_Luck By Chance_

It's time to grade a stack of godawful papers. That's why I'm here.

I saw Luck by Chance today, and am terrifically happy that I did. Aside from the cameos, and my internal squeal of "Oooooooh! It's ______________" (fill in the blank with the names of Aamir Khan, Akshaye Khanna, Shahrukh Khan (insert sound of fluttering sighs), Rani Mukherjee, John Abraham, Abhishek Bachchan, Vivek Oberoi, etc.), and the pride that I (a white woman from the suburbs of a medium U.S. city now living in a smaller city) am probably more able to name more current Indian actors than American ones, I am glad to have seen the movie because it was a thought-provoking one.

I tend to doubt that Bollywood is best positioned to critique Bollywood, but there are not enough drugs on planet Earth to make me head to the American versions of People and Entertainment Weekly magazines for information. Wall Street Journal? Yawn. As far as I'm concerned, Hollywood and Bollywood can stay away from each other forever if Saawariya is any indication of what offspring the pairing is likely to produce. Does Slumdog Millionaire (which I loved and will see again) count as a "mixed marriage" of Hollywood and Bollywood if the director is a Brit?

The critiques of less-than-admirable Bollywood practices were more straightforward than snarky, and with a dash of compassion where others might be tempted to go for pure cynicism. (I just read that the director, Zoya Akhtar, is Farhan Aktar's sister, and this is her first movie as director---WOW! Are there lots of women directing movies in India? I tend to think not, but there's a lot I don't know.)

Farhan Aktar is remarkable; I love Dil Chahta Hai to distraction, which he directed and for which he wrote the screenplay, dialogue, and shared the story credits. After I saw Rock On!, a movie that I liked a great deal, I found out that he not only played the lead role, he was the producer, wrote the dialogue, and wrote and sang the songs. Does the man sleep? Perhaps excellence and insomnia run in the family. It almost hurts to look at him, he's so cute, but he's awfully young. He's 35, playing a 25-year-old.

Konkona Sen Sharma is stellar. She's got to be brilliant, as evidenced by her choosing and playing such a wide variety of roles in good movies; how else she can be such a talented actor and still play a mediocre one, as she has done in Luck by Chance and in Aaja Nachle? The two characters are quite different, too. She also wins a huge star on the sidewalk of my heart for actually appearing to be Indian without apology, rather than looking like some of my Italian-American relatives. I wish Bollywood was not so colorstruck. People are supposed to be a variety of colors, especially in South Asia. Anyway, she is lovely. If I were higher on the Kinsey scale...

Juhi Chawla would also have me sighing a lot. (If you're a bad typist, type her first name with your right hand. It's fun.) Maybe it's just me, but Bollywood is creating more roles for female actors over 30 that don't rely solely on Hindustani Helicoptor Maa-ji and Flaky Aunty-ji stereotypes. I hope this movie helps the industry think about the wisdom of discarding some amazing performers who have decades of good work ahead of them.

There's more, but the Internet connection is about to die at the coffeeshop, which really should be one word, regardless of what Webster says.

Waiting in the Wings I

Happy Birthday, Sarah!

Neither of my readers will be surprised to discover that I have had two posts mostly written but had not finished them nor put them here. I'll spare you the excuses. Here's the first, which includes an update.

The Yearbook Time Warp and Madhuri Dixit

I don’t pretend to understand the psychological processes at work, but when I look at a photograph that was taken of people who were born before about 1950, they almost always appear to be older than I am now, even if they were 18 at the time. The student pictures in a 1945 high school yearbook are of people who look older to me than my own 47-year-old face. Maybe it’s the hairstyles or eyeglasses, which I mentally transpose onto the members of the class of ’45 whom I see in the grocery store. Maybe it’s the style of photography.

