Samit Basu's Blog: Newsletter!, page 11
May 29, 2012
April 27, 2012
Katju power!
March 8, 2012
Local Monsters
…is a comicbook I'm working on with Level Ten comics and Tranquebar. Level Ten just posted a teaser image on Facebook, so I thought I'd share it here as well. It isn't a cover, just an announcement.
When more stuff happens, you'll be the first to know.
Filed under: just
Happy Holi!
I lied. Holi is not a happy day, it's a day for carnage and general mayhem. Announcing the UnHoli Covered in Colour contest! Win free comics!
Post the most colorful picture of yourself covered in Holi colours looking the most zombie like, get your friends to like them and the person with the most likes will be the UNHOLI ZOMBIE KING OR QUEEN and stand to WIN 50 ASSORTED COMIC BOOKS! Get started today!
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Filed under: just
January 26, 2012
JLF 2012
Just back from Jaipur. So much happened, so many stories to tell, but already deadlines loom and so I'll just run away after posting some links, as usual. Here's a piece I did for the BBC on five highlights of the Jaipur festival. Here's the text:
THE RUSHDIE CONTROVERSY
If there was one unifying theme of the 2012 Jaipur festival, it was the Salman Rushdie controversy.
On the very first day, a tweet from Hari Kunzru, then on the verge of reading from The Satanic Verses, went viral, and by evening the four authors who read passages from Rushdie's banned text – Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi and Jeet Thayil – were rushed to the interiors of Jaipur's Diggi Palace, the festival venue, where frantic meetings with policemen, lawyers and organisers led, within two days, to their departure from Jaipur.
I was present at the Joshi-Thayil session, where the audience, not initially aware of the book from which they were reading, listened enraptured, and across the hall eyes lit up as key words in the text, read off a print-out, clued them in.
They ended to rousing applause; the atmosphere was electric and entirely supportive. Seconds later, a horde of TV crews (who could one day prove to be the answer to India's failure, thus far, to achieve anything in the world of rugby) invaded the venue, and over the next few days there were rumours of death threats, hit squads from Hyderabad and plenty of jail time for everyone concerned, though no-one knew exactly why, as it wasn't clear that they had broken the law in any case.
THE BRILLIANT TOM STOPPARD
If there was a prize for Best Speaker on Actually Writing, though, it would go to Tom Stoppard. In a session with David Hare, he was sharp, restless and brilliant, stressing the importance of digression in life and art, his interest in screenwriting largely as "a distraction from the writing process" and his refusal to work on more than one idea at a time, letting it grow from a molecule to a limb.
What came across strongest, though, was his amused disdain for any abstract, arty discussion on theatre as a culture or theatre as play.
"I'm exorbitantly unobservant, and hence disinterested in theatre as a culture," he said, sending his moderator into a downward spiral of jumbled facts and defensive theatre-babble.
Hare, too, managed to restrain himself for about 40 minutes before ending the session with a fantastic rant about any form of theatre that involved selling the idea of adults fooling around like children at a party. It could only end in stupidity, he said, concluding a session that definitely didn't.
ENDURING THE MEDIA SCRUM
Around 1,500 people registered for press passes at the festival, and around 500 actual journalists turned up.
Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, Amy Chua, Steven Pinker and Jamaica Kincaid interview slots were bargained over and traded relentlessly in journalistic power-plays, while a senior Mumbai-based journalist complained relentlessly about the Delhi media's indifference to the real world (Bollywood).
Among the younger long-form journalists, though, David Remnick and Philip Gourevitch brought with them endless possibilities of future New Yorker glory; their interviews were probably the most comprehensively researched of the whole festival. It was a pleasure, though, to see the most fiercely cultivated intellectual auras of India's next generation of long-form journalists disappear in moments of post-interview fandom.
Closer to the home country, Mohammed Hanif displayed world-class levels of stamina on Saturday afternoon when he took at least 16 interviews back-to-back on a shared video camera without any visible sign of a nervous breakdown.
