On New York’s streets

Blending Dickensian distress and Homeric tragedy, Martin Scorsese turns out an engrossing epic in “Gangs of New York”, says GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN.

MOST cities rose from turbulence and turmoil. New York too. This is what Martin Scorsese shows us in his latest “Gangs of New York”. As the nearly three-hour long film fades from the epic screen, we see a weather-beaten Leonardo Dicaprio and Cameron Diaz standing in a graveyard against a changing New York skyline. This transformation is just breathtaking.

Scorsese’s movie is not really about the passage of time, though: it is about the origins of a metropolis, its frightening beginnings in the early 1860s, when New York saw some of the bloodiest battles between Irish immigrants and natives. Set against the American Civil War, this city was the scene of another kind of slavery and subjugation.

The native ruthlessness and intolerance produced bravery and a spirit of freedom among the starving, homeless Irish who were dropping off the boats in the hope of a promising morrow. Scorsese says that since he was a child he had been drawn to stories of old New York. He grew up in Lower Manhattan, and, pursued by a zeal of curiosity, explored the city’s streets and alleyways to discover unbelievable stories of the working masses, the evil underworld gangsters and of the corrupt politicians and policemen. These were the men who formed the roots of the New York we know today.

These were the men who made the legends, which seem to have whispered notes of inspiration into Scorsese’s ear. The director pins down his focus on three characters, who make up the microcosm of an expansive canvas: Dicaprio as Amsterdam returns to 19th Century New York seeking to avenge the murder of his Irish father. Daniel Day-Lewis is the killer, “Bill the Butcher”. Cameron Diaz as Jenny is the hyphen between these two men, a petty pickpocket who ends up picking Amsterdam’s heart.

Scorsese, known for his dramatic narrative, pounds a viewer with spectacle and sound to benumb him into intoxication. This is his strength, and he plays it with aplomb. There is crisp conversation and remarkable realism, the latter created in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios. Hundreds of real people were used, and hardly any computer imaging. Scorsese’s eye for detail is extraordinary — right to the yellow teeth of his principal players!

The crew and cast spent eight months and a hundred million dollars there; delays and monetary bickering coloured creativity. “Gangs of New York” caused the kind of noisy arguments and fights that Federico Fellini once had with his financial bosses.

Fellini invariably overshot his budgets, and Scorsese too, at least this time, did the same thing much to the annoyance of his production company, Miramax.

Were the Scorsese-Dicaprio tiffs one reason why the actor failed to be as convincing as one would have liked him to be ? His part, in any case, seems to have been underwritten to the point of appearing somewhat shallow.

The elements of rage and regret in him are not powerful enough to pump life into the character of Amsterdam, who returns after a 16-year-imprisonment-of-sorts in a strict convent with revenge in his head. This aspect does not get adequate attention, and proves to be a weak link in the story.

However, Daniel Day-Lewis is superb as the Butcher. He steals every scene, with his co-stars paling into insignificance. With a scarred face, glass eye (the pupil of his left eye in the shape of a U.S. Eagle), upswept moustache, slicked down hair, a top hat and that wicked smile, Day-Lewis is memorable. He may well be nominated for the Oscars.

Scorsese got Day-Lewis out of premature retirement to wear the Butcher’s shoes. Robert De Niro was to have played the part, but personal reasons saw him out of the movie. Which blends Dickensian distress and Homeric tragedy into an engrossing epic.

Hindu On Net

THE figurine alley in Ramoji Film City that is used as a dance or song scene backdrop for Bollywood movies, Nov 28. – Bernamapix.

HYDERABAD Nov 28 – Have you ever wondered where in the world can a writer walk in with a script and walk out with a movie? It’s definitely Ramoji Film City (RFC) in Hyderabad, India, probably the only dream factory in Asia that has churned out movies not only for Bollywood but Hollywood as well.

Situated 25 km from Hyderabad, the modern Indian metropolis and IT hub that is second to Bangalore, the film city sprawls over 880 hectares of terrains and lakes in a concept that was Malaysia’s stillborn e-Village.

