9 to 12: The last show of the day

Hanna Montana on Vanity Fair & Watching SATC

Between the disdainful finger wagging and the vacuous uproar about sexual exploitation of the female tween-star is the ironic glimpse into American pop culture where a 15-year-old with a hit television show on the Disney channel claims her favorite show is ‘Sex in the City.” 

I am certainly not a fan of Miley Cyrus’s photo on the June issue of Vanity Fair (I find the photograph composition overused and stereotypical blah capturing a cosmetically unflattering side to the Hanna Montana star.  On first impression I did not see sexual overtones in the photograph, but I guess any teenager in the Lolita-ish age might be perceived as sexual if she is photographed in a bed sheet).  Disney obviously got into a huffy-tuffy fit about it and everyone blamed the magazine and its crew (ignoring the fact that her famous daddy on and off screen, Billy Ray Cyrus was at the photo shoot).  i am not going to add that photo to the post because the photo is nothing, it is just Cyrus wrapped in a bed sheet in black and white.  She really doesn't look nice in the photograph, she looks like a tired, sick kid. 

Her interview was more disturbing that the photograph. 

The Miley Cyrus of the Disney show Hanna Montana would certainly not be allowed to watch ‘Sex in the City’, At 34, I can barely process the casual sexual liberation of the ‘Sex in the City’ characters and in certain scenarios and storylines, apparently neither can the characters. 

I am not exactly sure whom Vanity Fair is trying to sell to anymore.  I can’t expect anyone legal to vote is even curiously interested in Miley Cyrus.  And there is no way my 7 year is reading Vanity Fair and you can be certain at 14 she won’t be watching reruns of Sex in the City.

Diss the future of Hindi-movie romance and skip Love Story 2008.

Rich, bored, unloved, motherless son, Karan (Harman Baweja) falls in love with butterfly chasing, dear-dairy-journaling sweetax Sana (Priyanka Chopra).  After some customary na-na-karte-pyar-tumhi-sai-kar-betha romance, and engagement is to follow.  Karan introduces Sana to eccentric uncle Dr. Ya an ex-NASA scientist who is inventing a time machine.  Sana expresses an interest in Mumbai in 2050 and sets the time-pod to 2050.  Cutback to the puppy love and suddenly Sana dies in a freak accident.

Forlorn Karan and Sana’s little brother and sister with Dr. Ya travel to 2050 to bring the future, re-born Sana to 2008 and she will remember jaanam jaanam ka pyar with Karan. 

The Karan-led gang travel to 2050 post-interval and enter the “special effects”.  Papa Baweja’s vision of the future is a cut-paste collage from Hollywood blockbusters: I, Robot, Minority Report, Star Wars, Back to the Future, and the Fifth Element but the effects just plain fail to impress most viewers who have seen the above and the more recent fare of digital effects in Hollywood creations.  The effects exist only to awe and tantalize gen-Xers who don’t watch Hollywood movies (if such a niche group exists).

Sana is now famous pop-star red-haired Zeisha and Mumbai seems to how become Hong Kong run by the Japanese.  A silly, microchip villain wanting Dr. Ya’s time machine provides for some galactic flying car chases and much to an exhausted audience’s dismay Karan has to re-coo and re-woo Zeisha so she will remember their love from her last life and return to 2008.  There is a talking teddy bear and feeling Robot , boobs sari-clad in Zeisha’s people-free life. 

The movie is exhaustingly aggravating because Baweja khandan really believes this is A-class commercial cinema, you can see the belief permeate in the movie’s production-attitude and you want to sit-down and counsel them extensively, expensively.

Dr. Ya played by Boman Irani and Sana’s loud-loving Punju mother played by Archana Puran-Singh is ho-hum-hamy and I hope they got paid handsomely for their roles, I can’t expect them getting anything else from boy-Baweja’s debut debacle.

Priyanka Chopra has screen presence that out-rivals any of her rivals.  The camera stupendously loves her in every shot.  She makes bad acting look good, her motion-picture mojo intoxicates the screen but unfortunately bad writing will make its nasty self evident and eventually even Piggy Chops can’t mesmerize with her magic.

