Stop already!

Tahereh Mafi has joined the long list of writers who are doing the unconscionable: Writing bloody trilogies and not ending the book that I'm bloody reading. What the hell. Laini Taylor, Becca Fitzpatrick, Jennifer Estep, Darynda Jones all write highly readable books but don't they realize that they are annoying the reader by blatantly writing for book contracts and not the satisfaction of the people who buy their books?
I want that sigh of contentment when I finish avidly reading a single story. If I like it I will buy your sequels (which shouldn't be plural, in any case, they should be standalone indulgences), never fear. But at least let me have a sense of closure in case I drop dead before the next installment is out.
Look at the incomparable JR Ward, Kresley Cole and Stacia Kane who all respect their readers and yet give us more and more of the characters we adore.
Mafi's "Shatter Me" is great reading - until I came to the end which turned out to be a comma and not a full stop. Maddening.

Holy Trilogy

There are actors, and then there's DiCaprio. There are directors, and then there's Tarantino. Now God has brought them together, and I will soon get to Heaven.

Wishing for Skyfall, until...

Javier Bardem walked onto the screen right before Intermission.

Bond movies are formula films, that's part of their USP. They have broken the formula with 1. A lead actor who looks like a thug with two expressions in his armoury. 2. No gadgets and too much reliance on brawn.

Is it Sam Mendes' fault that we have a slow dance for the first half of the movie when we wanted that spectacular opening sequence? Remember the first shot in GoldenEye (where Pierce Brosnan gave us the best Bond with his beauty, toughness and vulnerability)? That was a lesson on how to make an impact, not Craig's endless fight with the bad guy on top of a train. Another shot of Craig giving chase on the SAME ROOFTOP in Turkey we saw in 'Taken 2' made me worry about the budget for this film.

I think it's Barbara Broccoli's fault for tampering with genius in the first place. She chose Craig, who wears no expression throughout 'Skyfall' – except when the word itself is spoken to him and his eyes change. Then Mendes comes along and we are deprived of so much acting skill that we almost don't realize it since all the actors seem to be suffering from the same ailment. Then comes Javier. But even his long entrance is too long, his monologue too tender – until it hits you. Tender? He then runs his hand over Craig's body in the slowest, scariest shot and you think: Genius is back. But it takes a long time coming, and only because you have an actor in Javier who will always transcend his material slash director. The smirks, the false solicitude, the crazed focus of “What have they done to you?” whispered to Judi Dench when he has come to kill her, it's breathtaking.

Berenice Marlohe gets the formula back on track as the hot chick who has a moment in the sack with the spy and then gets killed off. The black dress we first see her in makes more of an impact than she does; at moments she is fascinating to watch, at others she is as hazy as a sepia photograph. She also doesn't have the body required for the role, large hips and fat ankles? Come on.

Both Bond and M are horrible people in 'Skyfall'. She lets her agents down time and again, he watches people die. Now I don't know about you, but that does not hero material make. And this is supposed to be a Bond movie?

The one special effects shot where a train plows down on Bond missed the mark because it had no people in it, thereby through one careless inattention to detail leaving us indifferent instead of gasping in our seats. The young Q brings no kickass new toys, (I know we're backtracking but may I say again, this is a Bond movie), and the entrance of Miss Moneypenny is equally daft: She was never black.

The last shot in the house on a Scottish moor where the Aston Martin getting shot up finally moves Bond to violence is almost tragi-comic.

But in the end, it's a great film because it has character. It reveals how ruthless government can be. It has bad guys who are good and good guys who are bad. It has those gorgeous sweeps of location that move you to sighs. It has the wonderful title song from Adele. It has Javier. It has Javier. It has Javier.

Nothing casual about it

I loved The Casual Vacancy. What a decimation of British smalltown culture, with their petty concerns, their sad sex lives and their young and aimless. Rowling says it all 'authentically', never mind whose point of view she is working from. I don't know many writers who can delve into the workings of an obese old man, an Indian expat and a teenager with equal ease. She even has a turn of phrase, although her writing style isn't extraordinary or descriptive: It is to-the-point and tells you everything you want to know. I was interested enough to read it right through, this story about Pagford and its high and low citizens. It was like sitting in the cold kitchen of one of its older residents as she dictated the town's history to a biographer.

The high school students are strikingly captured in all their angst, their obsessiveness, their feelings of alienation, things each one of us has lived through and never forgotten. Their parents are blind to their character, too embroiled as they are in trying to figure out their own lives.

The focal point is the death of a respected man and the vacancy that then needs to be filled in the local council. Enter the contendors, anonymous viper posts on the Net and a gathering free-for-all.

There is no sentimentality in the stories being told here. A young girl will die, and although she is both slut and saint, there is no redemption for her. Her world is depicted in gruesome detail, and you almost welcome her death for her sake. A boy will lose his sense of self with a single act of cowardice, when all the while you've admired his insouciant defiance. A married couple who hate each other will discover there is still love to be found amongst the ruins of over-familiarity and routine gropings in the dark. There are abusive fathers, and you can almost smell the terror of their households, rampant adultery in both mind and body, and the unravelling of established matrons in the most pathetic ways.

Rowling manages to make them all so real that you can see the movie coming. I admire this woman, especially for flipping the bird at critics carping about non-essentials when readers are simply enjoying the tale she tells.

Seven years....SEVEN YEARS

Just thinking about the author who spent seven years researching/writing what turned out to be a really bad book. Could anything be worse. Imagine what he could have done in all that time.
1. Adventure sports in New Zealand.
2. Marriage.
3. Divorce.
4. Landscaping his garden.
5. Writing a cookbook after seven years of research enjoyed by friends and family.
6. Being arrested and sentenced to 7 years after committing a non-heinous crime, like a Robin Hood robbery or some Greenpeace activity.
7. Worked for the Books page of a well-reputed publication - because as we all know, those who can't write, review.