The film city was the brainchild of media mogul and film producer Ramoji Rao who became a household name in the 80s with Telegu hit movies like Pratighatana, Mayuri and Sitara, said Rajeev Jalnapurkar, general manager of RFC.

Rajeev said the Hollywood action movie “Quick Sand” was filmed here and not in Los Angeles as depicted in the movie. The Arizona landscape and the military installations in the movie were recreated in RFC.

Parts of “Crocodile 2″ and “Panic” were made here as well, not to mention other Bollywood and Tollywood blockbusters. Among the Bollywood super hits from here that Malaysians may be familiar with is Bade Mian Chotte Mian with Amitabh Bachchan and Raveena Tandon in the cast; Lajja, another hit with Jackie Sharof, Anil Kapoor, Ajay Devgan and Manisha Koirala and the Telegu blockbuster Nuvve Kaavali.

According to Rajeev, RFC, which began operations four years ago, can be best described as a one-stop centre for film makers and a mythological theme park for the ordinary citizens. “We have a complete array of facilities for producing from budget to mega movies,” said Rajeev when met by Bernama at the film city recently.

The visit was in conjunction with the trade and investment called “Incredible India 2003″ which the Indian government will stage in Kuala Lumpur from Dec 2 to 6.

Shootings are conducted here on an average of five productions daily during the filming season of 150 to 200 days per year. Here, RFC not only provides the locales for films but also every aspect from pre- to post-production work. A tour in the provided vintage bus brings visitors to various locales used as the backdrop in the movie scenes.

Here visitors can appreciate the magnificent splendor of the red Rajastani architecture, the white marble Mohgul courts, rolling meadows, the sun fountain, Hawaiian gardens, Greek figurines, complete airport and hospital buildings, a fully mock-up interior of a passenger aircraft and the list goes on.

Visitors would be surprised that there is even a wild West setting with cactus plants and horses for Western movies. On the whole, the panorama is enchanting and the allure never ending. Yet, that’s not all.

Rajeev said RFC also furnishes sets that are tailored according to request by producers and directors and also recruits the extras. RFC also boasts 50 studio floors apart from the processing and editing labs.

The processing and editing labs are divided into three; Symphony that deals with post-production audio; Mantra that provides digital film facility and special effects; and finally the film lab, Rainbow.

Directors like David Dhawan (film credits Biwi No 1, Chor Macaaye Shor and Deewan Mastana), Raj Kumar Santoshi (Andaz Apna-apna and China Gate) and Sam Firstenberg (American Ninja, Quick Sand and Spiders II) are the distinguished names in the industry who had found the facilities here to their liking and have returned or are planning to return for more movies.

Silver screen idols like Manisha Koirala and Soundarya enjoyed their stint here, said Rajeev.

Rajeev stressed that the advantage RFC offers is that producers don’t have to spend on creating the sets as everything is provided, including the cameras, cranes, make-up artists and manpower. This means they can lower their production cost and realise greater returns on their investments. All they need is a good script and lead stars, the rest is all available in the film city.

To date RFC has produced at least seven movies for Hollywood, the rest are mainly in Telegu, Kannada and several in Hindi including blockbusters. Many more did their post-production work in RFC, among them, Lagan the Hindi super hit.

TV serials too are now being produced at RFC. Rajeev is proud of the fact that many who started with their movies here had made their name in the world of cinema.

But RFC is not for the movie icons only; it is also a place where ordinary citizens can get the feel of the fantasy portrayed in the movies. An average of 2,500 people visit RFC daily which is also a theme park providing entertainment based on the diverse cultures of India.

Rajeev stressed that RFC is a theme park and not an amusement park like the one seen in Universal Studios. That’s why there are no Ferris wheels or roller coaster rides. The day the writer was in RFC, there was a Chinese acrobatic troupe displaying their skill, much to the amusement of the visitors.

RFC also has three hotels in its vicinity to cater for visitors as well as conferences, said Rajeev.