Every now and then, though, I look at a person and make the same error. I usually forget that Anil Kapoor is only a year older than I am; in my mind he is another half-generation out. Maybe his staid character in Bewafaa fooled me into thinking he was older. Madhuri Dixit, whom I adore, is another such case. I first saw her in Devdas, and perhaps the first image of her looked as if it were from an old movie. Maybe it's because she appears neither underfed nor plastic surgeried and made-up beyond recognition, so I assumed she was from a time that saw beauty differently. (She is a gorgeous woman and doesn’t seem to work at it, which always impresses me. I get the feeling that she hops out the shower looking stunning.) But I kept being surprised that she was Shahrukh Khan’s (secondary) love interest, because she had registered in my brain as being one generation older than his character.

Shahrukh Khan was born almost exactly five years after I was, and Madhuri Dixit is another year-and-a-half younger. I don’t really have a good excuse.


Bad hair years

OK, so I’m usually clever enough to get out of my own way, but several weeks ago, in a local Bollywood palace, I saw a DVD entitled Dard-e-Disco: Best of Shahrukh Khan, and promptly lost my mind. Maybe it as the striped AND polka-dotted shirt coupled with sideburns. Maybe it was the blurb “BEST VISION WHICH U NEVER SEEN BEFORE” running around the box. Maybe it was the picture of a bare-chested, kneeling SRK with his hair blowing back. (Sorry, I can't bring myself to search the 28,203 pictures of SRK that Yahoo! images has listed to find that particular image. Try this or this or this instead. sigh!) Whatever was to blame, the mental maelstrom was so powerful that it temporarily washed away my aversion to bootlegged DVDs and my conviction that if I want Bollywood to be an honest business, I need to deal with it honestly, and I didn’t even check to see if it was a legitimate release.

Readers, I bought it.

It includes 65 song sequences, only two of which are from movies I had not seen (Shakti and Koyla). I have been watching in bits and pieces, and on the day I started this post, I saw “Dekha Tujhe To” from Koyla. In it, SRK and Madhuri Dixit dance around a mountain top, but it is difficult to actually see them. Look at the video, and see what distracted me.

I am trying to determine which are buried under more padding: Shahrukh Khan’s shoulders or Madhuri Dixit’s breasts. Late 80s style at its worst. Don’t ask me about the mullet, or I may cry.

I’ve seen Koyla since, and I liked it, for the most part. But I made the mistake of discovering that the movie was not made in the 80s, as I had assumed; its release date is said to be 1997. Too early for retro kitsch, too late for irony, no historical markers necessary---so what the hell were they thinking? I was almost embarrassed in one scene when all of Madhuri was lying down except for her breasts, which formed oddities never before created by biology nor architecture. (And I thought of the scene in Shashi Tharoor's Great Indian Novel in which our hero sneaks a peek at the breasts of his favorite Bollyood diva only to discover what he had seen was obviously padding. What kind of movie and sexual naivete could have kept him from knowing?)

I have an ally at the local Bollywood palace who has been suggesting late 1970s Amitabh Bachchan movies, and seeing his lean self in drag-on-the-ground bell-bottoms makes it clear why some people refer to him as Daddy Long-Legs. He must have a 48" inseam. Whether he's moralizing or clowning around, he's great fun, too! Badly choreographed (dishoom, dishoom!) fight scenes and the fact that he can't dance notwithstanding, I am liking these older movies.

So, now that I'm learning a little Bollywood history, maybe I can figure out how to count and estimate people's ages. Or figure out how old I am. A case could be made that that is the core problem.

Rethinking Kareena Kapoor

I don't know why this is news, but it is. It surprises me that I don't hate Kareena Kapoor. I am assessing her here as an actor; she may well be a terrific human being.

I had seen her in my first for-real Bollywood movie, Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon. (Why I returned for more, I don't know. Well, I do, but I'll save that story for another time.) Then I saw Bewafaa, which I mostly liked, even though she didn't thrill me. After this, I think I saw others. By the time I saw Omkara, I had seen her enough to be surprised. "Hey! I don't hate her in this!"

In Don, she was a vapid attempt at eye-candy, which can happen to lots of women in movies. Then I saw Chup Chup Ke, in which she played a young woman who was, inexplicably, mute. "Ugh," I thought, and worse. Who thought that someone could be a worse actor when silent than when speaking?* I avoided everything she was in, even when her co-star was one of my favorites. I said vile things under my breath while refusing to rent a large number of movies.

