Two films released in January, one Hindi and one Tamil, raise the question of why, exactly, filmmakers opt for remakes. For some, it is the opportunity to transpose a hit from one language to another, one cultural milieu to another, so that audiences who don’t know the original language, who aren’t from that culture, can enjoy the remake as a brand new film. (The problem arises when it’s an unacknowledged remake, in which case it isn’t so much a remake as a rip-off, but that’s a different topic altogether.) Then there are other filmmakers, fewer in number, who commit to a remake because they connected with the original in a wholly personal way and wish to channel the source material through their strong sensibilities, as Martin Scorsese did with Cape Fear, burrowing beneath a fairly straightforward thriller to discover a marriage on the verge of splitting up and a pubescent daughter’s sexual awakening.

But Gus Van Sant’s somewhat gimmicky shot-for-shot (almost) remake of Psycho aside, most remakes fall in the former category, adapting the source material to local tastes. Thus, The Italian Job, in Abbas-Mustan’s hands, becomes a more convoluted script, with twists and turns characteristic of these directors. Plus, we have some lip-smackingly trashy embellishments, like a villain who calls himself Spider and who honours his name by having images of the eight-legged creatures on his costumes and in his lair. Had the film consistently stooped to this level (or risen, depending on your love for lurid trash), we may have had ourselves a decent entertainer, but the directors seem to be after some sort of classy thriller that they are entirely incapable of. It’s a pity because their real strengths lie in the bad-taste department, which is as valuable a skill as any in the cinema because vulgar entertainment, at least in my book, is a very valid entertainment. (Hence the whole category of films I label as good bad movies.)

When I see a remake, the question I ask is this: What are you giving me that I didn’t get from the original? (People who haven’t seen the earlier film, of course, have no such expectations.) With Players, I sense, among other things, the assumption that audiences would want to watch a size-zero stick figure like Sonam Kapoor throwing herself into the kind of seductive number that Helen and Bindu and Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi could execute in their sleep. (Doesn’t this sort of dance item require someone with a fuller figure? What is the villain, in whose spider-embossed lair said seduction is underway, supposed to be turned on by? The outline of her rib cage as she arches in his direction?) It requires a special kind of skill to successfully infuse into a Hollywood thriller an Indian sensibility, with songs and relationship drama and scenes of comedy. In Players, these elements come off as flab, as if compensating for its lack on the heroine.

At the end of it all, you’re left wondering why they bothered. Why would I see this film when the perfectly entertaining original is at hand? And even if we consider these adaptations as Hollywood Movies For Those Who Don’t Watch Hollywood Movies, isn’t that audience left with the bewildering sense of being stranded in a no man’s land between a lean, mean Hollywood thriller that focuses, every minute, on ratcheting up the tension, and a three-hour-something Bollywood masala that simply doesn’t have enough plot points to warrant this bloated running time? Shankar’s Nanban, a remake of the staggeringly successful 3 Idiots, is equally long, but at least it’s stuffed with things, and it’s what you’d call a typically Indian movie, tailored to a typically Indian audience. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll do everything that you won’t do in today’s too-cool multiplex movies. This is a single-screen movie in every sense of the term – and yet, again, I was left wondering why Shankar bothered.

To those familiar with the original, this is a shockingly faithful remake – “shocking” because major filmmakers do not usually choose to make movies where they have nothing to do but make sure that the shots are canned and the music is recorded and the publicity is mounted. Shankar’s stamp – or vision, if you want to call it that – is in a mere handful of scenes and song sequences that feature computer graphics (and he gamely makes fun of his predilection for the same). Otherwise you feel a first-time director could have ended up with the same product, working off the same template. It would be interesting to listen to Shankar’s views about why he signed up for something where he’d have nothing to do – well, almost – but shout “action” and “cut.” Even his famed song sequences look like remakes of his own song sequences from earlier extravaganzas. I asked of this remake the question I ask of all remakes: What are you giving me that I didn’t get from the original? And the answer was “nothing.”