THE 'TAJ MAHAL LIFE' OF OPRAH
On Sunday morning, Jaipur was Oprah City. Mile-long queues, complete chaos at the festival's high-security entrance, and generally unbelievable levels of excitement about a global celebrity in Jaipur. If her actual TV show draws anything approaching this level of excitement, it must be one of the most successful programmes in India.
In Jaipur, after an epic party in Mumbai, where socialite Parameshwar Godrej invited most of Bollywood to dance for her on a beach, Oprah trotted out all the standard India checklist – "You feel like you're in the centre of something bigger and greater than yourself" – "I came here with an open mind, and it has been expanded … It's the greatest life experience I have ever had" – "I will take with me a sense of calmness, and a genuine respect … people don't talk religion here, they live it" – "What most impressed me here was the family tradition in the country and the fact that you take care of your parents, your grandparents" – and of course the must-have "India is a paradox".
But her finest quote, her quote of quotes, was worthy of classic Bollywood: asked whether she would like a Taj Mahal dedicated to her, she said, "My life is a Taj Mahal." Even Rajnikanth, the Greatest Movie Star in the World, would have been proud of this one.
LAUNCHED ON THE WORLD STAGE
Shehan Karunatilaka won the much-coveted $50,000 DSC Literature Prize for Chinaman, his quirky, complicated novel about the search for a legendary Sri Lankan cricketer. After a long ceremony that mostly involved a slightly confused audience trying to comprehend what 1980s Indian sex symbol Kabir "Sandokan" Bedi was saying (Bedi had clearly rehearsed this year, though, unlike last year where he spent far too long trying to pronounce juror Nilanjana Roy's name), Shehan performed his slightly surfer-like shuffle to the stage and made a truly charming speech, thanking his Indian publisher for picking the book out of obscurity and launching it on the world stage.
Serious cricket enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists would do very well to track Kuranatilaka, though, because of what he revealed in the latter half of his speech; every key moment involving the book's success coincided eerily with some major cricketing disaster for the Sri Lankan team.
Sri Lanka had just won a match the night before the award ceremony so Shehan was convinced the prize was not to be his. But clearly the jinx is broken, unless this suspiciously warm and pleasant Sri Lankan craftsman is playing a deeper game.
Samit Basu is the author of five novels, including a superhero novel set in India, Pakistan and England
And here's a video from my session. Only the first 17 minutes have audio for some reason. Will post the whole video if they put it online at some point. Which I hope they do. I had a lovely time, and I think everyone else there had fun as well; it was a happy hour for everyone except that blasted cow outside.
D1 SM 02 from Dreamcast.in on Vimeo.
Apart from doing my session and introducing Jeet and Ruchir, I also moderated a session on screenwriting with Prasoon Joshi, Javed Akhtar, Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj (poor gent barely got to speak). I'd been hoping to create an hour's worth of conversation that any aspiring Bollywood screenwriter would look at for reference and inspiration; that didn't happen, but it was all quite entertaining, the audience was going quite crazy for the panelists, and I actually had people coming up and thanking me for letting the Bollywood heavyweights ramble freely instead of asking them questions about writing, so all was good.
D4 FL 01 from Dreamcast on Vimeo.
I want to do a much longer post, talking about the whole free speech thing, the Rushdie readings and the circus that followed. But not yet, there's work typing to do.
Filed under: just
Unholi
Unholi is a zombie comic set in Delhi. I think that's pretty much all I need to say about it. Oh, wait, it's more comedy than horror. Also, there is carnage set at a publishing party. Here are the first few episodes:
And here's an interview about UnHoli on graphicindia.com
Filed under: comics
November 20, 2011
October 29, 2011
Going, Going, G.One: The Big Fat Ra.One Post
This came out on Rediff.com yesterday, here. Posting it on this site as well in case the slideshow format there doesn't agree with you.
