Monday, February 23, 2009

Congrats to A.R. Rahman

...for his Oscars for Best Score and Best Song. This is a long time coming, believe me. He's scored more than 50 films, starting in South India in Tamil and Telegu and reaching Bollywood with Rangeela (the title number "Rangeela Re" has a cute little rapping kid who's the son of Udit Narayan, playback singer for about half the movies in Bollywood. I expect to be hearing more from little Aditya in a year or two). He's done historical dramas like Lagaan (from which I got the working title for my WIP, "Mitwa"), Jodhaa Akbar, which I posted a clip from last month, and Mangel Pandey: The Rising (so many great songs; I'm picking "Main Vari Vari" because I love Rani's dancing on this one).

He's also done modern sounds with movies like Rang de Basanti ("Khalbali" being my fave) or Janne Tu Ya Janne Na ("Pappu Can't Dance", a song rumored to be about Salman Khan, although Aamir Khan says that's totally not true; Salman doesn't have an MBA...). He even did the music for the Mandarin/Japanese film Warriors of Heaven and Earth (gorgeous look, gorgeous sound, woefully deficient in the story department, as I've blogged before).

But my favorite A.R. Rahman piece is still the soundtrack for Dil Se. I've shown you
Chaiyya Chaiyya before (with Malaika Arora Khan dancing on top of a train, not to be missed), but my favorite from that film is "Satrangi Re", I love the way it twists around itself. The Himalayas are beautiful as well, of course. This is totally where I'm building my writing cabin:



You know, that was the first Oscar ceremony I've seen that was just fun to watch all on its own. The tributes to animation, comedy, and romance and especially the musicals were all cool; getting Judd Apatow and Baz Luhrmann involved was a killer idea. The stage was so beautiful, with the lights and the crystal curtain, and the elements they changed in the back drop for each award. But I particularly liked how they ditched the clips for the acting categories in favor of having five nominees give little salutes. It was so much more personal. And of course Hugh Jackman is always the bomb: "I'm Wolverine!!"

Thursday, February 19, 2009

I've been scooped!

I make up stories in my head all the time just to amuse myself (I know, weird thing for a writer to do). One of my favorites is completely useless to me really, but I've been exploring the back stories of all the characters in it, refining the world building and all that for a wu xia Bollywood mash-up for some time now. My two favorite things; how could I not try to put them together? But I haven't committed any of it to paper; I write novels, and I just don't know how I would write a Bollywood novel. Describe the musical numbers? So I haven't done much with it. It's just something for my brain to do on the days I run on the treadmill and can't read.

Then while watching a trailer show during halftime last night, I saw this:

Besides also being a kung fu Bollywood story, it's very different from the one in my head. I mean, mine is a space opera and the kung fu is more wu xia than this seems to be. So my story is safe. In the mean time, how geeked am I to see this? I've actually seen all of this director's previous work, and his last, Salaam-e-Ishq I've watched mmmmf times (no, totally not fessing up to a number. Let's just say a lot). Akshay Kumar is perfect for a comedy role like this one, and it even has Gordon Liu in it. Sadly it's already come and gone from my neighborhood multiplex that shows movies from India (in Hindi and Telegu and Tamil; it wasn't nearly so multicultural when I worked there). I'll have to wait for the DVD.

Another disturbing similarity to the world in my own head: The space station my novel Mitwa takes place on is Chandni 5...

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Because it helps to have a goal

Using Dr. Horrible as a motivation tool was pretty crucial in getting the first draft of MITWA down so quickly. I think I need something similar to get the revisions done. I mean, I took a week off of work at the beginning of the month to get started, and I did fuss with it a bit, but mostly I slept 12 hours a day instead. (It's OK, I really needed it).

So. After re-watching seasons 1-3 of Lost, I think season 4 might make a nice reward. Easy to dole out in small segments, but they all join together with lots of cliffhanger endings so it should keep my driven. Of course season 4 is the season that was smited by the writer's strike, and it's possible the ending was trashed as badly as Heroes was. (I've been diligently steering clear of spoilers, which means I don't really have any idea of how well liked the season was by other fans, because with a show like Lost, any discourse is a spoiler).

Well, I'm going to give it a try. 14 episodes to be sprinkled over revising 24 chapters. I know I'm going to need to add 1 or 2 more chapters, so the math here is going to get confusing. Wish me luck!

Friday, February 13, 2009

Movies in January

Apparently I watched a lot of movies in January. Well, that’s my usual antidote to post-holiday burnout.

