I was twelve when Karisma Kapoor ‘scandalised’ the nation with a song called Sexy Sexy Sexy Mujhe Log Bole. It was a rage and, even as the censors tweaked the Sexys (nonsensically and, to be fair, disturbingly) into Babys, we whispergiggled about it often that season, finding underage thrill in weak lyric. Like our definition of scandal, things have changed since. A schoolmate we called Tinni, senior by a year, acted opposite that Khuddar actress this Friday in a film called Dangerous Ishq, and I must assume he — in short pants and amused by a 1993 Lolo giving it her all — didn’t see it coming.

Tinni’s formally called Rajneesh Duggal, and — while I watched the movie more for ol’ Don Bosco solidarity than any masochistic hope in Vikram Bhatt’s oeuvre — I must concede Karisma looks rather fetching. She shows up first on Manish Malhotra’s ramp, strutting across the stage with natural confidence, working the whole catwalk-pause-pose-smile routine like a pro. It looks good (except for the cardboard 3D work) but then she must dismount and, um, act. With her career more lauded for inspiring her contemporaries to hit the gym than for any actual performance, here too Karisma displays the acting range of a waxwork, and the film emerges laughably disastrous. Tinni, poor chap, merely looks bewildered throughout.

It seems open season on the Bollywood comeback. Sridevi’s poised to return to screens this year with Amitabh Bachchan in a comedy called English Vinglish, but Aamir Khan’s nation-altering television show gave us an unexpected glimpse of her this Sunday. The Twitterverse immediately broke into a chorus of nasty, scurrilous (and only occasionally funny) nose-jibes. Judging from spontaneous public sentiment — and the way Mrs Kapoor’s suddenly-pert proboscis distracted even from Khan’s subject — the waters might not be conducive for that comeback-stroke just yet.

Ah, but her rival struggles as well. Following a failed return five years ago in Aaja Nachle, The Lady With The Smile is braving it out again and has picked herself a fine, suitably challenging vehicle, Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya, which should provide her a meaty female part opposite strong actors. Right now, however, Madhuri Dixit’s popping up in a spree of ads for a dance show, promos where she flounders as she gyrates to songs alien to her. One in particular, where she tackles Sridevi’s Kaante Nahin Kat Te, is particularly embarrassing. For the first time, the effort is visible on her face, and she looks less like the goddess from the Sailaab song and more like a winsome auntie at a well-lit Ladies Sangeet.

And then, to commandingly cap this bit about ill-advised returns to the marquee, there’s Rajesh Khanna. In a commercial for ceiling fans, a cadaverous Khanna walks into a hall full of whirring fans and says something about how he still has fans. Fans, not admirers. Oblivious to the irony, the septagenarian cocks a scarily sallow head and laughs, inexplicably even nudging the Big Babumoshai. All that’s left is for him to pull on a Riddler costume.

The commercial does the legend far more disservice than even that tacky Wafaa film from a couple of years ago, simply because nobody saw that. This one’s being shoved down our throats. And is leaving a lamentably horrid taste.

~

Originally published Mumbai Mirror, May 16, 2012

There’s a reason we call leading men heroes, and part of it has to do with them acting the part. They need to come through and pole-vault over insurmountablish odds, sure, but they also need to carry themselves with a certain deportment. With some relative smoothness, at the very least, if not actual savoir faire. Or at least they must when engaged in pursuit of a heroine, especially one — as is seen frequently in Hindi cinema — clearly above their station.

Not so in the new Bollywood, however, where we seem gradually to be encouraging our leading ladies to love the louche. Back in the day, Amitabh Bachchan had to shave and pull on a spotless suit to charm Satte Pe Satta‘s Hema Malini, while Amol Palekar took lessons in suavity to win over Vidya Sinha in Chhoti Si Baat. Winning the fair maiden’s assent has always been as integrally tricky a step on the hero’s journey as eventually defeating her smuggler father, but new films appear increasingly focussed on removing odds from the hero’s path.

The recommended ‘technique’ nowadays appears to be relentless stalking, following which pretty girls voice obvious initial complaints but then give in, visibly eager to settle. We’ve seen it in Bittoo Boss, Vicky Donor and, most recently, Jannat 2, where smart and highly educated girls with actual jobs first mock the neighborhood rogue and then, abruptly, are taken in by his… candour, one assumes? She’s a doctor, he’s a gun-runner, but hey, he dedicatedly follows her about, with pseudo-Sufi songs wailing in the background. That clearly counts for something, and I’m guessing whenever they do greenlight the inevitable Darr remake, the stammerer shall now prevail.

