The new season of MTV Hero Honda Roadies 5 is back and the auditions began airing on the channel for some weeks now. It’s Nikhil Chinappa and Raghu Ram who are back as judges distressing the poor kids into submission in the Torture Cell as it’s famously called. To give you an example from a recent episode, a candidate was asked to act like a monkey and the guy took the word so seriously, the next thing the judges knew he was pouncing on their table, discarding the sheets of paper and dropping the objects all around. Phew! he sure came closer to being sent to an asylum or a zoo at that point. On the other hand, you can bet that the anti-censorship lobby of the media would love to watch this show. No matter how many cuss words are beeped out by the channel (which is meant for the family), one can still make out the language being used from the lip movements (which need to be blurred on screen as well). It’s evident how hypocritical our censorship rules are which are so starkly displayed on television every week, it would put even the sleazy film directors and dialogue writers of Bollywood to shame.
entertainment
Life in a…Metro (2007)
There were a few reasons for watching this movie. Actors that I have revered all my life including Konkona Sen, Irrfan Khan, KayKay and Shiney Ahuja have played a part in this flick. Anurag Basu has helmed the role of a director, whose Gangster (2006) was critically acclaimed and loved by the masses. The music by Pritam and the songs (lyricists Sayeed Quadri, Amitabh Varma, and Sandeep Shrivastava) are so contemporary and funky, I listened to it almost everyday in Europe, visualizing the tale against the urban backdrop of Mumbai. The question I begged to ask now was – when is Life in a…Metro releasing?
Spiderman 3 (2007)
He’s back and in a BIG way. The visual effects are awesome, the story (though melodramatic in parts) is captivating and most importantly, more villains join hands to finish off our friendly neighborhood superhero than before — there’s Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), the New Goblin (James Franco) and Venom (Topher Grace). Additionally there’s also a slimy-sticky-creepy-black-substance that I must name as the most damnable character in the story as well. This is director Sam Raimi’s third Spidey installment and we all must hope to see the fourth one from him soon.
The Namesake (2007)
An incident with Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan) changes him for good and takes his journey, half-way across the globe and which spans a generation from Kolkata to New York and characterize a cultural drift between the two.
Mira Nair [Salaam Bombay (1988), Monsoon Wedding (2001)] directs The Namesake which is derivation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book of the same title. It got critical attention then especially since it was coming after Lahiri’s Pulitzer award winning and much acclaimed book The Interpreter of Maladies.
Does India Really Need the Oscars?
We have yet again failed to get a nomination for the OSCARs in the foreign film category. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti (Paint me Yellow), the new found mantra of the indian nextgen was rejected even before the final roll call. The last time an Indian movie made it to the five was Aamir’s Lagaan in 2001; a riveting account of a small village lad taking the British Raj up in a captivating cricket match. Before that, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay and Mehboob Khan’s Mother India have graced the coveted final OSCAR nomination list. None of them won the award though. The chinese film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (CTHD) won 3 OSCARs at the 73rd Annual Academy Awards ceremony, giving the director Ang Lee a godlike status in the Hollywood precincts overnight. CTHD was masterfully made with martial art sequences at its best and a traditional chinese story which is expected from oriental directors. Years later, he made a comeback by winning the OSCARs again for his work in Brokeback Mountain at Hollywood.