I spent a lot of time this year wandering the wilderness of Bollywood trying to put together a film adaptation of my last novel, Turbulence, a superhero novel set in India and England. Whether it'll ever get made is a question that hasn't been answered as yet, but meetings with a few of Bollywood's movers and shakers have taught me many things about the way the Bollywood collective mind works when it comes to high-budget action blockbusters. So here are some of the axioms, three of the Golden Rules based on which Bollywood blockbusters get made; they might help put your Ra.One experience in perspective.
People are stupid
It's disturbing for anyone who plans to make a living as a writer to hear this, but an alarmingly large percentage of B-wood power-brokers said this with absolute confidence. I still believe this is not true, but hey. The 'audience' is seen largely as an amorphous, slack-jawed blob with the collective intelligence of a not-very-intelligent 11-year-old. I suppose this holds true for Hollywood as well; it would explain many of their biggest commercial successes. People will go and see any film that has been marketed with a great deal of pizzazz; it doesn't matter what's in the film as long as it's hardsold to them and stars someone they like. There has to be at least one song that goes viral. The most worked-upon thing in the movie has to be the hero's abdomen. There have to be one or two 'dialogues' that people can repeat at each other ad nauseum. Location is important. It's distressingly cynical, but this rule works very often; just look at most of our recent Bollywood mega-hits and you'll see that this works. It could be said in Ra.One's defence that it wasn't yet another cynical, brainless 'South masala' remake. But in between the splendidly-put-together action sequences, look at the utterly moronic jokes, the endlessly crass attempts at humour, the barrel-bottom-scraping homophobic/racist jibes, the numerous plot holes, the many logical inconsistencies, and you'll realize that this is a film that does not expect any degree of mental ability from its audience. Like the aforementioned dim-witted 11-year-old, the audience must be told what to do. And what to like. If Ra.One works commercially – and I hope it does, because I have a personal stake in wanting Bollywood to make more superhero films – it will be yet another sad confirmation of this Bollywood principle. Like they say, 'Film's purpose is to entertain. Don't overanalyze.'
People do not want to see anything new
'The Indian audience is not evolved enough for anything that Bollywood hasn't done before.' This one was a particular shocker when I heard it the first time, because it goes against everything I've believed in eight years as a full-time writer. But again, look around you – TV, movies, books – and you'll see this is largely true. As one Bollywood top maven told me with utter certainty, 'People want to sit in the hall, relax, enjoy themselves. Nobody wants to struggle with new ideas. It makes them angry.' Fair enough – if money wasn't a consideration, I'm sure everyone would be happy to be wildly experimental. But big movies mean big money, and big money means big risks, and if you don't give the audience what you already know it wants, you stand to lose everything. The bigger the budget, the more the film must conform. None of this is new information. The saddest part of the Ra.One experience is the growing realization, as you watch the film, that the intentions of the team behind it were probably good when the whole epic project began. That at some level, it wanted to treat its audience as smart, and ready to see things it hadn't seen before. There must have been, at some point, a genuine desire to push the envelope, to give quality-starved Indian audiences something new. And in the technical departments, Ra.One achieves that – the VFX and sound are excellent, the crack international team behind the film has done its job well. Yes, most of the action sequences and character designs are wildly derivative, but the same criticism could be applied to any number of successful Hollywood movies. The problem with Ra.One is, though, that while it might have started off with the urge to push boundaries, it ended up being a confused mix of tried-and-tested and desperate-to-please. Worried that the film wasn't familiar enough, they stuck in gratuitous audience identification points – Karva Chauth references, Ganesh idols – and unnecessary celebrity cameos – Priyanka Chopra, Sanjay Dutt and the already-superhuman Rajnikanth. And the audience, already informed about these guest appearances by endless publicity, cheered dutifully – and gave up any involvement they were feeling with the film's actual story. It's easy enough to blame the writers for Ra.One's many flaws – the most clear problem is the bad script. But while the writing was undeniably terrible, varying between cliché superhero/sentimental speeches and inane attempts at comedy/melodrama, let's not forget these writers were unlikely to have made any of the key decisions about the way this film was made – there are probably lengthy debates about the marketability of every single line when the stakes are this high. What we end up with, though, is a film that wants to be new and familiar at the same time, and does not know whether it wants to be compared with Iron Man or Dabangg. It tries to be both, and fails at each; a film that was supposed to be ambitious and groundbreaking but at the very peak of its ambition aspires to match a level of technical competence that Hollywood takes for granted. What our esteemed Bollywood kings seem to be forgetting is that the application of these two axioms – assuming the audience is sub-normal and hates change – is exactly what has led to all of Bollywood's innumerable flops. If anyone knew what actually made films work, they would be bottling up that essence and selling it at malls.