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

At the far end of the lobby of Vivanta by Taj – Fisherman’s Cove, Akkitham Narayanan is stooped over a canvas, trowel in hand, smoothing out the cobalt blues and the reddish browns and the whites that make up a geometric painting that, as yet, bears no name. To the documentary crew filming him, he says, “We have all the abstract forms, provided we remove the religious attachments.” This appears to be an answer to a question asked before my arrival. He adds, “I am very fond of colours.” The documentary crew leaves but he continues to work, soaking a checkered handkerchief in turpentine and rubbing the canvas in slow, small, deliberate circles, like a mother massaging her infant, to strip away extra colour. I wonder if this is difficult for him, creating art before a public, not just members of the media filming him and writing about him but also white-skinned tourists from cold countries who stop and stare at this curious display on their way to a ridiculously blue pool. “You shouldn’t think of the public,” he says, “but it is difficult. You lose concentration and make mistakes, though you can always correct them later.”

He hums to himself as he works. Perhaps this is something he always does, even in his studio, alone, watched only by his muse. Or perhaps it’s the dash of performance that descends upon solitary artists when they know they are under scrutiny. Beyond him, in a veranda partly flooded by sunlight, stand a number of easels, some bearing canvases, the others forlorn, like waiters with empty trays. It is about 10:30 a.m. and a mere handful of artists are at work – the rest are still gathering. Some of them call this a camp, others call it a workshop, but the name on everyone’s lips is KCS Paniker, the giant of contemporary Indian art whose birth centenary is being celebrated by all this art being created. Amitabh Sengupta turns from his painting – a yolk-yellow background graffitied with Paniker-like calligraphy from Brahmi and Pali as well as scripts that Sengupta made up, alongside dots drawn from traditional pictorial representations like the kolam – and remarks that Paniker was a huge figure of south Indian art who later inspired all of India.

The calligraphic style of Paniker, Sengupta says, is most significant because he was looking for a different idiom, something that looked away from the western idiom of art. He looked at Indian manuscripts and rearranged their scripts in a pictorial fashion. About Sengupta’s own version of calligraphy, he is silent. He has been working on this canvas, the latest painting in his series titled Inscriptions, for three days and he doesn’t know if it is anywhere near completion. Two easels away, V Viswanadhan has been cornered by the documentary crew. He doesn’t appear to have started yet – there’s just an upright canvas by his side, smeared thickly and unevenly with white paint. He is showing his interviewer pictures from an iPad, and the difference in size between the embryonic canvas and the art inside the computer’s screen is unsettling, like the skewed-perspective pictures people take of the sun or the Taj Mahal squashed between forefinger and thumb. The interview shows no signs of ending, and I stroll over, past a canvas covered almost entirely in an angry crimson and another where a woman’s face emerges from a kaleidoscopic cloud, offering proof of Akkitham Narayanan’s philosophy that painting is an art where the process is dirty but the result is beautiful.

Chattrapati Dutta, who has begun to daub the angry-crimson canvas with pustules of yellow, says that these workshops allow him to interact with other artists, even if the performative nature of the exercise leaves him unsure about doing his best. “But,” he says, “it could also turn out to be something good.” He feels that he will “mess about” a bit here, in the open, and then retire to his room and continue working, like some of the senior artists in the floors above who are creating their works of art far from curious eyes.  Sunil Das has set up his canvas in the nook between the bathroom and the aisle leading to his bed. The painting is that of a bull, his trademark, a soot-black creature erupting from inky dust, its solitary eye wide open in cartoon-animal surprise. Das says that Paniker and Husain made a platform for “us contemporary artists.” He extends a hand as I make a motion to leave and I take it reluctantly, proffering the weakest of handshakes with an eye on the black paint that has smudged his fingers and seeped into the crescent cups of his nails.

