Deepti Bharthur's Open Salon Blog

Talking Movies: Vintage Celluloid

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:08:20 -0400

‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ has got to be one of the charming movies I’ve ever come across. It’s quaint flow and child-like simplicity can easily lull us into thinking of it like yet another romantic comedy. But ‘Purple Rose…’ is much like a warm breeze, that floats about unobtrusively and yet you can’t feel unaffected by it.

Directed by Woody Allen in a deceptively simple and comedic narrative, the movies tells the story of Cecilia played by Mia Farrow, a working class woman in an unhappy and abusive marriage who finds respite from the depression and grueling life in the glamorous movies that she watches every week at the local theatre. The more real life presses upon her, the more she escapes into the soothing darkness of talkies. It is during her fifth viewing of ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ that a character from the movie Tom played by Jeff Daniels jumps out of the movie screen claiming to have fallen in love with her. While panic ensues all around, Cecilia spends a day out of the dreams with Tom. Meanwhile, Gil Sheppard, the actor who plays the character of Tom runs into Cecilia in the hopes of finding his errant on-screen alter ego and bringing him back. An odd love triangle follows with both the actor and the character having fallen for her forcing Cecilia to choose while having to contend with her irate husband ( Danny Aiello)

‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ explores some interesting themes. It breaks the fourth wall both ways by having Tom travel into the real world and also Cecilia going into the movie. The other characters in the movies, find themselves lost without the presence of Tom and the momentum of the script to keep them going. They end up arguing with the audience, jumping into each other’s scenes and going off-page. The movie made in 1985 is set in the era of the depression. The starkness of the country and Cecilia’s own conditions forms a bleak contrast to the glamorous movies that she likes to lose herself in. This lends a bitter-sweet tone to the movie where while one is amused at the premise of the storyline it becomes evident that it isn’t quite a fairy tale romance. This further gets elucidated in the way that Tom fails to understand real world problems like lack of money or jobs.

The perfection of cinema that is seen on screen is juxtaposed with the selfish and egoistic side of Hollywood. Tom, the on-screen character is sweet, considerate and devoted to Cecelia while the actor who plays him is self-absorbed and arrogant. Even though he’s perfect for her, Tom’s naivety leads Cecilia to choose Gil Sheppard on account that he was from the real world. A choice she regrets in the end when she leaves home to go away to Hollywood with him only to find he’s left without her. The climax finds Cecilia alone in the theatre watching yet another movie after which she would most likely return to her abusive husband.

Look Who’s on Twitter!

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 08:04:42 -0400

Obama is on it, so is Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Vanessa Hudgens, Ryan Seacrest, Tina Fey, Robert Pattinson and a lot of other important and less important people. Who needs paparazzi to tell us what celebs are up to when they can do it themselves in 140 characters or less at that. When Shakespeare said ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’, You know now he was talking about Twitter, the micro-blogging service where you can find people posting updates, networking, promoting, looking for jobs, getting fired from jobs and having fun sometimes. There are even fictional characters like Shawn Spencer from USA’s Psych twittering online.

I joined Twitter many months ago out of sheer curiosity and then let my account gather dust. It seemed so silly to keep posting updates about what I am doing to a bunch of strangers. But in a vague moment of boredom a few weeks ago, I made a post and pretty soon, I realized I liked it. Now I make an average of three posts a day sometimes two in ten minutes. I think for the first time, I would stick to a social networking site after the initial enthusiasm wears off.

My past experiences with the social networking scene have not impressed me to the degree, where I could think of it the way a lot of journalists do. Orkut was fun till it got mildly creepy with pretty much anyone and everyone wanting to be your friend for no visible reason. The ‘frandship’ requests alone were enough for me to renounce my account with little regret. Plus I’d found Facebook by then and it seemed like a classier and more private alternative to being on Orkut. But then it became so over loaded with features, that you dreaded logging in, lest someone had challenged you to some inane game or quiz that didn’t make sense to begin with. It’s become the legitimate spam portal where anyone can push anything into your face. The only reason I am still on it is because I love my friends and I have to find some way of keeping in touch with them. Plus it’s sort of uncool not to be on it, even if I check my account like say once in three months.

Twitter is like the ultimate no frills Facebook. It is less complex, more creative and definitely cooler. It’s fun to think of the mundane daily activities in the form of witty, staccato sentences, and I think that’s really what people enjoy a lot more than the connectivity. Co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone was on The Colbert Report the other night, and he said “Twitter is like the messaging service, we didn’t know we needed.” I have to agree, since it is exactly the kind of messaging service I’ve been looking for. Free, fast and done through a key board.

More than the technical features of Twitter, it is the social dynamic which is more interesting. Why do we take so much trouble to worry about our privacy and then write about what time we got up or where we’re gonna go for dinner? It’s almost like most of the time; we’re trying to make our lives appear more interesting than it actually is or just making a performance out of things, because there is a hypothetical audience out there for it, reading about us.