The story is so weak and contrived and the even worse writing can't force a connection to characters with an audience who wasn't looking for high-brow cinema but simply an evening of entertainment but wishing intubation once the shoddy story continues ad-nauseum.

But Love Story 2050 was Harman’s launch pad towards Bollywood stardom.  This was an expensive screen test and I don’t think he completely failed it.  There are plenty of stars in the Hindi film industry who don’t perform to par with the greats and then again it was also his first movie so maybe can learn the trade.  Baweja is certainly not going away after his debut but he will have to overcome his identity crisis.

Boy-Baweja with his eerie resemblance to Hrithik, another cut and paste job, one can’t help wonder and then he speaks and all the similarities end.  His dialogue delivery is high-school-girl-squeaky and oh his limp, expressionless eyes emote nothing except dumbfound-ness in every frame, shot, and scene.

Hrithik Roshan and an other authentic actors and actresses of the same category emote with their eye expressions; it is the difference between playing an imaginary, crazy character believably or a real-life type character without credibility.

Unfortunately Boy-Baweja in Love Story 2050 is just not a natural and he will have to work less on the deltoids and more on the dialogue delivery.  Sure he can dance, fight, look-decently attractive to some I suppose, but Pappu can’t act, saala.

Not in 2008 and not in Love Story 2050.

Sex in the City, Just A Movie (A rather silly one). Not a review, just a rant.

Honestly I never got the appeal of the characters in ‘Sex in the City’, what I did enjoy about SATC is the sitcom’s edginess and wit in the pop culture subtext.

Some of the best episodes of the show explored highly charged topics with chutzpah, cute shoes, and horrible haute-couture (I mean, honestly which self-professed, obsessed clothes-whore dresses in such unflattering clothes as touted by the main character, writer and columnist Carrie Bradshaw, aka Sarah Jessica Parker—I mean she did own a full-length mirror in the show, I know I saw it, once. And if only, Carrie used it, once).  Personally I get style and signature but honey if it looks nasty off the rack and then on the rack, let’s call it as we see it.  Carrie Bradshaw may have eclectic taste in clothes but fashionista she is not.

Personally I could not relate to any of the SATC girls.  Samantha was just too randy (and lets be honest, if she were male we would plain think she was a misogynist).  I neither find the irony of Samantha’s sexuality iconic or accepting.  My brand of feminism is not driven by childish arguments that condone any women acting like a pig just because some men play in mud.  Women of yore weren’t, per se, fighting for our right to act dreadfully when they fought for equal pay, suffrage, and the right to choose.  Let us not reduce feminism to the simplistic adage of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander or in the case of Samantha, what’s reprehensible behavior for the goose liberates the gander when she partakes in it.

Miranda, the high-powered, career-driven, attorney is an alpha male reincarnate who propagates the stereotype that smart, intellectual, opinionated women are not pretty or nice people.

Charlotte, on the other hand, was pretty and fairly nice therefore could not string together a coherent, intelligible thought that conflicted with her pedigree conscious, pedicure-manicured, I-run-everyday-in-Central-Park in her clichéd Park Avenue existence.

And Carrie, the main character of the show, is a broken, dysfunctional girl trapped in a woman’s body who despite the introspecting, writer’s clairvoyance is unable to sift through her own emotions for the relevant, incisive questions and answers to her life, not just of her column.

Here is the reason for the rant: I just don’t get the hordes of women who (so I hear) “want” to be Carrie, Charlotte, or the ever-flat-one-dimensional Samantha (seriously Samantha?).  There are girls, out there (I am told), that relate and ape the above fictional characters (right down to their $700 shoes, of course). 

As a 30-minute show, SATC was many times captivating and sometimes brilliant and provocative but the SATC movie is a 2 hour, 33 minute, designer commercial with a few entertaining spurts but in the end highlights the sad life of single women in their 40s and 50s living in an American metropolis.

One of my still single friends said she liked SATC, the show, because the show’s popularity validated her status as a single person with an intelligible, witty, perspective versus the lonely, desperate woman-in-her-30s-persona created by society and fostered by the media.

The movie takes the premise of the 30-something single women having fun, continuing on their journey into their 40s and 50s making sad, uninspired, indulgent compromises with no perspective. (Ironically the similar compromises they did not want to settle into when they were 30-something).

