Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Aishwarya Rai makes it to Harpers and Queen Mag’s 100 Most Beautiful Women list
A new India emerges at the movies
The Waiting City is an ode to Calcutta A slew of films in the recently concluded Toronto film festival show India in a new light, says film critic Saibal Chatterjee, who attended the festival. Western filmmakers are increasingly tapping India for inspiration and locations and perceiving it in a new light. The runaway global success of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire may have triggered the growing focus on the subcontinent, but a spate of new films is going beyond the much flogged India-as-a-land-of-slums-and-squalor syndrome. Three major films in the official line-up of the 34th Toronto International Film Festival - The Waiting City (Australia), Google Baby (Israel) and Cooking with Stella (Canada) - narrate Indian stories while eschewing the clichés associated with the country. The Waiting City, written and directed by Sydney-based Claire McCarthy, is set in bustling, chaotic Calcutta (Kolkata). But it is a far cry from Roland Joffe's 1992 cinematic rendition of Dominique Lapierre's City of Joy and Nicolas Klotz's La Nuit Bengali (1988), based on Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade's doomed love affair with a girl from an aristocratic 1950s Calcutta family. 'Love song' Both the older films had courted controversy during and after their making. In The Waiting City, an outwardly happy Australian couple arrives in India to take possession of an adopted baby girl. Red tape holds them up in the metropolis for many weeks. The delay tests their patience, but they are gradually exposed to facets of Calcutta that change them as human beings. Stella explores the interface between Indian households and domestic staff Serious differences arise between the two - Fiona (Radha Mitchell) is a busy lawyer who cannot get off the mobile phone and the Internet; Ben (Joel Edgerton) is a failed but spirited musician who goes out in search of adventure and friends in a strange city - and the couple begins to drift apart. The relationship reaches breaking point when the mystical and the tragic combine to pull them back from the brink. "The Waiting City is like a love song to Calcutta, one of my favourite cities in the world," says McCarthy who, earlier in the decade, spent weeks making a documentary about her younger sister's voluntary work with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. "The city transforms Fiona and Ben spiritually and emotionally." McCarthy, an outsider with deep knowledge and understanding of the city's rhythms, brings an insider's view to bear upon the narrative. "I was determined from the very outset not to perpetuate Western misconceptions about India," she says. Similarly, renowned photojournalist Dilip Mehta, Canadian citizen of Indian origin and director of Cooking with Stella, was mindful of how he was going to project the city of his birth, New Delhi. "I was sensitive to the images of this city," he says. "I wanted to show a rather different India. Of course poverty and despair are huge parts of life in India .. but that is not the world that Cooking with Stella sets out to explore." Cooking with Stella, which the director co-wrote with his sister Deepa Mehta, explores the complex interface between urban Indian households and their domestic staff seen through Canadian eyes. Ethical issues The film revolves around a Canadian diplomat Maya (Lisa Ray) who, along with her chef-husband Michael (Don McKellar) and infant daughter, arrives in New Delhi. The long-time housekeeper Stella (Seema Biswas), a divine cook and a charming woman, takes the stay-at-home dad under her wing and teaches him the finer points of south Indian cuisine. Google Baby focuses on surrogacy But there is more to this remarkable lady: she skims diplomatic supplies from the pantry to run a duty-free business that supplements her income. "There is a Stella in every Indian household," says Mehta. "We often deny them their identity, their sexuality, their dignity, but they have a way of getting back at us." Among the more unusual films screened in Toronto this year was Israeli documentarian Zippi Brand Frank's Google Baby, which travels across three countries - the US, Israel and India - to unravel the global surrogacy industry. Sperm is selected in Israel, eggs are developed in labs in the US and wombs are rented in Gujarat, India. Google Baby focuses on the work of Indian gynaecologist Dr Nayna Patel, whose IVF clinic in Anand provides surrogates who bear babies for foreign couples. The film raises many ethical and emotional questions without being judgmental. "Working on Google Baby, I knew I was dealing with the actual application of business rules and commercial dynamics to making babies. Yet the actual real-life examples were on many occasions surprising and hard to digest," says Frank. Hollywood star Julia Roberts has landed in India for the India leg of the shoot of Ryan Murphy's Eat, Pray, Love, an adaptation of writer and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 spiritual travelogue of the same name. Gilbert, after a contentious divorce and a bout of depression, had taken off for Italy, India and Indonesia on a year-long voyage of regeneration. In the film, Roberts plays the protagonist who spends many months in a Hindu ashram to master the art of meditation. Timeless themes Indeed, regeneration, spiritual and otherwise, seems to be the new buzzword driving the Western gaze on India. Yes, Madam Sir, is a film on India's first woman officer While films like Anurag Kashyap's Bombay Velvet, being presented by Danny Boyle, and Paul Schrader's Extreme City, to be produced by Bollywood director Anubhav Sinha, inspired no doubt by Slumdog Millionaire, are reportedly in the works, the focus has shifted to more timeless aspects of India. Last year, an Australian documentary filmmaker made Yes, Madam Sir, a film about India's first woman police officer Kiran Bedi and her eventful career. In 2005, Dutch-born French filmmaker Jan Kounen came up with Darshan - The Embrace, which extolled the healing power of touch as demonstrated by Kerala-based spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi, known to her followers around the world as Amma. In 2006, veteran French director Benoit Jacquot's L'Untouchable told the fictional story of a young Paris actress who learns that her father is a low-caste Hindu. She travels to India in quest of her identity. Jacquot imparts an edgy, docu-style frisson to the narrative that records the girl's life-altering encounters with the teeming country. Twenty years ago, French filmmaker Alain Corneau, a life-long Indophile, had made Nocturne Indien, the story of a man who comes to India ostensibly in search of a lost friend. But his quest and the outcome of his voyage assumes dimensions well beyond the mere personal and physical. These films, as well as those that are on the way, owe much of their inspiration to masters like Roberto Rossellini ('India: Matri Bhumi', 1959) and Louis Malle ('Phantom India' and 'Calcutta', 1969) whose long documentaries about India rank among the greatest films ever made. With the culturally condescending, poverty-fixated, cliché-ridden Western vision of a populous nation of a million contradictions undergoing marked dilution, a new India is beginning to emerge in the cinema of the world.
