Lonely all your life

My nights are so exciting I get a shiver up my spine just writing these words. At 11 pm precisely, I switch on "Homeland" and there he is. Damian Lewis. I first saw him in "Life" and was totally into the show because he made it interesting. In "Homeland", he makes his character so ambiguous that you don't know whether to love him or hate him but this much I do know: He gets more and more attractive episode after episode - when he isn't attractive at all. One expression of awareness in his eyes or a flirtatious smile on his lips when he looks at Carrie and you forget 2 things: 1. How you feel like slapping Carrie with a dead fish every time she raises her eyebrows or gives that annoying, bird-like tilt of her head, and 2. The hysterical SNL take on Damian's mouth.
There are some things that really do degrade the sublime, like the little kid who made Nicki Minaj's Super Bass more famous by performing it (along with the deadest sidekick I've ever seen) on YouTube, but Damian somehow makes us forget every joke about his looks because he manages to transcend them. Not a bad act for someone making waves on TV.
Last night, Carrie said something that was more absurd than usual. Watching Brody walk back to his wife, she realizes that she will be "alone all my life". Uh, Yeah. Who isn't? You are born alone, have children alone, are married alone (because you never know what your spouse is really like, he could be a serial killer and you could end up telling the Police, "but he's always been the perfect husband...his children love him...he was on the Neighbourhood Watch!"), and you sure as hell die alone. What's with the epiphany, Carrie? Did you forget to take your meds??
Another guy who rocks my boat (how well does he mix humour and drama) is Denis Leary, whose Cindy Crawford and Eskimo Pie sketch made him famous way before "Rescue Me" of course. But the latter shocks you out of your seat. You begin watching, thinking this is fun, then Leary manhandles his wife and threatens her with extreme loss of life and limb if she takes their kids away from him. This is your first insight into how "Rescue Me" will keep you shaking your head and laughing one minute and then suppressing a scream the next. The show has been over for a year in the States but even 8 years later in the Third World is alright when you can enjoy Tatum O'Neal, frat boy firefighters, an idea of what risking your life every single day does to a body, freakazoid relationships....I could go on, but there's someone called James Arthur playing on VH1 and I cannot believe my ears.

Beauty & the Beast

Went to listen to Salman Rushdie as he did a Press thing for the movie Midnight's Children. So adore the courage with which he has conducted his life that all I could do was sit there lavishing him with maternal gazes. And am  always amazed at how young he is, in his manner, his interests, his sense of humour. He should sell his joie de vivre in Tom Ford fragrance bottles. 

He is also as articulate in person as he is in his work. He understands the force of a good anecdote, naturally, which simultaneously adds to the movie he is publicising, telling us how he wanted to play the soothsayer in the film but didn't want to shift focus from the scene with theatre-goers pausing to point and say, “Isn't that Salman Rushdie?” Which is exactly what they would have done.

I noticed even the way he signed books was in the deliberate manner all good writers bring to anything that has to do with the written word. 

People are amazing.

In more ways than one. Towards the end, a woman, dressed in what looked like too much curtain material, leaped from her chair and accused director Deepa Mehta of casting only actors she knows. Here I am, the woman said. I act. Please consider me in future. 

Aside: The movie world is a ruthless one. You have to look like Shriya Saran to get a foot in the door; for every hundred Sarans there will be one Edward G Robinson. Beauty or talent must win. Stands to reason. But reason is something a lot of people who live in small towns and think they are Somebody seem to lack. They are not just like people treading water and trying to keep their heads above it. They are like people who have already drowned in the sea of their fruitless ambition and overwhelming lack of redeeming qualities like humility, self-knowledge or perspective. Sometimes, you just can't fight the tide.

She later rushed the stage and thrust her card at the director, who said, and who can blame her, "But how will I know who this card belongs to?"

Liberty wins

Why would any self-respecting wife stay with a husband who has an affair? The clue must lie in the word 'respect'. Women so rarely own that, thinking of financial and emotional security instead. Men so rarely feel that in regard to women. If you look at the photos of Rupert Sanders and Kristen Stewart, it's painfully obvious that he lusted after this young and beautiful new experience, while she was in it for kicks and had no feeling for him whatsoever. A gorgeous model like Liberty Ross, whose only failing is she's getting older, should have reacted much sooner. She's filed for divorce now and one hopes she sticks to it, but I, living vicariously as is my wont, am punching the air. It's a kick in the shins for those men who are simply less evolved than their brothers. The only response you can make towards them is to cut them off like a gangrened limb. 

