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Hands Up: Lekha Washington & SPB Charan
Episode 7, Part 1
Episode 7, Part 2
Episode 7, Part 3
The Hurt Locker: Cheap Thrills
Genre: Action
Director: Kathyrn Bigelow
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes
Storyline: Every time a bomb disposal expert sets out to diffuse a bomb or IED, he’s setting foot on explosive territory.
Bottomline: A tense, edge-of-the-seat, riveting thriller.
A long time ago, in a galaxy not far, far away, Annie Hall beat Star Wars. And movie geeks made their peace with the fact that the most celebrated epic they grew up with only lost to one of Woody Allen’s best films.
This generation of geeks will find no such peace. The film that snubbed the spectacular Avatar is no timeless classic.
Don’t get me wrong. The Hurt Locker is not a bad film at all. In fact, it’s a tense, explosive, adrenaline-rush of thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat, with your heart in your mouth and your pulse racing. But that’s about it.
It’s one of those movies the boys would love to watch over beer and forget all about the next day – a Die Hard film minus the charisma of John McLane or his trademark Yippie Ka Yay quips and yes, shot with a hand-held camera to make you believe it’s a realistic documentary that takes you right to the middle of action in Iraq.
While the hand-held feel does help in making war seem real, the general lack of detail, shallow characterisation and stereotyping of the faceless enemy reduce this war film to a video game with multiple levels of danger.
Every few minutes, a bomb disposal expert walks towards danger to diffuse an unknown quantity of explosives with suspicious looking Iraqis keeping an eye. How can this not be gripping? The Hurt Locker caters to that basic voyeuristic human instinct of watching a living thing have a near-death experience. An amateur film student can achieve the same effect by filming chicken at the coop as the butcher sharpens the knife to make a hard-hitting statement about vegetarianism.
Remember how No Man’s Land got us hooked with by making a soldier lie on a landmine or how Turtles Can Fly achieved the same result by having children run around mine-infested fields? The Hurt Locker treads exactly the same territory.
There’s something inherently and literally explosive about bombs and, specifically, mines in films. An Improvised Explosive Device, by nature, being one of those things that adds an element of unpredictability to the impending danger, makes for riveting viewing, especially if you are able to create an illusion of reality. This is Kathryn’s biggest triumph though it is shamelessly manipulative and devoid of balance.
The Hurt Locker, though apolitical, is a one-sided account of a bunch of soldiers who are put into such extreme conditions that they become addicted to a life of impending death. It offers no depth or exploration into the psyche of the human fighting machines as the leading man philosophically explains that there’s just one way to do the job. “The way you don’t die.”
The film tells you absolutely nothing you don’t know within the first 10 minutes when a bomb disposal expert gets blown off and another is sent to replace him. Yes, Iraq is a dangerous place and they could die any moment and even the bravest of men could breakdown in these conditions. Tell us something we already don’t know.
If you want to go deeper into the complex mindscape of the soldier battered by the trauma of war, watch The Messenger. The Hurt Locker is pure, unadulterated, raw, war-film action that does absolutely no harm to your brain-cells simply because its agenda is to only make you wonder if the poor bloke walking towards his death will have his brains blown off or not.
Meet the artiste currently known as Prince
“Uncle, photo,” a kid screams out to the Artist Currently Known as Prince as he turns back to scream back: “Uncle? Who did you call Uncle?” The kid smiles not sure how to react. And Prince asks: “How old are you?”
“Ten,” comes the answer.
“I am seven. I just look big because I drink a lot of milk,” says Prince before calling the kid over and asks someone to take a photograph at the Blur Café at Sathyam Cinemas late on Tuesday night.
The press conference scheduled at four kept getting postponed because Prince was stuck in Coimbatore airport. And then, in Chennai traffic. There’s only so much an action hero can do.
But it has to be said that Vivek Oberoi works hard. Here he was at the end of a long day giving at least a hundred interviews in two cities and still at his charming best, promising a leisurely interview over dinner, one hour before midnight with a flight to catch at six the next morning.
Prince is so articulate that he could write the best ever review for his performance in Shootout at Lokhandwala. Sample this: “It took a lot of hard work to create a character like Maya Dolas in Lokhandwala. He was always on drugs, I had to project this laid back, easy, cheetah on the prowl, man who was seething with crazy amount of self confidence that he could do anything. At the same time, his body language was lethargic, arrogantly lazy… If you watch Shootout, it took hard work to achieve that drawl, that easiness in the dialogue delivery, the menace in the eye.”
We disagree on the merits of Lokhandwala but Oberoi has a rather simple yardstick to define good cinema. “I guess when a film fails, it means the audience has rejected your film. It means they didn’t like your work. Mission Istaanbul was a bad film, it didn’t do good for me. Shootout did really well and won awards, it did good for me.”
Does he regret some of the bad films?
