choice tabloid bits, it is at best a politically correct, uneventful even lazy drawl lit up only when a glimmer of arrogance slips in or an apology or when he mentions a forthcoming project (another remake of Sholay!). However as opposed to Mahesh Bhatt banality or Karan Johar banality, RGV’s tired comments present an enigma. Here’s a guy, smarter than the average director, with trademark auteur style- an absolute original, creator of more than a few influential films that ventured into largely untrodden territory to break new ground and a host of interesting flawed works, dream merchant for so many unorthodox faces and talents, still in his middle ages, ballsy beyond doubt and till a while ago, THE name to reckon with as Bollywood enters into a transitory …

‘Today there are opportunities for romance for you. You can make career moves that will bring you a much higher income. You’ll regret every word you say for some time to come. Obtaining and exchanging information takes on more emotional significance. Don’t be emotional; be practical in life.’
- Bangalore Times, Finolex Fortune for Libra, May 30, 2008

That evening, after a most regular day, the TV short circuits and burns my whole house down.

Einstein said,” God doesn’t play dice”, rejected the quantum theory and missed out on cracking the BIG question.

Destiny or fate is a very tricky matter. So there’s version A of my life lying tucked in mom’s old cupboard written by a wise old man on a palm pamphlet, seemingly by consulting the stars. Version B is what my placement counselor promises me if I fill a few forms and pass a few exams. Version C is an offer …

If timing was any kind of a horse, this one would be first past the finishing line. There would be no better time for a film like ‘Jannat’ to hit the screens than now when our nights and evenings are reeling with the spectacle of cricket at its most decadent. To call it ‘rife with possibilities’ is an understatement. Conceptually, this is a loaded gun. And it arrives with one helluva big bang metaphor. Cricket commentary plays on a radio. Emraan Hashmi’s voice cuts through asking to cut out the noise and concentrate on the game of cards. Big Badda Boom! Maximum Impact Metaphor! And Kunal Deshmukh makes his debut and he couldn’t have gotten a louder coconut to crack.

The people who will be going for a movie like ‘Jannat’ could be broadly classified as- the ‘Emraans’ and the ‘non-Emraans’. …

Volkswagen boy walks out of the apple-red phone booth onto the empty noon road. He rests his elbows by the window of his ride and peruses his hair in the side mirror- James Dean stares back. Satisfied, he winks and then stares at his watch- in a half hour he’ll be picking up Miss Daisy Daffodil and they have a date at the picture house. He switches on the radio. The Archies are playing on the box.

‘I only eat Candy”- legend has it these words were said by Andy Warhol in a cocky attempt to cover up his own short-comings when dealing with fancy cutlery in an upscale restaurant.

The picture house is showing- ‘Speed Racer’. Volkswagen Boy and Miss Daisy Daffodil …

Just where does the Great Disco Under the Lungi that Krishnan Iyer MA, nariyalpaniwallah sings about in all dhinchak swagger and gibberish aandu-gundu accent exist? How does one decipher the Ku-Ku-Ku-Ku that allegedly exists behind the choli? What branch of physics, meta or otherwise can explain the never-ending ammunition in Chunkey Pandey’s six-shooter as he somersaults into the villain’s den ready to blow the jaan and saans out of anybody who dares mess with him? What strange vibrations connect the heroine’s father’s nazuk dil to the chaukat that diya that goes kaput as soon as the dil collapses under so much dard?

The Vijay Krishna Acharya would like to present a hypothesis via ‘the coefficient of the linear is just a position by the haemoglobin of the atmospheric pressure in the …

I. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… the journey of the flesh. If there is indeed a soul or an immortal being it will pass on perhaps into another vessel of flesh, perhaps oblivion. But it is a realm still unknown. What is known is the body and that it will perish and rot. The flesh is a witness and victim of time. It is young and supple at birth. As it ages, it bears the experience of the world- it wrinkles, scars, portions of it drop off, rigor mortis and then dust. Such is the way of the flesh. For all the cosmetics in the world, man is still animal.

II. William S. Burroughs calls it ‘the cellular equation’, the insatiable cravings of the flesh that bring out the savage within. David Cronenberg who adapted Burroughs’ seminal “Naked …

How do you create division among people? Etch a line with the tip of your shoe in the dust between them and give them opposite sides to belong to. The rift may not be immediate but gradually across time there will be category and classification. There will be further division, conflicting systems of belief and later, fanaticism and dogma. Before long the dust line you drew will be blown away by winds but it doesn’t matter, they will probably have barbed wire walls up by then. All history and past will begin at the moment the line was etched. What existed before that is to be disregarded or is in the context of science. Few will talk of unity and a past where all was one. The tragedy of it will be that there will be no one to hear …

Miles from home, miles to go. Miles spent dozing in uncomfortable recline, in queues, eating out of sterile plastic containers, shuffling among strange faces in strange places, eyes open just till the laptop battery holds through. Continuous transit through a hyperreality where the sun never shines enough to out-bright the plastic white daze of the corridors of passage. Being awake or dreaming is a state of mind. Like jet lag. A strange world where rush hour follows rush hour and then yet another. Hurtled through the gray blur it is possible that one may lose oneself. Dissolve. Blend. Yet another plaster face starring at the signs. Follow the arrow. Up. Down. Left. Right. Newton’s Law number one. Miles to go and no time on hand. Walk forward-onward towards the light till the buzzing synthetic halo sucks you in.

