KANK revisited

I just watched this video again (for the zillionth time), and it got me to thinking about the impression Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna made the first time I watched it.

It was the first Indian movie I ever saw. I particularly enjoyed this song, because it was exactly the kind of thing Americans identify as "Bollywood." I knew nothing about the actors at all: no idea I was watching father and son. Clueless about the beautiful woman in pink who was in no other part of the movie. Hadn't the vaguest notion of how well-known or popular any of the actors were...though I remember thinking that "the older guy" was probably very famous. There was just a certain ease and charisma about him that suggested a great deal of experience. I was very taken with Shah Rukh Khan, although I found his movie character shockingly obnoxious. I thought it was kind of cool the way this song mixed some English in with the Hindi. I thought the older woman was splendid, and loved her chemistry with the older guy. I couldn't believe how long the movie was. I'm not sure if I noticed that no one kissed on the lips. Since the movie didn't have American-style credits identifying the characters and the actors who played them, I'm not even sure how I learned Shah Rukh's name, although I believe his was the first actor's name I learned. I thought he was quite cute, and made a point of watching a few of his movies in the month or so after. Then I didn't watch another Indian movie for about two years.

Two years later, I remembered how novel KANK had seemed to me, and I watched it again. I  believe that was October 2011. I don't really remember how I went about researching and finding out who these actors were and what Indian films were all about. (I get so wrapped up in new passions so quickly and deeply that I often can't remember where they began; they fast seem to be things I've always done and known. I can't remember for the life of me how I started making jewelry, for instance.)

What happened the second time I watched the movie was that I was fascinated by Amitabh Bachchan. I had been right the first time I watched the movie: he was the real deal. I expect I learned his name through my film bible, the Internet Movie Database, and I simply began to follow him; I started watching his movies almost exclusively, and branched out from there. It took me about two weeks of tooling around on YouTube before I learned how to pronounce his name; I also had his name written on a piece of paper by my computer to aid my searches, since it took a while for me to get the spelling down.

My second start with Indian movies was the real one. I knew there was a lot in the movies I didn't get, and did exhaustive internet research to learn some of the social context. I started to some some of the major actors I enjoyed: Shah Rukh, of course, Abhishek Bachchan, Kajol, and so on. I started to learn about playback singers and item girls and some of the top producers and composers and directors; I found out that no one ever kisses on the lips. I discovered Amitabh's blog, and started to make some internet friends in India. (Most particularly Shiva, who kindly pointed people to my blog via Twitter, and translated an interesting Twitter conversation for me between Amitabh and Ram Gopal Varma; also Pankaj, who recommended Aamir Khan's films. Another friend dear to my heart is Moses, an Israeli who learned Hindi from watching 3,000 Indian movies, and proclaims daily, "I love Amitabh Bachchan!")

I have one friend of Facebook who always calls me "Aunty," which I hate, but I love him anyway.

And of course I met Rochelle, an Amitabh mega-fan - a Jewish woman one year my senior who lives two neighborhoods away. Never imagined that Indian movies would bring me a new in-person friend who shares a lot of my tastes and background.

Barry noted that I have had far less depressive moods since I began watching Indian films. I am deeply appreciative of being led to so much fascinating study. I probably know about 40 or 50 words in Hindi. I have discovered some amazing Indian musicians, film musicians or non. (And I am including Adnan Sami in that group, although he's not Indian - if I have it right, he is of Pakistani descent, born in Canada, raised in England, and now living and working in Mumbai.) I taught Shiva some Yiddish via email, and recommended American films to Pankaj.

It's been a pretty fruitful nine months.