It’s probably the reason why there are so many celebrities on Twitter, after years of telling the media to leave them alone that too. Biz Stone says its because Twitter is a simple and quick way of controlling information about yourself and that’s why it attracts so much Hollywood traffic. Plus it also acts like an improvisation of word-of mouth in a way, allowing you to promote stuff as well and create a closer bond with the fans. My Space and Blogs require a different kind of structure of information and moderation which they may not have the time or inclination for.

Micro blogging has been around for some time now and Twitter takes it to a whole new level by bridging it with cell phone activity and that’s probably appealing to a lot of users, given the number of special applications cell phones have come up with to facilitate Twitter on cell phones. Android came up with Twitteroid. Adobe has come up with TweetDeck to bridge Twitter with Facebook, a web application that I am trying out right now and liking.

I don’t know whether to get too excited about it all, because a lot of good things on the web have taken a turn for the worse, simply because they became too popular for their own good. I hope the same doesn’t happen with Twitter.

The Lands of Perpetual Recession

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:03:04 -0400

It’s recession; people are losing jobs and crunching on their expenses. That means no more eating out two days a week or putting off buying some random new shiny that you saw last week. Why because it’s what you’re supposed to do. Thank the stars you’re still in school, so you don’t have to worry about losing a job maybe only finding one after it gets over. For now you’re safe, safe enough to write about things like this than worrying about your next meal.

But what if your entire life was to be spent in recession. Waiting it out and waiting to die are one and the same thing and deprivation takes on a whole new level. That’s unfathomable really. It’ll blow over right. Those large financial corporations and banks will get things up and running in no time. They’ve screwed up before, they’ll fix it as well. It’s why we give them our money, our future hopes and dreams, that house we want to buy and the car that comes with it.

In the arid lands of Medak in India, rural uneducated women are doing the same thing. Every week they turn over their hard earned and microscopic savings to people who they believe will take care of it for them. Who will open savings accounts for them in the nearby post offices and give them the financial skills to operate it. For these women, these savings are not about a swanking new SUV. It’s about escaping generations of debt that has pushed them into years of wage labour without a better future in sight. It’s about being able to free their tiny areas of mortgaged land so that they have something to leave for their children.

Rural poverty is something we can all pretend to understand. It’s all about using the right words, the sympathetic gestures and the apt amount of righteous indignation. But it really startles you when you confront it face to face and you find yourself not sympathising so much as grappling with the sheer deprivation that exists in the heartlands of every country. These are the people that globalization and the bandwagon that goes with it missed out on. Yet they bear the costs without a tangible benefit in sight. Their village water resources are bled dry to fuel cola company plants for urban consumers. They’re the ones left hanging dry when IMF reforms force states to rollback on their aid, so that capital can flow into the cities and give them the much desired structures of glass and steel.

Travelling across the Medak region of Andhra Pradesh in India about 170 km from the capital and IT hub of Hyderabad, I met many women who come under what is understood as the ultra-poor category which as defined by the World Bank includes people who earn less than 1 US $ a day. These women are part of the pilot ultra-poor programme started by the SKS foundation, the NGO wing of SKS one of the largest micro finance institutions in the country.

Operating from Narayankhed in Andhra Pradesh, it covers four hundred odd families across a hundred villages in the region. Under this program, single women who are the only earning members of their family without any financial assets such as property or live stock are given grants to acquire an asset like a buffalo or a goat to supplement their income from farm labour which gets them around Rs. 40 a day ($0.791) for 15 days in a month. Using the livestock for milk or labour assures them a secondary source of income and a minimal saving that ranges from Rs.10 ( $ 0.198) to Rs 50 ( $ 0.988) a week. They deposit these savings with a field assistant from SKS who records their weekly income and expenditure and advises them on health and financial decision making. It’s a two year intervention which is due to end in a few months following which the women would ideally have two sources of income and saving capacity that could improve their standard of living.

Talking to these women is an enriching experience. They open up easily, ready to pour their troubles to anyone who’ll listen. They’re not necessarily looking for any help, only someone who’ll patiently listen. It’s a common lament across thee three villages I travel to. Summer is a particularly tough time, as the cattle don’t yield a lot of milk and there is a dearth of employment in the farms. At these times, they get by on reserve stock of food grains from last year and manage to make ends meet by selling stone from residual quarrying, gathering and selling firewood or collecting leftover harvest from threshing.

Meeting these women leads me to believe, how wrong our approach can sometimes be. To understand them as hapless and oppressed in our romantic imagination of third world poverty, without any agency of their own is a great disservice to them even if our hearts should be in the right place. They’re strong and resilient people who try and make better existences for themselves and their families even when the odds are heavily against them. Even in the face of the heart wrenching poverty that they face, I find it difficult to pity them or feel sorry for them because they’re so full of grit and determination to change their lives for the better.

It also leads me to think why financial capitalism has no place for people like these. If it did, we probably wouldn’t be facing this colossal economic bust. A lot of micro-credit and finance studies have shown that while the largest of corporations default on millions of dollars of debt that get written off year after year by banks and firms, the poor are often much more dependable and low risk clients who pay up their loans with efficiency. Why then can’t they be offered financial services suited to their needs that can make all the difference to their basic existence? They may not understand or care about mutual funds or stock markets, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they understand the value of money more than anybody else.