He says he chose to work in his room because he has a “leg problem” that doesn’t allow him to stand for long, and at home, his studio has an adjustable easel that dispels this discomfort. In the room next door, Prakash Karmakar, grunting heavily every few breaths, is outlining pebbly shapes with a sketch pen, as if imagining a gravelly beach. His canvas is on a table that he had specially brought into the room, and in order not to smudge the canvas he works with the pad of his palm on a rectangular piece of paper that looks like the backside of a greeting card. Two other artists in the room discuss newspaper circulation figures. He too says that his health isn’t good. His neighbour, Subroto Gangopadhyay, is hurrying to catch a deadline in a room soaked in cigarette smoke. His contribution to the Paniker commemoration, the girl in a swirl of kaleidoscopic colours, has returned from its display at the veranda and is propped against the wall. He is now attending to a black-and-white illustration for a children’s book of fiction. Art is art, he seems to be saying, but in the meantime bills have to be paid.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

For a week now, I have been reading articles about how nobody knows who the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) are, and why they are qualified to hand out the Golden Globes for achievement in cinema. Well, they’re journalists who write about cinema – doesn’t that automatically qualify them? And if you’re going to question their knowledge, their taste, why not point a finger at the Oscar voter as well? How is some actor who co-starred in a clutch of movies in the nineteen-fifties (and therefore a member of the Academy) qualified to air his views, through a ballot, about the year’s bests in film? Has he gone through some sort of rigorous testing process that the Golden Globes people haven’t, where he exhibits his profound knowledge of editing and cinematography and the obscurantism of foreign cinema? At least the HFPA throw a better party, and here are five reasons the Golden Globes telecast is a marginally better watch than the Oscars.

1. There’s no pre-show red carpet special where actors, male and female, are accosted by self-anointed fashion experts and quizzed on what they are wearing. About couture, this show is not. The worst part is when, having dropped the names of their designers, the actors are left fending banal questions about how they feel about being nominated. Has there been a single star who’s answered this question with anything but fake sincerity? The only way this segment can be made watchable is if certain phrases are banned, beginning with “it’s such an honour.” Otherwise, it’s such a bore.
2. The HFPA treats television on par with cinema. Well, maybe not exactly. After all, host Ricky Gervais (who was curiously subdued) did note that there was a pecking order in the seating arrangements – the TV stars sat at the edge and movie stars in the centre of the room. But at least the ceremony honours TV and movie stars simultaneously. Why is this important? Because the shows on American television are often superior to what’s released in theatres, and they also accommodate talented actors who never quite got the right opportunities on the big screen, perhaps because they weren’t big draws, but eventually found their space in the dramas on cable and in the made-for-TV movies and miniseries.
3. The HFPA also treats comedy on par with drama, which goes at least a small way towards lifting the curse on being funny. The Oscars, on the other hand, often confuse being serious and noble with being good, rewarding In the Heat of the Night over The Graduate, Gandhi over Tootsie, Out of Africa over Prizzi’s Honor, Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction (which was certainly comedic, if not a comedy). It’s tough enough comparing two dramatic films – how do you rate a drama against a comedy? The HFPA cracks this nut by recognising both. This year, The Descendants was deemed as worthy as The Artist, even if there was something of a pecking order here too, with the evening’s final prize, the save-the-best-for-last prize, going to the drama.
4. The cast and crew of a film are seated at the same table, which is another blow by the HFPA for egalitarianism. At the Oscars, George Clooney would be seated in the first row – he is royalty after all – and the retinue, the rest of the people who contributed, in various ways, to The Descendants, would find seats allotted in the rows far behind. The HFPA may not know much about cinema, but they do know that it’s a collaborative art, and that George Clooney would be an emperor without clothes without the cast that supported him and the crew that sustained him. And we get to see all of them rejoice in his win, not just the latest model he’s dating.
5. Finally, there’s the alcohol. As Gervais said, “The Golden Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton – a bit louder, a bit trashier, a bit drunker and more easily bought.” And part of the trashy appeal, the shameless entertainment, is a result of the bottles of Moët at every table. Gervais walked in with a glass of beer, and five minutes later, he’d made a joke about his private parts. Later, Tina Fey and Jane Lynch high-fived at having cracked a “penis joke.” Seth Rogen and George Clooney followed suit. They can’t do this at the Oscars, where they’d have to be more, um, stiff.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