“You wake up in the morning, you take the wrong road with crazy traffic driving to office and you regret it. Life is like that, life is about thinking this is going to all right and realising it didn’t work. There’s no science to that.”
He makes it sound like a gamble.
“Do you know what will work? Art by its very nature cannot be manufactured to precision. Art can be born out of a whim, out of an idea, out of a fantasy, out of how a director is feeling on the day he’s shooting the scene, of what weather you had. Bound script is not something handed down by God. Kisnaa, you want to see it? It’s a thick fat bound script in Hindi and English. Mission Istaanbul was a bound script with shot breakdowns.”
That brings us to how to he signed Prince.
“Prince was a film I wanted to do a film that was challenging as an actor and yet in a sphere of pure entertainment. It’s stuff like the Amitabh Bachchan or Rajeev Rai kind of cinema. It’s the idea of a world’s smartest thief. A man who is charming and super smart and the irony is that someone steals his memory. And he has six days to live and he has to find out who I am, why are people behind him and he has girl problems. There are three girls all claiming to be his girlfriend Maya. So it’s paisa vasool seeti-maar cinema.”
But it wasn’t the five months of training, losing 12 kilos, performing death-defying stunt like hanging off the chopper at 8000 feet or jumping from a 32nd storey to a 28 storey building on the other side that bothered him.
“The scariest part of the film was the kiss, man. There were 700 eyeballs looking at me as I was asked to kiss Aruna passionately. And she said, ‘Don’t worry, I will take care of you.’ First I was nervous, now I am pretty much of an expert now. I can put it up on my wall now: Good Kisser.”
“This is a Bollywood hero who can take down 15 guys but with the vulnerability of not knowing who to trust. It’s like Bourne, or the guy in Memento, there are about 84 films (I bet he randomly made up that statistic because 83.967 per cent of all stats are made up) made on guys who have lost their memory. But here the doctor says that he’s medically fine.”
Does this mean we have to lose our memory, leave our brains home and suspend all disbelief?
“There’s Intellectual stimulation and there’s emotional stimulation. It’s the difference between sitting in a park with a nice glass of juice and sandwich and reading a nice book and riding a rollercoaster. Prince is a rollercoaster.”
Nausea-alert for those of you who like to play it safe.
TEDx Talk: How NOT To Make A Film
You can find the original presentation here.
You can download my film That Four Letter Word from here or stream it from the official IMDB page.
Hands Up: April Fool Special
Episode 6, Part 1
Episode 6, Part 2
Episode 6, Part 3
April Fool!
That’s the big promo for tomorrow’s Hands Up. The version you saw earlier in the day was fake. 🙂 Don’t miss the last 15 seconds.
Ok, so here’s how we got ourselves some super cheap publicity. Because April Fool is not to celebrate the classy and the intellectual. It’s to celebrate the juvenile and let the mischief out. And since none of us involved here have ever claimed to be mature or serious, we decided to have a little fun only because some of you started taking a rather innocuous comment made by Amudhan rather seriously.
His original reaction to Venkat Prabhu mocking Chennai 28 was: “AM OFFENDED. I AM HURT. I have lost all respect for Venkat Prabhu, Premji, Sudish Kamath & NDTV. To ridicule me is one thing, but to disrespect a defining, epic movie like Tamil Padam is unacceptable. To poke fun of Shiva’s Barathanatyam is simply blasphemous.”
“While I thoroughly enjoyed the whole caper, especially planning these things with Venkat Prabhu and Sudhish, the one thing that was really hard for me to do was to call Tamizh Padam an epic defining movie. I felt dirty after writing that one,” says Amudhan.
The last line clearly indicated that he was joking about the whole response. He only gave his trademark satirical response and he made it rather obvious with his following comment that he was only giving a “typically industry “response (based on a comment made by a certain star who had watched Tamizh Padam). “The one thing i can’t stand is people making fun of other’s work. Don’t u understand that it hurts feelings. It reflects very poorly on your upbringing. I did not expect this from you or venkat sir and premji sir.” (Again, the Sir giving away the tongue in his cheek.)
And to that, Venkat Prabhu responded with: “Mr amudhan… Please kindly take things easy… Like our movies… When u took it on chennai 28 we were cool about it… So chill brother… Next time work on ur story screenplay and direction… U will get much better results… Just as a friendly suggestion…”
Now this is where the game changes because it reads very serious. And I text Venkat asking him if he’s sure he does not want to hint it is a joke. And Venkat texts back saying: “Let’s go with this. Amudhan and me are happy and cool with this.”
Looking at the response it was generating, I decided to add drama to make the tension believable with the Public apology.
And Amudhan suggested we delete his earlier comment lest the smarter ones among you figure out he was kidding. So the reference to Shiva’s Barathanatyam is deleted and I quote him selectively on my blog.