Then I saw Jab We Met. My inner straight woman 25-year-old just adores Shahid Kapoor. (My inner 25-year-old gay man wants John Abraham in the worst way.) "Hey," I thought. "She's not thoroughly annoying in this!" which was nearly high praise at that point.

I forgot about that, then saw Asoka this last weekend. While I am not prepared to cut her the same slack I do Preity Zinta, whom I like even when she's bad, or Juhi Chawla or Rani Mukerji or Kajol or Sushmita Sen, whom I would continue to wildly adore even if they were dreadful, I was impressed. She carried a challenging role with guts and brains.

I know I run the risk here of appearing far too superficial to do myself or anyone else any good, but since I may be the only one who ever reads this, I think I've figured out one thing I have disliked about Kareena Kapoor. Whoever does her makeup often draws too much attention to her mouth and makes her eyes too close together. She sometimes reminds me of Karen Black, armed with pounds of lethal lip gloss. It hurts my feelings. I want to see women in movies and real life who have more substance and less frou-frou shit. When Kareena Kapoor is not preceded onto the set by petroleum products carefully applied with a backhoe, I get to focus more on her acting, which can be OK.

But please don't ask me about Karisma.




*It amazes me. The same industry that accepts and even loves Hrithik's thumbs deals so badly with other atypical health conditions by

• blatantly ignoring the realities of blindness (most blind people in Bollywood movies that I have seen, and not just those that are faking blindness, can not get out of a room once they have entered it unless they are assisted by someone sighted, flail their arms and heads around as if suffering psychotic episodes (don't get me started on Black), and can not tell where a speaker's voice originates) and
• not requiring actors to limp on the same leg consistently during one movie and
• making mental illnesses include lots of drooling, unless the person is a lovely young woman.

Use your words, _Dil Se_

Believe me when I say there will be plot spoilers ahead. I'll give another warning when I get closer. If you haven't seen Dil Se and want to see it without knowing what I think of it, and without knowing important points of the plot, stop when you see "PLOT SPOILERS IMMEDIATELY AHEAD."

When I taught day care a billion years ago, wee ones were told, "Use your words" in the Brady Bunch-est tones of voice. We did it as a way of encouraging them to say things like, "Hey, Phil, that's my fucking Play-doh!" rather than using copies of Goodnight Moon in a way that would make certain unnamed intelligence agencies envious.

It didn't always work, but I can get with the idea. I'm a word person.

It always pisses me off in (non-Indian) movies when kisses are used to answer questions. The music and lighting tell me that I am supposed to interpret these responses as being terribly romantic. "Do you love me?" Smooch. "Do you have to go?" Smooch. "Will you marry me?" Smooch. "You're pregnant?" Smooch. "What's our ZIP code?" Smooch.

Please. The only question a kiss ever answered, in the history of the world, is this one: "Will you kiss me?" (OK, it may also answer the question, "What did you have for lunch?" but that rarely is a major point of plot development. And, OK, escape artists were said to receive the key to their locks in a kiss from their wives or girlfriends just before being locked in a barrel and sent over the falls, so perhaps the question answered there is, "Are we going to make a mint from this crowd or are you aiming for wealthy widowhood?")

All this is a long way around to saying that I didn't understand Dil Se (From the Heart) when I first saw it. I bought it in the fall's Bollywood Buying Binge, which required several explanations to people who receive packages at the front office at work that "Eros Entertainment" sells Bollywood movies, which usually don't include kissing, let alone anything steamier. (The fact that the announcer pronounces it as "ehr-OSS" and identifies the company as being named after "the goddess of love" cracks me up irreparably, I fear.)

It didn't help that it took me five or six days to watch the movie, in shifts. I don't remember why; I tend to have a better attention span for movies, especially those with Shah Rukh Khan (sigh), for reasons I will have to take up in other posts.