What is also particularly bothersome about this situation is the passivity of the female lead. While the man comes on strong and assaults her with a charmless offensive, she seems to have nothing, or no one, better to do. She brushes him off, smiles coyly when her girlfriends cooingly declare how much in love he must be (since he says it all the time), and then finally caves, deciding his obsessive consistency will translate to some sort of eventual romance. And that, in lieu of anything better, seems enough. Like Esha Gupta tells Emraan Hashmi in Jannat 2, “Even if I don’t know whether I’m in love with you yet, I know I like it when you slap me.” Um, okay.

There is an overwhelming lack of elitism to the girls’ decisions, true, and that is both encouraging and utterly implausible, but then we’ve always had the sethji’s daughter falling for a ‘mamooli‘ driver. It’s just that now — as Salman Khan sits back in Wanted and makes fat-jokes about his heroine — our heroes are themselves content with being un-special. They’re mamooli, but of their own choosing. While the heroine is increasingly losing her say in the matter. She might as well get used to being whistled at.

~

First published Mumbai Mirror, May 9, 2012

Back in the winter of 2007 and stretching right into early 2008, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, crippling both Hollywood and American television. Films were halted mid-schedule, award shows were boycotted, and even the most successful TV shows were forced into a hiatus. It was at this time that writer and director Joss Whedon took a bunch of already successful television faces — Neil Patrick Harris from How I Met Your Mother, Nathan Fillion from Castle (and Whedon’s own Firefly), Internet sensation Felicia Day, and Simon Helberg from The Big Bang Theory — and threw them into a bewilderingly bizarre musical cauldron called Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, an irresistible web series you should watch immediately if you haven’t yet.

This Friday, Whedon does almost exactly the same thing, save for a few vital differences: instead of a dinky web series he’s delivering a $200 million behemoth; each primary character in the film has had their own massive summer hits made largely only to make the existence of this mega-movie a possibility; oh, and his all-star lineup comprises of Earth’s mightiest superheroes. (Also, one doubts that The Hulk or Black Widow will break into song. But hey, it’s Whedon.)

Right now, with The Avengers due to release this week and Whedon’s indie feature Cabin In The Woods — hailed as a postmodern (and yet scary) love-letter to the horror film — having hit theatres just over a fortnight ago, the 47-year-old director could be excused for putting his feet up. Instead, we’ll soon see his deliciously cast version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, something he filmed in twelve days, mostly between breaks of Avengers filming. If the cult of Whedon grows and grows at this rate, we might even (cross your fingers as you read the next four words) see Firefly brought back.

It *still* hurts, you see. Along with Mitchell Hurwitz’s Arrested Development, Whedon’s Firefly was one of the smartest shows on television, and the cancellation of these two remarkable shows alone is basis for the compelling argument against this being America’s golden age of TV. A savagely sharp and immensely witty science-fiction ‘Western’, Firefly was snatched away from us after only 11 episodes. We got some closure with its movie spinoff Serenity, just as well-crafted, but the fanboy forearm calls for a more regular jab.

Son and grandson to screenwriting men, Whedon kicked things off with the highly blonde (entertaining but daft) Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a movie that went nowhere until he changed its spirit and made it into a highly successful television show with a fanatical following. And then he wrote comic books.

But not just any comic books. Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men showed magnificient narrative dexterity, and his later work on The Runaways was just as incisive. We comic fans often dream of a great comic writer being given a comic book movie — someone let Jeph Loeb write Batman, or just look at Frank Miller co-creating the Sin City film — but Marvel was the first to generate a fanboy hallelujah just by announcing that Whedon will hold the reins.

I haven’t seen the film yet — a statement that will be untrue by the time you read this column — but I don’t need to read rapturous reviews to know that Whedon will deliver something special. Go this weekend.

~

First published Mumbai Mirror, April 25, 2012

A girl I know grew up believing that The Sound Of Music ended with the “So Long, Farewell” song. What with parents turning off the videotape before Nazis and high drama took over, her version of the film finished up — somewhat confusingly, she now admits — with a dinner party and little Greta Von Trapp lisping Auf Wiedersehen. This idea, however, of editing a film just by pretending part of it doesn’t exist, is an inspired one, and I feel most compelled to try it next time I show someone Silsila, distracting them right before the farcical plane crash climax, changing channels and saying the film’s over.

