The Camberwell Carrot & Other Withnail Scenes

From one of the funniest, most original films I have ever seen -

Prakash Mehra Tribute

Amitabh Bachchan on Prakash Mehra -

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Prateeksha, Mumbai
May 17, 2009
Sun  11: 59 PM 

Prakash Mehra passed away early this morning.  An entire era of cinema and my association with him passed away with him.  He was repairing well in hospital and was to be removed from the ICU to a general room.   A sudden infection resulted in multiple organ failure and he breathed his last.  A long fruitful and incredible period of his remarkable films that he did with me, flashed past.  His first meeting with me at RajKamal studio where he had come to cast me in Zanzeer in 1971 right through to the mid 80’s, year after year of unbelievable successes – Zanzeer, Hera Pheri, Khoon Paseena, Lawaris, Muquaddar ka Sikander, Sharabi, Namak Hallal.  What a huge bank of amazing films, right down to his last with me, Jaadugar.  The only one that did not work.  I still remember his phone call to me in Bangalore after the release. ‘Lalla’, as he endearingly called me ‘gadbad ho gayee hai !’ he said.  Things have gone wrong.  Honest and straight.  He had always maintained that the day I cannot make a successful film with you I shall stop working with you.  He never did anything after Jaadugar.  A simple man who had the capacity to narrate great stories through the medium of cinema in the most simple manner.  No fuss, no calisthenics.  Just very ordinary camera placements and extraordinary content.  A writer, a lyricist, a musician, he added all these qualities to his creativity behind the camera and gave me some of my most challenging roles.  Never rewarded by any institution.  And never sought one either.  His films have lived out longer than him.  A true mark of excellence.  The music he gave to his films still ring in the hearts and ears of each generation that came after him.  The performances he extracted from his artists were never ever considered for any recognition. It never bothered him.  Critics panned his films and the greater the criticism the longer became their duration, at the box office.  ‘Unko likhne do woh, jo bhi likh rahe hain, aur jahan bhi likh rahe hain. Main jaanta hun main unhe kahan likh raha hoon !’, he would often retort.

A friend and a colleague, gone forever.
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Duniya Khel Tamaashaa

yeh duniya oot patanga
this world’s all topsy-turvy
kithe hath te kithe taanga
<untranslatable beauty>
ate kukdi dendi baanga
<unknown>
ede chakde phatte
live it up, dude !

yeh duniya khel tamaashaa
this world’s a game, a show 
ethhe jeene ki bhasha
kanu khich pich tan ke shoo shaa
<unknown>
ede chakde phatte

yeh duniya mast kalandar
a winner-take-all wild ride
taa ate utte baitha bandar
with a monkey presiding over the melee
samjhe apnoo sikandar
believing he’s in control
ede chakde phatte

yeh duniya vaari vaari
chakde saare nar naari
they all take turns chasing life’s many colors
tu kahnoo baniya bhikhari
why do you cling stubbornly to your beggardliness ?
ede chakde phatte

FT : Game, Set, Match To Eastwood For “Gran Torino”

The fanciful warrant of an actor’s talent has long been his ability to read the telephone book: a great actor will sound it forth like Sophocles or Shakespeare.  By that measure Clint Eastwood is now up there with Garrick, Bernhardt and Olivier.  In early scenes of the deliriously enjoyable Gran Torino – a clever, immaculately structured, wryly raw comedy-drama about racism, gang war and redemption – Eastwood has little to do but alternate between pronouncing names and calling them.  He apostrophises people first, insults them soon after (or vice versa), in an ageing widower’s one-man campaign to resist détente with his family, his Catholic priest and, above all, his Hmong neighbours.  This tribal diaspora from south-east Asia – the Hmong from Laos, Cambodia and other countries won refugee status after fighting alongside the US in the Vietnam war – is now encircling Eastwood’s house.  The Korean War veteran’s brick-and-wood homestead, with his vintage Gran Torino nestling proudly in the garage, stands out amid untended clapboard neighbours noisy with extended-family conviviality and incomprehensible tongues.  Cranky old Clint, who has an unnamed life-threatening disease (presumably cancer), is troubled of lung and toxic of tongue.  When the neighbours come too close, he goes “Nngghhh”, a low noise like a teeth-baring mutt.  If he has to address them, he calls them “Ding Dong” or “Charlie Chan”.  When they invite him to a barbecue he refuses, adding: “And keep your hands off my dog.” F inally he takes a small shine to the next-door son Thao (Bee Vang), only because a greater xenophobia – aversion to the Asian street gangs trying to recruit the boy – conquers a lesser.  Walt Kowalski is Dirty Harry gone mangy, even rabid.  But Harry’s saving gracelessness was his ability to shut people up who needed shutting up.  We know Walt will do the same: the twist in Nick Schenk’s debut script is how.  Gran Torino has a startling end, ingeniously giving each spectator the different satisfaction he might want.  He can hiss the baddies.  He can giggle at racist abuse (disapprovingly, of course).  He can even cheer as another Clint hero reaches for another gun whose magnitude is surplus to purpose.  But finally his smile is wiped, leaving a deeper, interior grin that combines satisfaction with a pinch of stupefaction. 

What is there left to say about Eastwood the actor?  In his first role since Million Dollar Baby, and after threats to retire, he is more hypnotic than ever.  A geological history as complex as Vesuvius seems to lie beneath those cracked, striated features, with their smoke-puff of white hair and the pyroclastic glimmer of their eyes.  The voice is a sandpaper rasp, barely now even a whisper, but he knows how to make words scald or sting.  He can put the “bitch” into “obituary” (even when it isn’t there); he can leave plainspoken wisdoms dinning in our heads as if they were scripted by Tolstoy.  Someone says, of Walt’s Korean war traumas, that it’s terrible what men are ordered to do.  Eastwood, summing up his character and hinting at his hero’s back story, replies with perfect pace and aim: “The thing that haunts a man most is what he isn’t ordered to do.”  Game, set and match.  We barely see the ball pass us before it hits the baseline, but Gran Torino has proved itself another effortless Eastwood Grand Slam victory.

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1e2a57e4-fdd0-11dd-932e-000077b07658.html

Lunch With The FT : Disney/Pixar Chief John Lasseter

(click thumbnail for full article)

…..During Lasseter’s first stint at Disney he found himself being asked, “What would Walt do?” At the Lucasfilm computer division new ideas were not discouraged, partly because of Catmull’s background in science. “With science there is this culture of experimentation and most of the time those experiments fail,” says Lasseter. There’s a culture of failure, which is accepted and it’s become part of Pixar.”  It was important, he says, to strike the right balance between technological innovation and storytelling.  “Art challenges technology but technology inspires the art.  Often you’ll see a film where it’s been caught up in the technology and it doesn’t captivate.  What I learnt from those great Disney animators was that it’s what you do with the technology that matters.”  Steve Jobs (who earlier this week announced he was taking medical leave from Apple) heard what the Lucasfilm computer division was doing and ended up buying it for $10m in 1986.  Lasseter says Jobs funded the newly renamed Pixar for 10 years before it turned a profit.  “Over the years he must have invested another $50m-$60m.  There is nobody else that would have supported us for that long.”…..

Reference : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d65cc760-e35a-11dd-a5cf-0000779fd2ac.html