Arnold [dir. Lesley Chilcott]

You don't actually need the 3-episode Netflix documentary mini-series to understand the psyche of Arnold Schwarzenegger. This less-than-5min interview clip taken from the time he was filming Conan the Barbarian (1982) will suffice:

Remember here, this is before Conan had been released and made his name as a major league Hollywood star that could crush box-office records across the world. Arnold's primary reputation then was as a star bodybuilder, who had worked in a few small movies, and none as the leading man. But he is unironically comparing himself to Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford. With regards to his pathway towards stardom, he rates himself an "8 out of 10, with only 2 more points to cover".

Anyone that saw this footage at the time would have laughed his butt off at the man's audacity. Arnold's hulking frame, unmistakably Teutonic face and thick Austrian accent were considered liabilities in the Hollywood of that period. The only opportunities for bodybuilders to get leading roles had been in low-budget Italian "sword and sandal" movies (his idol Reg Park had done a string of Hercules movies in Rome in the early 60's before returning to the bodybuilding business).

But Arnold, from an early time in life, had a staggering level of belief in himself - what in some other man would have been vainglorious boasting, he set out to make truth. This is echoed in the documentary when he says [paraphrasing], "If I can visualize something clearly, then I know 100% that I can get there." In its 3 defined chapters - Athlete, Actor and American - Arnold sets out to demonstrate its subject's determination to "get there" in each of his chosen endeavors. It goes without saying that the treatment is glossy with more than a little dash of hagiography. It would have been essential of course, to obtain the kind of access they get to Arnold, the superstar for whom "Too big is not big enough".

So we get the familiar story of how young Schwarzenegger took up bodybuilding as a means of making his mark and getting away from the hard life in Austria with the aim of making it big in the USA. Once he had conquered the bodybuilding world (he held the Mr. Olympia trophy undefeated from 1970-75), he shifted gears to movies. Along with main box-office rival Sylvester Stallone, Arnold went on to personify the hyper-masculine gun and muscle toting 80's action hero, an icon that transcended language and culture. Over the next 2 decades, his films dominated global mainstream cinema and he became one of the highest paid actors in the world. In 2003, Arnold jumped into active politics and served as Governor of California for 2 terms.

Many of the details in Arnold are supposedly from his autobiography Total Recall. For people like me that haven't read it, there are some new details of Schwarzenegger's life: His upbringing in post-WW2 Austria where, in his words, a lot of men suffered from depression and PTSD, and this reflected on their families. Gustav Schwarzenegger had been a member of the military police in the Nazi-occupied country before being discharged in 1944 on account of medical illness. Subsequently he married and raised 2 children, Meinhard and Arnold. Arnold talks about a disciplinarian upbringing interspersed with drunk beatings from his father. Meinhard died in his 20's in a DUI accident in 1971, a year before their father passed away from a stroke. At the time Arnold was busy with his bodybuilding career in the US; he did not go for either of their funerals, attributing it to being so focused on his goals that he suppressed all emotion in the process. He also talks about how the difficult childhood toughened him up (quoting Nietzsche's famous "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger") while his brother, who he says had a more "fragile" persona, cracked under the strain. Again, there is almost no emotion when he says this, no sense of a bond between them, and no sorrow or guilt over the brother's fate.

While I am aware of his film career trajectory, it was a revelation to know that he was a millionaire well before embarking on his movie career, having invested his earnings from bodybuilding into real estate and other business. Thus, he had the luxury of working on carefully chosen projects, never for rent money. The same shrewdness and self-possession that had served him as an athlete now guided his path towards the top of Hollywood. Having been lucky enough to work with creative powerhouses like John Milius (Conan) and James Cameron (The Terminator) in his early days, Schwarzenegger quickly translated his box-office currency into clout over the projects he worked on. He wanted to expand his range and appeal, and deliberately courted directors like Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall) and Ivan Reitman (Twins, Junior) who designed projects around him.

His political career is the least interesting aspect of Arnold's life for me, since it had no direct impact on my life. But it was also around this time that the cracks in his personal life appeared. He was accused by several women of having groped and/or misbehaved with them in the past (his sleazy on-camera behavior as a celebrity ambassador in this early Brazil tourism video makes it easy to believe those accusations). He expresses regret over the incidents in an empirical, grudging manner, more in the vein of a man who acknowledges their inconvenience to his reputation than a genuine reappraisal of his attitude.

More damagingly, his wife Maria Shriver divorced him over an affair he'd carried on with their housekeeper, fathering an illegitimate child in the process. In these issues, we are only privy to Schwarzenegger's perspective. We do not learn what Shriver or their children feel about his behavior. Most telling is that we see Arnold living alone in a sprawling house, with farm animals for company. While telling his story, he fondly pores over his own pictures over the course of his career(s). But the depiction of his interactions with family is restricted to still images taken years ago.