After spending Silsila glaring at Jaya, Amitabh leaps merrily into her arms before the end credits.

Excising that horrific, tacked-on ending would let that masterpiece shine even brighter, and I doubt many would disagree. One of my all-time favourites, Silsila is a compelling drama about marital infidelity, made almost ridiculous by the last few minutes wherein a plane crash causes a very convenient rethink on the parts of all people concerned, and they just go back to their formerly unhappy married lives. Basically, they choose — repeat, choose — to love other people instead. It is a shamefully lazy end, but because the film is that phenomenal, we choose to overlook it.

It’s not the only time Yash Chopra, one of Hindi cinema’s most consummate storytellers, copped out and gave his story a lamer ending than it deserved. Kaala Patthar, Faasle and Chandni were all films that petered into ‘safer,’ more conventional endings despite them being strong stories that merited emphatic finishes. The last time he stuck to his guns and carried his bat right to the end gave us a striking film with an incredible finish — but the film crashed and burned.

On 22^nd November 1991, both Chopra’s Lamhe and Kuku Kohli’s Phool Aur Kaante released — and blame it on the story, the bold ‘ahead of its time’ end, Anil Kapoor’s hairless upper-lip or that model who couldn’t say Pallo — but Lamhe was a washout, while the unwatchably cheesy Ajay Devgan film rocked the box office. That Friday was a tipping point. Two diametrically opposed results — to two dramatically different kinds of films — shaped the following decade of our mainstream cinema, allowing the masala brigade who had tasted blood in the 80s to come in and take over entirely. The rest is history too recent to write about without wincing at the thought of Karan and Arjun.

The failure of Lamhe also frightened our filmmakers from unconventional endings. To this day, fine features chug along solidly before nosediving into mediocre climaxes. Relationships are smoothened with insane, abrupt ease; there is a mad twist that belies other twists; dozens of loose ends are tied up with lazy convenience; stirring drama is made maddeningly happy; and even in films where protagonists die, the scene is suffocated by star-worship. Less mainstream filmmakers do this better, but not by far. The weakest parts of the very best films of the last five years have mostly been the final moments.

And so conditioned have we become to these slapdash finishes that we take them in our stride. We’ve made our peace with even gripping narratives meeting a predictably Bollywood end, because that’s what we get to see all the time. “Not bad for a Hindi movie” just isn’t good enough. We have the writers, we have the stories, and we need to have the faith.

A massage parlour can give you a happy ending; a movie is for so much more.

~

First published Mumbai Mirror, April 18, 2012

Olives are not the only fruit.

Even as Hawkeye Pierce declared those of them doused in gin the only green vegetables he ate, a particular British secret agent scoffed at olives in his drink. Having cottoned on to the old bartender trick to fill a glass with large olives to skimp on the actual sauce, Ian Fleming’s James Bond preferred less obtrusive garnish for his cocktail, like a lemon peel. And unlike gin, which bruises easy, it’s perfectly permissible to shake vodka, which becomes colder on shaking. Hence those infamous dry vodka martinis ordered the way Sean Connery did.

Churchill opted for a glass of iced gin, drunk while looking at a bottle of vermouth; Noel Coward shook his glass in the direction of Italy, the land of the finest vermouth. Insisting on impossibly dry martinis — the more the spirit, the lesser the vermouth — has traditionally been part male-posturing, part call for potency.

True connoisseurs play it differently. In his very first novel Casino Royale, Bond put together a striking East-meets-West martini in honour of his heroine, Vesper Lynd. Combining British gin (3 measures) and Russian vodka (1 measure) with a half-measure of Kina Lillet, a bitter orangey aperitif, the drink Bond invents — “Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon peel,” he tells the attentive barman, later lamenting the fact that vodka from potatoes was used instead of grain vodka — is one he never revisits after Lynd is killed at the end of the novel.

The Vesper is a splendid concoction, and one that packs a nuclear wallop. Bond’s CIA chum Felix Leiter is taken aback by the measures. “When I’m… er… concentrating,” James explains, “I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad.” Classic 007, a tad drier than his drink.

All that changes quite drastically in the upcoming Bond film Skyfall, where that dashing secret agent of impeccable taste will order himself… a Heineken. The beer manufacturer, long been associated with the brand, is now forcing the cash-strapped producers to make James chug their wares. Perhaps even (horror of horrors) from a can. Egad.

