TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| The Bollywood conundrum India's latest blockbuster, 3 Idiots, has broken box-office records around the world – but it won't even make a dent in the British mainstream. Former Bollywood fan Nirpal Dhaliwal has a fair idea whyBollywood films have always felt like a test of my identity, one I've consistently failed. Despite my family ties, love of India and fascination with it, my inability to enjoy Bollywood has highlighted just how unIndian I am. My taste in films, like most else about me, has been shaped by the UK. I am a "Britisher", as a friend in Delhi likes to say and, like the bulk of other Britishers, I enjoy Bollywood – with its music routines involving beautiful people, light-hearted songs and cleverly choreographed dancing – only in small doses. The typical three-hour Bollywood experience, with its cliched plots, dialogue, hammy acting and confusion of unrelated narratives baffles me.I haven't liked it since I was a child, in the late 1970s, when my parents took me to the old fleapit Liberty cinema in Southall, a tiny corner of the subcontinent transplanted into west London. Showing only Hindi films, it was a dingy place where every shabby third-world habit was allowed to persist. When little boys wanted to go to the loo, inevitably during a scene that held their mums captivated and unwilling to escort them – a family feud or the tearful prayers of a young wife abused by her in-laws – they were often told to stand and pee against the back of the seat in front. I did so more than once myself.In those days, I loved Indian films for their "dushoom!" factor – the oddly wooden sound effect accompanying every kick and punch connecting with a hero or villain. I could name every star and the masala western, Sholay, was a favourite as beloved as Star Wars. But as I learned to appreciate things beyond my immediate community – films, books, friends, drugs and Tottenham Hotspur – Bollywood lost its magic.Now, confronted by the hype and ubiquity of Bollywood, I wonder what the fuss is about. I'm left asking: why does the world's most popular cinema, accounting for well over 2bn ticket sales a year – that's two-thirds of global sales – fail to capture the mainstream western imagination?A big Hindi film will play at 50 or more mainstream multiplexes across Britain (there are only four exclusively Indian cinemas in Britain today), and will sit comfortably in the box office top 10. That spot currently belongs to 3 Idiots, a screwball campus comedy starring Aamir Khan, the poster boy for the globalised new India. Released at Christmas, the film has broken Bollywood records around the world – though that still amounts only to breaking through the $10m (£6.25m) barrier in territories outside India. Nevertheless, in commercial terms, Bollywood beats British cinema on its home turf hands down. But the audience for these films remains almost wholly Asian, while the general British public ignores them.Prakash Bakrania, of Reliance Big Pictures, distributes Bollywood films in the UK. He attributes their narrow appeal purely to cultural sensibilities. "Indians want family dramas," he says, "with songs and dance and emotional melodrama."I point out that Moulin Rouge! succeeded while being as camp and musical as any Hindi movie, but Prakash argues that familiarity is also an issue: "Chicago and Mamma Mia! show there's a demand for such movies here, but the music in those films was familiar. Mamma Mia! had a strong USP with its Abba soundtrack. A lot of Indian people go to see a Bollywood film because they like and know the music; they've heard it on the radio. Other people haven't heard it."But quality must be a reason, too. I've seen a lot of movies in India and some of them – such as Love Story 2050, The Last Lear and Heroes – have been among the worst films I've seen, from any country. Daftly written, clumsily directed and terribly acted, they bombed in India, proving that Indians don't have an appetite for complete rubbish, but they suggest that film-makers will set a far lower bar for themselves in Bollywood than they would elsewhere.Prakash counters that Bollywood is a victim of its own success: "You don't get a Chinese film released in Britain every week. People only see the very best Chinese films, so have this misconception that they're better. But if you ask them what their favourite Chinese film is, they'll probably name Crouching Tiger, which is seven or eight years old now."He has a point. Bollywood's best films are as fresh and technically proficient as anything Hollywood produces. Tarun Mansukhani's 2008 comedy, Dostana, was tightly scripted, with great sets and cinematography, and funky music scenes that rivalled the best on MTV. A clever, modern Indian inversion of La Cage aux Folles, about two straight men pretending to be gay in order to seem respectable, the film still received no wider audience than usual, left to