It’s the place where writers can walk in with their dreams and walk out with a movie. – Bernama

Utusan Malaysia

Salute to a gladiator of substance

By Nirmal Shekar

From January 6, 2004, or whenever the fourth and final Test of the India-Australia series ends in Sydney, cricket will never, ever, be the same again for a good number of people.

Watching the game, many of us would feel as if we are watching a screening of the Gladiator without Russell Crowe, The Godfather without Marlon Brando or a staging of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark written out of the script.

There would be such a huge void in the game that you’d need a Stephen Rodger Waugh to fill it. But, alas, he’d be gone by then!

Test cricket without Steve Waugh? Pause now. Consider that. The pause can stretch all the way till January 6 and it still won’t sink in.

Few modern sportsmen, if any, may have left as big an impact on the state of his sport anywhere in the world as has Steve Waugh in cricket with the sheer strength of his character. In an era dominated by the genius of Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara, no player has been quite as heroic, on and off the field, as Steve Waugh.

Sport has its incomparable geniuses. It has, too, its great champions. Finally, in a few lucky eras, it throws up genuine heroes. Nobody who knows his cricket would doubt the genius of a Tendulkar or a Lara. And the sport does have its share of champions too. But there is only one hero — Steve Waugh.

A toweringly influential figure in the sport through two decades, Steve Waugh’s unshakable conviction in his own destiny as a player and a leader of men has set him far apart from the rest not only in the Australian team but in the overall context of cricket anywhere in the world.

Of all the virtues that propel a sportsman to greatness and glory, there is nothing quite as awe-inspiring as sheer strength of will. In sport, as in life, will precedes everything. And the success of no modern cricketer can be attributed as much to willpower as that of Steve Waugh’s. No single innings of his — including all his 32 hundreds — can be said to be a jaw-dropping work of genius, of genius of the sort associated with a Tendulkar or a Viv Richards or a Don Bradman. Yet, at a much deeper level, Waugh it is who has played some of the most awe-inspiring innings witnessed in Test cricket over two decades.

Few things in sport have given greater pleasure than the sight of Steve Waugh stepping out of the pavilion on an overcast afternoon with Australia on its knees at four down for 38 in a Test match.

At such moments, sport soars well beyond its defined orbit to take on the contours of super-sport. Cricket is not a game in such moments. It is much more than that. For, it acquires a Shakespearean dimension seldom associated with ballgames.

Jonny Wilkinson, the best known rugby player in the planet today, and the man who drop kicked the winning goal for England against Australia in the World Cup final in Sydney last Saturday, has said something remarkable in the VCD on his career called The Perfect 10. Talking about how he controls his nerves in moments of great stress and epochal importance, Wilkinson says at such times he allows himself to sink into an “almost sub-conscious second nature.”

The English fly-half did exactly that last Saturday to kick in the 99th minute extra-time goal that will become part of sporting folklore. Steve Waugh has done that time and time again in his remarkable career, to save Australia the blushes, to steer it to glory and lately to reinvent himself as a batsman of substance.

“Something happens inside you when you are pushed to a corner, when your knees buckle and your body tells you that you cannot take it anymore,” the peerless Muhammad Ali said more than a quarter of a century ago. Ali was talking about the classic rope-a-dope coup that saw him stop the seemingly unstoppable George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974. That “something” which happens deep inside is what separates a Muhammad Ali from the rest, what sets Steve Waugh apart in cricket.

Watching Steve Waugh in a crisis, you got the feeling that the result of the battle in the middle was secondary, both to you and to the great man himself. What mattered was the glorious struggle that Waugh elevated into a sort of art form.

Looking back, and getting to the very foundation of sport, it may not be difficult to see that sport, at least a majority of them, involve what was once called “survival skills” by our distant ancestors. In tracing the evolution of man — and sport — from survival-hunt to sports-hunt, the eminent anthropologist, social psychologist and author, Desmond Morris, writes in his foreword to the classic work The Tribes: “With the passage of years, (the) bloodthirsty form of ritual hunting has gradually been replaced by two new kinds of hunt: one physical and one mental. All forms of sport are either ritualised aiming or ritualised chasing or both. They take these elements of hunt and direct them towards a symbolic prey. And the tribesmen are still there to soak up the thrills. The sportsmen and their followers are the closest analogue we have today to the age-old human tribal hunters.”