Intelligible Television: On the Winter Line-up

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:03:30 -0400

It’s been a bad year for television and not just in a budget cuts, recession way. Many of the new shows which premiered this fall expected to be runaway hits, fell flatter than their non-existent storylines, with a few not even making it past their third episode. The only visible smash hit off the year, The Mentalist is nothing more than a grim, sophisticated knock off of the quirkier and definitely better Psych while Privileged, yet another tapered down and PG-13 take on rich and famous and completely fabulous teenagers who can’t seem to get through high school without everybody sleeping with everybody else has been left hanging in the air with no green light for a second season yet.

Shows that premiere in winter are seldom given the kind of hype that Fall line-ups receive. You’re already thinking, they’re on now because they weren’t good enough to be on in September along with the other new shiny on TV. But Dollhouse has been the entire buzz for quite some time before it went on in February. Yes, it is one more high budget, sci-fi show based on an utterly ridiculous premise that the people at Fox seem so adept at coming up with. But just like the other super absurd show on Fox, a little marvel of directionless yet interesting writing I like to call Fringe, it has me hooked.

People who can be made and unmade for specific tasks and engagements through a process of imprinting and then wiped clean when the job gets done: That’s what Dollhouse is all about. Eliza Dushku plays Echo, one of the ‘actives’ of the dubious company with a sketchy past that has driven her to having her memories erased and becoming a blank slate or the Tabula Rasa. She floats around in her spa like residence, swimming and doing yoga and gliding clueless by her other inmates when she’s not being transformed into a K & R negotiator or a safe cracker by a narcissistic genius scientist, Topher (Franz Kranz). Throw in a Fed obsessed with finding the Dollhouse, a mysterious, Frankenstein ‘active’ gone wrong whose out for Echo, and a former cop with ethical dilemmas turned bodyguard to empty headed Echo who can’t help being a trouble magnet even if the poor thing can’t remember it and you have quite a show on your hands. Oh also, the thing about our doll- her slate is not quite so blank. She’s assimilating bits and pieces from each of her assignments and no one has realized it yet.

Eliza Dushku in Dollhouse- She can be anyone you want!

Dollhouse is not exceptional, but it impresses. It’s a welcome replacement for Friday nights, and helps me miss Psych just a little less. The plotlines are engaging and manage to throw the occasional curveball that’ll have you arch your brows a bit. There is an element of mystery and the episodes are fast-paced and interesting. The second episode ‘The Target’ where Echo gets hunted down by a psychopath in the woods is my favourite so far. It manages to rely less on special FX and has some good old fashioned action stunts to make up for the lack of zing and neon lights. Bottom line, it’s good stuff.

Castle, which premiered on ABC this Monday starring Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic is a crime show about a bad boy author and a prudishly cold homicide detective who partner up to solve a copycat case based on his book. Think Brennan and Booth, but not really and you’ll get a sense of what Castle is about. Rick Castle is our rakishly, irresponsible (he hands a glass of champagne to his under age daughter, convincing her to generate wild stories about teenage years to tell her offspring someday) uber-successful author who doesn’t care for the rules, having just killed off the lead character of his books, much to the chagrin of his ex-wife/publisher and is going through the convenient writer’s block that has his upcoming book nine weeks over-due. Enter Kate Beckett, homicide detective, who has read every book he’s every written but is not a fan of him or his ways. Pit the stiff- upper lip crime fighter with the ‘ I only speak in sexual innuendos’ crime author and you have a partnership that simmers and bubbles over with sexual chemistry unlike the carefully restrained and amusing even if , antagonistic bickering of our Bones duo.

The crime plotline is secondary at least in the first episode. Given that Castle has found his muse and next lead character in Beckett whom he intends to stick with for the purposes of ’research’ , it is likely to stay that way. The show is promising because of it’s ‘ I love to hate’ lead character even if it may not have the most engaging sub-plot. Hoping that it finds the right angle of humour if not substance, I think I’ll reserve my verdict until the next instalment.

Reaper comes back for a devilish second season

In other news, Reaper is back with a much awaited second season, taking the place of afore mentioned Privileged on CW. So, Sam is the son of the Devil. It’s official! A fact that doesn’t seem to bother him nearly as much as it should. He’s found a possibility of getting out of his deal as bounty hunter after meeting a soul whose managed to get out of hell for good. Soc has an Asian step-sister, he has a completely inappropriate crush on and Ben is finding romance with a renegade demon who’s after Sam. Yup, seems just about right. The episodes so far have the same mix of quirky humour and action that made me a fan last season. Satan is temptation himself, playing his part to perfection as he goes about spreading evil because it’s fun and the trio manage to lead their directionless lives and sending souls back to hell, when they’re not goofing off work.

All in all, the winter line-up seems a little more interesting than Fall and hopefully with the reduced clutter of reality junk and other shows, some might actually get the chance to develop into wholesome entertainment.