大象传媒

Please please please can you and Mark Kermode try and start a campaign, at least within the 大象传媒, to stop the fatuous habit of calling films 'movies' ?!

I know this is a battle which is probably all but lost [I blame Cliff Richard, Sky 'Movies', and those idiotic URLs that contain 'movie'], however at least we can together make a small stand before we are obliged to...

* Call biscuits 'cookies'.

* Start walking on a 'sidewalk' taking care not to stray onto the 'curb'.

* Refer to mothers as 'moms'.

etc etc ad nauseam....

if you are going to do defiance why not check out a non hollywood film about people hiding in the belorussian forests

there is a belorussian film with english subtitles on ytube called 'Come and See'.

Not for the faint hearted.

#1 LordBedd


Cookies are real good with peanut budder and jelly.

You have my total support.

(To be fair, they do sell cookies in pounds and ounces).

I look forward to an evening when the Newsnight Revue discusses some music without lyrics. All they seem capable of talking about are pop music and musicals. Please refresh my memory on when they last mentioned jazz, or is that Late Night Line-up I'm thinking of?

It is indeed a little disturbing to note that the people who tend to go in for all of this all are predominantly female (as are those who study these subjects in higher education), and that the entire celebrity and entertainment industry (including TV) is not only marketed primarily towards females, but the publishing industry and advertising industry is too.

The trouble here is that most of the material is and it's just not the world any of us can afford to libe in (fantasy = lies by the way). With these industries (film, music, publishing, TV) contributing more and more of the Service Sector, how long will it be before we all forced to accept fantasy over reality, because 'the market' wants that?

Ah, silly me, it's already upon us, I forgot for a moment about the drivers of 'the credit crunch'.

It's a closed world I'm afraid.... It has nothing to do with anything ecept irreality (apart from making a small group of people a lot of money....).

#5 JJ.

Fantastic post.

for something to be Art it must have benefit.

If there was no need then Art would not exist.

So what need does Art become the benefit for?

What functions do stories serve? Why is Homer praised? Why has it endured if it had no benefit?

it is an exercise in self knowledge to find and understand which part of humanity Art addresses.

Scenes of poverty and squalour may appear romantic to Westerners and to our snooty elite but for ordinary Indians they are an everyday reality. One wonders what sort of mind can find such images aesthetically pleasing. Party-hopping socialites (for example, Shobhaa De after all her bombast of "enough is enough" after the Mumbai attack, went and watched a pirated copy!) who are distanced from such reality may find this film an "eye-opener" but for us it IS just poverty-porn. Leaving that aside, I have eight other objections to the film.
1) The director seems to RELISH showing violence. Some of it (like the police-torture) is quite needless. And why was the boy arrested in the first place? On what charge? Was it realistic?
2) How can a boy growing up in slums speak such accented English? Even if one assumes that the language he actually uses to communicate with the game-show host and the police officer is Hindi (granting the director the creative license to use a language better suited for international audiences), there are 2 instances where it is stretched too far: (a) when the boy becomes a 鈥榞uide鈥� for foreign tourists at the Taj Mahal & (b) when he becomes a substitute-operator at the call-centre.
3) When the boy uses his 鈥榣ifeline鈥� during the game-show, his friend discovers that she has forgotten her mobile and has to run back for it. This is plain Bollywood masala! Did the director HAVE to make it so melodramatic?
4) How did the boy know who invented the revolver just by watching his brother use it?
How does his friend know about Benjamin Franklin?
5) 鈥淒arshan Do Ghanshyam鈥� is NOT written by Surdas. It is written by Gopal Singh Nepali for the movie Narsi Bhagat (1957). This song is also credited as traditional and originally written by 15th century poet Narsi Mehta, whose life that film is based on.
6) After winning the game-show, the boy sits on the railway platform and nobody recognizes him! Considering the popularity of the show, is that realistic?
7) Two glaring omissions: To qualify for the show one has to answer several GK questions over phone or Internet. Even after making it to the show, a contestant can reach the hot-seat, only after 鈥渇astest finger first鈥�. All this is conveniently forgotten in the film.
8) And of course the greatest flaw in the storyline: programmes like 'Kaun Banega Crorepati' and 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' are NOT telecast live. As a result the entire structure of the film becomes unrealistic. For a film that boasts of being realistic such a flaw cannot be overlooked.
Anyone else wants to say this is a g-r-e-a-t film despite all these flaws?