The Hero is Everything
For Bollywood films above a certain scale, you can only raise money if one of the top five heroes of the moment agrees to do the film. And heroes are sensitive creatures who do not like sharing screen space, and like calling all the shots on their films. And physically being in most of the shots in their films. This rarely yields good results in terms of quality, though it seems to work fine for the legions of love-crazed fans who flock into theatres and spew hate on the Internet in defence of their gods. The chief problem with this axiom is that it imposes very dangerous constraints on films – there can only be one central character, everyone else is window dressing. In superhero-specific terms, it means we'll never have an X-Men/Avengers style multi-starrer superhero movie until this changes (On a personal note, every producer I met warned me that no hero would want to do an ensemble movie, and my script would have to be about one man only, regardless of the book it was based on). Ra.One is unapologetically a Shah Rukh Khan vehicle, and it must be said the man tries everything – he pulls off his most famous poses, tries out a range of facial contortions, hairstyles, costumes, accents, all in this vast, multi-crore attempt to please his son on and off screen. But no amount of the Khan's much-vaunted histrionic abilities can hide the fact that the characters he's been given to play are flatter than his abs. That said, Ra.One is not as one-actor-minded as, say, Ghajini, Singham or Bodyguard, and this is a good thing. Most of the praise that has come in for Ra.One can be reduced to 'Kareena and Arjun Rampal look amazing.' Excellent, but why bother with a story, then? Surely it would be more economically viable to have people sit in theatres and look at slideshows of all these hot people. I might just have hit upon the Next Big Thing here.
An even bigger drawback of the hero-is-everything approach is that films which aim to be 'mass entertainers' usually feature heroes who are invincible even if they are flawed; Nietzschean Ubermenschen who stride through their stories casually beating up people while flooring heroines with their charm, supporting and entertaining their families, singing, dancing, nipple-baring and never, ever letting the whistles in the audience die out. More superheroic than any superhero Hollywood's come up with yet, unbeatable musclemen, walking wish-fulfilment fantasies of millions of not-especially-Alpha Indian men. Shah Rukh Khan does try to break this rule – his real-world character is called a coward by his son, and we are repeatedly told that his video-game hero is weaker than the villain (though we see no real evidence of this.) Sadly, this is the biggest risk the film takes.
In a few weeks, we'll find out whether Ra.One is the biggest commercial success of all time or a huge flop. Like all Bollywood films of its scale, the essential quality of the film will be irrelevant either way, as frenzied fans and rival stars' fans battle it out across comment sections all over the Internet. If Ra.One succeeds commercially, there will be a sudden explosion of superhero films; if not, no one will try one for the next few years (well, unless the sequel to the equally flawed Krish is a box-office smash). Either way, given that Bollywood essentially has no idea about the basic tenets of superhero films, here are a few blindingly obvious guiding principles for those brave souls attempting the next one, whenever it happens:
A little internal logic would be nice
It feels sad to have to say this to people who are presumable a) professional writers and b) literate adults, but the fictional world you create must have rules, and these rules must be consistent. In a superhero/scifi/fantasy story, you can stretch the laws of physics, but that's really all you can do. After that, you have to work hard, even harder than in a 'real-world' movie, to ensure that the rest of the world you create is logical, that everything else makes sense. You can't just do whatever the hell you want with the plot, the characters, and the world your story is set in just because your heroes are more than human. If you have no internal logic system, you lose any member of the audience who is not a zombie. The set-pieces in Ra.One are extravagant, executed by professionals who've done this sort of work before, and are something the rest of Bollywood should emulate – though the hundreds of deaths that train action sequence would have caused leaves me in severe doubts as to the hero's competence, if not that of the VFX artists. The rest of the film seems to have been put together by bumbling incompetents.
