Tag: hollywood

Slumdog Millionaire versus Q&A

In my experience, movies based on books rarely live up to the promise of the book. But as I started reading Q&A by Vikas Swarup while comparing it to Slumdog Millionaire I found it hard to unequivocally decide which was better – the book or the movie. So I decided to do it the quantitative way!. I wanted to compare the two and assign points as I went along. Eventually I gave up because it turned into a no contest.

First of all we have the issue to of language/medium. I am okay with everyone talking in English because that is the language of the movie (and the book), but the movie is inconsistent with it’s usage of language. It is as if the director couldn’t make up his movie whether he wanted to use Hindi or not. In the book, this problem is not there but there is another, more serious, problem. The author dumps thoughts and experiences on the narrator that the narrator could not possibly have ever had. I don’t have the book with me right now and I read it a few weeks ago, so I do not have an example, but if you have read The White Tiger or A Fine Balance you would know what I am talking about.
Book: 0 Movie: 0

In the book, the show is called Who Will Win a Billion or W3B. The protagonist wins the jackpot before even the first episode is aired. The producers don’t have the revenue to afford a billion rupee prize until the first eight months. They offer the commissioner of police a cut of 10% (of what?) to prove the protagonist guilty. The police have a confession almost signed before a young female lawyer mysteriously appears and rescues our guy.

I thought that the book was more irreverent and cynical (a prize of a billion! the biggest prize ever!) and the producers have a more credible motive of denying the prize. Book wins.

The first question in the book concerns Armaan Ali (and not Amitabh Bachchan) who is the next big superstar in the tradition of Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan. It is the hero’s friend (not brother Salim) who is a devoted fan of the film star, not the hero himself. The whole episode is quite silly in the book but handled pretty well in the movie. Movie wins this one.

In the book, the protagonist is abandoned at a church. He is adopted by a Christian family but his adopted mother runs away and his adopted father returns him to the church where he grows up without realizing the difference between father and Father. The church undergoes the danger of being attacked for “conversions” so the boy is renamed Ram Mohammed Thomas (after a brief debate over the merits of names Ram Thomas and Mohammed Thomas)

The movie turns him into a Muslim boy orphaned by rioting Hindus. More dramatic but I like the book version (even though the book character sounds like Anthony Gonsalves). Book wins.

At some point the stories in the movie and the book start to diverge. A point to note here is that, unlike the movie, in the book the order of the questions does not chronologically align with the incidents of the protagonists life. Thus, the narration jumps back and forth making you do the guesswork to fill the gaps between the different story fragments. I find is hard to understand why the director would throw out this interesting non-linear narration in favour of the straight line and predictable story line in the movie. Book wins again.

In the book I kept waiting for Latika to show up. There happens to be a girl on the train though who Thomas rescues from a dacoit but she is quickly forgotten. There is no mention of the three musketeers. Should the movie lose a point for being too lovey-dovey? Was Danny Boyle attempting a “Bollywood” take on the story here? Not so sure here.

Book: ? Movie: ?

Okay, so after a point, the book loses it completely. No point bothering with the scores because halfway through the story, the book becomes too *fantastic* using too many coincidences and doesn’t even pretend to be realistic. Given that the movie itself is fantasy-like, you have to imagine how worse the book would be.

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ramblings mostly

I once read a book called The Shadow Lines. I was at home and it was lying near the bed. I don’t know who brought it there or when, but I was on vacation, so I read it. It’s the story of a kid who experiences a riot which affects his family and probably even his entire life. Later when he grows up, he realizes that the riot was largely overlooked by history even though he has always thought of it as a pretty significant event.

Later, earlier this year, I read another book called Above Average. I’d heard about it earlier, but I’d thought it was another one of those “campus” novels . I got to read it when my room-mate brought it back from his trip to India. This book also turned out to be very deep and moving. What is the connection between these two books other than the fact that I’d recommend it to you (and both are written by people named Amitabh but neither is spelled that way) ?