These Holy Men

There are so few individuals you recognize instantly as being a cut above, but when you do, it makes you hopeful when you are otherwise surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces. Watching the Critics' Choice Awards, I was utterly baffled by Daniel Craig getting an acting award. (Were the critics imbibing a bit too easily at their free luncheons and maybe thought they were voting Day-Lewis? There's no other explanation. Or perhaps they think 'action' movies aren't real movies. Who the hell knows.) So when Ben Affleck won his wins for 'Argo', I sighed in relief. And if you heard the reaction he got, you would have known it was a special moment because not only is Affleck-Damon-Clooney-Pitt wildly popular they are popular for the right reasons. They are intelligent, strong and committed, not only to their talent but to the world in which they live. Everywhere they go, they are greeted with reverence; there are so few of them, you see. Everything from architecture to politics to human suffering gets addressed with this lot, the beauty of it being they don't need to address any of it. They aren't running for President. They do it because they have something no one knows about; something that is whispered in dark alleys and rumoured to exist in strange lands, or seen hurriedly through the driving rain and gone before it's realized. That something is Integrity. Go on, look it up. You know you want to.

The human condition

Indian media. I'm just sad when I think about it. If you've been following the papers in the last 10 days, (which I try not to do but sometimes I'm pretty jobless), you would think all my countrymen have been doing recently is going on a raping spree across the length and breadth of this land. Minors, teenagers, older women who still have working parts (and really, isn't that all that matters), have been attacked, screams practically every Page 1. I beg to differ. My countrymen have certainly not been going mad in the last 10 days. My countrymen have been doing this FOREVER. Now, though, newsprint is spent on them. That's the only difference.
And why? Because Indian media likes to latch on to the easy catch; no struggling to land Moby Dick for them. If real stories mattered, every attack against a woman would have made it to Page 1. Every attack against a man or a child, for that matter. That's news, surely. What makes us, moves us, changes us, betters us, worsens us. What can be more exciting than the human condition? All news is humanity, anyway. It's the delinking of news from this, in favour of sales, that has spelt the downfall of newspapers in this forlorn country.
Right, enough angst. I'm off to see what's on Twitter.

You're so fine, Mickey

Why I love 'Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man':
Apart from the bit where Don Johnson begs Mickey Rourke not to hold the gun like a part of his anatomy?
Last scene, when Mickey in his Greek God avatar says to the supermodel posing as hitchhiker: "Where're you headed?"
She says, "Nowhere special."
He says, "Lemme take you there."

Die, die!

I've always had a weak spot for threesomes. By which I mean the girl-in-love-with-two-boys motif, silly. So The Vampire Diaries was a fave TV show. Then they got confused. The threesome is still going strong, never fear, but I can no longer keep track of people being killed and then coming back to life.
The worst was the Season 3 finale. Alaric's death scene was poignant, everyone comes to pay their respects, fat, white candles burn in the background - and then, hey presto, he's back! Ridic.
But wasn't it high time they made Elena a vamp? Of course, God knows what Season 4 will bring and I am not going to Google it. I shall wait, patriotically, until it comes to the Third World. I might even stay undisappointed longer that way. Like they remain undead.

*********************
Speaking of which, how painfully dull was "Breaking Dawn 2"? Although I did notice Rob Pattinson seemed so relieved throughout the movie, seeing the light at the end of the perennial fog in Forks, no doubt. The lead actors must have had 10 lines each, but Michael Sheen was hilarious. Every time he came onscreen, the theatre erupted in laughter. But the weird baby, the repulsive bond between a grown man and said baby, the way too facile answers to all the problems on hand and the stark contrast between how appalling the Twilight movies are when you compare it to the Potter movies... I can tell you Pattinson isn't the only one relieved the nightmare franchise is over.
Oh, and anyone wondering whether Kristen Stewart is a good actress or not? I was on her side until I saw "Breaking Dawn 2". When she shouts at Jacob for bonding with a newborn? Cringeworthy. Since I'm good at the waiting game, however, I shall reserve final judgement until "On the Road".

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.