The opening stretch is a gem, a precise spoof on how the mad scramble before Christmas has transformed into war. Some fifteen years ago, the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Jingle All the Way suggested this by having two fathers fighting over a toy in a last-minute shopping spree, as if Christmas was about the child at home and not the one in the manger. And now, this spirit has spread to the North Pole, where Santa’s minions function like a crack SWAT team on a mission timed to the split second. They drop onto rooftops like paratroopers, shimmy down chimneys, evade alarms, employ sophisticated gadgetry (like a nifty nice/naughty meter that scans sleeping children in order to determine their gift-worthiness) and even pull off a nail-biting rescue. Finally we see why time zones were conceived, simply so that these elves could span the world on the night of December 24. And yet, one little girl is missed out, her gift still stuck in the North Pole. Santa’s older son Steve, the technocrat responsible for modernising his father’s operations, thinks it doesn’t matter. But Arthur, the younger son and all heart, decides that it does.

And so, along with his cantankerous grandsanta – namely, the current Santa’s father; the film puts forth the view that Santa, like the Phantom, is really the latest male heir in a long line partial to peculiar clothing– Arthur sets forth on the aerial equivalent of a road trip (a sky trip?), sprinkling magic dust on his reindeer to make them airborne. Arthur’s subsequent adventures (voiced, among others, by James McAvoy and Hugh Laurie) are diverting enough without being special, though after a while we begin to wish that the characters weren’t such threadbare, single-note archetypes – Underachieving Kid Who Needs to Rouse Himself, Wisecracking Sidekick Elder, BFF With an Endearing Quirk, and so forth. Had the people at Pixar gotten hold of this material, you suspect they may have milked something poignant out of a son eclipsed by the shadow of the most overachieving father of all time. (Even God took a whole week to cover the world.) That’s another way Arthur Christmas mirrors the modern version of the holiday in its title – lots of shiny trinkets, but little by way of magic.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Or a puppet. Vera, in the present, is Ledgard’s sole patient, imprisoned in a windowless room and monitored round the clock while he manipulates her like how a filmmaker might mould his actors. He tests on her his latest creation, a burn-proof epidermis he labels Gal. That’s the name of the wife he lost to flames in an accident, but it could also be short for Galatea, the statue that Pygmalion sculpted and subsequently surrendered his heart to. Ledgard’s efforts to create and control new life also suggest the id-prototype of Pygmalion, the original mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and thus the landscape of Almodóvar’s film – a coiled horror-thriller built from the DNA of Vertigo, Eyes Without a Face and the director’s own Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – gets booby-trapped with existential interrogation. Is Ledgard, like Pygmalion, simply a besotted lover? Or is he, like Frankenstein, a modern Prometheus, a hubristic human barging into the realm of gods? And is science still science when it’s less about serving humanity than coddling the self?

Who is Vera? Why is Ledgard’s love for her so monstrously unsettling? And what have they to do with a young man who’s a dressmaker, another creator of “fitted clothing”? These labyrinthine discursions of plot, once unwound, stake fewer claims on our attentions than the questions we are left with at the end, questions about identity, the hawk-like hold of the past on our present, the porousness of sexual desire, the extent one should be allowed to lose oneself in love, the vaporous wall between voyeurism and obsession, and whether women are really better beings than men. Has there been another filmmaker whose oeuvre is such a shrine to mothers and the maternal? Even when Almodóvar’s protagonists are male, they are governed by the instincts to nurture (Talk to Her), to create (Bad Education, Broken Embraces), and to give birth, as Ledgard does to Vera. It is women, Almodóvar suggests over and over, who unceasingly pull us back from the verge of nervous breakdowns.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Universal Pictures, them of the cosmic name constricted to a disappointingly earthly logo, announced recently that their hundredth-anniversary plans – a yearlong celebration – included the restoration of 13 films, which were All Quiet on the Western Front, The Birds, Buck Privates, Dracula (1931), Dracula (Spanish, 1931), Frankenstein, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Out of Africa, Pillow Talk, Bride of Frankenstein, The Sting and To Kill a Mockingbird. There’s something in this list for fans of all stripes – of Spielberg (Jaws, Schindler’s List), of pedigreed literary adaptations (All Quiet on the Western Front, To Kill a Mockingbird), of animal-attack thrillers (The Birds, Jaws, the leaping-lion scene from Out of Africa), of classic chillers (Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein), of handsome leading men (The Sting, To Kill a Mockingbird), of titles that would double as names of vaguely pornographic features (Buck Privates, The Birds, even Jaws if you think about it with a suitably dirty mind), of movies spotlighting both halves of a definitively dysfunctional marriage (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein)…