First up, the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. Not as good as Fargo, but much more watchable than No Country For Old Men. Brad Pitt as the gym employee was fun, but George Clooney was the highlight for me (particularly the look he gives Tilda Swinton when he decides to take his big purple wedge and go; it was perfection).

Quin had a hankerin’ to see some westerns, a genre he’s not really familiar with. So for Christmas the boys and I loaded him up with western DVDs, mostly things I’ve already seen (namely, the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns – how had he never seen any of those?) I did get one that I had never seen before either: How The West Was Won. Apparently when this ran in theaters it was projected on three screens for a wrap-around effect, which I bet was really cool, particularly the scenes on the river or flying through the mountains. I didn’t like it quite as well as those spaghetti westerns but I liked the epic scope of the story. And seeing all the old stars when they were young, young, young was a treat.

The trailers for Wanted looked awesome, didn’t they? Sadly the movie was complete crap. Honestly, the depth of my disdain for this film can scarcely be measured. Partly it was the Mary Sue quality – the guy who works in a cubicle whose boss is a fat bitch and girlfriend is an unfaithful nag is secretly the son of an assassin and once he gets tapped for the family business he’s going to run around killing people and making out with Angelina Jolie. It felt like it was written in that cubicle. (Ironically, his boss has good reason to be a bitch – his work is pushed off to one side so he can spend all day Googling himself - and in his scenes with his girlfriend you wonder why she’s even still there since he couldn’t be more emotionally detached. Must be his rock-hard abs). I probably could have handled all that (maybe) if it weren’t for the nonsense about the tapestry woven with names in it by “Fate”. No one ever questions this; it’s just accepted that the names it spits out are people that have to be killed. No one questions the possibility that someone could cause these patterns to happen by programming or just fiddling with the machine. And in the end Morgan Freeman reveals that all of the agents were on the kill list by handing them paperwork – not even the pieces of tapestry (which he could easily fabricate if he wanted to, but never mind) and that’s proof enough for a massive murder/suicide. I will believe that bullets can travel in arcs, but I can’t buy people so incapable of asking completely obvious and necessary questions. And yeah, that was a spoiler there about how they all die in the end except the awesome MC, but believe me, you don’t want to see this movie. One last gripe: if you’re going to talk about God, talk about God, don’t rename it “Fate” but treat it the same way (to the extent of even saying “Kill them all and let Fate sort them out”). Fate doesn’t want things.

So OK, here’s a movie I was expecting to hate but really enjoyed: Mamma Mia, the musical of Abba songs. After Across the Universe I was reluctant to watch this one. I bought it but left it sitting on the bookshelf for quite some time until one night we were looking to kill some time before a west coast basketball game started and Quin had Aidan put it in. We ended up missing the first half of the game; this movie entranced all four of us. This movie isn’t an attempt to interpret the Abba canon; it’s basically an old-school Greek comedy about mixups and marriages that happens to use Abba songs in the telling (it even has a Greek chorus). And the cast clearly was having a lot of fun with it. I particularly liked Meryl Streep, who looks very good for her age in a natural, non-Hollywood botox etc. kind of way. You believe her as a woman who’s been running a hotel on her own for twenty years (actresses almost never look like they do the jobs they are meant to be performing; as much as I liked The Lake House, I did not buy Sandra Bullock as an overworked inner city doctor).

The Holiday was good as well; in the Nancy Meyer’s canon I’d rate this better than What Women Want although not as good as Something’s Gotta Give. I liked Eli Wallach’s character, the old screenwriter. Since seeing The Good, The Bad and the Ugly for the first time, Quin has been seeing Eli Wallach everywhere (he was the Ugly). He was also in How the West Was Won and kept popping up in movies Quin was surfing through on TV; just one of those journeyman actors you never really notice, until you do and then they’re everywhere.

TV on DVD: The Boondocks Season 2, even better than Season 1. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the comic strip that was simply the best drawn set of panels on the funny pages becomes one of the most gorgeously animated shows on TV. Honestly, the attention to detail on this show is sublime: the trees, the sunsets, the people’s faces. Plus, it’s funny as hell. I particularly like Katt William’s character, A Pimp Named Slickback, whom the family calls on for marriage counseling or to help Riley sort out his sexuality, because wouldn't those sort of things fall under his realm of expertise as a pimp? The songs are well done as well; I suspect the rappers that do voices also contribute there. The downside: this show will encourage a mode of speaking not considered appropriate to use in front of your children. Just sayin’.

