I would like to grow up to be like Clint Eastwood. Eastwood the director, Eastwood the actor, Eastwood the invincible, Eastwood the old man. What other figure in the history of the cinema has been an actor for 53 years, a director for 37, won two Oscars for direction, two more for best picture, plus the Thalberg Award, and at 78 can direct himself in his own film and look meaner than hell? None, that's how many.
Willie Nelson records so frequently (2008 releases included Two Men With The Blues, the solo Moment Of Forever, and the career-spanning box One Hell Of A Ride) that it takes some stamina to keep up. Not bad for a guy who recently turned 75.
Kaufmann can write a script about you writing an article about watching his movie and listening to an analogous hard rock album. Add some crazy time-bending thing with Axl writing the album based on a movie he thinks is going to be made in 2008...If you think there is great music and great reviews to look forward to, read this sattire-at-its-best piece by The Onion: Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8.
"Music used to be great, but let's be honest, it's a 6.8 now at best," said Los Angeles resident Lowell Radler, 23, who admitted that he just looked at the rating rather than reading the whole review. "I seriously might never listen to music again."Related: Roger Ebert on giving out too many stars.
"When the change was made uptown
And the Big Man joined the band"
A month back, I borrowed the latest book by Anita Nair, Goodnight and God Bless, from a local library. Earlier, I had read her columns in The Sunday Express and I own a copy of her last work of fiction (Mistress), which I liked. I glanced through this small book, priced at Rs. 399, before borrowing it, and realized that the material is nothing superior to the free stuff that I get from the blogosphere. To make matters worse, on reading the book I realized that most of the pieces were from her earlier Sunday Express columns which I had already read! Strange that this was not mentioned in the preface, blurbs or in any publicity material; but only at the end of the book as fine print! I was glad that I didn’t buy the book for 399 bucks, but spent just Rs. 40 (10%) as lending fee.
Most of the Indian Writing in English published here is overpriced, except for certain authors like Chetan Bhagat. I haven’t read Bhagat yet, but despite being a best seller, his books are nominally priced (The 3 mistakes of my life at Rs. 95). I like him for that.
The latest entrant to the overpriced Indian Writing in English scene is Nandan Nilekani, with his ideas for the new century: Imagining India, priced at Rs. 699! I am not commenting on the quality of the book, of which I have just read an excerpt, and I don’t expect the book to be mediocre- from whatever I know (and have read) of the author as a businessman and a person. I feel that it is overpriced, even though it is a thick book. As rightly commented by a reader on Nandan’s blog: “..when you price a book such that it’s inaccessible to many, you are not letting the ideas reach the people”. Mr. Nilekani, apparently, has bagged the fattest advance for a nonfiction work in India. With India eagerly awaiting the release (on Nov 24th) this one would easily become the all-time nonfiction best seller in India. Moreover, it is quite obvious that Thomas Friedman would be showcasing this book to a wider global audience who might not be really interested in India or Nilekani.
Indian is a country where Public libraries haven’t evolved as in the West. Reading a new book still means paying a 10% of the book price at a privately run library (if at all they get a copy of the book you want to read) or actually buying the book (assuming you don’t buy the pirated copies of limited collection of best sellers available).
Ironically, in the last edition of The Sunday Times of India (Nov 16), which carried an excerpt from Nilekani’s Rs. 699 book, the opinion page carried the column by Gurucharan Das about reading and the state of libraries in India:
Just as a great city must have a big public park along with lots of small neighbourhood parks, so it must have one big public library and many neighbourhood libraries. Ideally, public libraries should be free, paid by taxes, and managed by the municipality. But this is a distant dream in India where the state has failed to deliver even more basic services like schools and hospitals.
Between 1900 and 1917, [Andrew] Carnegie founded 3,000 neighbourhood public libraries [In the United States], insisting that the local municipality had to guarantee tax support for running and maintaining them.
Perhaps, one day we, too, will spawn our Carnegie.
Till that day, I wish, at least the financially sound Indian writers don’t overprice their books by demanding unjustifiable advances from the publishers.
Guy Montag, you there?
The storytelling is deliberate and laboured, and there’s so much pulling away for the larger picture, with such a densely plotted maze of procedural details, that the simple emotional beats get lost. When Batman faces the death of a loved one, we don’t feel that loss.
You cannot will a great movie into being. It just happens – if you’re lucky, and if about a few thousand variables click satisfyingly (and somewhat improbably) into place. The undoing of The Dark Knight appears to be that its greatness was pre-ordained (and heartily embraced by millions) to such an unprecedented extent that the film had to merely show up, and it would already be a masterpiece.
[..]in Batman Begins, where he transformed Batman into Bond, an ordinary hero (as opposed to a “super” hero) who needed the help of Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) just as Bond needed Q. This was an unprecedented level of inquiry into the origins of the powers of a superhero, who, in the comic-book universe, is typically self-made. In The Dark Knight, Nolan pushes Batman further into Bond territory, fashioning mirror events such as the loss of a loved one, or the fight sequence involving a shoe with a knife.Update:
It feels funny to say this, because The Dark Knight is certainly not a bad movie. It is consistently interesting, well intentioned and well crafted, with a lot of expertly executed action eye candy – but the numerous story threads aren’t tied together in a fully satisfying way. The Dark Knight shapes up into a solidly good movie – and while that’s hardly an insignificant achievement, that’s all it is.
We have heard many duets by successful male and female singers that have topped the charts. For instance – Bryan Adam’s When you’re gone (Duet with Mel C) or Neil Young’s Star of Bethlehem (Duet with Emmylou Harris). Both these songs probably would have worked well even if they weren’t a duet. Both these songs have female vocals humming the same lines faintly in sync with the prominent male vocal. For me, a duet would make sense when the singers sing separate lines (stanzas) of the song to complement each other and probably join in singing the chorus. Like Picture by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow.
