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La La Land

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I get why they called it La La Land. I’ve been reading about this land since my teens… when Gore Vidal, Jackie Collins and Joan Collins were some of the various authors whose works I devoured. I have read Joyce Carol Oates, Huxley and Fitzgerald in my college years. I have been a fan of movies since I could walk. I have been raised in Mumbai, a city that has the similar prestige of fulfilling dreams of fame. I have seen Abhimaan, the theme of which was applicable to La La Land, but in a more rustic way… though the music of the former completely outshines the latter – in my opinion.

But then I could talk about the countless other musicals that I think overshadowed La La Land. Singing in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady! Or if you must remove ourselves from the times when musicals were fantastic then I shall mention Grease, Moulin Rouge, Mamma Mia and Chicago!

I agree that the dynamics here are slightly different – we want grittier stuff, we want a sad ending, we want (do we?) a series of fade ins and outs, we want more reality, we want more angst – but don’t we also want good dancing, good lyrics, good – er, singing? I must say, I expected more. I expected good songs, dammit. It did divert from other musicals when the predominant focus of the movie was just these two characters, the only other character I remember other than the main leads, is the hero’s sister. So that in itself sets the tone apart from almost all other musicals.

I will point out the good stuff. Emma Stone couldn’t sing – but man, that woman can act! She is dynamic and her face is fluid with emotion. She stole my breath away in quite a few scenes, all of them when she is rife with struggle. She needs an accolade, she did but then so did Ryan Gosling. That brings me to him: He played the piano damn well, in fact, he learned how to make love to the black and white keys in a few months, commendable indeed! But acting? His face is pretty and wooden. So then I keep looking to his eyes then for some glimpse of emotion, but not only is his face stone but his eyes are blank. They had to light up his eyes in the end to get some life in them… He is just dispassionate – and he got an award?

The title track: the lyrics are flat, but the melody is breathtaking. It sits with you. You look forward to hearing it even in the background score. The song that I like (lyrics and music – not the singing, mind) is Audition (The Fools Who Dream). The lyrics are beautiful, it has the quality of I Dreamed a Dream, and Anne Hathaway’s is not the best rendition, yet still so moving… ah well. Audition rests as my favoured song from the movie.

But I would really like to ask, why make it into a musical? If you have a sterling actress and a reasonable plot why transform the genre? She is an actress and he is a pianist. We see episodes of her screen tests (magnificent) and we see episodes of him playing the piano. So shouldn’t that have been enough to lay foundation to character and plot?

Maybe it is a musical because of the last few minutes of the movie, when the narrative spins into a Ginger Rogers – Fred Astaire take on how the movie could have been, and when it actually catapaults you into the space where the movie breathes into a musical personality. It’s cut short however. Maybe then they should have just forgotten about making it into a musical – if it is about music, then it should have worked with predominant jazz, that called to Mia in the first place. Make it about his music and not make it into a musical! But then it’s not just about his music – so frankly, let me push the buck and say making it a musical seems misogynistic.

I admit that life has its idiosyncrasies, how people drift, how love and careers seldom make good bedfellows, but all of this could have been done better. Hell, it has been done better. The movie actually makes a little more sense when I see it from a different angle, it’s never about these two characters and their love for each other, it is about these two characters and their love for their careers and how these two enable that to happen in the course of their few months together. The best scene in the movie (no! it wasn’t them dancing in the “stars”) was the argument that they have at the dinner table, when they both tell each other that their dreams are what makes them tick, and the fact that they shouldn’t be given up for love is left hanging like a guillotine.

So the movie makes us understand that the Real and the Romantic do not mix, which is the truth. In reality, we are all really lousy singers. Passion lasts for about a year. You have to go through heartbreak to be successful. Dreams can be found, if dancing among the stars is forsaken, and there you have the paradox of the movie. No dancing together in the city of figurative, twinkling stars but performing in the city of worldly, rich stars

Also, if you note, she has a boyfriend whom she leaves for Seb, after she essentially hears him play the first time – I mean, who doesn’t have a thing for a talented, tortured musician? Okay, that’s a whole different argument. But coming back to my point, she hears him play when she is married in the end, so chances are she may just go back to him later – hopefully, there isn’t a sequel then. And if there is, please don’t let it be a musical!

(And I still didn’t understand why they didn’t get better lyricists for the movie?)