The world needs more sisterhood among women.  We need the occasional night-out to bond.  But as another friend puts it gently to ease the ever-growing aggravation, it’s just a movie.

Yes!  That’s the point.  If you must obsess about cinematic characters, there are better choices that offer more dimensions (and honestly with better fashion choices).

Young girls, SATC is just a movie (and no doubt a fun night out), good or bad, is a matter of opinion but at the end of the day, its entertainment we should not be aping or aspiring. 

Here is to the morons at Warner Bros. who have finally figured out that women can waste money on crappy, Hollywood movies with lame storylines with $700 shoes, $1000 purses, $50,000 diamond rings (just like men can watch crappy movies with $10,000 fake boobs, $80,000 cars and $ gzillion machine guns with lame storylines).

Equal opportunity exploitation Hollywood style, drink your cosmos to that baby.

She just had a baby

Finally a celebrity who didn't spring into a size 2 within  weeks of delivering twins...she looks great and check out the shoes...love the shoes.

The Jodha Akbar Review

One of my closest female friends said after a solo theatrical tryst to watch Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Jodha Akbar that one of the best trends in Indian, Hindi films is the cinematic exploitation of the Indian, male physique.  Her exact words were, “ Hrithik rocks” and that succinctly reviews his role in the Jodha Akbar movie.

Despite the public clamor about controvertible facts in Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Jodha Akbar the most obvious counterfeit faux pas is Hrithik Roshan’s Akbar sports a retro-modern hairstyle throughout the epic; But then again gala authenticity has a place and I am glad it is not covering hair on Roshan’s chiseled, beautifully handsome face.

Roshan’s haircut notwithstanding, the movie scores 2 stars for the costume drama that is requisite for a period movie and a special half a star goes towards the jewelry designers of the movie.  According to sources, 80 handpicked designers coordinated by Tanshiq assisted in the development of the adornments for the epic (jewelry addicts & admirers alike note that Tanshiq has made the Jodha Akbar collection available for viewing and purchasing).

The casting and acting are superb.  Roshan submerged himself into Akbar and eliminated the delineation between the actor Roshan and character Akbar resulting in a superb performance.  Rai’s acting as Jodha is competent.  Rai has the requisite celestial beauty to act the princess (Devdas and Hum Dil De Chuke) with the perfect combination of restraint and regal aura.  Why directors create physical action scenes for the former Miss World baffles and bothers me.  To quote another friend (who hated the movie), “she fights like a girl.”  Rai can’t play the athlete (Dhoom 2’s basketball scene with Roshan was a debacle) and when she is playing the role of the Empress of Hindustan, the viewers shouldn't’t have to suffer through her half-baked posturing as someone with an athletic ability, she is just not a good enough actress to pull off a fencing sequence.

IIa Arun playing Mahan Anga (Roshan’s nursing mother) deserves distinguished distinction for her role as monster-in-law antagonist.  She plays the character with the perfect combination of self-aggrandizement  and subtlety.

Unfortunately this is where the praises end. The real problem with Jodha Akbar is that the audience is trying to grapple the focus of this tale.  Is it the unexpected love between Jodha and Akbar resulting from a highly political move made by an ambitious Mughal Emperor?  Is it a general account of Akbar’s rule?  Or is it symbolic telling of how Emperor Akbar courts provincial Hindustanis with the same patience and love he courts his Hindu bride?  The answer is all of the above and the resulting narrative suffers because the audience is flip-flopping in a sea of sweltering stories without a lifeboat or a visible horizon.  The movie is as long as the Mughal rule and there is simply no anchor to immerse the viewer into the stories coupled with shoddy editing, it left this viewer worn.  Jodha Akbar is proof that an exceptional period movie needs to tell a story or a set of cohesive, well-tied stories with a flowing narrative.  Instead of transforming us into the surrealism of another era one feels like they are watching professionals play a game of costumed dress-up.

A big budget can buy you Bollywood beaus and beauties but you just can’t pull exceptional ratings without telling a great story when the movie is an epic. Jodha Akbar has bling power for your theater bucks with an empty bang; it is proof positive that style without substance, at least in the genre of a historic fictional movies leaves the viewer worn and purposeless. 

