I have a soft spot for well-crafted stories about children. Not stories necessarily for children, but stories in which children are the main focus. Children, seen through adult eyes, can often be the sadly one-dimensional sort that act like miniature … Continue reading
Yes. The first post on Dusted Off was published on November 4, 2008.
It wasn’t as if I’d woken up suddenly one day with an epiphany and decided I had to create a blog. It just so happened that everything began to come together for me in 2008. I’d just quit the corporate world after 14 years of hard slogging—years which had left me with almost no time to call my own. I read books in fits and starts. I wrote in fits and starts. I didn’t have time to watch TV, and only very few films, and those too mostly in bits and pieces: half an hour here, half an hour there.
But, in March 2008, having given up my job so I could focus on my writing (I’d just signed a contract for The Englishman’s Cameo, and was busy writing its sequel), I began to spend a little more time doing the things that really appealed to me. Like watching cinema. And seeing what others had to say about the films I enjoyed watching.
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Happy Diwali! With Diwali around the corner, it seemed appropriate to post a little ‘did you know’ about the festival, since the Mughals celebrated this festival with a good deal of enthusiasm.
Railway Platform begins, not on a platform, but in a train.
It starts with a song, Basti-basti parbat-parbat gaata jaaye banjaara, lip-synched by a philosopher and poet (Manmohan Krishna) as he rides in a crowded train compartment. This man, only referred to as ‘kavi’ (poet) throughout the film, acts as a sort of sutradhar. Not strictly the holder of the puppet strings, not always a narrator, but a voice of reason, of conscience, of dissent. His favourite saying is that “Two and two do not always make four; they sometimes make twenty-two.”
I am listening to Poochho na kaise maine rain bitaayi as I write this. I am hearing Manna Dey’s voice, bringing so much emotion, so much frustrated longing into “Ut jale deepak, it mann mera; phir bhi na jaaye mere mann ka andhera”. And I am remembering all the other songs of Manna Dey that I’ve loved over the years. Songs that I grew up with (and, more often than not back then, didn’t know who sang them). Songs that I loved from the very first moment I heard them. Songs that have grown on me. Songs that make Manna Dey immortal, even though he’s no more.
This is the 400th post on this blog.
And, what with my penchant for honouring precedents, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to watch a film that has that number—400—in its title. Les Quatre Cents Coups (known in English as The Four Hundred Blows, though the actual translation would be closer to ‘the four hundred dirty tricks’) was directed by François Truffaut, one of the most prominent pioneers of French New Wave cinema. It was Truffaut’s first full-length feature film, a work that not only won much critical acclaim, but also led Truffaut to make a series of sequels featuring the same lead character…
…who is, in Les Quatre Cents Coups, the twelve-year old Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud).
Some of you may know that I’ve recently returned from an exhilarating time at the Bangalore Literature Festival—one of the highlights (at least for a cinema fanatic like me!) of which was that I got to meet Nasreen Munni Kabir. (And was introduced to Farhan Akhtar, and met Sidharth Bhatia, and got to get photographed within the same frame as Gulzar… but that’s a different matter). Nasreen Munni Kabir and I actually shared a cab for the two-hour trip from the airport to the hotel, and spent most of it chatting about all things cinema. I told her about this blog, of course, and happened to mention that among the most popular posts seem to be song lists.
Which reminded me: it’s time for another list. And because this popped into my head while I was travelling, I decided to do another ‘sung in transit’ list. But because I’ve already done car songs (not to mention ghoda-gaadi songs and train songs), I’m going the water way this time: with boat songs. The criteria here (besides my usual ones, of the films being all pre-70s ones that I’ve seen) are:
(a) The singer(s) should be on the boat for at least three-fourths of the song’s duration
(b) All types of boats are allowed—shikaras, rafts, motorboats, ships, anything. Moving or not.
I’ve been absent from this page in the recent past, but all for a good cause (I think!). Firstly, I’ve been hard at work on the fourth Muzaffar Jang book. Secondly, I’ve been spending some quality time with other authors, readers (and potential readers, I hope) at the Bangalore Literature Festival, 27th-29th September 2013.
A session with Gulzar and Prasoon Joshi at the Bangalore Literature Festival
As frequent visitors to this blog would know by now, one of my weaknesses is good music—and there have been, over the years, dozens of films that I’ve watched primarily because they had good scores. In some instances, just one song that I really liked. More often than not, my luck’s been pretty shoddy and I’ve ended up sitting through frightful films like Akashdeep, Saaranga, and Akeli Mat Jaiyo.
With Waaris, which I watched mostly because of Raahi matwaale, I had hopes [cautious, considering my track record, but hopes nevertheless]. It stars Suraiya and Talat Mahmood, both favourites of mine, and it was produced by Sohrab Modi, who even if (when acting) had a penchant for ‘declaiming to the skies’, did make some good films.
This was not the film I’d been intending to review this weekend.
The film I’d meant to watch was, instead, quite a different one: a Viking/King Arthur historical, the Robert Wagner-Janet Leigh-Debra Paget starrer Prince Valiant (1954). Why, then, am I reviewing this film, which has nothing to do with Vikings or history? Simply because Prince Valiant turned out to be—as a blog reader had so succinctly described The Long Ships in a comment—a ghanta film. (ghanta, for those not familiar with this particular usage of the Hindi word, refers to something cheesy, inferior, and generally avoidable).
Besides the fact that it consisted of slightly pointless (not to mention extended) violence and some very predictable romance, Prince Valiant had Robert Wagner looking like a masculine Amelie, which really put me off. To recover, I decided to watch Charly instead.
Dustedoff 
