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a.r. rahman

Oct 20 2009
Love0

Review: An Education, Couples Retreat and Fighting

By Cinema, Reviews

Twickenham in 1961 might well have been the most bor­ing place on Earth. The 60s haven’t star­ted yet (accord­ing to Philip Larkin the dec­ade wouldn’t start until 1963 “between the end of the Chatterley Ban/and The Beatles first LP”) but the train was already on the tracks and could be heard approach­ing from a dis­tance if you listened closely enough. Middle-class teen­ager Jenny is study­ing hard for Oxford but long­ing for some­thing else – free­dom and French cigar­ettes, love and liberation.

In Lone Scherfig’s An Education (from a script by Nick Hornby; adap­ted from Lynn Barber’s mem­oir), Jenny is lumin­ously por­trayed by new­comer Carey Mulligan (so ador­able that if she’s ever in a film with Juno’s Ellen Page we’ll have to recal­ib­rate the cute­ness scale to accom­mod­ate them both) and she gets a hint of a way out of sub­urb­an English drudgery when she meets cool busi­ness­man David (Peter Sarsgaard) and he whisks her off her feet, to the West End and to Paris.

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Feb 10 2009
Love0

A.R. Rahman: a bonus

By Cinema, Music

In the Slumdog Millionaire review the oth­er day I called com­poser A.R. Rahman a “Bollywood legend” and, for those of you unfa­mil­i­ar with his oeuvre I thought I’d give you a few samples to demon­strate what I mean.

Dil Se.. (1998)

Dil Se.. (1998)

I first heard Rahman’s music when I stumbled across an mp3 from the 1998 film Dil Se.. on some blog or oth­er. It was catchy as all get out and I was hooked. This is “Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya” which was re-purposed slightly for the Rahman-Lloyd Webber West End music­al “Bombay Dreams” in 2002.

[audio:https://funeralsandsnakes.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/chaiyya-chaiyya.mp3] Sukhwinder Singh & Sapna Awasthi – Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya (right click to download)
Swades (2004)

Swades (2004)

When I was run­ning the Paramount back in 2004, we had a reg­u­lar Bollywood Sunday night hire and one of the fea­tured films was the big budget epic drama Swades: We the People star­ring Shahrukh Khan. The pro­moter gave me a copy of the soundtrack as a thank you and it became one of my favour­ite CDs of the year. This is “Yeh Tara Woh Tara”, the open­ing theme:

[audio:https://funeralsandsnakes.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/01-yeh-tara-woh-tara.mp3] Udit Narayan, Master Vignesh, Baby Pooja & Kids – Yeh Tara Woh Tara (right click to download)

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Finally, from Slumdog itself “Jai Ho”, one of two Rahman songs nom­in­ated for this year’s Best Original Song Oscar:

[audio:https://funeralsandsnakes.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/13-jai-ho.mp3] A.R. Rahman (feat. Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah, Mahalaxmi Iyer & Vijay Prakash) – Jai Ho (right click to download)

Rahman has two of the three Oscar song nom­in­a­tions this year. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what the tele­cast looks like. In fact, I may even take a little time off that after­noon to check it out.

Feb 07 2009
Love0

Review: Slumdog Millionaire, Role Models and The Map Reader

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest, Reviews

I don’t have much room this week and I want to spend most of it gush­ing over Slumdog Millionaire so let’s get started.

Back in 2003, when the Incredibly Strange Film Festival was still its own bump­tious stand-alone anarch­ic self, we opened the Festival with the sum­mer camp spoof Wet Hot American Summer and good­ness me, wasn’t that a time? Written and dir­ec­ted by David Wain, WHAS was a pitch-perfect trib­ute to teen com­ed­ies of the 80s and his new film Role Models attempts to ride the cur­rent wave of sexu­ally frank grown-up com­ed­ies but he doesn’t seem to really have the heart for it. The gross-out bits are uncom­fort­ably gross, the boobies seem like after­thoughts and the film really doesn’t hit its straps until it starts cheer­ing for the under­dog late in the day.

Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott play sales­man ped­dling energy drink to high school kids. After an unfor­tu­nate (sta­tion­ary) road rage incid­ent their jail time is con­ver­ted to com­munity ser­vice at Sturdy Wings – a ‘big broth­er’ out­fit match­ing mis­fit kids up with respons­ible male adults. This kind of mater­i­al has proved out­stand­ingly pop­u­lar recently when pro­duced by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and I can’t help think­ing that if he had got­ten his hands on Role Models it would have about 20% more jokes in 16% short­er run­ning time – he really is that much of a machine.

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