I have always been

The Triple Fool.
by John Donne
                                                                     

    I am two fools, I know,
    For loving, and for saying so
        In whining poetry;
But where's that wise man, that would not be I,
        If she would not deny?
Then as th' earth's inward narrow crooked lanes
    Do purge sea water's fretful salt away,
I thought, if I could draw my pains
    Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay.
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.
But when I have done so,
    Some man, his art and voice to show,
        Doth set and sing my pain ;
And, by delighting many, frees again
        Grief, which verse did restrain.
To love and grief tribute of verse belongs,
    But not of such as pleases when 'tis read.
Both are increasèd by such songs,
    For both their triumphs so are published,
And I, which was two fools, do so grow three.
Who are a little wise, the best fools be.

Sniffle, Cough, Smile & Laugh

I am suffering from a real bad flu so sniffles and cough being parcel of that package are frequent but every sneeze and cough produces peels of shrieks from my otherwise quiet, sweet happy baby. 

My little prince doesn’t like it when I sneeze or cough.  I am not sure if the sounds scare him or the way I look when I contort my face while doing either but he makes his displeasure known, loudly.

I was running out of ways to distract him after each involuntary attempt from my body to be rid of these germs (and I have a very low threshold for baby cries) so the new game is after every sniffle, cough, while my mouth is covered I play a form of smile peek-a-boo and then start spontaneously laughing.
It cracks the kid up to the point where he starts acting intoxicated on his own laughter and gets all loopy. 

I love that about him. 

Yesterday we were shopping in Safeway and he heard laughter in a distance (two young, teenage girls were giggling boisterously) in another shopping lane and my little prince caught their joke and started laughing rather nosily himself.

The shoppers in our lane saw him and started laughing and smiling too.

I feel I am raising quite a charmer, ladies.  Quite a charmer.

Getting over it.

Isn’t it amazing that post-fallout some people suddenly feel a public need to parade their sincerity, their love, and their overall great nature?  Acquaintances purposefully forgotten for lack of compatibility, fun, or interest seem more tolerable and unsavory words hurled about those same people are hushed and winked away because ‘it’s the time to disco’; Modern retribution is all about casually showing your happiness, like throwing a huge party for 50 of your not-so-close friends.

I guess I am old-fashioned; I need time and process to move beyond my loss and hurt.  As Gulzar writes, ‘dard hote jab dard kahin choop tha hi nahin’ (a loose definition: real pain emerges unmasked). .   I made the tumultuous decision of asking a loaded question: step up in the relationship or step out because my feelings and kids’ feelings are not begging bowls for your affections.  I received a dismal answer of hateful epithets. 

Life is too short to go through actions with less meaning and more contention.  Life is too short to deal with people who consistently excuse themselves of the thoughtless while holding everyone else to a higher standard of care.  Life is too short to have someone judge you less on the empirical evidence of your love and more on their negative moods.  Life is too short to be disposable in anyone's life.

It hurts when someone you cared about unmasks their inexplicable hate; it whiffs of cruel, unworkable usury.

I go through all the emotions of betrayal with textbook accuracy: denial, sadness, indignation, anger, sadness, hurt, real anger, raw hurt, sadness, a half-spherical, indulgent process with a beginning and an end.   

I just can’t walk around acting like I was never hurt to prove symbolic points to disloyal aggravators.   All I can say is that I am just not quite in the partying mood immediately after a well-executed betrayal.

Certainly surrounding myself with categorically, decisively forgotten friends of the past is antiseptic of nothing relevant. If I show up in the relationship on good faith terms and participate with sincerity but despite my best efforts, I am severely misinterpreted resulting in consequential spiteful fallout; I owe it to myself to mourn that relationship and my requisite efforts. 

Since when is an honest display of hurt and sadness such a bad thing?  Moving on without reserve is easy if during the relationship I had never cared or invested my love.  But I am not ashamed to say that I did care for those people who hurt me and partying after parting is shameless, sham grandstanding. 

And that is so temporary. 

I say live out the gore with guts.  Process away the negativity into small digestible packets.  Healing can only begin once you recognize the hurt. Recovery point is after hurt is healed and now new, more deserving, appreciable bliss is waiting for you and when you partake of it, it won’t be as retribution or as a symbol, it will be as it should be, just pure happiness. 