drown in the ocean of formulaic mediocrity that is the bulk of Bollywood's output and defines outsiders' perceptions of it.The social differences between India and Britain create an almost unbridgeable gap for Bollywood. Indian films deal with issues that are alien to the west or long since dealt with. A recent hit was Rock On!!, about the members of an unsuccessful rock band who ruefully look back on their wasted past. "That film was a huge success but was never going to cross over," Prakash admits, "because people in the UK are used to a film like that. It was a very original in India, but here it isn't."With bland, goody-two-shoes central characters, an anodyne soundtrack and no references to sex or drugs, Rock On!! won't interest Britishers accustomed to the grit of films like Control or Sid and Nancy. But the film is a fair reflection of India's urban middle-class youth who, while sporting grunge haircuts and listening to Nirvana, still live with their parents, aspire to good grades and, compared with Britishers, do very few drugs and have very little sex.Similarly, 3 Idiots is destined never to cross over despite its phenomenal success. Set in an engineering college in the 1990s, it deals with the hopes, fears and anxieties of India's first globalised generation. A trio of pals strive to succeed within the strictures of India's academic system while protecting their individualities before getting jobs with corporations and securing futures their parents could never dream of – a cocktail of pressures that has induced a suicide epidemic among Indian students.Westerners wouldn't care for mawkish scenes in which one character drops out of college to pursue his dreams of wildlife photography while another confronts her father for stifling her brother's hopes of becoming a writer. Tears flow, tempers flare and hugs abound as parents are reconciled with their children's choices and let them find their own paths in life. Cheesy and boring as it sounds, this is a massive issue in today's India, where traditional family values are increasingly in conflict with the freedoms and opportunities available to young Indians.Shridhar Subramaniam, managing director of Sony Music India, believes Indians and westerners want different forms of escapism. "A rural Indian will find a film like Avatar mundane," he says. "People flying around and having super-powers is no big deal, it's what Indians have in their religion. But Shah Rukh Khan dancing on Brooklyn Bridge is genuine fantasy for them. For westerners, it's the other way round. It's a different perception of what is fantasy and what is mundane."Bollywood, he believes, only succeeds by being the social conscience of India: "It has to appeal to a very wide demographic here. It's not a finely segmented market like in Britain or America. Each film has to appeal to grandparents, parents, and children of various ages. Cinema is often the only entertainment choice Indians have, so it has to appeal to every member of the family as well as to different income, literacy levels, and various regional and language groups. It needs to please those who pay £5 in the multiplexes, but also those paying 10p in the lower stalls, who want overemphasis in the story and the acting, who want to whoop and clap."This need for inclusivity means that a typical Bollywood film is a romance, comedy, family saga and action movie rolled into one. That, Shridhar acknowledges, gives westerners the impression that they are "loosely written, meandering and don't make sense". But Indians are instinctively forgiving. "People will watch a film and know that the next 15 minutes isn't going to be for them. It might be a dance sequence, or a 'hand of God' scene that's for the grandma sat next to them. Bollywood films are more like a live circus or a variety show than a western three-act concept of a movie."Shridhar is right. Last month, I watched three films consecutively on a day-long bus ride through Maharashtra. I noticed how men, women, young and old laughed at different moments, enjoying the parts that entertained them while quietly forbearing the rest. The attitude Indians have to watching films is the same as they have for life in general: one of community, great patience and good -natured tolerance. But for a Britisher like me, Bollywood remains a complete mystery.3 Idiots is out now.BollywoodIndiaNirpal Dhaliwalguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Eric Rohmer obituary Idiosyncratic French film-maker who was a leading figure in the cinema of the postwar new waveIn Arthur Penn's intelligently unconventional private eye thriller Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman's hero – who finds the mystery he faces as unfathomable as his personal relationships – is asked by his wife whether he wants to go to an Eric Rohmer movie. "I don't think so," he says. "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."Behind that exchange lies a jab at