Slumdog Millionaire, closing credits of: Jai Ho

I went to see Slumdog Millionaire, for the second time, with my father on Sunday night. I mean, I saw it for the second time and he saw it for the first time. I have a million things to say about the movie, and not enough time to explore (and bore you with) all of my thoughts, so I will start with this:

The closing credits – the youtube video of which is here (is that sentence correct? Oh, I can’t be bothered).

UPDATE: Hey, what happened? The video of the entire closing credits is gone! Too bad, it was fun to watch.

SECOND UPDATE: Here is a link to a youtube slide show of the closing credits, thanks to Michael (ThinkDifferent31), who popped up in the comments below to let me know about the slide show. Thanks, Michael!

The audience stayed, stuck like glue, in their seats at the end of the movie, to watch the closing credits. The Bollywood style dance number gets all the movie-reviewing attention, but really, I think it’s the music combined with the dance, and all of that  ’cut’ up with moving graphics that  zip across the scene, that is so exciting. The song, Jai Ho, has an upbeat B-wood surface, but sweet-and-sour like, it also has dark undercurrents. You feel, as you are watching the credits, that you have just been told a fairy story, a myth, a good tale, and the actors are now doing a turn, a final dance before they bow to let you know what they’ve done.

They have entertained you.

As long as we are discussing Anita Brookner……

“Her heroine, Vivien Kovaks, slightly resembles a rawer, angrier version of one of Anita Brookner’s dutiful daughters, waiting in a tightly suppressed agony of longing for life to happen. ” Stumbled across Linda Grant’s blog via normblog. I have to read this book. Along with all the other books and journal articles piling up….I have a journal service and I am hopelessly behind.

Anyway, related to the post below, perhaps the ‘dutiful daughters’ are just a classic aspect of a certain kind of ‘immigrant’ fiction and that is the aspect to which I am most strongly drawn in Brookner’s novels?

“Anita Brookner: ‘You should play Russian roulette with your life’ “

“Over the past decade, Brookner’s zestfully melancholy art has outpaced her detractors. Especially after Hotel du Lac won the Booker in 1984, smug and lazy put-downs branded her as fiction’s cracked record, a one-trick turn who snuck back over and over to the airless apartments of forlorn spinsters, left alone with their heartaches and their Harrods accounts.

There was always something facile, even hysterical, about these reviews (I should know; I wrote one). The annual Brookner offered a cheap shot to young critics, eager to savage a scandalous bearer of bad tidings about ageing and loneliness. Yet now she agrees with those snapping puppies. “I hate those early novels. I think they’re crap. Maybe I needed to write them. I far prefer what I’m doing now.” Yes, she does use the Ratner word. It’s like hearing a duchess cuss. Why are they crap? “They’re morbid, they’re introspective and they lead to no revelations.” Has she a favourite among her works? “I don’t like any of them very much.” “

I disagree. Yes, I disagree with the author, herself. I love her early novels as much as I do the later novels (the linked article makes a nice case for her later novels) because of the meticulous detailing of a certain kind of passivity and pathology. What it says about me, that I identified with the protagonist of Look At Me when first reading the novel in college, can’t be good, but there it is. I did identify with her. I read snippets of the book out loud to my friends in the student union at Grinnell College. In melodramatic twenty-year old fashion, I thought I was Frances Hinton in relation to my beautiful and glamorous friends. Why I should think that when they all were, actually, my friends, is utterly strange, but I liked feeling sorry for myself back then. Hazards of a drippy kind of youth, I suppose.

Back to the novels: the criticism is that she has written the same novel, over and over again, twenty-odd times. Well, of course she has. Every novel seems to touch upon the same theme, the loss of innocence and that first taste of adult knowledge: you may be disappointed in this life. Well, who ever recovers from that? It’s quite a blow when you first realize your dreams may never come true, especially your romantic dreams.

*Yes, I know, none of these articles I have been posting of late have been current. Why should they be? I’m exploring my old magpie brain and this is what I’m finding.

Simon Pegg: “You could spend a lot of time exploring the differences between British and American comedy only to reach the conclusion that, ironically, they’re pretty much the same.”

“When it comes to humour, however, there is one cultural myth that just won’t die. You hear it all the time from self-appointed social commentators sat astride high horses, dressed as knights who say, “Ni”. They don’t get it. They never had it. They don’t know what it is and, ironically, they don’t want it anyway. That’s right: “Americans don’t do irony.” This isn’t strictly true.”

