A Dog Day Night, A Friend and World Movies

Alongside the biopics, the latest craze in Bollywood over the last years has been the filmisation of real-life events. The ones making the cut are naturally the ones with enough blood and gore and sensation in them, preferably seasoned with a pinch of love and betrayal stuff. Ones crammed with enough masala ingredients, that is. During the 2008 Mumbai attack, I remember coming upon a piece of snippet news about how the producers were already lining up to book and buy their rights to film the event, even before the whole grisly saga was over.

Now one would think that there is nothing wrong with turning real events into films and there isn’t. The problem occurs however with the brazen manipulation of the events and the insensate treatment they are often meted with. Thus making the filmmakers only one in a long line of parties- including politicians, tv channels, newspapers- intent on cashing in on these generally unfortunate events. Commonly it comes down to this- they take the bare skeleton of the story, flesh it out with their own expedient imagination, then advertise it, either directly or through channels of rumour, as a faithful account of the original event (or, at least one based around it), with any glaring deviations from it left to be interpreted as exercises in artistic liberty. Result is the average potboiler as far removed from the original event as Haiti from Honolulu. You have your Gangsters for example.

Now if Bollywood has caught up with this fad only recently, it has never been out of fashion in the tinseltown by Los Angeles, though. Instances are just aplenty to mention separately. That which merits mention however is that the scenario over there is hardly any more encouraging. So things being as they are, it was more than a happy surprise when one day last week, in the wee hours of the morning, I caught up with this Sidney Lumet classic, Dog Day Afternoon, at World Movies. It was a crazy night. I was with a friend of mine and together we had already watched three films on the trot, all at World Movies. We had no prior plans of action. It just happened that they went on airing the films and we, on our part, went on watching them. So the time Dog Day started, just past three o’ clock, we were thoroughly wonked and conked out and more than ready to plunge ourselves into a long bout of sleep.

The TV was still on and we were having, what we thought, our last round of tea for the night. And then things started happening. Three fairly young lads broke into a small Brooklyn bank, with the intention of looting it. Then even before the whole thing started, one took to his heels. The remaining two stuck on and started doing some very funny things. And we knew we were in for our fourth of the night. Next couple hours, we by turn laughed our hearts out, waxed gloomier as events took some unexpected turns, and eventually melted mellow as the amateur miscreants met their not-too-pleasant fates, entranced all through, by bearing witness to an act of masterful filmmaking, not to mention some very real good acting.

So here it was. A real-life event that took place in the summer of 1972 being turned into a film (the film released in 1975). The event was ripe with all the ingredients of human drama and at the hand of someone less competent, could result in some very bad comedy and maudlin drama. With Lumet, it translated into a cinematic masterpiece.

That is however not to say that Lumet never deviated from the actual details. Only middle marchers are deserving of that kind of bondage. (John Wojtowicz, then in prison, was enraged to find the film vaguely intimating a midway complicity between him and the cops and that he sold off Sal to save his own back. And indeed, after the film was screened at the pen he was staying, he suffered a few attacks from his fellow inmates). Because more than a literal semblance (though that is important, too and Lumet often went to great pains to establish visual affinity of his frames with the published images of the incident.) it is about recognizing those little, curious details that are integral to the story and reveal one or two things about human predicament in general. Like Sal Naturile was 18 years but the man Lumet cast in his role, John Cazale, was 34 at the time the film was made. Yet place their pictures side by side and you can not but notice the strain of sadness stamped in both their faces. It is this sadness that defines Sal Naturile and you could not find any better man than Cazale to portray it.

Time may be our Mahesh Bhatts back home took a leaf out of Lumet’s book.

[For the Life magazine coverage of the real event, visit http://books.google.com/books?id=5VYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=1#v=twopage&q=&f=false ]

Tagging the Tags

Recently one day, while lazing my way through the inexhaustible repertoire of Google Images, chanced upon a couple of Playstation 2 ads and simply got hooked to them. Copies were at their wacky best. Biting, funny, witty, and also seasoned with a pinch of cynicism may be, though all in a playful strain. And the way the copies were designed. The hilarious letterings and all. Simply superlative. Kudos to the creative team. And you the lazy bone who is reading this piece right now, in want of something more worthwhile to do, are grimly advised to check them up for yourself.

Jokes aside the thing that will immediately set you off about the ads is their common tagline. It reads: BECAUSE YOUR GIRLFRIEND BORES YOU SHITLESS. A swell line, no doubt. But the innovation lies in that though positioned as a tag, it is headline, punch and tag all punched in one. Coz the bodycopy which is about all the nonsense his girlfriend is yakking about makes sense only in relation to the tag.

So like that sparked off my recent interest in tags. In the space of next few days, I made note of a number of tags that came my way, some very good and bad ones among them. A few like Cadbury_kuch mitha ho jaye or Sprite_all taste no gyaan floated up from memory, the fact that alone attests to their success. In fact in the ideal scenario that is what a tag must achieve, its inseparability from the product/ brand. Like the by now classical tag-phrase ‘Surobhito Antiseptic Cream BOROLINE’ (I was aggrieved to find recent Boroline ads doing away with the phrase and also the famous signature tune/ jingle). Or the no less famous Amul catchline ‘utterly butterly delicious’, coined way back in the 60s by the then ASP creative director Sylvester de Cunha (the recent Amul tag taste of india is quite good, too).