But Arnold is no depressed loner asking for your sympathy. Even at 70+, the alpha male in him loves oversized vehicle toys and machismo camaraderie. He believes in "work and fun", and exhorts people to channel their time to "being useful" instead of brooding over "What am I feeling today?" Advocates of empathy for mental health syndromes might balk at this mocking dismissal of depression, but for better or worse, this is just a reflection of the man's supreme self-focus and conquering attitude. It is the formula he has made to work for him.

Dancing on the Grave [Patrick Graham]

People of a particular generation based in Bengaluru city (in Southern India) will remember the sensational case of Shakereh Khaleeli, on which this new mini-series is based. Showrunner Patrick Graham, who had previously helmed OTT horror series like Ghoul and Betaal, takes a documentary approach, interspersing contemporary and archival interviews with re-enactments. I'm not usually one for potentially sordid true crime TV series content, but since Dancing on the Grave was only 4 half hour episodes long, it seemed like a decent diversion before starting on something else.

Shakereh Khaleeli (nee Namazie) came of an affluent and prestigious family linked to the Diwan of Mysore. She was married to Akbar Khaleeli, a high-ranking Indian diplomat and bore him 4 daughters. Wherever she accompanied her husband on his tours of diplomatic duty, Shakereh was known as a brilliant socialite, beautiful, witty and sophisticated. But during the late 70's Akbar went alone to Iran as India's Ambassador, it being around the time of the Iranian revolution. It was during this period she met Murli Manohar Mishra aka Swami Shraddhanand (SS). A godman-cum-fixer type, SS inveigled himself into the Khaleeli household by way of helping Shakereh with her business affairs. They set up a construction business in Bengaluru. During this period Shakereh divorced her husband and in 1986, less than a year after, got married to SS. The move led to Shakereh's estrangement from her family and former circle, who were aghast at the idea of this glamorous, sophisticated woman from a high family giving herself to a short stocky plebian who in their minds had undoubtedly snared her with an eye on her property.

Just a few years later, Shakereh seemed to have disappeared. Her daughter Sabah Khaleeli was at the time an in-demand model for ads and fashion shows - I remember being wowed as a kid by a glam cover pic of her in Femina (I am ashamed to say I only remembered the pic, and not the article it was part of). When Sabah, who had rekindled communication with her mum, found a sudden silence at Shakereh's end, she repeatedly enquired with SS, but found that he was fobbing her off with evasive answers about Shakereh being on extended holiday. In the meanwhile, he continued a lavish lifestyle in the Bengaluru home. Sabah went to the police and filed a missing persons complaint. The initial investigation was lackadaisical, frustrating her. Then things then began to slowly move. Almost 3 years after the report of her disappearance, Shakereh's body was uncovered as a skeleton buried in her own backyard and SS was arrested for her murder. He was convicted of the same, and sentenced to be harbored in jail till the end of his life, a term he is still serving.

Apart from covering the investigation, mainly by interviews with the investigating team and the legal authorities that worked the case, as well as journalists, the series does some superficial psycho-analyzing about how a smart social diva like Shakereh could have fallen prey to this ugly conman with dubious charm. Was she that lonely or desperate during Akbar's tenure in Iran? Did SS with his guidance of her business affairs, convince her that he could help her have a greater self-identity than being a diplomat's wife? There is talk about how SS claimed divine powers to grant her a male child, and how it later led to quarrels between them.

Shakereh's direct family (mother Gauhar Taj and daughter Sabah) are only seen in archival (90's) video footage. Some cousins and a nephew were newly interviewed for this series. In an eloquent and politely outraged manner (words like 'dastardly' roll unctuously off the nephew's tongue), they express their dismay at how one of their own was ensnared and brutally done away with by this lowly schemer, and insist that SS has only got the minimum punishment for his heinous crime. During their speeches, it repeatedly came to my mind, where were these family members when Shakereh had been reported missing. Going by Sabah's old interviews it appeared that she was running alone from pillar to post to get the police to take her complaints seriously. They had essentially abandoned her for daring to degrade their social standing with her poor choice in marriage. It is when the series moves on to show the perspective of SS himself that their current participation makes more sense.

Yes, SS is interviewed for this series, while still serving his sentence. In front of the camera, he pleads not guilty for Shakereh's death (his lawyer claims that has always been his stance). According to SS, he found Shakereh dead in her bed one morning when he carried in the tea; his crime , as he sees it, was to go into an immediate panic about how her family and the police would perceive his role in this matter. Instead of even calling in a doctor to ascertain the death, he directly proceeded to bury her body in secret. By any account this is a nonsense story. Shakereh was bundled into a specially constructed box and buried inside a deep pit dug in the yard (ostensibly for a tank). There is reference to evidence of fingernail scratches on the inside of the box, and her fingers tightly curled around the bedsheet she was buried in, indicating that she was likely alive at the time of burial, in a deeply sedated state. Even as he claims to have shared a deep bond of mutual love with Shakereh, there is no corresponding warmth in his eyes. He seems a man ready to try anything to see if it can get him a reprieve.

