OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

OPM*
Presents – Ram Gopal Varma has a tummy ache


It is a slithering, sultry, whiney bas*ard of a night in the summer of 2006 at Hyderabad. In the dark underbelly of Ram Gopal Varma’s Factory headquarters in the city, RGV has begun to suspect that the biryani he is stuffing himself with isn’t very fresh. ‘Why?’ you ask. Well, the dark innards of his belly have begun to ache. The pain isn’t discomfiting enough to make him stop working, but bad enough to send him regular reminders of its existence.

Why is he at work so late you ask? Ever since his film Company released to a rare combination rave reviews and big box office collections, his company has only churned out one flop after another. His financiers have told him that they will no longer play dice with their money on experimental films that explore just the kind of things that Karan Johar’s films do not.

But just what can RGV do? He can’t make straight-laced romances like Johar does. (Lace he feels, is not for straight men) He is only interested in underbelly stories. Preferably dark underbellies.
Having directed or produced films about the Underbelly of marriage (My Wife’s Murder – Anil Kapoor’s life goes kaput when he whacks an irritating Sunita Krishnamurthy), the Underbelly of a peaceful house (Kaun - Urmila Matondkar does a Tendulkar on everyone visiting her house), the Underbelly of a Ghost (Bhoot – How to reboot your house out of a ghost) and the Underbelly of an Underbelly story (Shiva – A remake of his own film) he still aches to make more experimental films, on the way to his life’s ambition of making a classic on the Underbelly of a Belly Dancer.

But aching bellies be damned, all that the audience seems to want is Karan Johar’s stories that concentrate on the chest..er the heart. Romances, with all their skippety-twirly-go-round delight, bah! From RGV’s point of view it looks like the heart is the only anatomical unit that seems to translate metaphorically to hit films in Bollywood. (On a separate note, the chest and parts under the belly are well covered, or uncovered by the porn industry)

Now with his financiers all but backing out completely, RGV is in trouble.
But he feels energized, as he is at his best as a storywriter/director while he is uncomfortable; like the sort of living-the-story exercise that some actors go through to improve their performances.
Now with things falling apart around and inside him he feels that, finally, cause-effect variables have tossed the coin in his favour and his pièce de résistance will soon be engulfed in a flurry of awards and adulation.
As soon as he comes up with his pièce de résistance, that is.

By the wee hours of the night he figures out a way to make underbelly movies which fetch an initial. (Initial, Box Office terminology - Unlike the postprandial cigarette which is always satisfying and more like post coitus analysis which could go either way)
Remake a classic and season it with underbelly sauce! The Factory engine goes into overdrive to decide which classic Bollywood film to remake.

After considering films like Mughal-e-azam (rejected as Dilip Kumar refuses to play Akbar), Mr. India (rejected as Anil Kapoor refuses to play Mogambo) and Baap Numbri toh Beta dus numbri (rejected as Shakti Kapoor refuses to play, except on a couch), the Factory finalises on Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay after a call to Amitabh Bachchan.
Amitabh will play Gabbar Singh. And ensure an initial.

RGV works day and night, stuffing himself with umpteen biryanis-gone-wrong, firing up his innards to complete a masalafied script for the New Sholay. He will have Malayalam superstar Mohanlal play a Thakur equivalent, mouthing immortal lines in exquisitely Malayalam flavoured Hindi. Lines like “Loehhaa geram hei, maar tho hataudah”! Sushmita Sen will play Radha the widow, but will dress in black and will want Gabbar to hang as much as Thakur does and Saambha doesn’t, thus making her a vengeful modern day spiderwoman, albeit of the black widow kind.
He gets to the place where Ajay Devgan’s Veeru is telling Basanti “Basanti, in kutton ke samne salsa mat karna” while Amitabh’s Gabbar is laughing at his bad dialogue delivery when RGV gets a notice from Ramesh Sippy’s office saying that none of the names from the original can be used in his remake.
The uncomfortable setback rejuvenates RGV who is tired of Amitabh’s silly Gabbar-grin and he gets down to reworking the script again.

Dhano the horse tranforms into an auto called Laila with low horsepower and Hema Malini’s Basanti becomes a tepid Ghungroo played by one of RGV’s Urmila-clone muses. Veeru becomes Heero (???!!?) and Jai becomes Raj (a tribute to SRK’s loverboy roles). Thakur becomes Narasimha, an encounter cop whose fingers are chopped off by Gabbar(now Babban Singh), who can’t get over the fact that he can’t give anyone the middle finger in Bombay’s peak hour traffic.