Among the recent ones, the tag I liked best is the YouTube one which is broadcast yourself. It is simple, succinct and successfully communicates the most exciting feature of the product. And all in two words. Similarly, NOKIA_connecting people is a success, too. Although, it looks simplicity and succinctness alone are never a guarantor of a good tag. The LG tag life’s good which looks like a complete failure, is a case in point. So is DoCoMo_do the new. Both the phrases are equally blank and fail to trigger any positive response.

Often also the tags in Hindi (or Hinglish) come as banal and vapid ones. FordFusion_go fida, MTS_badlo life ka plan, HDFC_sar uthake jio are few random picks. I don’t know, but it seems that the only good tags in hindi are those that are written in a humorous strain, often using the ‘tapori’ version of hindi like the Mentos one dimag ki bati jala de or Sprite_seedhi baat no bakwaas (my personal favorite- it is perfectly in sync with the cool, level-headed, no-nonsense attitude the product playfully builds its image around). The Cadbury tag mentioned earlier also uses a homely, intimate version. Of course, it must vary with the products, but formal/ normal hindi seems to be a disconnect with most of the products. Or is it only a failure of the copywriters?

Also there are times when an otherwise good ad gets somewhat marred by a bad tagline. This happens with a fordfusion ad that I spotted the other day. The ad was good, had an interesting headline- Some Cars Have Great Ads, This Ad Has a Great Car but the Ford tagline makes everyday exciting is too long, cumbrous and does not sound exciting in the least bit. Neither am I a big fan of the Telegraph_get life started tag. Especially when it comes with those ‘Before I Start I Stop by the Telegraph’ snippet ads. The ads are a hit with me. The diffuse gray-scale images nicely conjure up the languorous note of early morning and the call-to-action tone of the tag just sounds out of sync.

A few other tags I found interesting were World Movies_one world. one channel(now they have changed it to the world’s greatest movies- just whose idea it was?), Adobe_better by adobe, McDonalds_i’m loving it, Nike_just do it (came to find that Nike is using the tag for more than 20 years and it is still going strong- fabulous, huh?), and FedEx_relax, it’s fedex. The ones I found consistently bad were the banking sector ones, HDFC_we understand your world, ICCI_hum hein na, Bank of Rajasthan_dare 2 dream and so on. And there was one (Verna_feel it) which was so bad that it almost seemed a parodistic take on all bad and pointless tags. But then there was this little eatery, too, named Baked’n’Fried that I found in Ballygunge Place. Tagging along was the line ‘compulsion for connoisseurs’. It was a happy surprise.

But then as always, for the very best in anything you must look away from reality for a moment and turn to fiction. So it was here. The latest Shahid Kapur-starrer on the block Chance pe Dance, released just this week, has Shahid as a struggler (he is an aspiring hero, of course). The struggle phase on, he appears for a, yes lungi-commercial. The tag reads for easy air flow.

[if you will like an extensive list of tags, this guy at http://junksteronomic.blogspot.com/2008/02/tagging-d-punch-lines.html has a real nice collection.

The Playstation ads you can find at http://runningwithfoxes.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/ps2indiaad1resized.jpg and http://globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/indian-playstation-2-ad-1.gif ]

The Way of the Goons

It is always painful to see the way the politics of hate and intolerance is regularly promoted and practised in our country. At the earliest signs of inconvenience, our politicians, regardless of the party they owe their allegiance to, promptly fall back on this trusted and time-proven ally of theirs. So did recently S. M. Krishna, our External Affairs minister, while officially responding to the unfortunate incident of Nitish Garg death in Australia. In a press statement, he quite peremptorily asked the Aussie Govt. to take at the earliest all necessary actions possible to bring to an end these continuing assaults, apparently of a racial nature, on the Indians living over there. That was worthy of a minister justifiably concerned over the fate of his exiled subjects. It is the appendage to this statement which was incomprehensible. For Mr. Krishna, in a bid to convey just how utterly miffed and serious he is this time, chose to add , to the customary appeal for immediate action, a not-too-veiled threat at the Australians living here or visiting the country for some purpose, in case the Aussie govt. failed to respond in a satisfactory manner. He maintained that the anti-aussie feeling these incidents are giving rise to back home may result in some similar incidents taking place here, as retaliatory gestures from the masses and that if it did, Indian govt. would be held in no way responsible. Apparently this borders on the irrational. Because it is in a way to say that what we, so self-righteously ask of the aussie administration is something we ourselves are incapable to perform. But then, rational is not an attribute one would too often attach to an Indian politician. What is really objectionable however is the goon mentality evident in such utterances (and is encouraged by them) and a complete disregard at democratic conventions they manifest. The only way I can convince others as to the absolute seriousness of my enunciation is by deviating from the standard rules of democratic behavior. That is Indian populist politics for you. Blithely oblivious of the harmful and adverse repercussions such gestures can have on a society already enough precarious as it is.

Little surprise that a week after Krishna rolled fists at the aussies, Bal Thackeray has now come out threatening the Australian cricketers coming over to play in India. He is right, too. While you are at threatening, why not threaten the more famous ones?

In a more somber note though, the violation of law and order in India is only too rampant to herald newer troubles. So is expecting some good sense and a somewhat greater discretion on the part of our venerated representatives of people asking too much?