Robin Longtooth more like

Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott have played together in the sand too long; it’s time they found new muses. At one point in Robin Hood, I was wondering whether I was watching Gladiator, with RC exhorting his men to fight. Point Number 2: If this is the story before the legend, why is Robin 300 years old? All a bit much. And I’m sure Russell being the control freak he is would have had final say in his female co-star but great actress or not, Cate Blanchett has no chemistry with any of her leading men, and here it really showed. There was no point, either, for RC to get his famous temper displayed when someone interviewing him on the BBC said his accent sounded Irish. Actually, it sounded Irish and Scottish and Welsh. So there.

Paradise Found

Delhi is one of the prettiest places in the country. There's the joke where they say the only problem here is one too many north Indians but one look at those wide, tree-lined streets where you look left and suddenly see a brick-red monument hundreds of years old peering back at you makes you proud, for a change. I love the sound of Hindi and the authentic food. But the moment I decided to move if ever I got the chance was when I found Yacult in the supermarket. I threw in the towel when I saw Debenhams (Debenhams!) at the Ambi Mall in Gurgaon. Not to mention Aldo, Nine West, Chicago Pizza and Häagen-Dazs. Paradise Found.

Thanks for putting out the trash...

I feel as proud of Sandra Bullock as I would my own flesh and blood who put garbage where it belonged - out in the yard to be picked up the next morning. Can there, meanwhile, be anything more stupid than randy older men who think that sleeping with anything that moves somehow proves they still have it? There's no doubt they do - still have the rotting moral core they were born with, o yeah.

Best Stateside purchase I ever made

The Boudoir

Strange days, and then Vogue....

These have been strange days. I barely peek out of the bed covers, I read too much (yes, there is such a thing), I eat at odd hours, I worry. So when I came across the following in Vogue India, March, I could have wept, but I laughed instead. It was either that or, as my friend Anu and I keep a strict watch on, Go Postal.
Vogue contends that the look designers are going for this season embrace the 'sheer lightness of mood in Alexandre Cabanel's (work)....reflective of this season's neo-romantic trend.' Nothing wrong with that, you say? Perhaps, except that the 'lightness of mood' referred to here is Cabanel's painting of........Ophelia.
Is there a watery equivalent to spinning in the grave? Coz that's what O is doing as we speak. Is this better or worse than confusing Alexa Chung with Vanessa Traina a few pages on? I agree, much worse.


Goodbye, Mr James
Sandra, Sandra, Sandra. I could have told you nothing but humiliation awaits anyone who speaks about undying love for a partner in Hollywood. But I feel for you. I liked Jesse. He has a way of speaking slowly and saying the funniest things, he is also, as you pointed out, hot. But he is on his third marriage, honeychile; it's like having children, one is acceptable, two questionable, three is just two too many. But the real horror is feeling like a blinkered idiot after telling the planet that only this man showed you what it was like to have someone really care for you, who made you feel You were worthwhile, whom you loved trulymadlydeeply. It's one thing telling your best friend all this over cocktails, quite another telling the world media. If there was such a thing as justice, JJ would be egged and paraded down the main street of every country that reported Sandra's words. It's the least we can do.

Avatar, Blah-vatar

Possibly the biggest disappointment of the year. Apart from the special effects which were astounding, what does James Cameron mean by spewing out such an awful cliché of a movie? We’ve met the storyline as early as Pocahontas, did we have to get a rerun for the zillionth time? There was a couple sitting next to me in the theatre who walked out after 15 minutes. That’s all it takes to know you’ve been suckered.
The only thing I admired was the way women were on absolutely equal terms as the men on this mythical planet; now that is something that hasn’t been done before. But by the time Sam Worthington was transmuted into his avatar (oh, puh-leeze), it was all I could do to keep my breakfast down.
James, honey, you need to get back underwater… or get the water out of your ears.

Why parents should be banned

I have the most horrific neighbours. A couple of weirdo housewives who spend three parts of the day yelling at their kids. And what are they yelling about? “Eat fast!” “Swallow!” “Shut your mouth!” Slap, slap. To the listener, it’s appalling and evokes absolute rage for the absolutely helpless.
What parents don’t seem to get is that they have such complete control over their offspring that it can make them psychos. And it does. Children have no rights, as we all know. We tell them what to eat, (and when to swallow, apparently), when to sleep, how to study, who they can have as friends, what their career choices should be….a neverending spiral. But with great power comes great responsibility, etc. Children are people, too. And to crush their spirit is as evil an act as murder. Oh, not that I have been untouchable myself, but to be self-aware is the first step to not crushing a young child’s heart with a couple of slaps because she’s not eating her food fast enough to suit you.
No matter how hard you try, you can’t bring up a child faultlessly, sometimes even well. Is the universe trying to tell us something?

Some Fringe benefits, but...

