ALOHA MORA

Well most of you hadn’t seen the movie I wrote about last time and not surprisingly I had hardly any comments to that one. To be frank I did go a little overboard with the whole thing; I started taking myself too seriously and assumed myself to be the philosopher types. But the girlfriend did an “Aloha Mora” on me and it opened a whole new door (By the way she thinks it’s the door to the bathroom which I am supposed to clean every weekend).

After a few drinks at a house party couple of months back when i started imagining myself to be Kishore Kumar reincarnated (and it wasn’t the first time) and started singing, a friend of mine asked me to sing something new. Just then I realised I had absolutely nothing new to sing and all I had been singing all along was at the latest ten years old. What really happened in the last ten years? Why do I not remember any songs to sing? One of the reasons might be that I wasn’t a teenager for most part of it and had to carry the baggage that comes with adult life; work. Well I haven’t really worked for more that two years in my current job and some odd jobs for a couple of years before that but there was that pressure to get one some day and that too a good one. So I have spent most of my time slogging like a donkey (I know you fell off your chair laughing; but let’s assume it for argument sake); and had absolutely no time to remember lyrics or my choices have changed. Well if my choices have changed; then I can assure you that I didn’t do it myself.

Gone are the movies and the script situations which could make it possible for any composer to churn out umpteen songs for a movie. You get like say eight if it’s a musical and few of them are like theme music. Moreover; so called pop singers are getting into playback singing with the increasing demand of unconventional music. For composers to make the same amount of revenue with 8 songs compared to what they used to make with 16; there is this pressure to offer something new and also matching international standards as the customer has internet and the reach is longer than the “Kanoon”. With the range of singers come the different accents (a lot of em’ Anglo sized) and top it all come those fuckin lyrics in English in the background. You my baby but u driving me crazy crazy boy, you my baby but you driving driving driving driving. With the funny accent that I’ve got, (imagine Kishore Kumar singing a song in English) I can’t imagine myself singing those.

I had all that in mind when I went back to the motherland for three weeks. It was so fuckin hot; I spent a lot of time watching soaps on TV. I was expecting a lot of western influence or change in those as well. Well; to my surprise the plots in those soaps have gone backwards. Seven out of ten soaps were all set in the rural and semi urban India. That wasn’t the case 10-12 years ago; all of em’ had very urban settings and reflected quite modern sensibilities. I was stunned and just couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. What the fuck happened when I wasn’t watching?

After days of pondering and pulling my already thin crop of hair; I came to the conclusion that the audience has changed for this as well. Back when I used to spend time with my mum watching Tara, Campus, Saans and Banegi Apni Baat to name a few; the audience that those were reaching out to; were all urban middle class. These were the people who could afford paying 300 rupees a month for cable television. The majority of the mass watched Doordarshan and watched movies in a single screen theatre over the weekend. Over the years with all that money flowing into the Indian economy, rise in the level of literacy and a lot of the industries being deregulated; the urban community are an extremely busy group of people. They are going abroad, working long hours at organizations that’ve got gyms within campus to virtually make them live at work; they hardly have the time to go watch soaps on TV. So where do they go?

I am sure this was the question all the multiplex owners were creating an answer for. Nice quality movie watching experience. And when the target customers for movies in India are more global, have money and are more educated; automatically the scripts, the plots and the music are changing. But on the other hand the rural areas can now afford paying 500 odd rupees to have cable television and want to watch something they can relate to. Consequently tele-soaps are about caste problems, child marriage and basic rural issues more or less.

Well; I am 26, not old by any respect but right now if I was in India either you make way for the next generation and accept the emergence of a generation gap or Aloha Mora; India is changing.

U O K ?

Why do you like the feeling of victory?

What do you feel accomplishing something?

Biologically; it’s out of ordinary hormonal activity which the brain defines as happiness or in a very literary form; “The sense of accomplishment”.

But hormonal activity is not confined to just victory. Sex, depression, crying, laughter, thought gripping moments, love, violence; all help stir up your hormones. (May be different ones from the ones associated to victory). Keeping this in mind I come to think that emotional sensitivity is an extremely misunderstood concept. It’s widely used to describe people who have the tendency to cry or react to situations or in other words have a very low threshold to unwelcome situations. I believe that is incorrect. Being emotionally sensitive means that you have more than one reason that would stir up your hormones; and as I described earlier there are a lot of other things that would help you do that.