Will RGV, who has renamed the movie to echo his perennial stomach condition succeed in breaking his underbelly jinx in the same week that Bhojpuri superstar Ravi Kissen releases his Ravi Kissen ke Jhaag (soapva banaike ghar ley jae)

Find out when you watch RGV’s Aag releasing tomorrow. But don’t forget to carry some ENO.

* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.

Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.

OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

OPM*
Presents - India’s Temple of Doom? OR Why I’d rather believe in Harry Potter


The curious case of the UPA’s Presidential candidate, Pratibha Patil, has me in a state of shock.
It isn’t just the normal allegations of fraud, loan defaults and the odd linkage to a serious crime, common to most Indian politicians, which we, as a public, are now used to. Well, used to, like we can digest Sunil Shetty singing ‘Hai Hukku Hai Hukku Hai Hai’ to some awfully co-ordinated limb flailing or Chiranjeevi (in tight pants and shiny shirt) with Radhika/Roja/Rambha (shiny towel wrapped around head) singing and dancing to ‘Jammakku Thaa, Kassakku rroo’; i.e. we can live with it, but not understand it for the life of us.
No, coming from, possibly, India’s next President, it is other things she has to say that shock me.
Her unadulterated silliness over the purdah system and the Mughal’s with its clarifications and retractions and on the need for compulsory sterilisation for those with ‘hereditary disease’ are merely politically incorrect starters in the main course of National embarrassment that her Presidential speeches will guarantee to serve. And then there is the matter of her chats with a dead God man of the Brahma Kumaris sect at Mount Abu in Rajasthan. With a President who chats with dead people, India is sure to scale new heights as a tourist haunt for foreigners who want a piece of the mumbo-jumbo ‘Indiana’s Jones and Temple of Doom’ India. Expect spectacular seven-course-meal botch-ups in the coming years.

Unfortunately, as seen with said Patil, the more enlightened aspects of Hinduism and our ‘culture’ are lost on most of its practitioners. Our legacy is an inexplicable set of rituals and ’knowledge’ of our texts, mostly from televised versions, as with the Mahabharata and Ramayana. It seems that our culture and history are being redefined by this new half-baked knowledge in its practitioners and the world press. With Patil as first citizen, misinformed worldviews that associate India and Hinduism to Occult and other gobbledegook will only get exaggerated.

With this as background, in the week the new Harry Potter movie is hitting screens, it has been reported that Shekhar Kapur and Deepak Chopra have ambitious plans of translating Indian Epics onto the medium of film. These movies will be on the scale of an LOTR at a fraction of the production cost. The movies, if and when they are made, will be termed ‘Mythological’. There is an astonishing insight here (yes, astonishing because this column is making claims to enlightened thought, however dim the enlightenment), but first, some background.
The word Mythology (from Greek ‘mythos’, meaning a narrative, and ‘logos’, meaning speech or argument) literally means the oral retelling of myths – stories that a particular culture believes to be true that use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity. This oral retelling was particularly tough, considering the sheer number of stories that mankind developed in the absence of television (a much more serious issue that the absence of God). It was made even tougher as the tape recorder had not been invented, thus ensuring that every person with a story to tell (which was almost everyone), was left pressed for time. (This explains why the advent of the tape recorder coincided with the population explosion, as everyone had better uses to put their oral skills to)
In modern usage, "mythology" is the body of myths from a particular culture or religion (as in Greek mythology or Indian Mythology).
But it isn’t that simple because the popular and common meaning of the English word “Myth” is that of a rumour, misconception or mistaken belief. This is in marked contrast to the meaning "stories of deep cultural or spiritual significance".
I have observed (however oxymoronically) that the stories and mythologies of pantheistic faiths such as Hinduism or faiths of the ancient Greeks and Romans etc, when translated to film or other media are always termed ‘Mythological’ by the foreign press while one never hears terms like Christian or Islamic mythology. And I suspect this is because the term ‘mythology’ today alludes to the contextually undesirable modern meaning of ‘Myth’.

Of course, when Deepak and Shekhar’s mythological releases, we will see that they have adopted the Mahabharata to suit today’s deep cultural and spiritual ideas.
For instance, the Pandava’s will be less than ideal blokes, thus translating them to modern times. Examples:
Yudhishtira will never speak a lie, except when he really needs to, usually while gambling.
Bheema will pay for his excessive eating and will have to go on GM and Atkin diets regularly.
Arjuna will be shown to be the crybaby he really is.
Nakula and Sahadeva will resent being clubbed together always and reinvent themselves as popular DJs Now-cool and Dev.