PLOT SPOILERS IMMEDIATELY AHEAD:

When I saw Dil Se in the fall, I wanted words. I couldn't understand why these two characters liked each other at all. He was obsessed with her with very little encouragement; she was distant, pouty, clingy, alternately indecisive and aggressive. She was Doctor Doolittle's pushmepullyou, an animal that only I seem to recall from the book, even though I don't think I ever read it. It's a two-headed llama-like mammal. (That could be bad for knitters; with no flanks, there's less acreage for growing yarn.) When the beastie wants to move, it tries to go in two directions at once. I don't find pushmepullyou people very enticing as potential partners, and I don't understand people who do.

I have had the Dil Se soundtrack in my car for weeks, alternating with Saathiya. A.R. Rahman is brilliant. The music does a fine job of moving the characters into position as soulmates, but the rest of the movie does not.

• Part of this is because, as I said before, I need characters to use words, and most of the questions in Dil Se, by design, go unanswered.
• Part of this is because most of the romantic connection between the characters is established in fantasy sequences; in their real lives, most of their communication is done with varying shades of irritation. She wants him to go away, he wants her to explain why she holds him off.
• Part of this is because they communicate so much with eyebrows.

Shah Rukh Khan's eyebrows are just about trilingual. When I first developed my embarrassingly prepubescent Tiger Beat-worthy cinematic crush on him, I set about collecting pictures of him from the Internet. I couldn't figure out why none of them were adequate. I realized that one of the things I like about his acting is that his face is constantly in motion, acting and reacting to the situation his character faces. That means that still pictures will rarely capture the emotion that he exudes. This may well be what makes some people dislike him as an actor.

Monisha Koirala has expressive eyebrows, too, of the sort that would inspire poetry about small frightened birds and elegant butterflies and stuff. Some people would want to protect her, but after a while, I was thinking of medication for PTSD.

Now, I can get with eyebrows. I am very glad to have two. One arches menacingly, flirtatiously, full of question and caution and wry humor, as the situation requires. But my damned eyebrows can't be expected to carry a novel.

"Satrangi Re" ("[You] of the Many Colors," according to Bollywhat?) is one of my favorite Bollywood songs. The sequence illustrates difficulties in showing the struggle of the characters who are coming to terms with their love for each other. It's a mixed bag. The song includes some of the sexiest vocals (there's an alto!), but the choreography is, for the most part, pedestrian. (Perhaps after the amazing "Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya" Farah Khan got exhausted and farmed out this bit to her assistants.)

The staging is excellent, and there are a few good parts, but there are not many inspired dance moves in this sequence. The section in which the characters are in one costume, alternately adoring their metaphorically sexual connection, which is not the least bit foul, and then struggling to move apart, is great. I also love the section that's played backwards. It lends an otherworldly David Lynch-like air to the swirling garments without too many weird reminders of lines such as, "Sometimes my elbows bend backwards," or whatever it was that Laura Palmer said. The "Lovers' Pieta in the Snow" bit is lovely. But these are thirty-second stagings, not dance.

There are times when the characters' romantic conflicts get played out in this dance sequence with inadvertently comic results. The choreography and costume departments conspired on a "hearts in bondage" trope, a decidedly non-erotic scene, in which Monisha Koirala is wrapped in the stern lines from the QE2 and does a hobbled little sideways Charlie Chaplin-esque dance. What possessed them, I just don't know. In the scene where she is wearing a purple dress and shawl, the wind gets the better of her, and the lack of choreography is tangible.

This movie also includes a line that may work a lot better in Hindi, but in English subtitles, it's sadsadsad. At one point, he has been beaten up by her comrades (for the second(?) third(?) time) , and he calls her on the phone, asking, "Don't you feel our love is more important than terrorism?"

But I knew there was more there than I could see the first time, so I watched the movie again. And this time, I got it. These characters can't say what they mean. He, as a journalist, needs words to understand and connect, but he'll settle for the nonverbals because he needs something in his life that is not business. She relies more on gestures and action because she has had her words stolen from her by violence, but at the end she will settle for his words because they are more comforting, more personal than the words of her comrades in violent revolution. In the last scene, just before the explosive ending, she accepts his words as he accepts her actions.

And though I can not accept double suicide as the height of romance, within the context of this movie, these characters, I get it.

What Would Rani Mukerji Knit?