ÂHollywood's mistrust of any film-maker, especially a French one, who neglects plot and action in favour of cerebral exploration, metaphysical conceit and moral nuance. The Dream Factory, after all, had proved through trial and error that cinema is cinema, literature is Âliterature, and the twain shall meet only provided the images rule, not the words.Of the major American film-makers, perhaps only Joseph Mankiewicz allowed his scripts, fuelled by his own sparkling dialogue, to wag the tail of his movies. While acknowledging the Âbrilliance, Hollywood punditry never failed to complain that Mankiewicz characters simply talked too much.Rohmer, who has died aged 89, pushed even further into this disputed territory. The oldest of the group of critics associated with the film review Cahiers du Cinéma, who launched the French new wave in the late 1950s, Rohmer had (writing initially under his real name of Maurice Schérer) established impeccable credentials for a future film-maker. Among the objects of his admiration were Dashiell Hammett, Alfred Hitchcock (about whom he wrote a monograph with Claude Chabrol), Howard Hawks, and above all FW Murnau, the great visual stylist of the German expressionist era (on whose version of Faust he published a doctoral thesis). As a film-maker, however, he turned instead to such literary-philosophical luminaries as Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, Choderlos de Laclos and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.His first feature, Le Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo), completed in 1959 after one false start and a handful of shorts, fitted comfortably into the early new wave formula of Parisian life, with its tale of a student musician, tempted into debt by a promised inheritance, who lapses into abject destitution after the legacy turns out to be a hoax. In retrospect, one can clearly see in it the seeds of Rohmer's later work. Showing little interest in plot or action, Rohmer concentrates on demonstrating how Paris itself becomes an objective Âcorrelative to the hero's state of mind, gradually metamorphosing from a Âwelcoming city into a bleak stone desert as he realises that the friends from whom he might hope to borrow are all away for the vacation.With Le Signe du Lion failing at the box office, Rohmer retreated into television where, while working on educational documentaries, he hatched his daring conception for a series of Six Moral Tales. Variations on a theme, each film would deal with "a man meeting a woman at the very moment when he is about to commit himself to someone else". Furthermore, as Rohmer later observed, the films would deal "less with what people do than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it".Made for TV, the first two films in the cycle, La Boulangère de Monceau (The Baker of Monceau, 1962) and La Carrière de Susanne (Suzanne's Career, 1963), shot in black and white and running for 26 and 60 minutes respectively, were too cramped in every respect to be Âmore than clumsy foretastes of what was to come.Completing the series for the cinema with La Collectionneuse (The Collector, 1966), Ma Nuit Chez Maud (My Night With Maud, 1969), his Âinternational breakthrough Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee, 1970) and L'Amour l'Après-midi (Love in the Afternoon, 1972), Rohmer found exactly what he needed in the bigger screens, longer running times, more expansive Âlocations and availability of colour (actually in black and white, My Night With Maud uses the snowy landscapes of Clermont-Ferrand as a perfect Âcounterpoint to its chilly Pascalian thematic). Backed by the richly sensuous role now played by the visuals, the somewhat arid intellectual dandyism of the first two films flowered into a teasingly metaphysical exploration of human foibles.Le Genou de Claire, for instance, Âperhaps the most accomplished of the six films, is about a French diplomat, on the brink of both middle age and Âmarriage, enjoying a brief lakeside vacation in Switzerland. Seduced by his idyllic summery surroundings, he begins casting an appreciative eye over the young women on show. Innocent Âdalliance, he assures himself, proclaiming that his courtly fancy has been captured by the perfection of the eponymous heroine's knee. Deeper down, though, as he comes to realise when a pert and pretty teenager responds to his casual Âflirtation by remarking on his resemblance to her father, lies a less palatable truth: there, but for the grace of God, goes a dirty old man.Rohmer followed his Six Moral Tales with two similar cycles, identical in style, method and accomplishment. First came Comedies and Proverbs: La Femme de l'Aviateur (The Aviator's Wife, 1980), Le Beau Mariage (A Good Marriage, 1981), Pauline à la Plage (Pauline at the Beach, 1982), Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (Full Moon in Paris, 1984), Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray, 