I was so looking forward to watching Fringe after reading about it in the glossies that for the first 10 minutes I didn’t notice the Mistake Number 1 that was trying to catch my attention. Alas, not for long. But it was such a great opening scene: An airliner hits turbulence, a man injects himself with either insulin or anti-anxiety meds and as he makes his way to the bathroom with an airhostess trying to rush at him, telling him to get back to his seat, he turns and screams rend the air. His face seems to be melting, a horror that catches up with every other passenger as the camera moves backward. Then, it pulls away and all we hear is silence 40,000 feet in the air. This is the X-Files delightfully updated, Joshua Jackson and new face Anna Torv providing the eye candy. It should be a great show, paced, interesting characters and a running darkness of plot that keeps you coming back for more. The paranormal is the point of entry here, with FBI Agent Olivia Dunham bringing a fresh-faced optimism to the hard-edged world of human experimentation and other oddities. Well, that’s the problem, you see, Anna Torv as Olivia. She is effortlessly gorgeous and oddly annoying, not because of but despite this. She must speak in a monotone and an accent that cannot be placed, ending with a pursing of the mouth no matter what mood she is trying to convey. The accent seems eastern European until Google tells you she’s Aussie (with Estonian blood, ahh...). As for the moue, maybe someone should just tell her that it’s not sexy? It’s difficult to watch the show now, but one must try because there is a saving grace: John Noble as Dr Walter Bishop who has been sprung from a mental institution and whose verbal meanderings are hilarious; he keeps you on your toes as he is liable to spew viciously when you least expect it. Joshua Jackson (best known, unfortunately, for Dawson’s Creek and as Diane Kruger’s BF) plays his son Peter Bishop, not consistently. Jackson has his good days (you believe him) and his bad (he seems to think he’s in a play where he has to throw his voice to the back rows). The token black actor comes in the form of the highly expendable Lance Reddick as bossman Agent Phillip Broyles. There is one other point of interest: Mark Valley (from Boston Legal) who plays rogue agent John Scott, (dead rogue agent whom I suspect will not be dead for very long) and who plays it well. He has also upped and married Anna Torv and little things like that always raises my interest level.

Another Tarantino classic

Quentin Tarantino understood early that movieland was the only kind of life he wanted. In that sense, he’s like a lot of us who know that this world is not quite up to the mark, so we need to escape it the best way we know how. Tarantino is the best way we know how. He’s manic and clever and gives his audience just what they need. You don’t watch Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill or Grindhouse or Inglourious Basterds without thinking about it for days, months, years after. If that isn’t the mark of genius, I don’t know what is.
Inglourious Basterds’s opening scene is an instant classic. There is a bucolic image of the verdant French countryside where a man is seen in honest labour, chopping logs and a young girl is hanging up the washing. A car comes up the winding drive, inside are three men in uniform. As the car comes to a halt, you see the men are in German uniform, are in fact Nazis, and the watcher’s adrenalin notches up. This is the beginning of an agonizingly slow build-up of terror that ends, as expected, badly.
The sole survivor of the Jewish extermination in microcosm, Soshanna, goes on to work in a cinema house in France. The mark of the beast is seen on her face, devoid as it is of feeling. But when she learns that Hitler and his crew will attend a premiere at her theatre, she comes back to life and plans murder with relish. In this she has unknowingly become part of a parallel plot, one spearheaded by the Basterds, men who hunt Nazis for sport. The opening scene is invested with so much human emotion that you would think everything else will be an anti-climax. Not in Tarantino’s hands. It is, instead, the start of an almost 3-hour extravaganza that fulfills all our secret desires. When it comes to making a great film, it’s all about the director - look at the debacle of Twilight. Here, Tarantino has got the most compelling performance from every one of his players. Diane Kruger makes up for Troy with a mean, tough spy persona whose death is as terrible as the times; Brad Pitt continues his comedic streak after the marvelous Burn After Reading (his white jacket scene before the climax is hysterical) and Christoph Waltz as the SS maniac Max Landa (the Who? you’re asking in your mind you never will again after Waltz wins the Oscar next year) mingles hilarity, horror and self-seeking to the point that mad though he is, you miss him when he’s not onscreen. Rod Taylor’s few minutes of screen time as Winston Churchill is invested with all the power the WW2 hero embodied and Melanie Laurent (who apparently screamed on the streets after being told she was in the movie) as Soshanna is vulnerable, steel-cored and unforgettable.
There’s been a lot of talk about the title of this movie. A slurring of reality, sometimes a spoof, sometimes a comic strip, that’s what’s in a name. When QT misspells the title, we need to figure out why; this is what the director wants us to do when he says it’s just his way of spelling it, or that it’s his homage to Basquiat.
The script is vintage Tarantino, long dialogues that keep you straining so as not to miss a nuance, that allow the characters to luxuriate in their skins. It’s no surprise that Inglourious Basterds has made four times what it cost.

forgive him anything

Clint Eastwood always made women weak at the knees, whether he was not acting in spaghetti westerns or making jaws drop worldwide with Unforgiven. It’s not the good looks, of course, it’s the class. The loping stride, the unflappable demeanor, the slash of a wicked grin, ever so lopsided, he’s the kind of man people want on their side to give them credibility. It’s why Angelina Jolie clung on to him for The Changeling but even Clint couldn’t stop La Jolie’s star power from ruining her acting chops, not that she has many. “I want my son, I want my son” should go down in the annals of horrific hamming. Of course, to give discredit where it’s due, why Clint thought it worthy to have a grieving mother be as cold and hard as Angelina’s character, with sharp points of inappropriate red lipstick, will forever be a mystery. But I still admire Clint. All the more after hearing him describe how he prefers to say other things rather than Action! and Cut! He’ll say instead, softly, “Ready when you are” and after the scene, “I think that will do”, or “Ok, that’s enough of that shit”. Love him.

What if....

Now that the Indian elections are over, I wonder……

What if Sonia Gandhi had been a blonde Italian? I don’t think she would have found the level of acceptance she has found in the country, even if she chose to wear simple, cotton sarees. She would have done an Evita act and, very possibly, been hounded out.

Speaking of Sonia’s simple cotton sarees, so like her late mother-in-law’s, I like Michelle O, even though she tries so hard to be Jackie O. Those bodycon, simply-cut dresses, those pearls, the coiffed hair, the stand-by-your-man stance…the reason why she deserves respect is not just because her man deserves that kind of stance but because she seems remarkably heartsound herself. Her interviews, like Marilyn Manson's, are so articulate and clever they give you a delicious shiver up the spine. It's rare, you see, to find clarity of thought out there.