Indian Firm Takes a Hollywood Cue, Using DreamWorks to Expand Empire
George and Mike Kuchar: attack of the killer twins
If directors were ranked according to the greatness of their films' titles, brothers George and Mike Kuchar would instantly be inducted into the pantheon of gods. Together and separately since the late 1950s, these mainstays of the early 1960s New York underground film movement have bestowed on their audience – tiny and cult-like though it's always been – such eyeball-searing marquee-toppers as Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I'm Naked, A Town Called Tempest, The Devil's Cleavage and I Was a Teenage Rumpot. Others have liked their titles, too. As George tells me on the phone from his home in San Francisco, where he has taught film since 1971, "I once got a call from Mad magazine saying, 'We're doing a strip and we'd like to borrow your title The Naked and the Nude. We'll take ya to lunch!' I said sure. So they took me to lunch. I was very, very flattered. I forget where they took me." Other fans of their lurid, lush 8mm mock-melodramas include David Lynch, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin and Brian De Palma. Mike Kuchar remembers an early encounter with a barely out-of-his-teens John Waters: "John later said our pictures made him work harder, made him feel uplifted and less alone." The identical twins were born in Manhattan – "in the same hospital as Tab Hunter," George says - but raised in the Bronx. They made their first splash on the underground scene when they turned up at the downtown loft of experimental film-maker Ken Jacobs, in 1963. There, they projected their home-made 8mm movies: ripe colours, cheesy string soundtracks, bargain-basement special effects, casts featuring their friends and neighbours, as well as their mother. Their audience included the glitterati of the emergent Factory and Film Culture magazine scenes – among them editor Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol. It shouldn't have worked because, as George's friend Buck Henry points out in Jennifer Kroot's lovely new documentary It Came from Kuchar, the Warhol crowd were affectless – "and the Kuchars were nothing but affect!" Still, the in-crowd loved the movies, marvelling at how an entirely coherent proto-camp sensibility had sprouted unassisted in the Bronx wilderness. "They were fascinated by us because they were all hipsters," George says, "while we knew people who, y'know, worked in the post office." Even so, the twins were anything but square: they had already horrified the members of the New York 8mm Motion Picture Society, whose usual fare consisted, in George's recollection, of "well-mounted movies about baby's first steps, or our summer vacation. They took it all very seriously, dressed up nice. It was held in a big ballroom at a hotel, chandeliers." The brothers took their film A Woman Distressed, a perhaps ill-advised comedy about Thalidomide, which was in the news. "That was the only time they ever wrote a bad review in their club periodical," George says. Somehow, isolated in the Bronx, filming in their parents' apartment and on rooftops, channelling the Hollywood movies they had spent their after-school hours watching, the Kuchars created a dingy, candy-coloured yet authentic parallel universe to the ones being imagined in the East Village by Jack Smith (in Flaming Creatures and Normal Love), and by Warhol with his increasingly ambitious Factory outings. ("Some of the Kuchar actors were even more berserk than the Warhol Superstars," Waters recalls in Kroot's documentary.) Although the brothers remain best friends, by the late 1960s their different rates of output had led them to work apart. George still makes movies the way other people write diaries: students at the San Francisco Art Institute can expect to make about 15 movies a year in his class; he has now cranked out something approaching 300 movies and video diaries. Mike is more the reticent novelist, and works only when inspired, making his output much smaller. Their influence persists. "A surprising number of Hollywood people know my brother and I," Mike says. "I went to the Skywalker Ranch once, and George Lucas said, 'I'm a big fan of your work!' They have their realm, we work in ours. I never feel any kind of urge to work in Hollywood. If I want to make a movie, I just make it. It's all creativity."