And somewhere …

Civilization and progress has its own flotsam-jetsam buried away and forgotten like old Ghost Towns. Hollow mines, empty wells, overgrown graveyards, hotels with broken windows, a junkyard carnival gathering rust and time ending up as faded black and white curios that grace the archives. Or they are woven into the ballad of a weary traveler. Original soldiers of fortune caught in a time of hope and upheaval, who traveled afar in search of opportunity only to be disillusioned, not just by the alien land but by fellow men. It is not the body alone that hangs weary but the spirit of man. Naïve adventurous souls battered by savagery and those that survive the battering emerge not just as abominations of humankind but ironically, the pioneers of progress and civilization.

A movie …

They were the ones who knew that underneath the decency, the manners, the calm and order of everyday society lurked something diabolical- an ugly past, a fiendish urge, undying grudges and a freaky boilpot of guilt and fear. Hark that thudding heart of the dead, the bottomless hypnotic pit in the eyes of the snake who isn’t there, a creeping shadow of whose only footsteps are heard by night and by day all that remains is a trail of innocent… and not so innocent blood. Poe, Bierce, Hoffman, Le Fanu, Lovecraft, Stoker and the likes, masters all, they chronicled the deviance and deceit in the darkness and behind closed and respectable doors, doors that opened to hell itself where you may expect to find a bearded red scaled fiend but instead realized that the …

‘Wow them in the end,’ is the sage advice screen-writing guru McKee gives Charlie Kaufmann in ‘Adaptation’. No matter what, wow them in the end. Reserve your best for the lag end and just before the public is ready to pack up and head home, sock it to them, hook line sinker. Give the crowds something to cheer about, to exult, to weep, to scratch their heads, to linger in as the lights come back on. Give them something that will bring back the last 100 odd minutes in a perspective that is pure head rush.

With ‘Mithya’ director Rajat Kapoor gives not one but two absolute ‘wow’ endings. First, a tantalizing twist, disruptive, abrupt, darkly funny, open for interpretation, pulpy, a turn of pure destiny which would cause Chabrol to smirk approvingly. And then there is the second, absolute antithesis. …

A landscape no man could tame, the geography of nature’s wrath. Barren miles blasted by sun and lacerated by sandstorms, heathen lands cursed off even the most basic of nature’s bounties and claimed by the wild. Apocalypse acres where men and beast have perished of thirst and scorch, home to bandits and scorpions, where atoms are split in an experiment in holocaust, where Mad Max and other motorheads scourged and pillaged for petroleum and continued existence, where Riddley Walker came of age.

Survival is in raw instinct. The more animal the better.

Where then is God- the one who blesses and provides? What in the forsaken landscape inspires the idea of divine benevolence? What then is justice? What is morality?

Piercing existential questions chant in the soundtrack as a knife-wielding behemoth of a man gives chase to his heavily pregnant wife in the godforsaken terrain in jealous fury. In grave danger she runs …

J’ACCUSE’,(I Accuse) screamed the old man at the audience exuding an impotent violence as he watched both the world and fate swoop down vulture-like on his hardworking, self-sacrificing daughter’s plight. It is a scene of tremendous provocation causing the audience, till then sitting comfortably in the auditorium ‘watching’ Ritwik Ghatak’s classic ballad of womanhood and sacrifice to reach out for their hearts and souls in panic. A scramble for emotions. An existential dilemma. How human are you? What can you do? There is an overawing claustrophobic misery as the audience comes to terms with its own helplessness. Then on, as the movie proceeds, one either harbors delusions of some kind of hope, nothing short of a miracle or has given in to the inevitable bleakness at the end.

With ‘Naal Pennungal’(Four Women) only his eleventh feature film in a career …

A grenade tossed into the sherry party of English fiction’
- sci-fi messiah J.G. Ballard on William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’

‘Maybe we should call Dr. Burroughs’
- Performance (1970)

Naked Lunch:———- arch anarchist William Burroughs’ depraved junkie howl from the land of the damned. A miserable soul- senses deranged, displaced, screaming obscenities as he sets a monkey-wrench to the very foundations of modern society. Mocking social reality with the glee of a naked perverse madman. The personal hell of a modern outlaw. Winston Smith with Klashnikov in hand and junk in the blood stream up at arms against an unknown fascism. Big Brother dressed up marquee style, flashing his grin from fifteen feet high canvas informing that you could be so suave, so popular, so hip if only you could buy that one brand of bathroom soap. How about a car? Then a fairness cream …

One had a lanky blonde young guy suffering from a sudden bout of asthmatic asphyxiation during an early morning jog being let in by a lonely house wife. Then there was a particularly supercharged episode of a couple of female CEOs of global conglomerates who run into each other in a ladies room. The more adventurous one had intrepid travelers off into the deepest jungles of the Amazon, the red plains of Mars or the castles of gothic Transylvania. The most common of all, which deserves a sub-genre of its own, is the ‘utility and services’ sector- the nurses, bell boys, waiters, cops, maids, pizza delivery boys, plumbers, telephone repairmen, piano teachers, psychiatrists etc.

As the awkward tableaus of common-place are staged, one is aware that the suburban/corporate/intergalactic reality is having a febrile slip into fantasy. The cardinal rule is, after all, it must end in sex- one-on-one, orgies, …

Director Georges Franju casts his seminal 1960 horror classic ‘Eyes without a Face’ in the fear of frailty. The fear that grips you when you accidentally bump into a rare Ming vase of extraordinary beauty and value, the string of images flashing through your head as the vase wobbles threatening any moment to be reduced to nothingness, to blank out a moment of history and beauty, the implications of a single moment of heedlessness. There is uncommon exquisiteness in every frame of the movie eschewing the shock value norms of horror but present throughout are lurking undercurrents of terrifying violence. Nothing good will ever come of it. The brittle and the delicate will shatter and bleed. The horror of it all…

The movie begins starts on an ambiguous note as the camera passes across unending rows of trees planted on the corners of the roads while a strangely innocuous tune plays …