Now this is going too far. Connery’s suits in the first few films, tailored by Anthony Sinclair of Savile Row, were fitted so immaculately that he eschewed belts and suspenders. By film 17, Pierce Brosnan was in Italian suits and had swapped his iconic Aston Martin for a generically flashy BMW. Bond’s innate Britishness, his ridiculously On Her Majesty’s Secret Service ways, has increasingly and tragically been homogenised, moulded to more modern tastes. And to sponsor demands.

As lovers of Bondage, we’ve sat back and accepted it all, even his current blonditude. We’ve taken it all on the chin. But leave the Commander’s damned martinis alone.

In Kingsley Amis’ Book Of Bond, the advice he gives double-o-aspirants about beer is that “you drink it occasionally; In Geneva, a Löwenbräu; in the States, a Miller’s High Life, a couple of Red Stripes in Jamaica and as many as four steins of local brew in Munich if you find yourself with an ex-Luftwafffe pilot. But eschew English beer. It, like cider, belongs in pubs and 007 does not.” As kids nowadays succinctly say, Word.

And here we have the vile Heineken. Shudder. It’s not even drinkable by beer standards. This is as diabolical a move from the Dutch firm as SMERSH could dream of, and one can pray that James winces ever so slightly — but unmistakably — at his first sip. It’s what Fleming’s man would have done. Shaken, just a bit.

~

First published Mumbai Mirror , April 11, 2012

Vidhu Vinod Chopra was 29 years old when he made Khamosh, and to me, coming from a bright young filmmaker flying the independent flag high, the cunning murder mystery always contained elements of wish-fulfilment. Set on a fictional movie set with Sadashiv Amrapurkar as a servile director eager to please everyone (except naturally the writer), the film casts actors as fictional versions of themselves, under their own names: Soni Razdan plays an actress likely to speak in English even if her character won’t; Shabana Azmi plays the kind of heroine who wins successive National Awards and yet acts in a highly commercial melodrama; and Amol Palekar stars as a matinee idol so popular all are bullish about his election prospects. (“MGR, NTR, Palekar!” is the cry, with the leading man heralded as the country’s biggest star.)

With selected theatres currently celebrating 30 years of Vinod Chopra Productions, it is a fine time to revisit Chopra’s gangland masterpiece, Parinda, with many of my generation awestruck as they watch it in theatres for the first time. I was 8 when it originally released. A terrifically taut drama that unspools with ruthless elegance and frequently shocks us, thanks to both cinematic craft and emotional heft, Parinda is unquestionably one of the finest Hindi language films of the last thirty years. But you know that already.

No, this column is about Khamosh, the 1985 film that tells you a lot more about Vinod Chopra than any of his subsequent features. Unravelling with breathless grace, the plot is that of a classic whodunnit, a murder mystery on the sets of a film being shot in a small Kashmir town. Crammed with some of the finest actors in the history of Hindi film — Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapoor, Ajit Vachchani and Sushma Seth fill out the cast — Khamosh is a wickedly clever thriller with smashing characters, a film impossible to look away from. Chopra, aided by editing goddess Renu Saluja, demonstrates an economy of storytelling currently unfathomable in our overlong cinema, and pours out the simple but compelling plot through minimal rivulets of information even as the narrative chugs along quick as can be: keeping his audience guessing, second-guessing, wondering. Keeping them hooked as he masterfully reels it all in.

It is a stunning ensemble, with Razdan, Azmi and Veerendra Saxena standing out, and top honours won by dazzling Naseer, his intensity and dramatic fury taking not just antagonists but also the film’s very plot by the collar. Pankaj Kapoor, as the producer’s junkie son, is frighteningly fine if a trifle overplayed, while it is amusing to see Sudhir Mishra play Michael, the film’s cameraman. The joy is in the detailing, the on-set snark, the whimsy. Besides the meta-celebration of small-budget cinema and its actors, Khamosh also contains a number of MacGuffins and — in a truly inspired fanboy moment — a marvellous sequence which simultaneously pays tribute to both Psycho and The Godfather.

I have here lamented, in a previous column, our current cinema’s lack of attempts in the whodunnit genre. The heartwarming success of Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani — a film more enjoyable for texture than plot — might give the ever-compelling genre a fillip, and one can only hope for more mystery in our movies. And for a few films that learn from Chopra’s lethal masterstroke. As silent — or as silencing — as a guillotine.