Yes the five Pandavas will still share a single wife, but for reasons that are deeply culturally rooted. Kunti, having had the luxury of watching TV soaps all day will realize the deeply cultural TV soap truth that families go nuclear because of daughter-in-laws. For this reason, she insists that her sons share one wife. (Other than the fact that the modern version is set in Chandigarh, where the Female sex ratio has fallen to 790)

Amidst such modern day contexts (some positive, such as Bheeshma having no problem fighting Shikhandi, in these days of gay rights) I suspect many of us will see the merit of seeing “culture” as something that is not constant, something that is best as it evolves (and, *wink*, brings with it more national holidays)
For instance, feasting on Bertie Bott’s Every Flavoured beans is a better way to spend your old age than becoming an ascetic with the aspiration of an afterlife spent in sterile heaven along with Yudhishtira, Harischandra and other moral but boring denizens of that supposed space.
This is why I’d rather believe in Harry Potter than any mono or pantheistic idea of religion, afterlife, God, UFO’s or 72 Virginians in heaven.


* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.

OPM*
Presents – Aap ka Common Nouns


The Internet has made the world a much smaller place, though Stephen Hawkins says that it only appears so, as he has it from reliable scientists like himself that the Universe all around is actually expanding, which, come to think of it, explains my growing girth. Leaving that expansive topic aside, the Internet is only making the world a much smaller place, metaphorically. So there is no danger of your house shrinking and bringing untold losses to your real estate portfolio. And even if there appears to be such catastrophe in offing because of a shrinking world, it is easily set off by the expansion of the universe.
This expansion-shrinkage is a terribly confusing business and experts in the field including the world’s best Shrinks and Sexologists gather every year to discuss shrinkage and enlargement in a sterile space (Space is often sterile. If you are a man, you know how sterile it can get when she asks you for space).
I decided to use the Internet’s metaphorical powers to find some school and college friends I have lost touch with over the years. After numerous hours of downloading porn, er, searching for them using tools like search engines, social networking sites and blogs I had more or less given up when, by quirky probability I chanced on my friend Kushal Pande’s blog. Only, he had changed his name to Koolshal Pondy and it took me a while to figure out that it was indeed, my friend. Why had he changed his name? Numerology.
What is numerology? Numerology is any of many systems or beliefs in a mystical relationship between numbers and physical objects or living things. This goes beyond the physical relationship that young schoolchildren associate with bowel movements. Yes. Actually. And the damned ‘science’ is driving me insane because of Numerological name alterations. I have realized, to my utter dismay, that forty percent of my friends and several relatives have or are considering changing their names after visiting a numerology consultant (just like Management Consultants, but with other bullsh**)
Numerology, I found, is a counteractive force against the metaphorical powers of the Internet, because said powers are pretty useless without the right data. To illustrate: When Gopal becomes Sugopalen and Vivek, Vivacuous the original names are worth nothing to a search engine.
Post these debacles and being aware of the phenomenon (no, not the Malayalee called Pheno Menon) I have observed a dangerous trend of numerology creeping into language and spelling.
OPM this week deals with a movie that has been similarly affected, Himesh Resham-Miya’s debut, Aap Kaa Surroor – The Moviee, The Real Luv Storiee.

Himesh’s friend, Prashant Chadda who is also responsible for his baseball cap, trench coat and big buckle belt wardrobe malfunction, er, look directs him in this abominably named motion picture. With words that look like they have been in an accident involving mangled steel and a shipment of Oxford Press dictionaries appearing in mainstream media titles, one despairs about a day where a future generation will abandon Spelling as a course and all words will become common nouns. This only magnifies my worries about the future of the Language; worries that have been around since I was introduced to the Sms Generation and Compulsory Regional Language in school with English as an option.
The advent of Himesh Resham-Miya as a film actor overshadows such worries for now, though. I am filled with a mixture of pale hope and indelible dread because of what Himesh- as- movie star throws our collective way. An explanation is in order.