I’ll stop now, but the issue at hand stems from To Kill a Mockingbird. Flat-out masterpiece, right? Not according to a friend, who groused, recently, that he was halfway through Harper Lee’s quietly disturbing chronicle of innocent eyes being opened to a cruel and confusing world, and he couldn’t see what the fuss was about, why the book deserved the Pulitzer Prize, and what the people featured in the long list of accolades on the back cover saw that he wasn’t seeing. He asked me what it was. I didn’t say anything at first as this is such a vast, unanswerable question, whose answer hinges on matters of taste and patience and about a hundred other qualities that each one of us possesses in varying degrees. His question, in essence, was a rebuke to anyone, especially a critic, who says “This book is great” instead of “This book is great in my opinion.” The latter is an admission of personal joy and discovery, the former an admonition: If you don’t like this book, you’d better wear that dunce cap and go sit in a corner with the others who don’t get Hemingway and Dickens and Tolstoy.

The history of cultural criticism (art, books, movies, music), or indeed any criticism that deals with intangibles and unmeasurables – like how well an actor acts or how beautiful this musical interlude is, as opposed to how fast a sportsman ran or how many of his election promises a politician kept – is replete with finger-waggers determined to impose their tastes, their knowledge of pearls, on a world of uncultured swine. This isn’t about the critic’s function as gatekeeper, making an educated case for permitting a work of art into the canon, but about the relevance of these opinions to the public at large. This friend – no, it’s not “friend” in the Freudian sense, as in, “Doctor, I have this, cough, cough, friend with problems in the, erm, plumbing department;” let me state unequivocally that I love To Kill a Mockingbird (the book; the movie I merely like) – isn’t much of a reader. He probably ploughs through a book a year. And it killed him that he wasn’t reaping much pleasure from a novel he landed on after so much scrutiny – the Pulitzer for fiction; all those unending pages of raves; the word “classic” oozing from every pore. It made him feel that the problem lay within him.

The problem is actually with whoever decided, at whatever point in the history of the universe (or Universal Pictures), that what the critic says matters to the public, that his approval is a signal that the book/movie/song is one for the ages, and if he says something stinks, everyone else should automatically clamp a hand on the nose. A critic’s role is far more important than simply acting as a two-thumbed consumer guide – among other things, he should put forth perspectives, ignite discussions, which probably matter only to those with a burning passion for the art being considered. Why should an average reader, who just wants to amuse himself on a flight or a porcelain throne, concern himself with what the Pulitzer committee thought? In the spirit of things, let me extend a hand in solidarity to this hurting friend and admit that I, too, have undergone these bouts of misery from the other side, as a critic not getting something everyone else in the movie-going public seems to get – like The Shawshank Redemption, Number One on IMDb’s list of Top 250 films ever. Seriously? My vote for Hollywood movie about middle-aged male suffering set to shamelessly stirring music that makes me all gooey inside would go to Field of Dreams, but that’s not even on the list. So much for my capabilities as a public-taste arbiter.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

If it’s customary to welcome a new year not only by resolving to do right in the forthcoming months but also by learning from our wrongs in the months flown by, then the lesson is this: do not expect anything from any movie. Walking into a screening with a clean slate is one of my cherished ideals, which is why I strive not to hear, see or read about a film ahead of its release. The best thing, the only thing to do, in my opinion, is to step into the theatre and let the film speak for itself. And yet, there are times we are seduced by earlier accomplishments, which cling to the film like a damp fog – the haze of anticipation is unshakeable. Had Don 2 been made by a well-intentioned newcomer and not by the director who gave us Dil Chahta Hai and parts of Lakshya (which was a letdown in comparison, but seen from today’s vantage, very much a solid accomplishment), would we have been so crushed?