Looking forward to this...

Oh, what a lovely war!

I just read two World War 2 books (The Collaborator and Night Soldiers) back-to-back and realized why I like them so much, apart from the fact that they are gloriously written: It was a time when we could see clearly between good and evil. 

The enemy had a face, not a mask. 

We knew who was fighting the good fight and who we had to rally behind. Love, Integrity, Justice, Brotherhood were words we understood and embraced; the opposite of them were so horrific only madmen like Stalin and Hitler could embrace its darkness while normal humans veered to the light.

 Now, there is so much darkness that we are all stumbling around, careening into each other. On one hand, heroes have turned villains, while villains try to outdo them at every turn. Other grey areas abound.

As we speak, there is a strike in the city I live in. When once my country's strikes were symbols of unity and fights against oppression, now they are vehicles where the lawless have a day of partying; young men feel powerful when otherwise they are helpless against a daily ritual of poverty slash ennui. They roam the streets burning tyres, shouting slogans gleefully and strong-arming shopkeepers who disagree with the idea of a strike that takes away their day's earnings. 

So the strike in 2012 means nothing more than fear, not unity, with businessess and ordinary citizens' lives shutting down for 12 hours.

The issue at stake was our highest judicial authority giving a ruling on sharing our river's waters with a neighbouring State. So with a strike, not only are we thumbing our noses at our highest judicial authority but we're also proving that the idea of “good neighbours” hasn't only been twisted on Desperate Housewives.

Found this on a news site today, a bit intense but the sentiment (except for the Kannadiga comment, some of my best friends are smart Kannadigas!) is spot-on:

“To the twits who think water rights are ENTIRELY owned by the region or territory where the river originates, please spend 10 mins on the Net and you will DISCOVER how the world handles it. By your incredibly stupid reasoning, China can completely deny the waters of the Brahmaputra to us - you all fine with that? Knowing the limited intelligence of the average Kannadiga, I wouldn't be surprised if you answered Yes cause you are not affected by the Brahmaputra and could care less about anything else other than 'what is in it for you' !”

The Drone life

Where are we? Beirut? East Berlin? The Gaza Strip? No, we are in a country that borders my own, where my brothers live. And are now dying. When will we say 'Enough'? http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gibson-drones-civilians-20121004,0,1147467.story. If you read this, read the comments below, too.

One tries to differentiate between the Governments of a country and its citizens, but sometimes that's difficult to do. All Pakis are terrorists, going by what white people seem to think. In that case, all white people must be rednecks.

Irrespective of who's who and what's what, I can't for a moment imagine not being able to step out of my house to buy groceries, or take my children to school, or go to work. Oh wait, I'm black. I don't do these things. I'm supposed to build a bomb in my garage, so the Great White Shark, sorry, Saviour from the West has no option but to send flying toys that pack quite a punch to annihilate me and my toddlers - who of course would have grown up to strap more bombs around their chests and kamikazi an embassy or whatever. What a mercy they were blown up themselves before they could achieve that grand ambition.

The scary thing is that American presidents now blatantly encourage murder, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, bin Laden. (Isn't that what terrorists were doing? How now do we tell the difference between anyone?)

Tomorrow, of course, an American Prez could issue a fatwa against Me. Bloody hell, tomorrow it could be You. I guess then we'll give a shit.

Really? Brahmin?

It's a bag company. Rather delicious ones, actually. But surely they could have come up with a better brand name? Casteist and provocative to the very same caste.
Ignorance is no excuse in a world waiting to trample on you the minute you open your mouth about, well, anything really. You want to make a film? Trample. You want to draw a cartoon? Trample. You want to write a book? Trample.
The real problem is that very few of us have lives so anything that can distract us is welcome. Or worse, we're just cretins.
Now let me get back to my crochet.

It's pretzeling ALL my buttons

You gotta hand it to OPI. Love the names in the German Collection Fall 2012:
Schnapps Out of It!
Danke-Shiny Red
Don't Pretzel My Buttons
-  (and my favourite) -
 Nein! Nein! Nein! OK Fine!

Reflected glory du jour

                                                   Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012

One Horseman is right here

TLC's "What Not to Wear India" should be a lesson on why Western TV shows can never be successfully replicated in the subcontinent. We're just different animals.
Soha Ali Khan is great. She has the personality and the smarts, not to mention the good looks, to host something like this. Aki Narula, although flinging his hands about indiscriminately, is palpably sincere. So where have they gone wrong? The first client was enough for me to know instantly: It's in the people they've chosen to reinvent. The woman had only one thing to give her a passport to the show: A stunning absence of style. She also had a corresponding absence of a single accent, it being a mixture of Surat and the States. Apart from that, she was inarticulate, dull and never underwent the emotional transition that made Trinny and Susannah's chosen few such a hit.
There is also one other rather inexplicable element: The clothes Soha and Aki choose for the client are horrendous. I cringed every time she appeared in another tasteless, badly-tailored, cheap outfit. What the hell was going on. Especially as Soha herself was dressed beautifully. Then, of course, I got it.
This is India. We don't have anything like Topshop or Forever 21 or H&M. Yes, we have Zara and Aldo but what, that's it? And no one not associated with Bollywood can buy designer labels like Jimmy Choo and Vuitton. The rest of what's available to us, exemplified by the most downmarket malls it's been my misfortune to be surrounded by (in the south of India, admittedly Delhi's are good), is tacky in the extreme.
Which is why this programme is like hearing hooves thundering in the distance; it feels like it's being brought to our screens by one of the Horsemen destined to usher in the Apocalypse.
Like we needed any more.