Guru Dutt and his movies

 It is a leaden gray Saturday evening, raining dense into the night. I am stuck on Guru Dutt. Pyaasa (Thirst/Yearning) rests heavy on my mind, Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers) is not light as the title means, although this must be the second or third time I am watching these films, but years and life had happened in between.

I scour the internet and read or watch every single piece on Guru Dutt, one of India's legendary directors/actors. I read about his friendship with Dev Anand, I leaf through the chapters of his life with his wife and the singer who lend her voice to the songs in several of his movies - Geeta Dutt nee Roy Chaudhary, his team of creative minds who got together in every film of his - cinematographer V.K.Murthy, director/writer Abrar Alvi, his muse, actress Waheeda Rehman, actors Johnny Walker, Rehman. I find that he lost a ton of money on Kaagaz ke Phool - India's first cinemascope which was a movie he directed to showcase the talents of his cinematographer friend Murthy. How he recouped his losses with Chaudvin ka Chaand. 

The more I read or watch interviews I realize how much Guru Dutt is the poster boy for the temperamental, mercurial artist. For a mind in such constant state of disquiet, who brought his emotions and life translated raw into cinematic medium (referring to Kaagaz ke Phool & Pyaasa), it seems almost unlikely that he would exit through a natural death. Of course he didn't. I read about his last evening with his brother, Abrar Alvi and Shakti Samantha before he committed suicide or had an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. He was 39.

Film schools all over the world teach Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool to the students of world cinema. Kaagaz ke phool is a movie about the world of movies. Its camera is turned inward on a director down on his luck played by Guru Dutt himself. Although now regarded as a classic of Indian cinema, Guru Dutt stopped directing movies and confined himself to production and acting after the failure of Kaagaz ke Phool at the box office. 

Much has been analyzed and written about Guru Dutt's body of work. He would make three or four movies that would appeal to the public and keep the counters ringing before plunging deep into his pet project, like Pyaasa or Kaagaz ke Phool. Guru Dutt the artist, the director, seem to have a real serious case of melancholia, so much so that Dev Anand once remarked after Guru Dutt's passing that Guru Dutt was a young man, he should have made happy films instead of stories about depressed people.

This is the only footage of Guru Dutt in color, the famous song from the movie of the same name, Chaudvin ka Chaand

Read More

Glitch : A series co-produced by Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Netflix

Why did Glitch not show up in any of the best of Netflix lists? Glitch, an ABC show, picked and co-produced by Netflix from its second season onwards is one of the highly bingeable shows on Netflix (US.) I accidentally stumbled on it after watching a zombie series (Dead Set, UK) on fast forward and was looking into more 'shows like this.' In a way it is a zombie show without blood, guts and the inevitable zombie apocalypse. No spoilers, check it out for yourself.

If you have been looking for glitch-in-the-matrix, afterlife or paranormal TV shows, Glitch is it. There are three seasons and six episodes per season. With each episode an hour length, you can probably finish watching the entire three seasons over a weekend if you put your mind to it LOL like I did. There is no fourth season or AFAIK nothing is in the works yet.

Glitch takes place in a fictional town of Yoorana, in Victoria, Australia. A set of people come back from the dead, rising out of their graves in perfect physical shape. They are helped by a police officer and a doctor who first discover them. All characters have a back story and their story lines mature as the series progresses. As viewer I felt invested in the characters though all the actors were totally new to me. Brilliant casting, great acting and a solid story / screenplay bring to us the vision of creators Tony Ayres and Louise Fox and director Emma Freeman.

One of the things that made me like Glitch, especially the first two seasons, (the final one was a washout though,) is it is very un-American. There is no hint of Hollywood anywhere, it is feels like an Australian original. Although in reality, it is not. It supposedly got its inspiration from Les Revenants, a French TV show and a cancelled (after season 1) American TV show, The Returned. I am pretty sure the American show would have been too much plastic for me, call it my confirmation bias. Also I prefer the sunnier Australian outback to the dark French mountain towns. 