But even Don 2, to me, wasn’t last year’s biggest disappointment, the film that wagged a pointy finger and cautioned me never to expect anything ever again. That film was Maneesh Sharma’s Ladies vs Ricky Bahl, which brought over most of the team from Band Baaja Baaraat, not just one of the best films from India in 2010 but one of the best rom-coms released, that year, in the world. The rom-com is a tricky thing to negotiate – you cannot have too many surprising turns of events, and yet, the film has to surprise; you have to tell the story of boy and girl getting together as if we thought they never would – and it was thrilling to witness such a well-conceived, well-executed instance of a genre, a type of film, that isn’t even our own. (Our emotion-saturated style of filmmaking lends itself better to rom-drams, romantic dramas.) If someone could pull off something so phenomenal, the next film arrives with a fair amount of expectation, with its own patina of damp fog, however much you tell yourself that every film is its own beast and has nothing to do with what came before it.

But Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl has almost nothing going for it, save for a few swatches of richly embroidered detail, mostly in the early portions involving a nouveau riche Punjabi family in Delhi, where the father prowls about his mansion in a velvety robe draped over a furry chest, and the mother pleads with the strange boy carrying in her daughter – his girlfriend, who’s passed out from a night of revelry – to deposit the girl in her bed upstairs. (The moment is so scary, yet so right – you have to laugh.) There are a number of talismanic carry-overs from Band Baaja Baaraat – a moment involving the hero and his helmet; the employment of “kaand” in a line of dialogue, a word we rarely get to hear in this context in Hindi cinema; Ranveer Singh’s confessional speech in front of Anushka Sharma; an ending whipped up from just the right kind of mush, sentimental and yet not too sickly sweet; and a terrific supporting cast populating the minor parts, the pick of whom is the actor playing a smarmy hotel employee named Shankar.

But after a promising beginning, almost nothing goes right. The audience is always two steps ahead (and this includes cottoning on to the real name of the identity-shifting con-man hero, which is bafflingly given away in the title). Perhaps the fault lies with the story. Do some types of narrative – like this con man being out-conned plot – defiantly resist the razzle-dazzle Bollywood treatment? In The Thomas Crown Affair, we go lightheaded with anxious delight watching hero and heroine, cold professionals who fall in love despite themselves, turning the screws and upping the ante on each other. Ladies vs Ricky Bahl follows a similar trajectory, but with songs that kill the mood and with unconvincing emotions. (Unlike The Thomas Crown Affair, we know that our heroes and heroines will not be allowed to become too heartless, too predatory). The team that succeeded beyond our wildest dreams with one non-Bollywood genre flounders about desperately with another. It shouldn’t matter. It’s just a movie. But somehow, this betrayal feels personal. Hence this resolution that, like most others, is likely doomed to failure. Do. Not. Expect. Anything. From. Any. Movie. In. 2012.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

The last column of the year. Should I devote it to best-of lists? A more cohesive meditation on the cinema of a year that, at the end of this day, will vanish from the physical present, the here and now, and take up a more permanent residence inside our heads, alongside other years, like files in an airless cabinet with sheaves of memories? Or something more overarching, something to do with the very nature of what I write about, something that encapsulates the ephemeral essence of pop culture? I speak, of course, about Kolaveri, the undoubted sensation of 2011, something that – like a bug in a bad science-fiction novel or a star-studded Steven Soderbergh movie – crawled out of nowhere and infected the planet. The Japanese are dancing to it. The hits on YouTube are too numerous to count anymore. Even Sonu Nigam’s son performed a version, a cute little boy voicing unknowable feelings about murderous rage – papa must be so proud.