The Complete BlackAdder we watched with the boys. In an attempt to work down my To Be Read pile I used my gift certificates on British comedy shows rather than books. Most of what I bought I’d already seen; Fawlty Towers and the complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but Blackadder I’d only ever seen bits and pieces of. The boys loved it, and it was a nice roundabout way of using what they’ve been learning in history (they got the context the stories were set in without having to have it explained, which was nice). My favorite episode is definitely the one with Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, although the scene where Blackadder is being tortured by an inquisitor who only speaks Spanish and the two have to converse in pantomime was brilliant.

Two Cinematic Titanics: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks. The first was originally an MST3K episode, but here it is again with all new jokes. I think this version is even funnier than their original take, but then again things just seem funnier when I enjoy them with my boys. Castle of Freaks was good as well; the boys were particularly taken with the boob blimp that floated into the screen to cover the film’s gratuitous T&A, always getting there just...in....time.

Two Mira Nair films: Salaam Bombay, in Hindi but not remotely a Bollywood film. I’ve been digging into the slums of Mumbai for novel research, mostly online things (like this or even Google Earth). This movie is set there and is quite a heartbreaker. The last five minutes of just the boy alone, how you can see what he is thinking as it passes over his face, is genius. How she got such a performance out of such a young actor I can’t imagine. An excellent film. Vanity Fair I enjoyed as well; gorgeously shot with a nice little nautch girl number near the end (choreographed by Farah Khan, but then you already knew I adored her work). You know I didn’t think I liked Reese Witherspoon, but after this and the Johnny Cash biopic I might have to reevaluate that assessment.

I recently picked up a Bruce Lee box set on DVD. I had them on video but I haven’t had a working VCR in years so they were really just paperweights. The set included Game of Death II, which I didn’t even know existed. Game of Death was always a really lame movie with a terrific ending (the bits that actually had Bruce Lee, natch, but just the idea of fighting you way up a pagoda is very cool). A sequel is pure exploitation of the Lee name, but honestly I found it more watchable than the first. The story was better (particularly after they killed off the actor that was supposed to be Bruce Lee; their technique of working in his reaction shots from other movies was far from seamless). Not a great film, but no where near as bad as it could have been. Plus the movie clips from Bruce when he was 6 were cute.

And I’ll admit I only picked up Nomad: The Warrior because it had Jason Scott Lee in it. That man just doesn’t get enough work. I can argue that Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is more of a Bruce Lee movie than anything that actually had Bruce Lee in it, if you want to listen to me wax rhapsodic on the philosophy of kung fu, but you probably don’t. At any rate, I fell in love with Jason Scott Lee when he played an Inuit in Map of the Human Heart, a very fine film. Nomad isn’t exactly great, there were story problems I longed to fix because with just a few nudges this could have been great. It was very interesting, though; set in Kazakhstan, a country I know next to nothing about but is absolutely gorgeous. The costumes and cinematography were so lush, it’s a shame they didn’t bring the same attention to detail to the script.

Wrapping up with Bollywood: Yaadon Ki Baaraat and Haathi Mere Saathi are both early Salim-Javed films. Yaadon had a very young (8ish?) Aamir Khan in it. Thankfully he grew into those ears. I liked the music in this one, sort of surf guitar/spaghetti western/girls in go-go boots mash-up I could see Quentin Tarantino really digging. The story was good (three brothers are separated as children when gangsters kill their parents and eventually find each other as adults with very different lives), but could have used a stronger sense of structure; it kept wandering a bit and I think it would have worked better rotating through the three brothers more rather than sticking with one at a time (I kept wondering what the other two were up to). Haathi Mere Saathi was the first Salim-Javed collaboration, a story of a boy who is saved by a herd of elephants who then become his lifelong companions. I think this is a story that would actually work better as a novel. The story of a man wandering penniless, followed around by his four elephant companions, is quite charming, but a lot of things in it were quite disturbing specifically because you knew it was really being done. I mean like having an elephant grab a tiger by the tail with his trunk and bash him on the ground repeatedly. And if that’s not disturbing enough for you: a baby is allowed to crawl face-first into a pool of water. Sure the elephant pulled him right back out again, but still. How horrifying for that baby.