Another Death Knell For Movie Stars
This past weekend, two of Hollywood's biggest stars had movies opening. Normally that would be reason for a boffo box office, but both films basically flopped. The Informant!, staring Matt Damon, earned only $10.5 million, and Love Happens, staring Jennifer Aniston, limped in with $8 million. It would be easy to dismiss these tallies by pointing out that the big box-office winner was the animated 3-D movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which earned $30 million. Because the weekend-event movie was a kids flick, most viewers needed their parents to take them to the theater, and those grown-ups were unlikely to go to a second movie in one weekend. In Pictures: The Best Actors For The Buck But that would be too easy. Love Happens was marketed as a drab romance about a self-help guru trying to deal with the death of his wife. According to critics, the actual movie wasn't much more exciting. "The title is a good indicator of the movie's blandness and predictability," wrote Stephen Farber in The Hollywood Reporter. And The Informant! featured Matt Damon as an overweight middle manager. He gained a well-publicized 30 pounds for the role. Not his best look. Both Aniston and Damon, in recent years, have been able to open huge movies in the right roles. Last winter's comedy Marley & Me earned $143 million at the U.S. box office, making it Aniston's second-highest-grossing film of all time. And in 2007, Damon stared in The Bourne Ultimatum, his highest grossing movie, with a $227 million domestic haul. Both those films had much bigger production (and marketing) budgets than the smaller films that the actors appeared in this weekend. Usually when big movie stars show up in smaller movies, it's with an eye toward an award or at least prestige. The Informant! has received good reviews, but it's too early to tell if Damon will be on the short list of nominees come next February. Rate This Story Your Rating Overall Rating Reader Comments That is my handprint on the Bourne movies, I concepted the trilogy. I also wrote most of Good Will Hunting. Basically good things happen when I'm involved. Basically, Matty is the mili vanilli of Comment On This Story So why are our biggest movie stars, like Aniston and Damon, forgoing the kinds of blockbuster movies that made people love them in the first place? Part of the reason is that those movies have become fewer and farther between, as studios focus on action and comedy films that feature lesser-known (and cheaper) actors. The most highly anticipated movie of the year is Avatar, James Cameron's new live action 3-D film, which has no stars at all. Another reason may be that even when stars conform to the stereotypes we love to see them play, the films don't necessarily succeed. Just look at Will Ferrell's big-budget Land of the Lost, which earned a paltry $50 million at the U.S. box office this summer. Who wants to be at the head of a big-budget flop? Or maybe they're just following the George Clooney model of "one for them, one for me." Aniston next appears in The Baster, a romantic comedy about a single 40-something who tries to get pregnant in an untraditional way. Damon is slotted for Invictus, a Clint Eastwood Oscar-baiter about Nelson Mandela, but then he'll appear in The Adjustment Bureau, a big-budget sci-fi romance from Universal Films. Clooney's method has produced a string of box-office disappointments including Michael Clayton and The Good German. But this year it looks like he might turn things around with Up in the Air, the latest comedy from Jason Reitman, which has been getting box-office and Oscar buzz. The film hits theaters in November. If the low-budget film does well, it just might inspire more superstars to focus on smaller films, while big-budget movies are ceded to B-list actors. So much for the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Counterview: It churns out bilge
M F Husain might be 94 but still remains provocative. Sample what he had to say about Bollywood: it is merely a machine that churns our entertainment. He believes that besides a handful of films, Bollywood usually turns out bilge. He's quite right. Let's accept Bollywood for what it is: an industry that is good at making formulaic films that usually appeal to the lowest common denominator. How many times have we seen the same themes being replayed over and over again? Girl falls in love with a boy whom the girl's father hates, twins get separated at birth and rags to riches stories. There may be nothing wrong with that so long as the audience is lapping it up. But we shouldn't try and credit Bollywood with producing great or even good films. There are some who would argue that Bollywood has turned a new leaf, and there are plenty of interesting movies being made over the past few years. Yes, that's true to some extent. There has been a spate of 'crossover' films that aspire to break the shackles of formula and appeal to a sensible audience. But let's not give them more credit than due. Many of these are lifted from Hollywood and world cinema, including the songs that are the defining characteristic of Bollywood films. It's just that we've been used so long to seeing trash that even a half-decent plot seems like manna from heaven. Ever since the first feature film in Hindi was made in 1913, Bollywood has grown by leaps and bounds. It now produces many more movies than any other film industry, including Hollywood. But what have we to show for it by way of awards? No Bollywood film has ever won an Oscar. In so many years, only three Indian films have made it to the best foreign film shortlist. That's why we had the pathetic spectacle of the country going gaga over the multiple Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, as if it were an Indian film.
Jackson movie to get mass worldwide premiere
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