My brother loves zombies. I mean, he loves zombie movies and zombie books and zombie everything. Don’t worry, I’m not going off on tangents, this post has everything to do with Simon Pegg. When I first saw Shaun of the Dead, I was shocked that I loved it so much, because I don’t love zombies, or movie gore, but this actor, Simon Pegg, I really do like him. Ironic.

“Madeline’s review of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”

“I was supposed to be doing homework, but I chose to spend an hour finishing Miss Pettigrew instead. I regret nothing.  The book is charming, and so is the movie……..” . I linked to this review because I thought the title of the post matched the title of the book. I watched the movie last night and enjoyed it, although I thought the overall effect was a little flat.

*An excerpt from the book, too, because I like book excerpts. How can you know if you want to read a book if you don’t see a sentence or two of the writing?

(Listening to: Fila Brazilla ”Mermaids” and some Dido. Now, Pipas  ”Barbapapa”).

“It is my right”

We had family over for Christmas lunch, a late lunch as it turned out, because my cousin and his family (wife, three daughters, father-in-law and mother-in-law) didn’t arrive until 2:00 or so in the afternoon. The day was sunny and cold and we opened the window blinds wide-open in all of the rooms so that the afternoon sun flooded each room. The view from my place, a few floors up, is an interesting one – you can see brick-fronted shops, apartment and condominium buildings. The train, and it’s attendant track and station, are well visible, the train flashing glints of silver as it goes by.

My cousin and his family are very sweet. His in-laws were visiting from India. I’m not sure what they thought of the cold, the snow, the dreariness of a midwestern winter. The children are 100 percent energy, and even though we bought them books and had all sorts of cartoon channels on cable, they quickly became bored. I’m afraid the adult-ness of my place with it’s shelves of books and sharp angled furniture isn’t exactly what kids want. Lunch was delicious, anyway, cooked by my mother (with me helping). We had rice, rajma, a ‘dry’ potato subzi, a kind of sweet and sour apple ‘curry’, palak-paneer, and some fresh pita from a local place. No one was in the mood to make naan or roti. Home made pedas, too, creamy, smooth, and sweet. Christmas cookies! A real Indian-American mix.

While leaving, the father-in-law tried to press a few bills into my hand, part of the Indian customs that are confusing to me because my parents don’t really follow them. I find some of the gift giving aspect of Indian culture embarrassing, I never know how to respond. When I tried to object, he said, “it is my right.” I felt shy and quiet at that moment: it would have been rude of me to refuse. My mother and I walked them all down to the lobby where their car was waiting, after lunch and a nice long conversation, and I felt a little pang as I watched them get into the minivan, all bundled up in western winter clothes over lighter Indian clothes.

It’s funny, when I was younger, I wanted to escape all the old Indian things and now they seem the most grounded part of my life.

In the hospital, on the morning of Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 2008

1. Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!

2. Paged to a ‘rush’ biopsy this am; the resident had let me know last night that there was a patient in the Burn Unit who needed a skin biopsy looked at this am, so I went to the hospital this morning to look at it. Thankfully, it seems that it will be okay.

3. Listening to Billy Bragg, “Great Leap Forward”, the lyrics of which strike me as faintly ridiculous, but the music (! ) reminds me, completely, of my senior year of college. Funny, fond memories. (Okay, now I am listening to Kings of Convenience).  As always, some of the music-y links are musical, so don’t click if you are in a place where you want to be quiet! And, now, Yokota! I adore Yokota.)

4. “ When I was in a 90% Jewish public elementary school in the Bronx, we learned Christmas carols at this time of year. The songs were pretty, and it was a way of finding out about another culture, one that was all around us and well worth finding out about.”  RLC, via Ann Althouse. Sweet. I felt that way too, as a young not-very-religious Hindu child listening to, and singing, Christmas carols in school, at Christmastime. I felt I was learning about a different culture and it was charming. It really was charming.