True, there are discrepancies in the prosecution case, which his lawyer points out. In the video captured at the time SS was led by the police to the crime site after being made to confess, he is seen to pull the keys of the house from his own pocket; they should have been part of sealed evidence when he was called in for questioning. The lawyer points out that is this a break in the chain of evidence, and suggests that the police could have easily used the keys at some previous juncture to plant sedatives in the house. Any criminal, he insists, would have discarded these sedatives in the 3 years after Shakereh's disappearance; it's a fair point. My own view is that although the police did get the right man, they knew the material evidence they had was purely circumstantial and may not be sufficient to obtain a conviction, hence 'bolstered' their case with some planted evidence.

The legal machinery may have also been under a lot of pressure by the family because Shakereh had made a will naming SS as the beneficiary. If he was not unequivocally convicted, he could make a claim for Shakereh's estate over the rest of her family. He had already made money off selling pockets of her land around the house, using the power of attorney she had bestowed on him. Still, there is the question, when so many habitual criminals with multiple murder crimes are given pardons for good behavior? Especially after more than half his life has been spent behind bars, and there is little likelihood of his posing a danger to society now, why is he being held without any hope of compassionate pardon? Surely he cannot, as a convicted criminal, hope to lay claim on the assets for which the crime was committed.

In terms of the making, I would think that the 'series' could instead have been a single 80-90 min documentary. In his groundbreaking Thin Blue Line docu-drama Errol Morris showed that re-enactments of incidents could be a powerful tool. Here, the re-enactments are extended to completely trivial and petty footage, a cheap shot at raising drama. Not the film-makers' fault, but the almost sneery nature of the relatives currently interviewed annoyed me, and I wish they had been questioned more strongly about the family's desertion of Shakereh, which led her to becoming an isolated lamb, easily hunted down by the wolf in disguise. The only place I got a genuine sense of grieving for this brutal crime was in the archival footage of Sabah and Shakereh's mother (former Femina editor Sathya Saran talks about the pain she always saw in Sabah's eyes).

Still, if you're interested in this piece of shocking true crime history, it's only a couple of hours of your time in all. Showing now in India on Amazon Prime.

Gamak Ghar aka Village Home [dir. Achal Mishra]

Although scripted and acted, Achal Mishra's directorial debut Gamak Ghar (GG) aka Village Home is closer to an anthropological documentary than a fiction feature. The titular house located in rural Bihar is home to a large extended family we first meet in the year 1998. In this segment, presented in a 4:3 frame, we see the joint family getting together for a festive occasion in the summer (a baby's naming ceremony). The children revel in their outdoorsy games, men sit at cards or run errands, while the ladies share in the domestic activities. In their casual conversations (in the Maithili tongue) and interactions, we sense an ease that comes with familiarity and affection.

Cut to around a decade later (2010), the screen space expands to 16:9. It is autumn and the house is a little emptier now. The family patriarch is long gone, and several of the second generation, both in this house and from around the neighborhood, are settled in other places. Even the mother is convinced to shuttle between her children's families than manage the village home by herself. The grandkids are glued to their electronic gadgets, and prefer Maggi to the more rustic snacks. Conversations are less given to humor or frivolity, and small disputes arise. But there is still an attachment, at least with the adults, to their original home. They look with fondness (and some regret) at photographic or written records and reminiscence about the past.

Skip approximately another decade to 2019 with an even wider frame of 2.35:1. In a wintry haze, the house lies decrepit and forgotten, save for a wizened caretaker. It appears that the family no longer convenes here. Like some aged relative abandoned in a pilgrimage location or a once loved dog left behind while shifting, it waits forlorn for signs of its family's return. There is a moment of redemption towards the end when we see it undergoing renovation with the purpose of returning it to its former glories. But who knows what it will all come to?

On paper, GG sounds like a dry preachy exercise about the gradual erosion of family values in the modern age. But the very understated manner in which Mishra (as writer, editor, producer and director) has executed his script, it comes across as very real. The conversations are natural conversations, not purposeful dialog - on several occasions the maker chooses not to display subtitles because what is actually said is not important. While always perfectly framed, the camera sits non-ostentatiously, like an eavesdropper. You could be fooled into thinking this was a documentary put together from actual footage capturing the interactions of a real family.

Featuring several long takes with a stationary camera, GG is not the most kinetic of films. But once you align with its rhythms, it is a wonderful time capsule and a warm study of a universal social structure defined within a specific cultural milieu. I was wholly engrossed.