Meryl Streep

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

It is seldom that a speech made by a Hollywood Celebrity makes me sit up and applaud. The last time I did that was when Christopher Reeve gave a speech at the Oscars in 1996. I have liked Meryl Streep, I have never been an immense fan, tonight it was a pleasure to hear her speak after she received the Cecille B DeMille award for her contribution to cinema. And she surely has. Through the years, she has amassed a body of work that few actresses can boast of.

Over time, I have felt a strange apathy seeping into me. I have lost faith in humanity, more or less. The ideals that I grew up with, from the works of authors and poets and artists and visionaries and dreamers with much larger sensibilities than the world could hope to replicate, ingrained in me a sense of balance that I find shaken by the times we live in. The people I grew up with and have loved seem to have their moral compasses aligned opposed to mine and I find that it is difficult to be meaningful in a world that is now a strange dystopia.

I keep thinking of Yeats’ The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I don’t want to quote the entire poem, it leaves me with an eerie feeling of premonition and I shudder. But tonight, I heard Streep’s speech and she spoke so beautifully that I just had to keep a transcript of it here. So without further ado, here it is:

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.
Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.
As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

Tilly

Published on by Harpreet Chhachhia1 Comment

Yesterday just before I was leaving to watch Passengers, Saurabh gave me a call and asked if I had heard the news. I asked what news? And he replied with, “Tilikum died”. My heart sank.

It’s life’s ultimate cruelty. Sea World’s branch in San Diego had just announced their last killer whale show. The detractors of Sea World rejoiced. It was a small step toward what they had always wanted. Sea World closing shop, albeit one show in one branch. Of course, it did not mean that there would be no more shows of whales, dolphins, seals, or not to keep several species in captivity, elsewhere, doomed to live an unnatural life devoid of natural attachment and rightful freedom. But where Tilly, as he came to be known in affection, was imprisoned, there would be no showcasing of orcas.

It then came as such a tragedy that Tilikum, the whale responsible for generating such a verdict, would meet his end a week later. It’s almost as if he was born to bring an end to the shows, he had been a part of for approximately 30 years, which so heavily impacted the captured animal trade that exists for base human entertainment. His role in the universe was done and he made his exit amidst millions of tears and tragic applause.

He died at the age of 36. Two other people who impacted my life through their work and lives also died at 36: Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. No strange thing that I felt a deep affinity for him ever since I saw Blackfish. The documentary left such an impact on me. I’ve grown up having this link to animals. I’ve been with dogs since I was four, and I have grown up in their company. A deep desire has always been to visit the Masai plains and watch the wildebeeste migrate from there to the Serengeti. It’s a calling that I have not yet wholly understood… and I don’t really try to. I have grown up with The Black Stallion being my all-time favourite movie. I used to watch Attenborough religiously in all of his shows dealing with the wild. I cried copiously when I watch Elsa, the lioness, walk away from Joy Adamson, and I remember not ever wanting to see that movie again, as a child. I couldn’t understand why they had to give her up to the wild.

I understand it now.

Freedom is something human beings should understand most of all. We have had revolutions dedicated to its cause. Humanity has so much grace and valour. We deem ourselves to be the most intelligent species on Earth, and yet, we are capable of such barbarism! Intelligent and yet oblivious. Glorious and yet despotic! Capable of such good and yet of such violence. Believers in a higher power and yet have no fear of it. Relativity is taken for granted and thinking through another perspective isn’t even applied. The concept of freedom, I know, can never be understood unless it is taken away.

My heart grieved bitterly. It continued to do so since years, when I hear about the plight of creatures that have been mistreated, victimised, slaughtered. It grieves now. It will continue to do so. But I am afraid that these debates have overtaken public consciousness to such an extent that it’s already a non-issue even in the minds of those who would otherwise care. Apathy created from explanation. It’s so strange. This is also a human condition.

Tilikum died. He died. Alone. Hanging in a small pool.

Ever since the death of Dawn Brancheau in February, 2010, his story has spread far and wide. But his condition worsened. Trainers wouldn’t touch him. He was kept in the size of a pool which would be the equivalent of a human being in a bath tub. He was hosed down instead of being massaged. He was isolated. His shows were cancelled. And he would rest perpendicular in this pool for hours – the sight of which is so horrifyingly filled with despair that even the most ignorant of human hearts would still in response.

I have no faith left in humanity. I have no belief left for higher governance, earthly or divine. I have no recourse except to mention in a most insignificant blog about how I feel and what Tilly meant to me. I just know now, that death brings the ultimate peace and for sure, he is finally at rest.

I end with a song dedicated to Tilly. Stay free!