But then, for a modern-day fighter in sport, a gladiator of the professional era such as Steve Waugh, the thrill is not so much in the strike, not so much in the prey, as in the chase, as in the process of the hunt, in the fight itself.

Man is a sporting animal simply because he is a fighting animal, a survivor, in the first place. And all sportsmen are fighters in varying degrees. If you can’t fight, you can’t play ball at the highest levels.

Yet, somehow, Steve Waugh’s fights were different; there was almost an other-worldly dimension to them, something you sensed when the late Formula One champion Ayrton Senna drove on a rain-soaked road circuit in Monte Carlo, struggling with a mechanical failure yet surviving — and soaring — to take the chequered flag.

For, men like Senna and Waugh elevated survival-skills and their employment on a sporting stage to a sublime, transcendental form of art.

It is for this reason cricket will be split into two eras. Pre-January 2004 and post-January 2004. Meanwhile, play on Steve.

Hindu On Net

A temple for his idol

There are fans and fans. And there is Gajarajan aka Rosemars

The King is god to Gajarajan.

KHUSHBOO’S HAD it, Amitabh’s had it, Bob Marley’s had it and now Elvis Presley and Princess Diana will get one each. An award? No, too boring. A temple, no less. Gajarajan, a Presley nut and former P&T Department employee, plans to build a temple to these two icons. Rosemars, as Gajarajan calls himself after Elvis’s favourite flower, has taken adulation to new heights. Having made a Kannada movie, Dhara, in 1984 with a song on Elvis thrown in, he keeps a portrait of the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer in his pooja room, religiously observing his idol’s birth and death anniversaries.

He has floated the Sri Arun Vani Trust and plans to build an Elvis Memorial Welfare Centre in Bangalore. He hopes this will eventually fulfil his dream of a grand temple for his idols, probably in Hennur, Chikkabanavara or Devanahalli. He did build an Elvis shrine at Devalapura, but it’s too small for The King. Now he wants a grand double in the region of half a crore rupees, which he hopes to raise from Elvis and Diana fans.

In the twin temples, he sees a confluence of the USA and Britain. “If only Elvis were to sing “Candle in the Wind”,” he exclaims, “I can feel the goose pimples on me.”

“It was Scotty Moore’s “Guitar Riff” when he was doing the Steve Allen’s show that got me into music. I have been an Elvis fan since I was a kid,” says Gajarajan, who pretty much dresses up in Elvis fashion. He believes Elvis is the reincarnation of Karna, no less. In his book, Why My Daughter Married Michael Jackson, Gajarajan claims Elvis had spoken to him from another dimension about daughter Lisa Marie who married Wacko Jacko. Explaining the couple’s divorce, he writes: “She married a musician of her father’s calibre and not Jackson per se.”

Gajarajan, who has visited Germany to see the house where Elvis met Priscilla,

has been celebrating Elvis’s birthday by holding secular prayers, performing Elvis aradhan
, playing his music, feeding and clothing the poor, distributing sweets to children, all topped with a mangalarathi to Elvis.

He marks Elvis’s death anniversary as “protest, request and compassion day”, dedicated to distribution of fruits and giving solace to patients in hospitals. He visits the Tawkkal Mastan Dharga, Sacred Heart Church, and the Draupadiamman Temple on the day. Only Elvis’s songs can cure the country of communal disharmony, he says, pointing as an example the King’s 1968 number: “If I can dream of a better world where all my brothers walk hand in hand, Oh God, why can’t my dream come true, there must be bright light burning somewhere where all my brothers walk hand in hand.”