1986) and L'Ami de Mon Amie (My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, 1987). Then, Tales of the Poor Seasons: Conte de Printemps (A Tale of Springtime, 1989), Conte d'Hiver (A Winter's Tale, 1992), Conte d'Eté (A Summer's Tale, 1996) and Conte d'Automne (An Autumn Tale, 1998).In between times, Rohmer also made a number of non-series films, most notably two literary adaptations which are rather different in their visual approach. Die Marquise von O... (The Marquise of O, 1976) adopts a severe neo-classical style in transposing Heinrich von Kleist's teasing early-19th-century novella about the social furore occasioned when a chaste young widow suffers a pregnancy which she insists can only be the result of an immaculate conception. Perceval le Gallois (1978), on the other hand, toys joyously with cut-out sets and false perspectives to invest his adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes's 12th-century Arthurian tale with the faux-naif aspects of an illuminated manuscript.Both remain entirely consistent with the body of Rohmer's work, a highly original and endlessly fascinating attempt to render the interior exterior by mapping out the maze of misdirections that bedevil communications between the human heart and mind.Rohmer guarded his private life fiercely – giving different versions of his date of birth and real name on Âdifferent occasions, so that it is difficult to be certain of the truth. He was married in 1957 to Thérèse Barbet, and they had two sons.Ronald Bergan writes: The Lady and the Duke (L'Anglaise et le Duc, 2001), set during the French ÂRevolution, is as elegant as the heroine, a patrician Englishwoman who defies the citizens' committees. Always experimenting with visual style to suit the subject, Rohmer had the actors seen against artificial tableaux of Paris circa 1792. However, these are not painted backdrops, but perspective drawings, which are intriguingly combined with the action through digital means. It proved that Rohmer at 81 was willing to utilise new technology.His last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, 2007) revealed him as interested in the combination of the intellectual with the sensual among young people. Rohmer's achievement lies in recreating fifth-century Gaul, with shepherds, shepherdesses, druids and nymphs, and making it meaningful to a modern audience. If Rohmer's contemporary films evoked 18th-century novels and plays, his period pieces echoed present-day sexual relationships. Rohmer's characters are largely defined by their relationships with the opposite sex, which take place in sumptuous hedonistic settings. For films that deal to a large extent with resisting temptation, they are tantalisingly erotic.• Eric Rohmer (Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer), film director, born 21 March 1920; died 11 January 2010• Tom Milne died in 2005FranceEric RohmerRonald Berganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
This week's cinema events Mira Mexico! LondonThe darkly surreal edge that saturates both comedy and tragedy in Mexican cinema is a constant source of delight, and there's plenty of it on show in this season of contemporary Mexican talent. Rollicking circus black comedy Meet The Head Of Juan Pérez, for example, revolves around a magician's unfortunate decapitation, while in Rodrigo Pla's art-and animation-suffused The Desert Within, a peasant attempts to thwart a government ban on religion. There's also Daniel And Ana, a shocking tale of kidnapped siblings, and Five Days Without Nora, a heart-warming take on a well-organised suicide.Barbican Screen, EC2, Thu to 27 Jan Slapstick 2010, BristolWhether it's a twirl of Chaplin's cane, fisticuffs between Laurel and Hardy or a cartoon anvil falling on an unsuspecting cartoon head, chances are you're a secret, or not-so-secret, lover of slapstick comedy. And why not? As this sixth slapstick silent comedy festival proves, it's as popular today as ever. Catch up on the comedy that never went out of style with some classic Laurel and Hardy shorts, René Clair's brilliant 1928 screwball comedy The Italian Straw Hat, and documentaries on bygone impresarios such as Fred Karno, Will Hay and even Kenny Everett, usually with live musical accompaniment. There are also gala events in which national treasure Michael Palin discusses his career alongside a screening of Buster Keaton classic The Navigator, and Python/Rutles/Bonzo Dog co-conspirator Neil Innes is honoured with a new documentary, aptly titled The Seventh Python.Various venues, Thu to 24 Jan, visit slapstick.org.ukAndrea Hubertguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
NY Times mocks Dexter star's cancer cap A JOURNALIST made fun of the Dexter star's beanie, without knowing that the actor has cancer. news.com.au |
In pictures: How to spot an alien Science fiction writers, Hollywood and television have already warned us what to expect guardian.co.uk |