I don’t feel bad when I cry, get angry or violent and am absolutely in love with the feeling of victory and sex. I love it when Rocky Balboa runs up the steps; Gladiator takes off his mask, when Sachin hits the winning run and Ben Kingsley in full flow.

The House of Sand and Fog; it might be a little bit too dramatic for some people’s taste but it just absolutely made my day. It manages to amalgamate so many aspects of life that the very thought of the characters going through them breaks you down. Ben Kingsley (playing a soldier from Iran) and Jennifer Connelly (playing a person who has the tendency to screw up everything) together create a masterpiece. It humbles you to the importance of owning a house, and things that a family does to you unknowingly; and most importantly it does not allow you to judge any character.
Jennifer Connelly is evicted from her house by mistake which she inherited from her father which she definitely cannot afford on her own as she is a house cleaner and has been dumped by her husband because she’s an addict.
Ben used to be a high ranking soldier in Iran but has fled the country and staying in America as people were trying to kill his Family. He is used to live in an aristocratic fashion; lives in a high rise building in the city and is seen only in the best suits in and out of the building. He works as a labourer by the day and at a convenience store at night. Nobody knows about this except for his wife.
Ben buys the house from the county in an auction and fixes the whole place up in a span of a few weeks before the county finds out that they auctioned it by mistake. Now Ben wants 4 times the price he paid as that’s the asking rate. The county won’t pay it, Jennifer wants the house back and amongst all this the police man who evicted her is in love with her and has left his wife of ten years for her. This is how the director sets the stage for a gruelling emotional drama and if you’re wondering why the fuck did I go on and on about hormonal bullshit then dear reader; it’s a fucking hormonal feast.

Go treat yourself.

Reader Contribution:

At first glance, your overall description of the film seems to encompass all of what the film is about in a nutshell. I like that myself, as it gives me an insight as to what Im about to go and watch, but sometimes too much detail may uncover some aspects of the film best kept secret. Some people may call you a "Homer Simpson" as he ruins endings of movies by always saying He dies in the end, before people see the movie !
You've done a good job at setting the scene but you have also raised the bar for this flick very high with your opening comments up to the first paragraphs. I can see you enjoyed this film extremely but the way you explain the emotional rollercoaster this film is, makes me think Im gonna cum in my pants just watching it.
Was it really that good ? Did you enjoy it because you can relate to it ? Can you pick any holes in the plot to tone down your enthusiasm about it ?

Mauro Lipo

LUCIDITY IN CONTEMPLATION- AN AGE OLD MALADY

Yeah you can have a chuckle; I did use the synonym tab for the title. But the piece is about two products that had everything going for them but as the title goes; had no clarity in thought. Making movies for the intelligent audience is acceptable but not at the cost of bad screen writing. The intelligent audience are good at peeling layers of the story but; they are also the first to notice a half cooked meal.

Movies deliver a message when told efficiently, and Dilli 6 and Dev D were not managed efficiently. If you fuck up after having scored great music, decent actors, media attention and a good plot , you not even worth any pity. Competing with all the fuckwits that the Indian film industry has, if you have all that going for you and you still can’t deliver is like losing a race where you are the only one competing.

I don’t care what anybody says; but Dilli 6 was a wasted opportunity.

The genre was similar to Swades but the execution was incompetent. Swades used the dam as the pivot to capture the intensity and the agony of the nonsensical involvement of the misunderstood Indian tradition. Dilli 6 lacked that pivot. There wasn’t anything that connects the bits and pieces. Using the Ram Lila as an apologue was interesting but not effective. The love story could have been that pivot. The story should have revolved around the protagonists. The director probably thought that he had to get away from the cliché love angles of Indian movie making but I can’t think of anything else that would have conveyed the same result. Like Raj Kapoor once said; “let them come to see Zeenat Aman’s tits but they will go back remembering the film”. Well; it works.

Dev D was not just a contemporary version of Devdas, it was meant to be alternate take on it. Anurag Kashyap’s Dev was supposed to be the biggest chutiya you will see rather than the eternal lover previously shown. But regrettably it felt like all he did was used the synonym tab to make it look 2009. The end definitely elevates the story to new heights, but it’s just a sudden jump from a story that had almost fallen flat with inappropriately used background score, lifeless acting, and insignificant characters.

Same problem again, lack of execution. The only hope is that unconventional story lines are being backed by financers but the multiplex audience might fade out in a few years as a result of the taken for granted attitude and we would be stuck with Karan Johar.

GOD HELP US