Webindina has this lovely story about a monkey:

…a monkey appeared at an Orissa temple, prayed for an hour folding its hands in the traditional sign of respect, took prasad, put vermilion on its forehead – and then fled.

One part of me cynically responds, “He did it for the prasad,” but there is the other part which is completely delighted. The villagers seem to agree, they did not drive the animal away and even garlanded it before it ran back into the jungle. I am not sure if the monkey actually stuck around for an hour, or that it had never been seen before as the article claims, but then it does make it a better story. I can only be glad that the stuff of myth survives in the world.

I don’t have much going on these days, other than my current gig which brings me home at 3 or 4am everyday. I don’t have a social life and not even a domestic life. The only people I interact with are the limo drivers who bring me home, and the guys who run the all night delis.

One of the few friends I have made is Besam, a man who works a deli counter near Rockefeller Center. Besam started to speak to me in Spanish, and I said, “What?” He switched to English, “Which country did you come from?” “India.” Sometimes I still follow my mother’s instruction not to talk to strangers unnecessarily. “I really respect India,” “Why?” Obviously my mother’s instructions don’t always work. “Because of Gandhi, he is a great man, the more I think of him, the more I respect him.” So where is he from? “Egypt.” For some reasons visions of the library in Alexandria float through my brain. “Egyptians are generally very well educated, ” I say. “I was a doctor in my home country.” So what is he doing making sandwiches twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for the last four years? Maybe I’ll find out if I eat more of those unhealthy sandwiches.

In Whose Name is a short documentary by Nandini Sikand for which I was the editor. It has won the Best Documentary Short award at Tupelo Film Festival in Mississipi. It will also be screened at the Asian American Film Festival in New York on July 19th at 6:30 pm.

In Whose Name? (2004, 12:00) is a filmic essay inspired by a changing political landscape. It explores the co-opting of icons by right-wing and national agendas. Filmed in India and the UK, this experimental short is told through personal narrative, Super 8mm home movies, Bollywood film and comic book art, creating an evocative pastiche of symbols and imagery.

In a world where Hollywood is big business, and everything hinges on the box office gross a film can generate in its first week, only one man has the reverberating tones to convince an audience your film is worth seeing. That man is Don LaFontaine — and for the past forty years, there’s been nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, from his enduring imprint on movie trailers.

You know the voice, especially from foreign movie trailers, since American audiences supposedly run screaming from non English speakers and can’t or won’t read subtitles, and Don LaFontaine is the one-man army that makes that world reassuringly digestible.

Don LaFontaine was a guest on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me this week. A satisfyingly funny moment in the show is where he performs cliches from public radio in movie genre voices. There is also a interview with him on the Trailer Trash website, where you learn valuable things like his voice box isn’t insured because the premiums are too high.

The Wikipedia entry on LaFontaine has an MP3 of his most beloved cliches in trailer form, in case you need a refresher.

Due to an difficult work schedule, blogging is light these days as is everything else. But we did manage to see the Enron documentary this weekend, with the director in attendance.

Its a good documentary and worth watching. Though I have some minor quibbles with it. It spent way too much time on the macho corporate culture, and too little on how that culture actually works. Kind of like how reality shows manage to naturalize their participants’ bad behaviour, even as they set up the conditions that make that behaviour mandatory. The film could have withstood a more detailed explanation of what it is that the executives were doing and what the rules were that they were “gaming,” audiences are nearly not as dumb as what producers sometimes think they are. Spending so much time psychologizing the Enron fraud was kind of a waste of valuable film time.

I usually skip the question and answer part at screenings, but the one with the director of Enron was very good and illuminating, he talked about the ways in which Enron was a very innovative company, and how they weren’t actually breaking any rules technically, which is something I would have liked to know a lot more about, because there is something wrong with the way things are set up which allow for an Enron to happen, rather than the testosterone poisoning of business its executives (that too, but it only has so much explanatory power). The film did suggest it, but didn’t argue for it strongly enough.

My favorite section in the film was an account of the energy crises in California. It pulled together all the vectors that went into that particular drama. Finally, do go see the film and support it, its worth seeing and supporting.

The Guardian has an article on cinema from largely Muslim countries. Tariq Ali does a quick review of cinema in countries from Indonesia to the Soviet inflected style of Tajik films. Regarding films in Pakistan, Ali mentions that Indian films were banned in the 50s and 60s, but Pakistani popular cinema never took off:

Bosoms could heave but had to be carefully covered and, even at the beach, actresses had to swim fully clothed. Cinema proprietors in Pakistan decided to spice their shows with a “tota” (strip). In Lahore, touts would parade outside some movie theatres and whisper to bystanders that a “one-minute strip” was being shown at the late-night performance. The prowling males would pack the show and halfway through some boring movie, a minute or two of porno-flicks would appear on the screen. After this the cinema emptied.

Ali has a lot more appreciation for Iranian film (the Guardian also has an interview with Abbas Kioristami), though he has nothing to say about Arab films. If you’ve seen Egyptian films on cable, they are quite a bit like Indian films, at the very least in terms of their sensibility in melodrama, but then these are older films, so I don’t know how things have changed since the seventies and eighties. Films from Lebanon, from the few I have seen, have been something I have never seen before. They have a loony style that is quite remarkable. I have been told by knowledgeable friends that the poetry coming out of Lebanon has quite a bit of crazy experimentation going on as well. Though can you call it “Islamic” cinema? I guess the term doesn’t make much sense anyway.

Going back to Bollywood, for a very illuminating account of watching Indian films in Bangladesh go to Shobak.org the essay tell you how Indian cows became symbols of neo-colonialism.