Happiness is not about the showmanship of old memories but making genuine new ones.  Living a happy life is the best revenge when one feels there is nothing left to avenge.  There is a difference between posturing over the past versus being real past it, it is the difference between vindication and victory.

Victory takes longer but it is sweeter and worth the wait.

Rejecting gender compartmentalization

Why do women insist on reducing themselves to a social stereotype?  The latest article in the Washington Post by Charlotte Allen, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” is lazy writing supported by the inanity of her thoughts.

There is an acquaintance we meet at a relative’s social events who purportedly “jokes” on the dimness of his spouse most of the time; this person is so pre-occupied making love to himself that it completely escapes him that his comments are offensive.  The fact that most of the crowd is captive by sheer presence of space versus by his beguiling persona never occurs to him and so his joshing nauseously continues.

There is a tinge of misogynist truth in all his attacks against his wife.  That is the unfortunate truth for his wife and Allen’s “spoof” on the inability of women to contribute intelligently reeks of similar type of ribbing.

Marrying into a family with no contemporary women among the brothers, the hint of misogynist among the men is quite superficial and while it does not come across as malicious as the latter person’s “jokes”, over a period it is irksome.  The smirk-ridden comments about the inability of women (in a family) to get along are especially nonsensical. (Are we talking about women in Ekta Kapoor serials or real women?).  The real women in my extended family and friends have amazing bonds of steel which while at times might grate one another loudly, are incredibly strong and rarely break.

I am no flaming feminist but I will not tolerate women (or men) reducing me to a social stereotype.  I will not participate in compartmentalizing myself under a cultural guise or to be political correct in polite company when another party is espousing less than civilized dialogue.

I am more than the sum of all the subsuming stereotypes of my sex. 

I will no longer play into your prejudices of my gender just for the fun of it.

Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post remembers a scence from West Wing (in his response to Allen's drivel):

Sam Seaborn, evaluating a bit of copy, ridden with the hoariest and most cloying of liberal cliches, dismisses it thusly:

SAM First of all, it's bad writing.

HENRY
What's wrong with it? [sits]

SAM
It sounds like it was written by a high school girl.

HELEN
Is there something wrong with the way a woman writes?

SAM
There usually is when she's in high school.

A few minutes later, aware that the faintest whiff of misogyny might be lingering in the room, Sam offers this important clarification:

SAM: I know plenty of women who can write, Helen. I know women who can blow the walls of brick buildings. This sounds like a girl.

Linkins adds, “With this distinction in mind, I'll only offer: Charlotte Allen, you write like a girl.”

Now that’s funny.

The glass half-full problem

The biggest problem with being an optimist is the inability to accept human limitation in the realm of individual personalities and interpersonal relations.

Some adults are incapable of depth and emotional maturity, an optimist believes that these people are not limited by their ability but by their unawareness.

An optimist believes if you never tell the aggravator of the inconsiderate and hurtful then they are unable to course correct a perspective, a perception provided equally overwhelming evidence.

An optimist believes that most people do not want to be seen as hurtful, insensitive, and selfish and if they send such a message across, they would analyze harsh accusations with not just initial indignation but also with a modicum of introspection.

Yet being a human our depraved flaw is the inability to course correct and receive unfavorable information about ourselves.  No one likes it when someone displays wrongs, unfairness or anything remotely critical when it is personal.

Herein lays the real dilemma.

The person who participates in any degree of introspection with the self in the mirror is constantly course correcting over a lifetime.  These people have many relationships and many of them are deep, meaningful, and rich in substance and style.  These people are perceived as approachable and warm.

The person who operates without internal drivers are the ones who potentially face damaging external error messages, are these people more amenable to self study upon notification?  Alternatively, is it really that some people are hardwired to think internally, those people do, and face minimal issues and those we do not, well just won’t no matter what.

An optimist cannot accept that there are people who are incapable of depth and maturity; and then like a hamster on a wheel going nowhere, the optimist is challenging someone of something they will not, cannot, cure.

The real euphemism should not be about the quantity of the stuff in the glass but the quality –an optimist suffices with a few drops as long as the water is pure.  A glass full of the grimy water is enough to turn a committed optimist into a pragmatist.