~

For your viewing pleasure: Khamosh, in its entirety, on YouTube

First published Mumbai Mirror, April 4, 2012

In the Quentin Tarantino universe, everything is connected. I brought in Tuesday by rereading the final draft of the screenplay of his upcoming Django Unchained, only to realise that March 27 happens to be the director’s birthday. That manner of happenstance is just a taste of the sort of pop cultural synchronicity the director, now 49, thrives on, lining up his self-referential ducks all in a row to shoot them down all at once in a glorious meta-textual blitz of bullets and homages, in a style so unique that even a cinematic cliché like the Mexican Standoff – where everyone points a gun at everyone else – is turned on its head and made more Quentinian than Mexican. (And yes, Mr Pink runs away with the money.)

Reading a Tarantino script is a thrilling act, one that nearly always exceeds expectations. He might only be supposed to blow the bloody doors off, but then Tarantino – blessed, dyslexic, grammatically-challenged Tarantino — never quite made his peace with ‘supposed.’ Which is why well before his film starts shooting, he leaks the full script online, typos and all. As if to challenge us to eat it up, chew down every single spoiler, literally spell out exactly what to expect…  And then he lights the words on fire and watches our all-knowing heads spin.

The reading comes doused in the basest of temptation. You know reading the screenplay will let you in on every secret, and take away the element of surprise. Wouldn’t you rather just wait and be wowed on screen? You know you shouldn’t read it, right? Sure. I used to think that before I read Inglourious Basterds, and gasped at the audacity of that first scene, that mammoth twenty-three page opening conversation scene that had me breathless just reading it aloud and watching it unfold in my head. When I finally saw the scene several months later, it was like watching a spectacular novel adapted perfectly onto screen. The gasps were all in place, every single one of them. And they remain thus every time I watch the film.

It helps that Tarantino is an electrifying writer, one whose narrative is made of both pulpy shock and highly effective storytelling. The dialogue is, of course, inimitably crackerjack, and the style so vividly visual you can’t help but picture it. It’s all immensely evocative, and while I’d like to believe years of awestruck gazing at Tarantino’s oeuvre would let us in on it, would let us picture the scene just as he’s going to show it to us, it really doesn’t. He’s still going to punch your senses right in the gut, knocking you out either with visuals or pace or improvisation or, often, with a staggeringly visceral choice of music.

And maybe he just picks his songs at the end, filling in those aural blanks when everything else is in place, or maybe there are some cards even he likes to play close to his chest, but the script doesn’t give these away. All the script says is “Cue COOL music,” and lets the reading brain explode with possibility, just as it does when the camera moves away from the ear-slicing and lets us fill in our own horror.

I urge those of you with an interest in cinema, in screenwriting and in Tarantino to read the Django Unchained script, available easily enough online with some smart Googling, for this Southern – a black cowboy film set in the South, which means its not a Western – may well be his most brutal and most important film. Or just a helluva hoot that earns Leonardo DiCaprio another Oscar nomination.

Either way, Mister Tarantino, thank you – for the words that come before the images do. And here’s wishing you a Happy Birthday.

(Cue COOL music.)

~

First published Mumbai Mirror, March 28, 2012

I have always been distrustful of high-heeled shoes. While adorning female feet, they’ve struck me at various points of my life as precarious, duplicitous and even deceitfully intimidating, with a rapier-sharp stiletto heel more than capable of cutting through both a wayward-waltzing big toe and a reluctant wallet. And Martin Scorsese hasn’t helped their case. In his magnificent new film Hugo, the master filmmaker shows us great cinema — cinema at its brightest, most inventive and pathbreaking — and then literally sets the reels on fire. Unlike in Quentin Tarantino’s recent revisionist masterpiece, flaming celluloid here does not kill dictators and win a war; no, Scorsese’s usage is significantly more inglorious, so to speak: in Hugo, strips of surrealist fancy and moments of movie whimsy are melted down to make heels for women’s shoes.

Hugo, releasing in India in March and nominated in the major categories at this weekend’s Academy Awards, is an achingly beautiful film. An adaptation of Brian Setznick’s graphic novel The Invention Of Hugo Cabret, it is unlike anything from Scorsese’s fabled filmography — proudly profane, preternaturally pop-soundtracked and gloriously gun-filled — and yet has his signature emblazoned across every painstakingly constructed frame. It might be his first ‘family film,’ certainly, but his films have always been about family. This one, about a wide-eyed boy gulping in the miracles of cinema, merely seems more autobiographical.