Bichhoo was one that Quin’s coworker had specifically recommended that he watch. It soon became clear why: it was a remake of The Professional/Leon, one of Quin’s favorite movies. It starred Bobby Deol, who balances the hitman plot/goofy love back story here as handily as he did in Soldier, and had a dance number with Malaika Arora (which is really all Quin needs in a Bollywood movie anyway). Rani Mukerji had the Natalie Portman part, which was odd. She’s clearly late 20s, but she acts like she’s a tweener; I’m not sure how old we were meant to see her as. The guy who took on the Gary Oldman part was fantastic, genuinely creepy. He was a big guy, though, and part of what made Gary Oldman so intimidating in The Professional (or anything else he plays a bad guy in, actually) is his lack of size. His personality overwhelms you. So, Bichhoo, an interesting albeit not successful experiment.

Which leaves only Jodhaa Akbar, the latest epic from Ashutosh Gowariker, who also wrote and directed Lagaan (that being the movie where I got my working title MITWA from). This is not quite as good as Lagaan, but is still just the sort of sweeping epic I tend to really go for. It’s the story of the Mughal emperor Akbar and his Hindu wife Jodhaa whom he allows to remain Hindu (not a popular decision with his Muslim family and advisors). There is some history here although the story itself is largely fictional; rather like Shakespeare used to do. Hrithik Roshan is wonderful; he communicates so much without words (watch the moment in the clip below when the people confer the title “Akbar” on him and he is so overwhelmed and grateful and humbled all at once. Wonderful.) Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is also good as the wife who is equally comfortable storming into the kitchen to make dinner for her husband herself (not an empress-like activity) or sparring with him with swords (again, not your usual empress way to spend the day).

The music for this one is by A.R. Rahman, who is up for a couple of Academy Awards this year for Slumdog Millionaires (a movie I long to see but will have to wait for the DVD). There is a song done by a troupe of Sufis that slowly evolves into spinning dervishs I quite liked, but this one has to be the highlight: the party the people of India throw for their emperor when he repeals a tax that targeted Hindus but not Muslims. They really like their emperor a lot (except the guy with the bow; he's clearly not a fan):


Monday, February 09, 2009

Books in January

Well, I didn't quite crack 100 books read last year. That's a goal I've had since forever but I've never quite pulled it off. My other goal, to bring my To Be Read pile down to a more respectable 20 or so is still far off; I'm at 231 at the moment. I tried to keep my Christmas and birthday book hauls smallish (and I see some sort of ebook in my near future; I'm running out of space for books here). In defense of my massive TBR stack: there are a lot of Sanskrit plays, Tacitus and Herodotus, and the like in there. It takes a special mood for me to tackle those. But this should probably be the year I take on Larry Niven.

In the meantime, I'm still reading Sufi things for research. One of my characters is named Rabi'a, so it seemed about time I read an entire book just about her: Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a by Charles Upton, a collection of poetry that is attributed to her. Short but sweet. I also picked up The Alchemy of Happiness by al-Ghazzali, which I found more dogmatic and not particularly sufi. But the Conference of the Birds by Darid Ud-Din Attar was sublime. Still not sure how I'll use any of this in the novel, but it gives me some context for Omesh's father and by extension Omesh himself. Living in Space by G. Harry Stine is probably the last book on this subject I'll be tackling just now, mostly because it covered everything I've been searching for answers on (and also engagingly written; I recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing).


I alternated reading all that with reading Hellboy; he makes a nice antidote to Too Much Research. With Strange Places, The Troll Witch and Others, and Darkness Calls, I'm pretty sure I'm all caught up on Hellboy in comics. But there are various spin-offs I can plunge into next.




And as one last non-genre read before I plunge into all that Niven I read two novels by Mark Bastable. I went to considerable effort to get these; they are out of print and I don't think were ever available in North America in the first place; I had them shipped from used book sellers in the UK. But they arrived just before I started all the Heinlein novels and got (criminally) set aside. The first, Icebox, was an engaging read, but Mischief just blew me away. There are a number of scenes that are written in just such a way that you believe one thing that turns out later not to be true. There were several points that I was certain something else had definitely happened and furiously whipped back through the pages to re-read a scene, only to find that it actually hadn't definitely happened at all. And it's not like these scenes felt in any way oblique on the first read; there was no clue that the narrator was being less than honest. (My husband found the process of me reading this book quite amusing; there was a lot of this paging back, always capped with a gleeful "oh, you bastard!" when I realized I had made another erroneous assumption).

Yep, those two novels were well worth the effort of acquiring them.