5. More charming-ness:  Lucy’s Kitchen Notebook, also via Althouse (commenter Chip Ahoy in a comments thread).

Jim Geraghty: “Obama vs. The New Rochelle Train”

I’ve been meaning to link this quote from Jim Geraghty for some time:

“But there’s a fine line between rejecting that life and looking down at that life. Because some people are just fine with jobs that require them to take the New Rochelle train. Some people actually prefer it to the stress, the risk, the time away from family, the constant demands from strangers. And the world needs these people – who get up every morning, go to work to do jobs with no glamor and little or no prestige, wages modest or worse, and whose names never appear in the newspaper. These folks receive a round of applause when they dance at their wedding, and at their retirement party, and that’s about it.”

 These folks receive a round of applause when they dance at their wedding, and at their retirement party, and that’s about it. 

That touched me deeply. It’s the old humanism, isn’t it? I don’t care too much about making a political point, here, but that passage lodged itself in my magpie brain, and I couldn’t forget it. This is the life of millions, or more, well, surely more, and it’s humbling to think about.

“Andrew Anthony on Cultural Amnesia by Clive James”

“What completed my social amnesia, however, was Cultural Amnesia, James’s compendious collection of biographical essays on influential cultural and political figures, as well as more obscure subjects, like the young Nazi-resistor Sophie Scholl. Published in 2007, the book garnered some approving reviews, but I don’t think the full depth and breadth of James’s achievement has been widely acknowledged.” 

At normblog.

I remember reading through this book half-a-year-ago, racing through it at one sitting. I was home, sick with a slight case of the flu, or just run-down from work, more likely, and spent the day in bed reading when I should have been catching up on sleep. Somewhere in the book, Clive James makes the comment that a person living in the comfortable market democracies of the West might make a quiet and useful life for themselves by working at a  ’small’ and safe job,  if such a thing exists, while soaking up on all the books and culture readily on offer in modern life during their ‘off’ time. Witness Google Books. I always imagine that person when I see an enveloped-in-a bubble-of solitude soul in the hospital cafeteria, head buried in a book, occasionally checking the clock for the end of break time, otherwise completely absorbed.

“The Pepper Potts Look”

I spent Sunday in, as any sensible person would given the winter wind rattling windows and dropping the wind-chill to arctic temperatures, watching movies: the Incredibles and Iron Man. I’d seen the Incredibles before and thought it sweet and funny, but what surprised me was how much I liked Iron Man.  It’s a confident movie, light-hearted and brisk, different from the tortured super-hero movies Hollywood has been feeding us of late. Well, as in, since the early ’90s when Batman went ‘dark’ with Michael Keaton.  It’s been almost 20 years since the super-hero became high-minded and tortured by his past. It’s not so new anymore.

Robert Downey Jr and Gwyneth Paltrow are a surprisingly good pair in this movie, and to prove my point, there are a ton of Tony Stark-Pepper Potts-in-love fan videos on youtube. Ahhh, the youtube fan video – I’m not sure I understand the phenomenon or what inspires people to clip film stills together and add a home-made power ballad soundtrack over the image, but it’s as good a hobby as golf, I suppose.

“ Pepper Potts: You’re not Iron Man.

Tony Stark: If I were Iron Man, I’d have this girlfriend who knew my true identity. She’d be a wreck. She’d always be worrying I was going to die, yet so proud of the man I’ve become. She’d be wildly conflicted, which would only make her more crazy about me. Tell me you never think about that night.

Pepper Potts: What night?

Tony Stark: You know.

Pepper Potts: Oh, are you talking about the night where we danced and went up to the roof, and you went downstairs to get me a drink and you left me there by myself?

Tony Stark: (slightly awkward and chagrinned) Uh-huh.

Pepper Potts: Thought so. Will that be all, Mr. Stark?

Tony Stark: Yes, that will be all, Miss Potts. “

Another aspect of the movie, smart in a marketing sort of way, is how many fashion blogs are interested in the ‘Pepper Potts look’. I wonder if this was intentional by the film-makers or if the fitted suits and strawberry blond hair is just fashion serendipity?

Update: I tried to see this movie in the theater with my parents last Spring but as soon as the movie started my mother said, “it’s too loud. I can’t take it, I’m going home.” My poor father wanted to stay and watch the movie, so we left him to do just that, and I took Mom home. We asked for our money back on the way out: “it’s so loud, my ears can’t take it,” my mother told the poor ticket taker, who looked all of twelve. “It’s an action movie, ma’am,” he said, but gave us our money back anyway. I was a little embarrassed. Dad got home,  and I asked him if he liked the movie. “Yes,” Dad said, in his laconic way. Well, he was right. It was good.