Set mostly in a French railway station (and also notably *behind* its numerous clock-faces), this is the story of 11-year-old Hugo Cabret, who, having inherited clockwork precision from his late watchmaker father, tirelessly labours at fixing the broken automaton they worked on together. This involves stealing spare parts from the station’s toystore, run by the crotchety George Méliés, a grump who happens to share his name with cinema’s first real magician. As Hugo, and Méliés’ literature-loving godchild Isabelle, embark on an adventure, Scorsese literally winds the clock back and shows us how it’s done, lovingly detailing gears and sprockets and taking us to libraries where books literally come alive — pictures of movies turning into moving pictures — in front of incredulous children, even as the director turns us all into just that.

There is much attention to detail in this story of love, love for images and even, indeed, for words — James Joyce has a walk-on cameo, and Isabelle is far more impressed by Hugo’s correct use of the word ‘panache’ than his pluck or tinkering skills — and cast-members themselves seem enchanted as they walk through Scorsese’s splendidly recreated sets, especially the movie sets of movie sets.

Hugo also marks Scorsese’s first foray into 3D, and it’s remarkably ingenious how he takes cinema’s newest storytelling device, still in its teething stage, and uses it to pen his love letter to the movies, three-dimensionally paying tribute to the giants of early cinema, most notably to the Lumiére Brothers’ iconic 1896 film, Arrival Of A Train At The Station, a film that, at the time, had horror-struck audiences screaming and struggling to get out of their seats, thinking the black and white locomotive was coming straight at them.

There is some gimmickry then, yes, but when the balance between story and spectacle is so perfectly struck, the word wizardry seems a lot more appropriate. Scorsese’s homage to Méliés introduces us all to his pioneering work, while allowing one of the finest filmmakers of our time to indulge in his own immodest prestidigitation.

And for that, for restoring our faith in the rabbits that live exclusively in cinematic top hats, we must thank him. His name is Marty, and he can make fly.

~

First published Mumbai Mirror, February 22, 2012

Black dresses don’t have to be little when you’re Angelina Jolie. It was a particularly predictable and soporific night at the Oscars, when Jolie walked across the stage, her infamous lips red like a messily fed vampire, her right leg imperiously showing through a black Versace dress with a slit so high it looked slashed by an indiscreet samurai sword. Beaming ear to ear, she took the microphone and thrust out her bare leg, left hand on her hip like a comic-book superheroine. Jessica Rabbit would have trouble competing as Angelina held her pose, basking in the fact that she made us all hold our breaths. And so it was that Angelina Jolie, who did not appear on screen in all of 2011, conquered the Oscar telecast – and she did it with one leg.

The amazing thing about Jolie and her ‘come look at me’ act wasn’t the right leg itself (spectacular as that was) but her overwhelming, impossible confidence, the sheer larger-than-life aura she radiated, the ridiculous entitlement with which she breezed in and decided to own the room. And what a room to own. One can’t be trained to become a screen goddess, and no matter what you may think of her, there is only one Angelina Jolie.

Like there will ever be only one Marilyn.

Michelle Williams is everything in My Week With Marilyn. Just not Marilyn.

The multitalented Michelle Williams is one of Hollywood’s most thrilling actresses, and her work in My Week With Marilyn is extraordinary, a sensitive and vulnerable portrayal of a week in the life of the most iconic woman who ever lived. It is a dazzling piece of acting, one true to the film’s spirit and one that impresses consistently. Except Williams is not Marilyn, and that difference – that difference she cannot be blamed for – sneaks in and lets the air out of the painstakingly inflated balloon. Just last week I watched The Prince And The Showgirl, the 1957 film Monroe made with Laurence Olivier, the making of which is featured in My Week With Marilyn, and the gulf between the two is too massive. At her strongest moments, Williams is a lovely caricature; at her weakest, a poor mimic. It is an inevitable comparison, especially since the new film chooses to include scenes of the old film, and Williams, pretty, vacant Williams, pales in comparison to that sexiest of goddesses in cinema’s pantheon, one who can’t be replicated.