Welcome to my new blog. The title of today's post is the old working name for the entire blog; fortunately, a friend helped me see reason. (Thanks, Kelly!) Bollywool is a little less obscure. It is a combination of Bollywood (itself a blend of Hollywood and Bombay, the old name for Mumbai, one of the movie-making capitals of India) and wool, and so is my life, once I have left work and am not in a coffee shop.

Who is Rani Mukerji, a.k.a. Rani Mukherjee? She's a remarkable actor whom I had mistaken for a half-witted ass-shaker until I saw her gutsy performance in Veer-Zaara a second time. Here's a web site.

My answer to the question of what she would knit is this, which is one of the projects I've got on the needles. She would most likely knit it as a wrap, as I am doing, by multiplying the cast-on number by three. Being a woman of glamour, she might knit it in hand-painted silk. Because I am a vegetarian who gets irreparably gacked out by the thought of obtaining fiber by boiling wee beasties alive in their cocoons, I am knitting it in this alpaca yarn (yuuuuuuuuuum) in black. I even gave in to the urge to buy Addi Turbos, the Maseratis of knitting needles. I was hesitant to use them because I have little tolerance for high-pitched noises, especially metallic ones, but I'm pleased with how quiet they are and how nicely the pointed tips help with this fine yarn being knit on big needles (US 10.5, 6.5mm, UK size 3).

Sadly, my knitting attention has been hijacked, mostly by the sizeable stash my mother bestowed upon me when I visited my folks in July. Said stash, which includes mostly solid-color wool yarn and some odd colors of acrylic, weighs in at several paper bags and a couple of boxes, and is probably 35-40 years old. Fortunately, it's permanently moth-proofed. I've got two red and gray striped hats going, waiting for me to locate an unoccupied set of dpns so that I can finish the tops. I've also been knitting small log cabin blankets (from this book) for the local animal shelter from the Red Heart acrylic yarn that's from a time when I had less money and a lot less faith in myself as a knitter.

My mother used to transcribe Braille; she would read and re-format printed texts and transform them into Braille through diligence, magic, and a tremendous knowledge of the English language. She still uses Braille-esque abbreviations in writing, and I am her child. I always read "dpns," knitting jargon for "double-pointed needles" as "doupons," to rhyme with "coupons." For non-knitters (what's wrong with you?), bamboo dpns look like dowels sharpened at both ends. They are used for knitting in the round or for small back-and-forth knitting. They also keep annoyed knitters with long hair from becoming raving murderers when they have been beset by hot sweaty hair sticking to the back of their necks while trying to puzzle through a challenging pattern. Here's a picture of them in their natural habitat.

After an epic clusterfuck battle with FedEx, I received a package the other day that includes six Bollywood and Bollywood-esque movies (Omkara, Mangal Pandey: The Rising, Monsoon Wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, two older movies I got on the cheap) and a song-sequence anthology. I still haven't watched Dil Se, so if the Bollywood pickings at my very favorite theater (Galaxy Cinema) continue to be summer throwaways, with the notable exception of Chak De India, which was excellent, I will still be able to get my fix of good movies.

Soon I'll cajole Sarah into teaching me how to post pictures from the not-so-hot camera on my cell phone. To be just, she has agreed to help me; I keep forgetting to follow through on it. I'll see if I can get dog pics and knitting pics on here, too, and a few Bollywood movie reviews.

I'll leave you with this; if you're thinking of seeing Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag ("Ram Gopal Varma" is the director and producer and "Ki" is a possessive, so Aag is the title of the actual movie, as well as a pretty good onomatopoetic review), I have a few ideas here for more entertaining and fruitful pursuits:

• use a spork to cover a clay canary with Cheez Whiz, paying careful attention to creating realistic feathers,
• write an epic poem describing why the movie is not pride-inducing enough to justify including one's name as part of the movie's title (I mean, it's not William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, fershitssake),
• use the same gifted cast and bearable, if uninspired plotline, and write a movie worth actually watching, AND/OR
• knit a movie-screen-sized warning (extra points for knitting the lettering in reverse stockinette and in larger needles so the writing appears to be backlit) about the horrid waste of talent and time that audience members are about to undertake.