I've also become active on Twitter during this time; I joined a year or more ago, but never really cared for it. I found the 160-character limit stifling. Now I adore it, way more than Facebook. Neat little jokes and messages and information fly through the ether, and I can reach out to people I would never have encountered before. And of course it's always thrilling to get a reply or retweet from someone I admire from afar. I've had replies from Amitabh himself (only one, but that's plenty), from Raghu Dixit, and often more than once a day from Adnan Sami (brilliant man with a great sense of humor). Some nice replies and retweets from one of my heroes, Dick Zigun, "the unofficial mayor of Coney Island." (I used my blog name as my handle, @northofconey, so I'm followed by a lot of Brooklyn-based people and organizations.) I've said hello to Dick here and there over the years when I've seen him around Coney, but last Friday night, when I introduced myself at the Mermaid Parade volunteers meeting, he knew exactly who I was. I've had some nice replies from the actor John Ortiz and former jockey/actor Gary Stevens. I've also had some Twitter exchanges with a couple of the "Deadliest Catch" captains. In fact, on that week's "After the Catch" (kind of the postgame show for "Deadliest Catch"), they put my live-tweet on the air! (Not having a smartphone or laptop, I had to run to my computer to live-tweet during the commercials, but it was well worth the fuss. It was a pretty major moment, seeing my tweet on TV.)

Whiplash change of topic: it is now apparently considered old-fashioned, when writing, to put two spaces after a period or colon) instead of one. It feels weird. Makes me feel a little old (though not quite like being called "Aunty").

Yes, I had my first volunteer experience at the Mermaid Parade, and sad to say, it didn't go well. I was assigned to sell merchandise, went to the meeting the night before (Rochelle was there, too), signed in on Saturday morning, got my free tee shirt and a bottle of water, and was told to go to 21st Street. Met up there with two of the people who were also supposed to sell merch (we were told there would be three tents with four people each), but there was no one to tell us where to go or what to do. The three of us sat under a tent, where there was a cooler with bottled water and a porta-potty, and waited for an hour and a half. We kept asking staff people what was going on, and some of them radioed in, but we never got any information. A couple of times, one or the other said, "I think you're supposed to go to 22nd Street," or some other location, but no one at those locations knew anything, either. (I very much enjoyed meeting one of my co-merch-volunteers, a woman in her late eighties, who had sold merch in 2011 and had some very interesting stories to tell about her life.) We didn't get the lunch that was supposed to be provided. It was an extremely hot day. After and hour and a half, one of the staff said something about a problem with the merch set-up, and I walked the ten blocks back to the volunteer station. The woman there said that there wasn't going to be merch, apologized and gave me lunch and another bottle of water. (I have to say, they were very on top of having plenty of water.) She said I could carry a banner, but I knew that was beyond my stamina limit at that time. Barry and I found each other, but it was already a half-hour before the start of the parade and impossible to get a decent place to watched. We tried to watch a little, then went home.

I emailed the volunteer coordinators about my experience. The next day, they sent a group email to all of the volunteers, and apologized sincerely for any glitches. A day later, I got a very lovely personal email from one of the coordinators, apologizing again. So I kind of got to be part of the event; tried my best. At least I got the tee shirt. I think I'll give it another shot next year.

more movies, more actors

I started watching Agneepath yesterday, although the subtitles got screwed up in the middle and I wasn't able to finish.  (I've gotten a second copy which I hope to be able to finish.)  There's a remake opening soon, and I thought I would watch the original Amitabh Bachchan version first.

Somehow, I was under the impression that this was one of those films based on Hindi myth, and I'm not sure why.  It might have been the promo snippets I saw from the newer film that suggested it, or maybe the title.  But it's far from that.  It seems to be one of those Indian films that doesn't cop to being a remake or "inspired by," but is in fact...well, basically, it borrows really heavily from Scarface.  Like Sarkar, Bachchan is made up to resemble Al Pacino in a big way, and wears a lot of white suits.  He's a gangster, his mother doesn't approve, and it looks as if his pal has taken a shine to his sister, apart from the fact that the gangster, Vijay, starts off working for four established gangsters and then takes over their business.