It’s exactly like watching the electrifying James Franco – so sublime at playing Allen Ginsberg – utterly fail at being James Dean.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable Meryl Streep – the lady the Academy nominates by default every year and then fills the four remaining slots on the ballot – played another iconic woman, another woman impossible to forget. The Iron Lady is a significantly flawed film, but Streep’s performance is a work of chameleonic grace, as well as much more. Her Margaret Thatcher is ambitious, self-serving, ruthless, overachieving and yet, like the most memorable of movie monsters, capable of drawing out whatever sympathy we have to give. Like with James Mason’s Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, or Frank Langella’s Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, we are awestruck by how an actor has taken a real-life personage we have been conditioned to loathe, and yet won us over. And Streep does it beautifully.

Williams gives her all to the part, and is most impressive. Yet Streep, who rightfully beat her for the Best Actress Oscar, had the fight in the bag all along: after all, Maggie Thatcher never stood atop a subway grate and let her dress fly up.

~

First published Mumbai Mirror, February 29, 2012

More Rushdie-lite than rushed delight, Narcopolis tries far too hard.

Jeet Thayil begins his first novel with a very long sentence, one of those showboating literary devices that can make or mar the mood, and while the writing in that chapter-long opening salvo is more precious than authentically frantic, far too eager to show off the poet’s linguistic range — from poor puns to patronising punditry — there is an undeniable energy to it, a grace apparent even as the writer aims to impress, to astound, to make you draw your breath in and wonder what comes next, admittedly a pretty smart way to start a book except, and here’s the thing, except it isn’t really a long sentence, it doesn’t really glide, instead using commas as crutches, as fullstops in disguise, striving unnaturally to take a relatively intriguing prologue and turn it into a stream-of-consciousness spectacle, a guitar-solo opening meant to electrify the reader, and while that is peachy keen in theory, perhaps there is a reason events, even literary ones, don’t begin with showstoppers, and this ambitious Narcopolis is left teetering as the writer keeps scrabbling to find room (in a hovel-novel crammed with characters, backstories and dreams) to roll up his unprosaic sleeves and work in another sensationally gaspworthy guitar riff, and the result is painful as each of the book’s undoubtedly colourful multiple narrators — junkies of extraordinary description, separated by gender, geography, greed — look at the world with the very same open-mouthed sense of wonder, absorbing it all like sponges with remarkable powers of observation and regurgitating it right up to the point that they take their next hit, which, invariably, sends them down a spiral that spells out how all dreams are prophetic and all dreamers doubly so, a repetitive trope that renders the book tragically turgid, one that exhausts more than it exhilarates even as Thayil laboriously pulls out all the stops to dazzle us, taking us from the book’s leading lady — a eunuch christened Dimple after the hit film playing in theatres at the time she was Bobby-ted, so to speak — to Chairman Mao’s China, to the McMumbai of today, and while Thayil painstakingly and often beautifully details the varying effects different drugs have on very different people, lingering meticulously on the consumptive process behind each drug, his fond intoxication with the subject renders it tiresome as the book goes on and the method and madness of every single drug — at least to the casual user, nay, reader — blurs into the other and we are tempted to feel that the writer is leading us down parallel rabbit-holes all to the same effect, which isn’t altogether true, but (all together now?) sure as hell feels like it, despite the writer fleshing out the eunuch character quite brilliantly, telling us her story with fascinated sympathy while all other characters seem somewhat condescendingly pinned down by cliché, by the need to act like books and movies inform us characters of that ‘type’ would act in similar circumstances, especially when the action shifts to rice-eating Mao-worshipping China, but despite provoking much rolling of the eyes, the writer occasionally manages marvellous stylistic flourishes (“The sky was the colour of someone’s black eye,” he writes for the rain-ravaged city) that almost make up for constant allusions to the kind of authors he would like to share a shelf with (Baudelaire mentions notwithstanding, this lies closer to Khushwant Singh’s masterful Delhi, a great novel which managed the city-as-eunuch narrative far more authentically) as he keeps nudging, winking and suggesting that this Narcopolis is just the type of confounding volume its character Mr Lee would wonder whether to call imagined autobiography or a historical novel, and which first novel we should just call a trip, no more no less, a surreptitiously sucked-in hit that thrills only in bits, thrills less than it tires, but nevertheless a quick ride with true merit and some steam, and if only he, like his narrator, had split the seductively long line into more coherently sized chunks, we’d all have inhaled it easier — though I must here confess that writing a really long sentence is mad cool.

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First published Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle, February 19, 2012