Cabaret aka India Cabaret [dir. Mira Nair]

"No one at home knows that I dance", says Rekha, the main face of Mira Nair's 1985 documentary Cabaret. Rekha is a veteran strip club dancer. She had been once married, but walked away when the husband started to oppress her, even "rent" her out to friends. After her parents refused to take her back, she decided to make her own life and chose the striptease as her career. Outside the club, Rekha is indistinguishable from the typical Indian middle-class hausfrau, adorned demurely in a sari and the traditional bindi as she goes about her household chores or haggles with the vegetable vendor. But when in the crowded anteroom with her co-workers she dons pancake and mascara, and the suggestive outfit that will come off in the course of her performance, she becomes the night's wet dream for the roomful of men around her.

Cabaret has a special resonance for me. In the 80's when I was a kid, there was a restaurant-bar  called Meghraj a stone's throw from my place; many a weekend, we would head there for family dinners. The main restaurant, a well-lighted family-friendly place with (as I recall) teal and white interiors, was on the ground floor. But a set of stairs led to another floor, whence came the sound of music from behind closed doors. While I never had the opportunity to verify, it was known to be a strip bar. Sometime just before the 90's, the place shut down amid rumors of criminal activity. It was never redeveloped as anything else, suggesting that the property remains under a cloud. 

Nair's film enters the Meghraj dance bar when it was still a flourishing concern with a regular strip show. Swaying their hips to live Western music (and trendy Bollywood numbers), the fleshy, heavily made-up dancers slowly cast aside their clothing and shimmy among the clientele, encouraging them to buy more drinks. They walk the tightrope between exuding the come-hither attitude with their movements and expressions, yet keeping a sufficient barrier for their own safety from the not always happy-to-just-stare men. They receive propositions for private encounters that ask for more than dancing; on camera the proprietor declares that he plays no role in such affairs, whether they accept or not is up to the individual women.

Some of the customers are also interviewed: They acknowledge that they enjoy watching the women drop their clothes, and assert that those who protest the loudest are in secret the biggest patrons. One of them says, "Men want to do whatever their heart pleases, but they want their own family women to be Sati-Savitris [pious]" When asked what sort of woman he would prefer to marry, he responds with a grin, "Of course, a Sati-Savitri."

Nair also explores the daytime lives of the women. Some live together in cramped rooms and the neighbors can be unduly curious, even hostile. They are shown as homely people who want to just peacefully get along in society, and to make enough money to better their lives and of their families, many of whom are not aware of their profession. One of them argues that this line is better than being a secretary somewhere because a girl makes far less money in an office and gets groped even there. Some like Rekha are smart enough to buy property and invest their earnings while the going is good, because they know theirs is not a long-term career. Rekha is also interesting in terms of being an independent strong-minded woman that will marry only on her own terms, not out of gratitude to some savior. Towards the end of the docu, she agrees to marry a suitor she has kept hanging for years on end to test the loyalty of his affections.

The film also enters the home of one of the regular customers, a Gujarati businessman with an extended family. His wife with a wry smile deplores her husband's habit of staying long hours in the dance bars, while she must look after his family; he laughs her off patronizingly. Nair and editor Barry Alexander Brown (who later worked for Spike Lee) splice together an interesting mirroring between this 'respectable' housewife discussing her mentally imprisoned state and Rekha's more empowered stance.

The tone of Cabaret is inquisitive, but not sordid. In Rekha's amicable parting of ways with the profession, it ends with an admiring salute to the spirit of at least those women who have learned to survive the ups and downs of the profession and manage to retain control of their self-worth.

The complete documentary is up on Youtube (It is also included as a bonus feature on the Criterion Blu-ray/DVD release of Monsoon Wedding and the BFI Blu-ray of Salaam Bombay!):

Dawson City: Frozen Time [dir. Bill Morrison]

Sometime towards the end of the 19th century, a little town in the Canadian Yukon territory shone brightly for a brief spell as a gold-mining hub. In its salad days, the town had bulged with an ecosystem of tens of thousands of gold-hunters and others that lived off the prospecting boom. But it wasn't long before that shine dimmed and the population dwindled to barely a couple of thousand.

During the first three decades of the 20th century, Dawson city also experienced the magic of the cinema by way of film reels - including features, shorts and newsreels - that reached there after traveling a long way through America. After exhibition, these were generally dumped in Dawson because it was not viable for them to be sent back all that distance once their screening value was over. The film stock primarily used in this era was nitrate based, a flammable material which quite often spontaneously combusted, leading to major fires in movie houses and places of storage. After being shunted between different locations, the reels that were not disposed of by burning or throwing into the river were buried under the local ice rink. They were rediscovered in the late 70's and sent to Canadian and American film archives for preservation.