The good surprise in this movie (so far) was Mithun Chakraborty as the pal, Krishnan.  Like Manny in Scarface, Krishnan is a less sophisticated foil to the lead.  This is where my knowledge of India fails me somewhat, but he seems to be identified as a "southerner," which I'm sensing is something like the way American southerners were once stereotyped: good-natured, non-urban, old-fashioned.  But Chakraborty takes the role and runs with it.  The movie is most not musical, but more than an hour into it, there's a scene where Krishnan shows up at a dance to check on Vijay's sister, and gets himself a nice little dance number.  It's like being in another movie for a little while.  In this scene, Krishnan comes into the "disco" party, where the young people make fun of him, until he shows them his "coconut disco." The character announces himself over and over as having a master's degree but working as a coconut "wallah" (vendor).  I have no idea why they're disco dancing in 1990, unless the film is set earlier and I missed those cues.

The actor has had a very long career, and I'm interested in seeing more of his work.

And speaking of remakes...there was an exchange on Twitter yesterday between Ram Gopal Varma and Amitabh Bachchan in Hindi, which seemed to have something to do with remakes and flops and American film. One of my mutual followers there was nice enough to translate for me. It's kind of thrilling to be privy to that sort of thing.  RGV was basically saying that Indian remakes of American movies are never as good as the originals, and that America makes the best original movies.  Amitabh replied that one never hears about American flops, and besides, what about films like Sarkar and Sholay?  (Sarkar is the Godfather-inspired film that RGV directed himself, and Sholay, Bachchan's big breakthrough film, was a remake of The Magnificant Seven, which itself was a remake of The Seven Samurai.)

RGV may have been taking a swipe at Players, Abhishek Bachchan's just-released movie, which is a remake of The Italian Job and opened to lukewarm reviews.  That couldn't have pleased Big B too much; he's like a mother bear protecting a cub when it comes to Abhishek.  On Friday, he retweeted every single positive thing about Players, giving me the brief impression that it was something of a hit.

I get two TV programs a week here that deal with Indian movies:  "Showbiz India" and "Namaste America."  They're basically combinations of  movie-star gossip and promotions of big commercial films (although "Namaste America" usually has a segment of political news as well).  As I've watched the shows over the weeks, the films promoted went this way:  Desi Boys, The Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl, Don 2, Players.  The new Agneepath (which Hrithik Roshan) seems to be next on the list.  It was on one of these shows yesterday that I learned Players was not all that well-regarded.  One of the shows interviews customers leaving the theater, and even though half are in Hindi, it's pretty easy to tell when someone doesn't like a movie.  No one seemed to like the music.

For the most part, Amitabh's fans drink the kool-aid when it comes to Abhishek.  (For my non-American friends:  "drink the kool-aid" means to blindly follow.  It comes from an incident in the 1980s where an American cult leader's followers committed mass suicide by drinking a poisoned soft drink similar to "Kool-Aid.")  One member of the EF was brave enough to report that she didn't much care for Players, but that was an exception.

A lot of the newer films don't excite me that much; they're geared to a younger set of viewers, with younger actors, and more Western dress, music, and themes.  I can watch American romantic comedies and American Idol if that's what I want.  I like Indian movies to be Indian...hate to see them spoiled by the worst of the west.

One other thing from yesterday's show-biz shows.  They showed Bachchan at a promotion for a new book by Anupam Kher.  Kher is kind of an interesting guy; there isn't that much info on IMDB or Wikipedia, but he seems to be something of a renaissance man, a writer, activist, and theater actor as well as a long-time character actor in Indian film (he's also done a little crossing over into Western films like Bend it Like Beckham and the Ang Lee film Lust, Caution).  He's also married to the actress Kiron Kher, who played opposite an older Amitabh Bachchan in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna and Veer-Zaara, but was something of a bombshell as a younger woman.  She's still quite lovely.

I swear there was something on my mind besides Indian film, but I have no idea what it was.