We really need to know what the superhero/villain is.
Are Ra.One and G.One humans? Robots? Or life-sized mannequins that come to life? And whatever the case, why do they have superpowers? I put software in my USB drive all the time; it hasn't started chasing me around the world and trying to kill me, at least not yet. What are Ra.One and G.One and why do they have powers in the real world? No one knows. No one seems to care. Even if one accepts that a piece of software escapes a video game and finds form in the real world, it is really rude to your audience to not even provide a semblance of a pseudo-scientific explanation as to how, unless you specifically mention that no one knows how it's possible, or explain it away by saying it's magic. It's not enough to copy scenes from the Terminator movies; if you've seen them, you know there's a whole deal of elaborate explanation of how their bodies work the way they do. G.One seems to be made of metal (hence the horrible pierced groin in metal-detector scene) but surely someone at Dalip Tahil's video game company might have noticed that they'd made an incredibly complicated cyborg? There's some brief introductory technobabble about how the gaming company creates tangible 3-D holograms, but then film ignores its own half-hearted attempts at explanation when the software, instead of just manifesting physically, proceeds to enter physical replicas of the video-game characters. Complete internal logic shutdown.
We really need to know what the superhero's powers are.
At various points in the movie, G.One and Ra.One exhibit super-strength, super-speed, mind control, energy radiation, shape-shifting, self-healing and self-cloning abilities. These powers crop up conveniently when the problem they're facing requires them, and disappear otherwise. Which indicates a) an utter contempt for the audience b) really, really bad writers.
The villain is always stronger than the hero
Most superhero films have villains who are physically stronger than the hero; hence the hero has to struggle to overcome them. This is a standard feature of a superhero film, not a breathtaking innovation the way Ra.One makes it out to be.
A little research helps
Ra.One's hero makes video games. His greatest achievement is a video game where you have to pretty much be a fully trained ninja/acrobat to defeat Level One. I know Kinect controllers and the like require movement, but if you're planning a game where success is based on real-world acrobatics, you're looking at a seriously niche market. Most video games involve sitting on a beanbag and pressing buttons. I suspect the Ra.One video game will require exactly that. If not, it is not going to be a commercial success. While it is clear Team Ra.One knows nothing about superheroes, it would be nice if they knew anything about video games
The villain has to be scary
What does our supervillain, Ra.One, want? World domination? Nuclear warfare? The destruction of Facebook? No, he wants to kill a small boy who was kicking him around in his videogame. Granted the small boy was extremely annoying, and Ra.One had my sympathy for most of his few appearances, but you know what? This is not the kind of earth-shaking conflict situation you base a superhero movie on, unless it's a flat-out comedy or parody. If you met Ra.One on the street, you could just get out of his way; he wouldn't bother you otherwise, unless you were foolish enough to buy what looked like a terrible game and take him on in it. We also never really know what G.One wants, apart from protecting said annoying small boy from Ra.One. Once that's accomplished, it's difficult for us to care what happens to G.One, because, well, we don't know what he is! Is he capable of turning human or otherwise giving Kareena Kapoor the loving she clearly needs? Is he going to be locked in eternal combat with Ra.One in a video game that will presumably be cancelled by its makers since we know it's capable of unleashing real-world mass destruction? Why should we care?
Reality and fiction are different things
Again, internal logic=good. You can have an interesting cross-film cameo from Cheeti the robot from Endhiran. You can have a celebrity cameo from Superstar Rajnikanth. You can't have both. Sorry. Not even for the reality-bending Rajnikanth.
In the end, how you feel about Ra.One depends entirely on what standards you're using to judge it. Does it measure up to the best of Hollywood, or to similar films made in China or Japan? No. Is it better than the worst Hollywood superhero films? Certainly. Is it a step forward for Bollywood? Absolutely. But it's still unclear as to whether it's in the right direction.