Bill Morrison's documentary starts with the story of the excavation that led to the discovery of these films, but the bulk of Frozen Time is a history of Dawson City itself, visually depicted by a marvelous splicing together of clips from all those reels that were originally buried there. The excerpt from Charlie Chaplin's original release of The Gold Rush, showing a serpentine queue of prospectors trudging up the snowy hills, is the most easily recognizable. Obviously the attempt is to have the feel of a silent film, with those vintage clips super-imposed with explanatory titles that tie them together into a heart-felt ode to this once vibrant settlement. The marks of damage and decay in the celluloid sources become a part of the film's artistic grammar, emphasizing the transience of human experience. The concept is terrific and one must give kudos to the film-makers who have sequenced images from so many different films and sources to provide a coherent and poetic journey.

If I have one complaint, it is that the film at 2 hours is quite long for an image-focused experience. A certain amount of repetition comes in - I realize it was a deliberate way of showing how fires from nitrate film and other materials were a constant and accepted hazard of life in those days, but when you see the 5th or 6th time a movie house or other building burns down set to a new age drone score, it starts to get a little old. It was the primary reason for me to split the viewing into two sessions.

While I did not love it as much as I hoped I would, Frozen Time is still an admirable painstakingly executed artistic effort that deserves to be seen.

Mifune: The Last Samurai [dir. Steven Okazaki]

 A short while ago I watched Mifune: The Last Samurai, the documentary on legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, who with Akira Kurosawa formed a legendary collaboration, as acclaimed as John Wayne and John Ford, Max Von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman or Amitabh Bachchan and Manmohan Desai.

To reference the Samurai of the title, the documentary (narrated, at least in the English version, by Hollywood's own Last Samurai Keanu Reeves) begins not directly with Mifune, but with the depiction of Samurai in Japanese cinema, which started as early as the silent era. The swordplay dramas became known as chanbara, a term generated by the sound of blades clashing in combat.

After this beginning the film turns to its subject, touching upon Mifune's childhood as the son of a Japanese family in China. It was actually sometime near the beginning of WW2 that he returned to Japan and worked as an aerial photographer. After the war, Mifune applied for work in the growing film industry. Popular rumor says that his application for a cameraman's position was misdirected to the actors' section and he took it up anyway. Better represented in Kurosawa's Something Like An Autobiography, Mifune captured the director's imagination with his wild audition performance, which eventually led to a nearly 20 year collaboration, starting with 1948's Drunken Angel and ending with 1965's Red Beard. This history is supplemented with input about Mifune's nature and work ethic from the sons of Mifune and Kurosawa, and several of Mifune's co-stars including Seven Samurai actor Yoshio Tsuchiya and his leading ladies. The partnership with Kurosawa ended after Red Beard possibly because of tensions caused on account of the commitment required by the director from his leading star who was by then also a movie producer with a company to run.

Mifune also worked with several other Japanese directors (including notably Hiroshi Inagaki for whom he played legendary warrior Musashi Miyamoto in the famous Samurai Trilogy). The need to keep his company running meant Mifune went into TV, something of a comedown for a star whose presence dwarfed the biggest screens. He also worked in some international productions including John Boorman's WW2 castaway drama Hell in the Pacific, the East-Western Red Sun and Steven Spielberg's war spoof 1941. Spielberg himself is on hand in the documentary, relaxedly talking about Mifune as a star, the Kurosawa collaboration and his own experience of working with Mifune. The narrative highlights Mifune's standing as the first global Asian superstar.

The tone is of course quite reverential, the documentary glossing over the scandal of Mifune's infidelity, which led to a decades long separation from his wife Sachiko. Also, there are few new facts for Mifune fans. Of course that's not a knock against its makers, but a byproduct of this trivia-hungry information age. It would have been wonderful if they had any archival footage of Kurosawa speaking about Mifune (the only contribution from Kurosawa is in the reading of a posthumous letter he wrote Mifune after the actor expired in 1997 (less than a year before Kurosawa himself passed away).

Clark Ashton Smith - The Emperor of Dreams [Darin Coelho]

You've heard of the term musician's musician. Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) was the fantasy writer's fantasy writer. He may be less known among the public at large than some of his contemporaries and several of the people that could regard him as a spiritual teacher, Smith's otherworldly vision and felicity of expression puts him in the top echelons of the genre.

The Emperor of Dreams (EoD) (taken from the opening lines to Smith's poem The Hashish-Eater "Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams") is a serious look at the life and work of this reclusive titan. Going in chronological order, the documentary first looks at CAS as a shy and frequently sick child growing up in a remote part of California, quitting school early for self-education aided by his photographic memory and voracious appetite for literature, particularly poetry. Poetry was Smith's calling to early fame, and the film discusses the support he got from serious American poets like George Sterling for his first book of poems, even proclaimed by one critic as the "Keats of the Pacific". The fame was short-lived. EoD suggests that Smith's constant health issues combined with a severe shyness (although conversely he was something of a local ladies' man) meant that he was confined to his neighborhood of Auburn (he apparently demurred from traveling out of Auburn to meet Ambrose Bierce and Jack London). His commitment to poetry that rose purely from the realms of fantastic imagination (like Lord Dunsany) also meant that his work would in time go out of fashion.