Let us start at the beginning, which is where we should begin considering that Flashback or flashing any other portion is illegal under the Immoral Traffic Act.
Primarily a music director, Himesh Resham-Miya later became the phenomenon (no, not the Malayalee called Pheno Menon) he is for his vocals, which have a distinctive high-pitched nasal twang. Over the last year Himesh’s, unfortunately prolific, musical output has caused my senses untold grief on the Tele and the Radio, in auto rickshaws and from baraat bands (baraat: different from Borat, the movie, but often as grotesquely funny, when relatives of all sizes decide to shake, nay, flail their limbs in joy, allegedly dancing).
Unexpected and inexplicable success as a singer having gone to his head (and symbolically having stayed there as his trademark cap), Himesh now tries his hand, and the rest of himself (he will try his Hand alone, later, on a Puppet show) at being an actor.
Partly based on Himesh’s own life, the movie opens to a Utopian world where Himesh is being thrown out of music directors’ offices, where he is looking for work.
On being thrown out he lands on a terribly plain fifteen-year-old child artiste called Hansika Motwani, injuring her badly and worse, breaking her set of Talking Barbie and Ken Watanabe in Japanese Embrace. The rest of the story involves Himesh playing the forlorn lover and trying to win the minor’s affection by fixing her Talking Barbie set. In frustration he records himself in a squeaky falsetto to substitute Barbie’s talkie microchip. Hansika falls in love with him immediately, injuring herself again trying to break the fall. A desperate and partially deaf Music Director finds the recording and gives him a singer’s job, thus turning him into a huge success before the night is out.
Why should you see the movie? Himesh reveals why he always wears a cap, and it is not a plug for a hair care/growth brand.
Why do I have pale hope when I behold Himesh, the actor? I hope this movie is a blockbuster and he stops singing. It is more likely though, that he’ll both sing and act. That explains the Indelible Dread, huh?


* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

OPM*
Presents – Ocean’s Thirteenth Year

Ocean's Thirteen, a film directed by Stephen Soderbergh, starring an ensemble cast led by George Clooney, Al Pacino, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt is set to release tomorrow. The third in the franchise that started with Ocean’s Eleven has spurred discussions on varied topics including Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both self same people in India, their adopted kids etc, for months now. Apologetic mentions of the movie are included sometimes when these two very popular stars are photographed at locations like Pune, Cannes and their backyard. (Ex: Brad and Jolie spotted for the 13th time on the Pacific Ocean coastline, Brangelina to name 13th adoption Ocean)
Ocean’s Thirteen is the third in the Soderbergh series following the 2004 sequel Ocean's Twelve of the 2001 picture Ocean's Eleven, a remake of the 1960 Rat Pack film Ocean's Eleven (being a Rat Pack film all the stars consequently die of poisoning. Yes, rat poison) which was itself highly influenced by Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (French, literally, ‘The Flambeur of Bob’ where several Englishmen spend hours, bobbing up and down, agonizing over what the hell a Flambeur is. No, they don’t find out)
After the hugely successful run of the first two movies, Soderbergh realized that though heist movies (Try: Jules Dassin’s Rififi, Kubrick’s The Killing, George Hill’s The Sting and Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon) would always have audiences, the arithmetic progression (with common difference 1) of characters and numerical suffixes in film name could not last for very long.
For example, in due course, when the 212th movie in the franchise is in the making it will be decidedly tough to fit in 212 different characters with as many sub plots into a 2-hour movie. Or for instance, the problems Ocean’s 666 will face, being condemned by religious groups as an act of Satan. If that isn’t convincing enough, think of some far future when half the world’s population will have to play lead roles in Oceans Three Billion Ninety Three Million Nine hundred Thousand Four hundred and Eighty Six? This arithmetic progression of characters, Soderbergh realized, was a very dangerous thing. Imagine the budgets he would have to organize! And the number of Vanity Vans!

Taking this into account, the filmmaker decided to put a new spin on the numeric in the nomenclature, using the numeric to denote something other than a character addition. Thus, Ocean’s Thirteen is about the teenage years of our heisting protagonists. There are rumours that the next film in the Ocean franchise will be Ocean’s Sixty Nine, the terribly interesting plot details for which are available on the Internet as an Oral clip.

Onwards to the movie releasing this week though – Ocean’s Thirteenth Year.

The movie begins with a pleasing close-up (particularly pleasing for the men folk in the audience to note that young George was a really ugly young boy, what with years of gushing from women about Clooney’s looks) of a 13-year-old Danny Ocean, played by a young George Clooney. All the other boys including Pitt, Damon and Andy Garcia join him, each competing for the years Most Annoying Child on Screen award. It turns out that all the kids are juvenile delinquents with a fetish for extra candy (sweets and toffees, not a girl named Candy. Candy, the girl, makes an appearance in Ocean’s Sixty Nine, as do some other interesting fetishes. My lips are sealed though! Anyway 13 isn’t that kind of movie. Kids can watch it, especially illegally)
Yeah, so the kids want extra candy and since this is a heist film, decide to steal it from the Candy Shop run by a 60-year-old failed white singer called 50 Cents for the Candy Bar (played by Al Pacino), who keeps lamenting his failed career as a hip-hop musician blaming his arthritis ridden hips for impeding his hopping.

What follows plays out like a sad rendition of ‘How much is that Doggie in the window?’ repeated over and over. Let me know if you liked the movie. Maybe I’ll send you some Candy.



* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

31 May 2007 - Pirates III

OPM*
Presents – Poirots of the Caribbean

I have had it with Viagra Spam! Every day people called Patricia Webbe, Doco Loco and Porsche Mary send me email about how I can safely buy the performance-enhancing drug cheap, in just a few minutes, over the Internet. Since I am a pretty two-dimensional person (as you’ve all noticed I’m severely lacking in the third dimension – Depth) with severe low esteem, Viagra Spam has had me worrying about whether people know something I haven’t realized yet. I have spent many hours this past week analysing several rather embarrassing things at an anthropological level, involving complex physical phenomena such as levers and fulcrum. After spending several afternoons in despair, I was brought some cheer when it came to my notice that my favourite movie franchise would release its third instalment this week. Yes, Captain Jack and his friends are coming to your neighbourhood, in the summer’s most awaited movie: Pirates of the Caribbean – At Wit’s end.

This week’s OPM takes a look at what the movie promises. We will need a little background info to begin with –

As the second instalment of the franchise was not as well received as the first movie, the studio decided that they needed to change the plot substantially to revive interest in Captain Jack Sparrow and his cohorts. To this end they ran a workshop in the Caribbean (around the same time the Cricket Worldcup was being played there) to rework the script for the third movie. After a tremendous amount of waxing and waning, not to mention some amount of mooning by 3 sexually repressed writers (yes, most of us are afflicted), inspiration hit them when the Woolmer murder flew into the resulting public outrage, across media everywhere. Why not turn the third movie into a whodunit? Due to the inexperience of their writers in writing for the genre they decided to turn to the grand dame of mystery, Agatha Christie and her civilian gendarme protagonists, for help. The intricate universe of characters from Agatha Christie’s books sets up the basis for the movie’s plot, also borrowing heavily from her 1964 publication, A Caribbean Mystery.

The suitably renamed Poirots of the Caribbean sees Johnny Depp reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow, but with a psychodynamic twist that would make Freud proud. Captain Jack keeps his name, but inhibiting him, somewhere between his Id and Super ego, is Dame Christie’s well-loved Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot (pronounced Hercule, as in Ridicule, Poirot as in Poor Rot) No, I don’t believe in silent alphabets. I say, call a spade a spade, dammit!

Jack Sparrow is made resplendent as Depp meshes Captain Jack’s irrepressible irresponsibility with Poirot’s droll wit, Jack’s effeminate prancing with Poirot’s haute-couture French suits and Jack’s cavalier womanising with Poirot’s opinion of Miss Lemon.
Johnny Depp puts on several kilos and goes bald to play this memorable character, especially with his anagrammatic bon mots and tongue in cheek humour that causes severe embarrassment to several Victorian women as it usually involves his tongue in someone else’s cheeks.

Keira Knightley plays Miss Marple; a thin sickly girl who misses her friend called Marple sorely and is determined to be in an adventure to find her. Her curiously eponymous character is the object of Inspector Japp’s affections, who consequently proceeds to inspect her at every given opportunity. (Orlando Bloom, a famous flowering tree from the city of Orlando FL plays Inspector Japp) Having to contend with Japp at every step Captain Jack tries to make the best of the situation by quoting the anagram: Menage a trois is an orgies team. (not that this works, but life goes on as Jack continues to savour the joys of savium with Miss Marple!)
To this eclectic mix is thrown in Geoffrey Rush, playing a wretched version of Sherlock Holmes who sports a monkey called Dr.Watson (a brilliant bit of evolutionary reversal that this character poses: a monkeying doctor or a doctored monkey?) on his shoulder.
The villain of the piece, a cross between Moriarty and a Chinese villain called Ichi the Killer is played by Chow Yun Fat (as a result of which, he is very obese)

It turns out that every character ends up on a ship sailing to Europe from the Caribbean, for reasons of their own. Captain Jack is hoping to display some tongue-in-cheek humour for Miss Marple’s benefit when Japp is not inspecting her. Sherlock is onboard, as someone has fooled his monkey into believing that the boat is sailing to a Banana Republic. Chow Yun Fat is trying to lose weight by being the solitary oarsman for the ship.

Things go nutty, when halfway into the Atlantic Ocean; Chow Yun Fat discovers that all the rowing has made him extremely fit. He stops rowing and a row erupts among the passengers.

What will happen as the ocean churns unhappily around this stationary ship and Captain Jack goes on a roll with his pithy anagrams (Dual gender is general dud, Humble arrogance is changeable rumor etc), trying to figure out who will row the boat? Go watch the movie to find out!



* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release