The Film Far(c)e Awards

Planet of the Apes

On February 27th 2010, all the stars of “Bollywood” descend from the sky at their pretentious best, shamelessly aping Hollywood right from concept to the red carpet, from the nude statues to the fake emotional speeches, from the late after-night parties to the press conferences next morning, from the way they give interviews to the way they profess their love to “mommies, daddies and everyone else in their extended families”, and all of this captured by the shamelessly greedy media masturbating loads of fake enthusiasm trying to ape the paparazzi of America! (Ta da! I think I just wrote the longest sentence ever!) With all the aping and all the taping, it is one big planet-of-the-apes award ceremony. Yes, we are talking about the filmfare awards.

Its in the Name

A lot of people are of the opinion that the name Bollywood should not be used because it is ripped off from Hollywood (like that is the only thing they ever ripped off from Hollywood!). They want it to be referred to as the “Hindi Film Industry”. To be honest, I'm offended. We all know that Bollywood is not an industry; just look at it. It is a small bunch of families living off the dollar exchange rate by making movies for the million odd NRIs while neglecting a billion odd Indians. That is not how industries run; Bollywood is at best a mom and pop store!

Film Farce Awards

I don’t entirely hate Bollywood, only 97% of it! The sole reason being the “gibberish with English titles” that they market as movies. And the reason I have no respect for awards (apart from the reasons aforementioned) is because they just reward the stars. How else would you justify the huge number of nominations for Paa and 3 idiots? They are successful and entertaining movies but if you are judging them as a form of art, how do they fare? Does the screenplay of 3 idiots compare with that of DevD? Is Amitabh Bachchan’s acting masked by 3 inches of makeup in Paa better than Ranbir Kapoor’s almost no makeup act in Wakeup Sid? And Gulaal is not even nominated for best film!

The thing is, star studded movies like 3 idiots and Paa will sweep all the awards while the really deserving ones like DevD should be content with the critics’ choice award and that is my reason why filmfare awards should be renamed to filmfarce awards.

Note: the author is neither a fan of Ranbir Kapoor nor Wake up Sid. The references have been used just for convenience.

Film Far(c)e Bingo

As a reader of my blog, I assume you are fairly intelligent and hence not watch the filmfare awards. However if you do, I suggest you play gtoosphere’s very own filmfar(c)e bingo for some extra fun.

Image courtesy: http://allbollywood.wordpress.com

Seinfeld already said that

A couple of weeks back…

Its 9:30 in the morning, less than five hours to go to the exam and almost half the syllabus left uncovered, my phone starts playing the departed sound track softly at first gradually increasing the volume making it more and more irritating to the point that I start searching for the phone on my bed like a blind man searching for his pennies that just slipped out of his hand. Once I find it, my hand involuntarily goes to the snooze button and 2 hours later my ex-roommate wakes me up! Too late!

I sat and pondered about the snooze alarm. The snooze-alarm to me is the ultimate triumph for the marketing world. Just think of it, they advertise that their product doesn’t do what it is supposed to do and also concede that they cannot really do anything about it and that surprisingly, helps them sell more of those! I found the observation quite funny and jotted it down in my diary (the last few pages of my DBIS notebook) that night. I have had this habit of jotting down funny thoughts and random ideas as soon as I get them for quite some time now. The very next day I was watching this episode of Seinfeld I which Jerry Seinfeld while doing his 2 minute comedy routine at the beginning pretty much said the same things about the snooze alarm that I wrote down in my diary the previous night! I realized that I had already watched that episode a long time back and completely forgot about it. And when the snooze-alarm thing happened, the same things came into my head and I completely believed that they were my original lines. One more classic case of my brain trying to fool me and it successfully did! You know these brains of ours… it’s like we can’t trust them anymore.

This coincidence somehow affected me a great deal. Every time I thought of or said something there is an irritating high-pitched voice singing in my head in a teasing tone– “Seinfeld already said that, Seinfeld already said that”. So I made a mental note to blog about this and then I realized that even this Seinfeld-already-said-that singing is inspired from a Southpark episode which in turn was inspired from Simpsons and the recursion never ends! Even Seinfeld jots down his ideas as soon as they come to his mind! I read that in his autobiography. That was the boiling point, my brain was like- Holy Crap! Nothing in my world is original…
Apparently my brain works in a way that is different from others. Every time I hear something funny, I make a mental note of it and also process a list of possible realistic scenarios where I can use a line like that and have a database kind of a thingy in my thought process (ten seasons of F.R.I.E.N.D.S, nine seasons of Seinfeld plus hundreds of movies in three languages- that’s a massive database!). If I realize that I have a line that I haven’t used for quite some time now, I force the conversation in a direction where I can use that! (I don’t do this anymore). After a long seeking-for-answers analysis, I have made my peace with my brain. After all creativity is the art of hiding your sources ;)


P.S: "Reasonably" good advertising ;)

Boredom

I miss being bored. Seriously I do miss being bored. I think boredom is healthy and necessary. Boredom is an emotional state experienced during periods of lack of activities or when individuals are uninterested in the activities surrounding them, a detachment from the external world like meditation. It is a time to explore the inner cores of the mind, a time to stop, reflect and rethink our lives. It is during those patches of boredom that we get insights into our life, like the epiphanies of a relationship or a new theory on how the universe was formed, it is a prelude to creativity.

My concern is that we are slowly losing the luxury of boredom because of the anti-boredom gadgets that are always in our pockets. In those precious moments of boredom that we get, we shut all doors to get any insights into life by seriously shuffling through songs in our ipods or playing pacman or tetris in our mobiles(I know people who do this), or refreshing the scrapbook of a social networking site or reading someone's blog. (Let's make just this blog an exception ;))Luckily I am still a student and I do get my healthy dose of boredom in the classes I attend and this happens to be the consequence of it.







P.S: the paper and the scanner didn't quite work as a team. You must have observed it by now.

I get nowhere...

SO... I have to say something about myself. Sometimes it is hard to introduce yourself because you know yourself so well that you do not know where to start with. When I start pouring my feelings into words, I worry that they will become the structure I give them; that my liquid essence will take shape of whatever phrases I choose, that my thoughts will be defined by the words I use, and confined to the rigid boundaries of a language unable to accommodate the fluidity of my mind; that they will be limited to one distinct avenue when a linear direction does not suffice to express these multi-variable musings. It is easier to float in the sea of my unarticulated thoughts than to build a language boat and sail on a definite course, but in allowing myself to drift at the whim of my mind's currents, I get nowhere…

i get nowhere