Somewhere in this course his work attracted the notice and adulation of his contemporary HP Lovecraft (HPL), which led to a deep friendship over correspondence that lasted more than 15 years (till Lovecraft's death in 1937). It was HPL who encouraged Smith to write fiction prose, even if that was not his preferred medium. Like Lovecraft (and Robert E. Howard) CAS was frequently published in the Weird Tales magazine, which went some way to help support himself and his aging parents, but he also had to take on several odd jobs involving labor. The film  examines Smith's output in fiction, comparing his style to Lovecraft. We also see his artistic expression through sketches and paintings, and sculpture. CAS frequently illustrated his own and other writers' stories in magazines. For the famously erotophobic Lovecraft's tale of The Lurking Fear, Smith produced a drawing of trees that look rather like sensuous nudes.

Once Smith's parents and his friend Lovecraft passed away, it would seem he lost interest in writing any more, depending solely on his manual skills (woodcutter, fruit-picker), and often lived in poverty. Although weird fiction patron August Derleth gave CAS's fiction a second lease of life by releasing his stories in limited edition volumes, he could not persuade Smith to produce new work. For a long while Smith lived alone as a recluse (he was said to be, under the circumstances, a gracious host to visitors), but at the ripe age of 60 he entered into matrimony with a nearly 20 year younger Carol Dorman, who had children from a previous marriage. Unlike with his friend Lovecraft, married life seemed to agree with Smith (although he was distraught when he lost his Auburn home to fire) and lasted 8 years till his death in 1961.

EoD benefits from the contribution of CAS experts like Donald Sidney-Frier, Ron Hilger and Scott Connors. His close friendship and literary kinship with Lovecraft means that HPL disciples like ST Joshi and Wilum H Pugmire are on hand to talk about Smith and the association (Joshi also edited the first edition of CAS's work on Penguin Classics - The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies). Celebrity weird fiction Harlan Ellision professes his huge admiration for Smith's fiction (he does ramble on a bit towards the end). EoD also gives a brief look at the rare instances of films loosely inspired by CAS stories.

I have to say here that the documentary is not as juicy as Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. But that is essentially a function of its subject. Smith in comparison to Lovecraft was arguably less influential on the genre even if as a writer more skilled. His vision was, as some of the people speaking in the film suggest, too otherworldly to gain the same amount of traction. In Lovecraft's most celebrated work he starts off in the present day of his time and provides an exhilarating glimpse into another dimension, but Smith eschews any sense of connection with the real world. Also, the bulk of Smith's output in fiction is in short stories, not the novellas / near-novellas which made Lovecraft's name. Smith's work is far less concerned with plot and action than it is with creating an alien world we experience for a short while till the tale lasts. Hence the discussions of his work also tend to me more of an overview than a dissection of specific themes and plot points. Also his personal life wasn't filled with the quirks and controversial flaws that made Lovecraft a more luridly interesting study.

That said, for people who are acquainted with the work of CAS, and interested to know about the man, EoD is a fine introduction with some serious academic weight behind it. It is currently available via streaming on Amazon (US) Prime and Vimeo (I rented it from Vimeo for 4.99$), and you can also purchase a DVD or blu-ray from Hippocampus Press.

The Giant's Dream [dir. Anthony Giacchino]

“What if a gun had a soul and didn’t want to be a gun?”

It's rare that making of's or special features content for movies feature anything truly insightful, but The Giant's Dream, an approximately hour-long documentary included on Warner's blu-ray of Brad Bird's underappreciated animation classic The Iron Giant is wonderful in its own right. It starts off with charting Brad's life right from when he was a prodigy kid keenly interested in animation who got invited to visit Disney's animation studio after they saw a rough demo reel of his version of The Tortoise and the Hare and was enrolled into arts school on an animation scholarship. It covers his discontented early stint at Disney where he was constantly at loggerheads with the play-safe management to the point of quitting his childhood dream workplace (Later he was invited by Pixar's John Lassetter and went on to do The Incredibles).

Biding his time with TV's The Simpsons and other projects Brad got his next shot at feature animation, ironically after the success of 90's Disney animated ventures, which goaded other studios like Warner to get into the game. Eschewing the trend of child-oriented musicals, Brad concocted (apparently without consulting his team) the tale of the bond between a kid and a hulking robot with massive capacity for destruction. Somewhere behind his take on Ted Hughes' source story was the death of his sister killed in a gun violence incident by her husband.