With his Sri Arun Vani Trust, Gajarajan plans to treat drug addicts, alcoholics, geriatrics, mentally challenged, and provide shelter to stray and wounded animals. He says he has the support of his family and friends in his ventures. He has managed to convert Chandrappa, a landlord, who has also become an ardent Elvis fan.

M.V. CHANDRASHEKAR

Hindu On Net

Beyond the baize

Pankaj Advani and Geet Sethi represent the hope and glory of snooker and billiards

ONE HAS become a synonym with billiards and another the new hope in the snooker firmament. Geet Sethi and Pankaj Advani, the veteran and the new sensation, were the centre of attraction at the World Billiard Championship being held in Hyderabad.

Certain things in life provide the cue for forthcoming possibilities, – like chopsticks, in the case of Pankaj Advani.

A spectacular cueist from Bangalore, the young lad has the whole world at his feet at just 18. Second youngest in the history of Snooker to win a world title, Pankaj Advani has become an institution by bringing back the World Snooker crown to India, after a hiatus of 19 years. Not very long ago, Pankaj was a sixth-grader in Frank Antony Public School – where he was advised against the game for being undersized.

An undaunted Pankaj set off with chopsticks and marbles in the backyard of the Advani’s Fraser town-residence, which almost immediately became an addiction.

Persistence won Pankaj a couple of casual shots – his firsts – at the Karnataka State Billiards Association hall, where his brother Shree used to play. “I was possessed,” Pankaj, reminisces his first-time.

“Observation taught me nuances of the game, and former national snooker champion Arvind Savur schooled me in rules and other requisites.”

And before his 14th birthday, Pankaj created a stir when he posted century breaks in both snooker and billiards by simply whitewashing seasoned players at the K.S.B.A hall, – the same ones who at an earlier time cocked-a-snook at him, and advised anything but snooker.

His rise is almost akin to his predecessor Geet Sethi, who started playing at the age of 12 and has been cueing just fantastic for the past 30 years since then.

Seven world titles— four World Professional and three IBSF World Billiards Championships, Gold at the 13th Asian Games, a world record of the highest break made in the last five decades, entry into the Guinness Book of World Records , and some of the prestigious awards of the land, Padma Shri (1986), Arjuna Award (1986) and Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award (1992-93). That’s Geet Sethi’s portfolio.

After winning a string of national billiards and snookers championships, he got his big break — in 1985 and won the World Amateur Billiards Championship that was held in New Delhi, an event that was telecast live. “That transformed the game. People got to know about the game then owing to the telecast. Today there has been tremendous awareness with more youngsters taking to it. You have Pankaj Advani who is 18 and the world snooker champion,” says Geet Sethi. Appreciation and applause is coming from all directions for Pankaj Advani. A wee five-feet four-inch frame belies the steely grit and sense of purpose that Pankaj Advani is full of. Having lost his father at an early age, mother Kajal Advani became his support system in all pursuits.

“My lower middle-class background imposed the necessary emphasis on academics,” says the world-class champ, currently pursuing a Commerce degree from Jain’s College, Bangalore. Crediting his success to prayers of his mom, Pankaj says, “A focussed mind and a clear conscience can conquer any ambition.”

The tour to U.K, the sporting — Mecca of snooker just a month before the world championships helped him tremendously. “I went to UK for training and got a chance to play against the world’s best players which gave a new dimension to my game.” “When I potted the last ball I just pumped my fist in the air and turned around to see team coach Michael Ferreira and fellow player Yasin Merchant do the same,” Pankaj describes his reaction after his career-best act. “The victory is yet to sink in me.”

A teetotaller, who inspires himself by reading self-help books, Pankaj exudes tremendous maturity, and assumes a strange calm when he plays, – which according to Geet Sethi “are the two essential ingredients of a good snooker player.”

A four-hour practise session interspersed with videos of World Billiards championships is one religious regimen that Pankaj has been following for the last four years. With his eyes set on the World Billiards-title, he is single-minded about it. A trace of wish to meet Britney Spears cannot play down that.

SOUVIK CHOWDHURY SYEDA FARIDA

Hindu On Net