Why did Kolaveri become such an uncontained rage that it would barely cause a ripple of excitement, tomorrow, if the newspapers showed us spacecraft pictures of little green men on Mars hopping to the tune? Why did this song, of all the year’s songs, go viral, crossing linguistic and geographical borders with the greased ease of a Harry Potter blockbuster? Was it the pounding percussion, hardly new to Tamil ears but perhaps a novelty to others? Was it the laidback-slacker way in which Dhanush delivered the number, as if he couldn’t be bothered to rouse himself to the levels of indignation demanded by the opening lines? Was it the ingenious way the whole thing was presented, artfully packaged like fly-on-the-wall visuals from an actual studio recording? Or was it just the ungentrified English, a decisive gesture of defiance suggesting that our former rulers can cross their t’s and dot their i’s but leave us out of it, thank you very much?

No one can say for sure. The reason for the success of Kolaveri is as mysterious as popular culture itself – if they knew why something worked, the formula would have already been patented and bottled and sold. That’s why Javed Akhtar missed the point by a mile when he tweeted something to this effect: “KOLAVARI-D. Every one is praising the robes but the emperor is naked. Tune ordinary, singing substandard. Words an insult to sensibility.”  His is the hilariously misbegotten assumption that consumers of pop culture buy into quality (and even that contention is troubling, for who’s to decide what constitutes “quality”?), and that we are somehow misguided because the lyrics aren’t lofty and the singing isn’t ethereal and the tune isn’t the kind that wrings tears from rocks. He may be right on all those counts – where he is wrong is in that none of this matters when it comes to pop culture, which doesn’t always welcome the deserving and the worthy but sometimes the sideshow carnivals that make modern life such an entertaining merry-go-round.

Akhtar’s sniping is like the criticism of the thesping talents of a great light of a golden age that was extinguished this year. We didn’t like Dev Anand because he was some sort of great actor in the timidly defined sense of “great acting” – oh, he can play the hero and the villain and the cross-dressing heroine’s aunt, and he can laugh and cry and race through acres of dramatic dialogue. Those are valuable skills, but they do not necessarily determine why an actor captures the affections of a large mass of people, why he becomes an inextricable part of popular culture. Even as I write this, even as I use the term “popular culture,” I realise that there may be in it an ingrained speck of snobbishness, as if Kolaveri and Dev Anand and anything seized and claimed by millions, the great unwashed masses, can only be recognised and respected in a “popular” context, and for true culture, “high culture,” we have to seek out Waqt ne kiya and Dilip Kumar. But who cares how a thing is labelled if it provides, if only for a diverting instant, a sense of diving into a great ocean of communal joy?

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2011 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

A really truthful ad for It’s A Wonderful Life, on the other hand, would have declared: You’ll feel like slitting your wrists. Indeed, the depressed protagonist, George Bailey, tries to kill himself after getting smashed out of his skull – and that’s just the film’s beginning. Hovering around this central event are episodes no less funereal – a child falls through a frozen lake, another child loses partial hearing, a third child is almost poisoned, a father suffers a fatal stroke, money saved up for a honeymoon is lost in the cause of repairing losses, skyrocketing rents burden the poor, savings are stolen, an arrest warrant is issued, a car crashes into a tree during a snowstorm, and a long-cherished dream is repeatedly sacrificed. Has there been a more downbeat story that’s come to symbolise the spirit of a holiday?

And yet, at a time Christmas has come to signify shopping more than anything else – bow-tied presents at the bottom of the tree – It’s A Wonderful Life argues for an appreciation of the life of Christ Himself, who suffered for His fellow men. George, too, suffers for the betterment of those around him, his crown of thorns always a private lament. And the heartwarming core of the film is that he learns, as do we, that a wonderful life is one that touches a million lives, however glancingly, however accidentally. Is it sentimental? Oh yes. But just as the angel in the film earns his wings, the film earns its tears. George Bailey is saved, at the end, by the very people he’s saved over and over. In the words of Clarence, the freshly minted angel, no man is a failure who has friends. Nice guys do finish first.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2011 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.