The Iron Giant had only a fraction of the budget and prep time awarded to the typical Disney feature and the team included a lot of novices or retired animators, since the cream of the crop headed to Disney. The docu looks frankly at the often troubled production, with tight resource crunch and disinterest from the studio (they wanted to get out of the animation business after the failure of their previous venture Quest for Camelot) leading to protracted conflict between Brad and his producer Allison Abbate (who says diffidently in the docu that she would not want to work with him again). While the project was allowed to be completed (in one way the disinterest was a boon as there was no interference as well), Warner had neglected laying out any significant advance publicity for the film, none of the tie-ups and merchandising that garner the public's attention. So while the film did well with critics, it was a commercial bomb, which only later gained second wind as an undermined classic.

The documentary charts all this history superbly with tons of archival video and the use of still and semi-animated illustrations in Brad Bird's style depicting the significant events related to his life and the making of the film. What could have been just a series of talking head interviews is put forth in a terrific visual language that pays tribute to its subject's creativity.

The Iron Giant is a true American classic of animation and The Giant's Dream is an incisive and emotional journey into its creation.

Gulabi Gang [dir. Nishtha jain]

Don't confuse Gulabi Gang with the upcoming Madhuri Dixit - Juhi Chawla draamebaazi film, this is a documentary feature on the eponymous 'gulabi' (pink) saree wearing group, focusing on its founder Sampat Pal and other members. Directed by Nishtha Jain, GG starts with Pal looking into the death of a young bride that was possibly murdered by her husband's family: it covers her interactions with members of the girl's and boy's households and the local police, the general resistance she faces at all ends etc. Another thread deals with the group's efforts to overthrow an exploitative village chief. We also see the GG movement running a recruitment drive in villages to increase their membership and spread (Apparently 1.5 lakh women across several hundred villages are now GG members) and putting up several of its members as contestants in local elections. While following the course of these threads, we also get an insight into Sampat Pal's life and the formation of Gulabi Gang.

Jain's coverage is gratifyingly non-jingoistic, preferring to simply document the proceedings without telling the audience what to feel. She does not unnecessarily glorify the lead players or make heavy-handed statements. Their successes and setbacks are depicted with attention and objectivity. Later in the documentary she exposes the cracks in the organization, when members with differing social views have conflicts with the group and its hierarchy. In less than 100min a good amount of ground is covered, without confusion or a rushed feeling. The film is also visually strong; Jain has a great eye towards capturing the rhythms of rural life and the shots are edited together with admirable fluidity. On the whole this is a high caliber documentary film that should be seen by people interested in India beyond the metros.

Right now the film is being screened at select PVR cinemas at limited show times. If you're interested in the film, you owe it yourself to catch it before the coming weekend by which it is likely to be out of the running, probably in favor of the Bollywood version.

Note Extraordinaire [dir. Amol Palekar]

My knowledge of Hindustani or for that matter any classical form of music wouldn't be a thimble's worth but I appreciate some of the moods it evokes and have tremendous respect for the skills of the people that have dedicated themselves to the study and performance of such music. Kishori Amonkar, the subject of this documentary is someone I first heard of when I saw Govind Nihalani's film Drishti, for which she had done the score. Drishti as a film, the more I think of it, the more I feel it sucked, a lifeless Ingmar Bergman pastiche with some nice moody cinematography (Nihalani himself). But it had fine music, mostly on account of Amonkar's voice; there's an aura and resonance to it even a neophyte like yours truly feels captivated by.

I never got any albums by her because I didn't have a clue what to get, what compositions by her would suit the moods I have a preference for. But I found her interesting, having read of her being a temperamental person who transcended accepted norms and orthodoxies of technique, and who didn't indulge in the public relations exercises that a lot of renowned musicians do to keep their names abuzz.

Amol Palekar's documentary goes some way to giving an insight into the individual behind the name. The film begins with Amonkar talking about her mother. She waxes on about her mother's talent, her struggle to bring up Kishori and her 2 siblings after her husband's death, her philosophy towards music and its study, her manner of teaching the young Kishori and the corrections and criticisms she made, which shaped the singer we today know. There's a palpable emotional element during some of these conversations, revealing the depth of the guru-mother influence.

Palekar then puts the focus on Kishori's own evolution as a singer, her distilling of the training she received into forging her own path, and the development of her musical philosophy. She makes some very interesting remarks about how the rendition of a note is not an isolated element but weighs on its spatial and temporal relationship to the other notes, the overall composition and the mood it is trying to evoke. This is genuinely revealing stuff that takes this documentary from the domain of an ordinary biography to an exploration of an artist's thinking process. Full marks to Palekar for this kind of insightful reporting. Apart from Amonkar herself, there are conversations with her sons, who talk about her as an artist and as a mother, with other known names of Hindustani classical music (Amjad Ali Khan, Zakir Hussain, Shiv Kumar Sharma) who sometimes offer up more than superficial paeans to Amonkar's mastery, and with music critics who dissect the evolution of her style over time. This is a lovely portrait of an interesting artist that people who like Indian classical music will find very welcome.

