ahmedabad / baroda

ahmedabad- that provincial town where everyone knows everyone and huge incredible homes lie on the outskirts. in the heart of town though along the sabarmati neo-fascist monument whose scaleless gargantuan monumentality gave me chills.

iit guest house

photopost 1 - studio x mumbai

discreet charm of the bourgeoisie . naya nasha

random and fantastic: the perpetually unfinished dinner party of the bourgeoisie. every time they sit to eat ridiculous guests turn up. ritual and ceremony are displaced by other rituals and ceremonies. it is in the collision of these, and the completely unfazed nature of the goings on that the film that an exquisite corpse of a film is made. and then there are the recounted dreams by characters who walk in and out of the film and also by the participants of the dinner party. and while these performances around food repeat endlessly going nowhere, our group of suit and gown clad elites walk steadfastly down a road heading nowhere in particular.

if only they had met 'grandpa' in his cane and bamboo den behind the psychedelic smoke filled haze of the drug palace where nanda is tempted out of her boredom into the world of sin. but then this 'naya nasha' is not only the bane of the bourgeoisie as the title scroll right at the beginning tells us it is 'the seventies'. where the working class is bored because of unemployment and the bourgeoisie because of the rejection by their parents. students are rioting on the streets or escaping into fantasy. nanda chooses the latter as she walks over the tome called 'moral moral moral' that she dumps on the floor when our vamp takes her to 'grandpa'. it all comes down to the doctor/ husband to save her from herself. he stands by steadfast even when she gives birth to a deformed little boy and shelters a drug dealer in her garage. all this time nanda talks to inanimate objects, throws her hair about and laughs manically and is in a flash reduced to tears. and she bites her lip. over and over again. in close up and in several violent crash zooms.

carlos. eden is west . fish tank . latcho drom . 7 khoon maaf . beautiful losers . pirates of silicon valley

the 6 hour epic drama about the jackal ' carlos' plays like a terrific thriller. he doesn't shapeshift as much as the forsythe characters but the story is way more exciting/ his journey through the murders in paris through the opec kidnapping and his eventual capture in libya. a terrific story and unstoppably told.

a road movie through france 'eden is west' cuts through landscapes from a high end beach resort on the mediterranean through rural landscapes with gay german truckers, all the way to paris as an illegal migrant searches for a magician who promised him work in paris. at the end the magician hands him a magic wand that makes the eiffel tower twinkle.

the 'fish tank' is dreary working class housing in britain where a dysfunctional family lives in the endless grid of rundown skyscrapers and derelict parking lots and overgrown gardens. it is in these that sudden beauty is found- a sky through the window where birds fly rapid in formation; or the waves hitting the shore in the desolate landscape around an industrial area; or in the skin on an aging horse caressed in the morning light. its beautifully shot. the heart shaped balloon in the last shot as it flies above the housing complex was a redundant metaphorical image in a film that before that had managed to stay above such symbolism. reminded me of the last scene in 'the flight of the red balloon' when the red balloon flies over paris.

the music in 'latcho drom' is fantastic. i am not quite convinced by the journey of gypsy music as constructed by the film- from the plains of rajasthan through egypt, turkey, hungary, romania, france and eventually in spain. i am also not certain about the pretend gyspy lives that the singers are purported to be living- singing on the tracks of trains, or otherwise. regardless- the music is gorgeous- the voices!

i tried to love '7 khoon maaf'. not quite dark comedy, not quite romantic drama, not quite anything much. murky and meandering for most of the time. some of the husbands were fun to kill. my favourite bit is the s&m seduction of irrfan. but the final murder was a cop out. and the music disappointing.

'beautiful losers' - a talking heads documentary american style that makes heroes out of so-called freewheeling out-of-the-box artists; and then goes ahead to in a half-hearted way explore the problems when this avant garde begins to be mainstreamized. utterly predictable and would have been completely pointless if it wasn't for the drawings. street art and graffiti. nothing 'radical' about the film making though.

is the title of 'pirates of silicon valley' a reference to the johnny depp series? are we supposed to see steve jobs and bill gates with pirate hats on and eye-patches as they steal ideas from each other and mega-companies to make their own massive monoliths. ibm and xerox play the giants that windows and apple brings down. while jobs comes across as a self centred power hungry ass; gates is a slimy weasel. the only hero is steve wozniak who steps out of the fray and is therefore the only person the film is partial to. don't film makers like geeks? think 'the social network'.