Amitabha Bagchi, who wrote Above Average also read The Shadow Lines and admits that the book influenced his writing In fact he pays a cheeky little homage to Amitav Ghosh, author of The Shadow Lines. Click on the picture below for more on that.
Above Average - Amitabha Bagchi
If the last few lines in the picture excites you, you would be delighted to know that the book was typeset using LaTeX.

Somebody said, in a totally different context, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”. I don’t know how to describe a good book (or a good movie) but I know it when I read it (or watch it). I loved both of the above books and loved them. But I could hardly describe what I liked about them. I have a problem with that. I can never really describe what I felt when I was watching a movie or reading a book, but I certainly feel something. Most people express themselves after watching a movie by talking about it. People discuss it over dinner, on the way home, write about it on their blogs, or message boards on imdb etc. I, on the other hand, read. I read reviews, I read blogs, I read news articles, – I do all this till I find the articles I agree with, with views that strongly resonate with mine – even though, I don’t know till then that I held those views. Which is probably why I subscribe to more than 112 blogs and websites in my Google Reader account.

I watched the latest Batman movie on Friday evening with a friend. The movie was like any other movie of its genre and would probably have felt the same if it ended about an hour before it did. Around that point it became something else.

Maybe that is because I’d been reading about Heath Ledger and the fact that his death might have been related to the movie (he had been living alone in a hotel room to prepare for the role and he kept a diary to record the Joker’s thought . That is just difficult to imagine for me – I can’t keep a diary of my own thoughts).

The situations became more real to me. There is a scene where the Joker arrives at Harvey Dent’s fund raiser (We are tonight’s entertainment, he announces). Rachel comes out to confront him while Bruce Wayne takes Harvey to safety. You would normally expect characters in a movie to behave that way, but it was just so scary to imagine something like that if it were real. And later on, Batman has to make tough decisions – decisions which are for the better but they would make him less of a hero in the public eye (This kind of thing is not new, we’ve seen countless Hindi movies situations where the hero sacrifices his love so that the heroine remains happy!). But in this movie, these situations affected me differently. At the end, I described the movie as dark, depressing and complicated, but I would have to watch it again to understand the movie and my reaction to it. Of course, I was a little behind the plot also towards the end, but it isn’t just the plot that makes it better than other movies that I’ve seen. Or just the action scenes – the shots of batman soaring through Gotham skyline are great and the batbike (whatever it’s called) scenes were really cool. Or those little moments – the Joker’s magic trick, the You complete me dialogue, the coin scene, etc. There was something else in that movie that made me react to it the way I did.

There, I said nothing in 500 words or less.

From the movie: O brother! Where art thou!

Delmar O’Donnell: Them syreens did this to him. They loved him up and turned him into a horny toad.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Are you sure that’s Pete?
Delmar O’Donnell: Of course it is! Look at him! … We gotta find some wizard to change him back.

Ulysses Everett McGill: You can’t display a toad in a fine restaurant like this! Why, the good folks here would go right off the feed!
Delmar O’Donnell: I just don’t think it’s right keeping him under wraps like we’s ashamed of him.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, if it is Pete, I am ashamed of him! Way I see it, he got what he deserved, fornicating with some whore of Babylon. These things don’t happen for no reason, Delmar. It’s obviously some kinda judgment on his character.
Delmar O’Donnell: Well, the two of us was fixin’ to fornicate!

Delmar O’Donnell: We thought you was a toad!
Pete: What?
Delmar O’Donnell: [leaning in, speaking slower] We thought you was a toad!

Matrix Reloaded

Saw Matrix. Alone!

And while I sat through the 9-minute long credits, waiting for the Revolutions trailer, I found only 5 people giving me company. Obviously anybody who waits to see the full credits at 12:15 AM must be crazy!

And when I came out the escalators were not working, so I took the elevators to the floor marked “G” which turned out to be parking lot. Then I went up to floor “1”. This too was a parking floor but at least it was on the ground level so that I could walk out and hail a cab.

This is one thing I like about this place – you can get a taxi any time of the night and that too at the same fare as daytime. But what use it is when all shops close by 9:30!

Snatch

Brick Top: You’re always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.
Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?
Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it’s no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies’ digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sievin’ through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, “as greedy as a pig.”