The overall effort is quite laudable, but there are certain lacunae to Note Extraordinaire. Palekar is no Satyajit Ray, only intermittently realizing that interviews and conversations need not exclusively frame the talking heads. Amonkar's music is also not as prevalent in the background as it could have been. The volume levels for older performance excerpts are out of sync with the sound recorded for the documentary. Interestingly, on the DVD, you have 3 sound options – Marathi (original) or Hindi (voice-overs) with stereo sound, and a Marathi option with 5.1 surround. In my view, it's stupid to have a surround track for a solo performer documentary, but you have the option. Lastly, I believe it's plain cussedness that in this day and age, films presented in a widescreen (digital video) format are given non-anamorphic transfers that don't stretch correctly over flat-screen televisions. It is especially egregious since the makers have taken care to ensure that the provided English subtitles appear inside the film frame. It's better than UTV's Harischandrachi Factory DVD, where, if you don't grasp everyday Marathi, you couldn't watch the film in the original aspect ratio, on account of the subtitles going out of the zoomed in widescreen frame, but such carelessness spoils one's view of the overall worth of these off-the-beaten-track releases.

Food pr0n

So of late I started watching some food oriented shows. I don't watch shows to learn how to actually cook stuff and so I am more interested in programs where the host takes culinary excursions and discovers different cuisines or eating locations. The Keith Floyd shows on BBC used to be a huge favorite of mine. Floyd had the lovable asshole part down pat, so even if you thought some of his own attempts at cooking were just random stir-fry stuff with liberal (really liberal) lashings of alcohol, his enthusiasm at roaming markets and food stalls and mooching on other people's food made for fun viewing.

Getting back I sat through an entire 18-episode run of this Travel Channel show called Man v. Food. MvF can very literally be described as food porn. The food here is of the greasy variety (I like cheese in general, but the ubiquity of said item here is staggering). The aesthetics of presentation are variable - more often than not dishes are created in slap-one-thing-over-another mode. The focus is hugely on quantity - most of the places featured on this show pile enough onto a plate to fill  at least two normal-sized servings. We do know that thanks to this culture of excess the US produces an alarming number of obese people (a third of its population or more) and trashes enough food to feed probably several African nations. If you're a vegetarian, avoid this one at all counts because I doubt if apart from the dessert oriented stuff, there was a single item that did not involve the death of mammal / bird / sea creature. Several of them featured kilos of flesh food.

So why? Well, I do happen to like my meat and there were many moments of drool at seeing various fleshy grills and sandwiches and pies (although you'll never convince me that fried hotdogs covered in melted cheese and snuggled into raspberry jam coated rolls are have anything other than gross-out value). Secondly, MvF has a great host in Adam Richman. The format of the show is that in each episode, Richman visits a different city/town, checks out the recommended local pig-out places and lastly takes on a local food challenge, which is typically to consume X humongous amount of food or some insanely spicy dish (chicken wings seem a favorite in this category, since I recall at least 2 episodes where he downs batches of super-hot wings). Surprisingly Richman's not some obscenely fat mouth-breather - if you check up on trivia for the show, he seems to maintain a pretty healthy lifestyle outside of the show and exercises religiously during program shoot schedules. He is boisterous and fun-seeking, but also exudes a humbleness and genuine liking for new people and places that keeps his act from crossing over into prick-like behavior. After a while, there's little novelty left in the food and the challenges get mononous, and it's really his enthusiasm and sense of humor that keeps one moving over to the next 20 min (without ad breaks) episode. Should I bother to check out Season 2? Apparently he meets Alice Cooper in one of the episodes. Hmmm....

I also watched one episode of No Reservations, which like MvF is another Travel Channel program. Host Anthony Bourdain is more in the Keith Floyd vein, traveling to different countries to see and taste their cultures. I saw an episode where he visits Kerala. This was fun. Bourdain meets up with Indians happy to host the camera-crew escorted gora-saab interested in "Indeeyan Culture", and has a good time, be it pigging out at roadside food stalls in Kochi, attending a traditional "saddhi" feast or giving himself to inertia and gluttony along the backwaters. He even wrangles entry into a Mammooty film set and gets invited to share the superstar's lunch. Bourdain makes the typical firang remarks about the complexity of Indian culture and the continued existence of the caste system, but he's pretty alright as a host - curious but traveled enough to not be gullible or cloyingly polite. He's also more cautious than Floyd about getting drunk and doing something stupidly embarrassing (which was part of Floyd's charm, to be frank). I'll definitely be checking out a few more episodes of this stuff.