This is where it gets fun (for me). I get about 250 hits on my blog on a Sunday and about 450 hits on a weekday. But four hours after my apology went up on my blog at 8.30 p.m on Sunday, I got a thousand more hits.
On Monday, I got 4300 plus hits. On Tuesday, 4800 hits. And just to make it believable (because people get suspicious around March 31), we stopped posting updates and pretended that the issue was already “sorted out” and insisted that the media leaves the name of the channel out of it. Subversion worked because this is exactly when Behindwoods reported it, followed by Zimbio, IndiaGlitz and some movie buffs who bitch about cinema on Orkut on the Tamil cinema community went overboard with 120 plus responses to What’s the problem of (sic!) C.S. Amudhan? I got another hundred responses over Twitter and Facebook and all this was wholly believable because Venkat Prabhu and Amudhan had a pact to take light digs at each other’s movies in the Tamil press.
Since it was closer to April 1, both of them stepped up the offensive and it got to a place where the entire film industry started talking about it, picking sides, bitching about the other…
So Shiva, Charan, the common costume designer of both crews Vasuki (who also happens to be Venkat’s sister), Vaibhav and other friends of the filmmakers responded and swung into action to patch things up or to advice to stay away from the other. We are pretty sure some of them are going to be pretty uncomfortable facing each other after April 1. 😀
Meanwhile on Tuesday, Venkat Prabhu and Amudhan came down to NDTV HINDU for the fake PUBLIC DEBATE episode (which we hope you know by now is the new episode of Hands Up) and I put up tweets saying that Hands Up will return next week, revamped as a clean, fun, family show.
Gotcha guys there again. Almost all of you fell for that one. I am touched that you guys insisted that it shouldn’t change.
A special word about those who thought they guessed it was a prank… Most of them changed their minds because of our responses ranging from aggressive to blocking them off the FB list and blog comments etc while some just assumed it was a prank only because they didn’t know the detail of how far Amudhan and Venkat had gone to make it look real. They had even taken ads in the papers abusing each other’s films and we were not going to let smart asses play spoilsport. So all you people who believe I yelled at you, Gotcha too suckers! 🙂 Will unblock you soon.
But yes, we admit that it is not possible to fool everyone and some of you smart people did get it and mail us privately in the right spirit of the All Fool’s Day tradition.
Also, our apologies to Shakti Girish, Editor of Galatta magazine who went on record to say that the Tamil film industry did not have a sense of humour and director Gautham Menon who responded to our request to the fake Public Debate byte. A big shoutout to my producer Suriya Narayanan who sat all night to edit the teaser promo and the final one today and ran around to get all the quotes needed for tomorrow’s episode.
To see how all these responses have been used and why and to watch directors prove that they could make very good actors, watch (or you are welcome to skip it if you are mad at us) Hands Up at Friday 9.30 p.m and the repeat at 1.30 p.m and 11.30 p.m. on Saturday and 8.30 a.m. on Sunday with one last repeat on Wednesday 6.30 p.m.
Thank you all for taking us to No.4 of the most watched videos on the NDTV HINDU channel on Youtube that has about 1900 videos.
“Yes, it was all for cheap publicity,” as Amudhan says.
You can’t expect anything more or less from us.
Hands Up will continue to be politically incorrect, juvenile and borderline offensive. If you want something else, watch something else.
Have a great All Fools Day. ☺
End of story. Please move on.
Despite my requests, a section of the media has gone and dragged my name and the channel’s name in their reports.
I take responsibility and kindly once again request you to leave out the channel’s name out of the matter. The issue has been sorted out and settled.
It was all a misunderstanding. As you can see from the clip below, despite their differences, they have moved on. So please let’s not dwell on this anymore. Hands Up will return with a new episode next week after a week’s break due to technical issues.
Public Apology to C.S. Amudhan, Shiva, Venkat Prabhu & Premgi Amaren
Public Apology
I wish to publicly apologise to Mr. C.S. Amudhan, Mr. Shiva, Mr. Venkat Prabhu and Mr. Premgi Amaren for any confusion or bitterness caused by your comments on my show Hands Up in Episodes 2 and 5 respectively.
I realised that started as an innocuous joke misfired big time because of miscommunication and egging done by me (though intended in good humour). I apologise for the bad taste it has left in all our mouths.
I urge both parties to please make peace. You both make irreverent films and any infighting is injurious to the health of humour in Tamizh Cinema.
I take full blame and responsibility for this misadventure and admit that these comments by either parties were provoked by me in the course of the show.
I hope we are able to end the matter right away now that I have apologised on behalf of both of you to each other.
I admit it was wrong to have poked fun at a superhit film like Tamizh Padam and a cult film like Chennai 28 and it was entirely my fault. It was not my intention to undermine anyone’s effort and hard work.
So kindly accept my apology and shake hands with each other.
Thank you.
MADRAS INK. 