Samit Basu is a writer of books, comics and one day, films you can all make fun of. Address all propositions and invective to @samitbasu on Twitter.
Filed under: just [image error]
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September 29, 2011
Putu returns, and other heroic nonsense
Putu is a Hero now
Putu is a Hero now.
Stop him if you can but how?
Putu wearing underwear
Wiggling like he just don't care.
Putu stopping every villain
Only bruisin, never killin,
Putu shooting beam from eye,
Like a lightning in the sky.
Putu having honour code,
Always paying what is owed,
Never taking law in hand,
Except when is real demand
Putu having secret name,
Out of custom, not of shame,
Secret Putu mild in manner,
Self-effacing urban planner.
Is your city facing crime?
Naughty people all the time?
Never worry Putu here
Striking pose and heart with fear.
Sinner Son and Demon Daughter,
Super Squid from underwater,
All these villains, without fail,
Putu putting in the jail.
So if you are facing trouble,
Someone turning house to rubble,
Someone steal your ancient treasure,
Someone causing you displeasure,
Someone robbing local bank,
Someone crushing you with tank,
Someone making life less simple,
Someone playing with your pimple,
Someone teasing your friend Rhonda,
Throwing her to anaconda,
Someone doing vulgar gesture,
Someone eating cow in pasture,
Someone pinching you in thighs,
Setting off nuclear device,
Telling you cuboid is prism,
Indulging in terrorism,
Delaying your application,
Hogging buttons of PlayStation,
Or committing other crime,
Do not worry! Just take time,
Smile a smile and make a call,
Putu will come and fix all,
You are laughing, saying Wow,
Putu is a Hero now.
(In case you have never met Putu before, you can read about his literary career here)
Pehelwan
Where is the mighty Pehelwan, who could lift thirty tractors?
Why did he leave the city? What were the causing factors?
He should've been a hero, a champion without peer,
A spokesperson for PETA, a model for Fruit Beer,
His name should have been sung out loud from Kohima to Leh,
But no, he's gone, he's lost it all, he's carting dung today.
His brow honest and sweaty, his triceps well defined,
His hair providing shelter to his sadly feeble mind,
Oh Pehelwan, we lost you and your mighty, manly muscles,
When you lost your way that day and fled the urban bustle.
When times are dark and full of foes and monsters mean and rotten
We wish you were on Facebook; your number we've forgotten.
Superman
Hey, listen, look! Up in the sky!
I'd rather not – No, look! Up high!
Is that a bird? Is that a plane?
Yes, it's a plane. Don't ask again.
I thought it was – I know. Please stop.
Superman! – Oh God. Shut up.
He strides the sky – No. Different guy.
Faster than a speeding – Why?
Why would you think that plane was him?
Look at its wings! Its purple trim!
Look at the logo on its tail!
It's a plane – Or, a flying whale.
A beached whale saved by Superman!
He put it in a big old can
So it could breathe! Now wait and see
He's going to toss it in the sea!
Go save that poor whale, Superman!
If you can't do it, no one can!
Moti The Wonder Dog
Moti can do tricks with his tail and with his tongue and he can bite right through an iron bar.
If Moti's after you it means you did a bad thing and he can outrun you even if you have a car.
There's no point trying to bribe him with biscuits or meat or sticks, Moti is incorruptible.
You could shoot him with a gun or a bazooka but it wouldn't matter, Moti is indestructible.
Moti doesn't bark much because he spends most of his time in quiet contemplation.
He doesn't have opposable thumbs so he can't write it down, but Moti knows the secret of Creation.
Moti's father was a circus dog but his mother studied Anthropology in Australia.
She didn't finish her Ph.D. so in the Wonder Dog family she's considered a bit of a failure.
Moti has one weakness; his moral compass fails when it comes to cats and, for some reason, rabbits.
He hunts them down even if they're not criminals. But Moti really has no other bad habits.
Filed under: just
March 25, 2011
Untouchable: Downloadable
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