Minor Scale

For a month. Might blog once in a while.

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.
Be good everyone. :)

My obsession with subtitles has found a new outlet - Bombay TV (via Screenhead). They call it Bombay TV, but the creative choices are aplenty. My favorite being a clip from, what I think is, Karna with Japanese(?) audio. Muthuraman-san sounds oh! so Samurai.

Some of my movies:
Parts 2 & 3
‘Extra’ Wisdom

I was stuck in traffic today for 10 minutes. A friend of mine was stuck in the cafetaria line for 15 minutes. Karthik is stuck in Malaysia for 2 more weeks waiting on his passport. Mrs.& Mr.Fardeen Khan were stuck in an elevator for 5 minutes. And Salman Khan was stuck at home nursing his brand-new hair. All 86 of them.

Amit links to an Indiatimes article that’ll soon be flooding Inboxes everywhere (it made its way to mine this morning). The updated Rajinikant Logic-Defying Stunt email. Please, someone help me out here. I’ve always wondered about this email. I consider myself a moderate Rajini fan, but am not sure what movies these are allegedly from.

#1 - Chandramukhi, except I don’t remember him jumping high up in the air and staying up there for a few minutes, defying gravity. (He did perform a nifty move where he jumped and clicked his heels, but hey, that was him just dusting off his shoes).
#2 - Chandramukhi again? If yes, then that was supposed to be part of his comedy routine with Vadivelu. Hmm, “comedy routine with Vadivelu”…sounds so much like my “date with Kate Beckinsale“.
#3 - What the Ffffffevicol? Really, he did that?
#4 - Veera, but it was NO swimming pool, but somewhere inside of a recording studio. There’s a difference. Spools of magnetic tape *could* do that to 6 knives. Water cannot, cos’ Water sucks.
#5 - “A coconut falls on the starter, Rajni releases clutch, and away he goes chasing the villains”. He then breaks open the coconut with 6 knives, and with a smattering of cigarette ash, he uses the brake wire and muffler to refine the coconut water into high octane gas. So what?
#6 - I didn’t watch Baba, so let this be from Baba, cos’ Baba was apparently made in the middle of one of his drinking binges.
#7 - One of those Maaveeran/Manithan era movies? They don’t count. Anything after ‘Mr.Bharath’ and before ‘Guru Sishyan’ does not count.
#8 - Rajini runs faster than the current. And what’s logic defying about that?
#9 - We’ve already established what he can do with magnets/magnetic fields. If there is a magnet involved in a Rajini stunt, it is with good reason.

Ek Onkar Satnaam:
What can you say about sweet female vocal harmony that half-sing, half-chant a Guru Nanak prayer for about 90 odd seconds? Nothing much really, so fast forward.

Rang De Basanti:
A Bhangra 101 intro greets you at the outset - the impatient picking of a tumbi (which seems to go a little awry, but that’s Rahman for you), the background male voices with their already appreciative oh-oh-ah-ah and the dhol beat. But that’s only until 00:18, after which the Rahman sound begins layering niceties on the song. The staple Rahman bass sound that’s always a delight, followed by the strings, and finally the twist in the anupallavi(!) that makes even Daler Mahendi’s voice go mellow and you go “Nice”. Rahman even reprises the staccato synth ala ‘Noor Un Ala’ to increase the flavor. A pause and then…like a whiff of stale breath at 1:04, Daler goes off on a 30 second boring Bhangra binge that just plain sucks. Thankfully you don’t hear it again for a long time until 04:50. In between there are short interludes and charanams that are lifted beyond the ordinary by carefully placed trademark Rahman chords and the bass. But the absolute piece of sweetness in the song is the contrapuntal female voice that leads you out of the saranam. Chitra’s thin playful voice in the next charanam is in stark contrast to Daler’s, but it works. If not for the standard Bhangra-isms that the song descends to in the beginning and towards the end, it works as the foot-tapping number it’s meant to be. I’m not a big fan of the genre, except when it helps feed my drunken dancing frenzy at times. But just like with other Rahmanized Bhangra numbers, I’ll make an exception and listen to it more than once.
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