While the seasons 1 and 2 were gripping and had good production value for a series produced on a tight budget as Glitch was, the season 3 was below par. It was as if the creators of the show couldn't figure out how to bring the series to a culmination. New characters were introduced, then had their stories abruptly cut short. There were a lot of loose threads with explanations lacking and a very anti-climatic ending. I thought the characters deserved more. It was as if there was only enough money to somehow finish the third season and no more. Therefore they had to set a fire, annihilate everything and bring the series to a close once and for all.

Still, it is worth a watch. Because it is not very often that we come across paranormal or tales about glitches without eerie sound effects, cheesy story and production design and ghosts who are not dressed in white.

Read More

Godless : A Netflix Original (Review)

 I am a fan of movies and TV shows based in the American West. Not all of them have to be Westerns. In fact I have not seen any movies of John Wayne, the classic Western icon. Maybe I will, one day. The message of the glorified cowboy who wins the West and its pioneer trailblazer construct does not appeal to me much.

It was Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy that introduced me to the westerns. These spaghetti Westerns were not classic Hollywood fare at the time. They didn't have just one good cowboy, what they had was a mixture of good, bad and ugly in the same people, fighting each other against a fantastic background score. And these Leone westerns were not even shot in the U.S! 

Places and things interest me more than people. The starkly beautiful, hostile wide-screen landscape is appealing to my eyeballs. The history of the westward expansion was another aspect, how it affected the conqueror and conquered and it all happened so close to the present. I have documented my love for the stories of the West a few times in this blog - here, here, here.

 

Godless is a Netflix mini-series that dropped in 2017. Yes, I am late to the party. But better late than never, right? It is written and directed by Scott Frank (director of Minority Report, Get Shorty) and the executive producer is Steven Soderbergh. The heroes in Godless are ordinary folks fighting their own personal battles and more than half of them are women. Although not exactly the feminist Western the series was marketed as, a frontier town without able-bodied men is a new take. 

The powerful performances by the women actors do justice to the story. Sam Waterson, Jeff Daniels, Jack O'Connell, Michelle Dockery, Merrit Weaver, Scott McNairy play some of the important characters in the series. It seems funny to me that for an American western TV show more than half of the lead cast is from U.K.

The Hollywood cliche trap that even Godless couldn't escape is when there is a powerful female character in a leadership role, she inevitably has to be a lesbian. Have they not seen hetero-sexual leaders like Angela Merkels, Golda Meirs or Maggie Thatchers of the world or our home-grown Kamala Harris ? Or is it done as a symbol of political correctness and inclusivity to make sure they don't leave any minority groups out? I am looking at you Mindhunter (Wendy Carr), Xena and Batwoman. It is almost as if a hetero-sexual woman won't have the balls to take on the leadership role intended for the said character. 

Godless captures the epic scale, wall to wall geography of the West faithfully making even trigger-happy TV remote user like me soak it in and keep my fingers off the fast forward button. As expected from the title, there are no Gods in Godless. It is set in a territory of lawlessness and struggle. Yeah, the struggle is real in 19th century New Mexico. 

 

Edifices dedicated to a higher power are conspicuously absent. The story is mostly centered around the silver mining town of La Belle, NM where a church building is seen to be in perpetual construction state and is never seen finished. All the men of the town perished in a mining disaster, except the grocer, the saloon owner and the sheriff and a few other old men.

 

The series is written as a journey through the lives of the people in La Belle as they advance towards the ultimate showdown (which will happen in La Belle) between two outlaws - Roy Goode and his adapted 'Pappy', Frank Griffin, both gun-slingers and outlaws of the finest kind. Roy being a Goode, the makers of the series are trying to tell us that there is some good in him. Guns play an important part in the show, but the lead character Roy Goode, while he is an ace shooter, sometimes belts out dialogs like he is a spokesperson of a gun control advocacy group, which is okay be me. Goes to show that even among gun-toting outlaws the voice of reason and reality was not always a lost cause.

Read More