The Graveyard Book

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

Yes, it’s still Neil Gaiman week.

Neil Gaiman‘s latest book, loosely based on The Jungle Book, is a wonderful thing. Where Kipling’s Jungle Book had a human child raised by animals in a jungle, Gaiman’s Graveyard Book has him raised by ghosts in a graveyard. There are a few other parallels, in characters and in passages, but this book is its own beast.

The Graveyard book

This was my third audiobook (I’m going to stop keeping count now), and Gaiman himself reads. He does an excellent job, doing the voices of all types of creatures, keeping it just as spooky and mysterious as it needs to be.

∞

There might be a Graveyard Book movie. Can we have Henry Selick animation again? No, it seems like we’ll be getting Neil Jordan and live action.

Eastwood, Clint Eastwood

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 5 Comments

gran-torino-eastwoodI don’t always like Clint Eastwood’s movies– the ones he directs. I leave with a feeling that there was less to the story than the weight it is being given. Of course, I have only seen a few (out of his 30+ features)– Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima and now Gran Torino.

Of which, I thought Mystic was okay, Midnight and Million Dollar were no good and Unforgiven took too much time to tell too little. But I loved Letters from Iwo Jima, it’s one of my favorites of all time.

I liked Gran Torino quite a bit. Most of all for Eastwood’s own performance, the gruff grizzly old widower who finds more in common with the Hmong family next door than with his own kin.

Also, Eastwood sings a song in the credits.

∞

Eastwood’s Invictus comes out this week, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as the captain of the rugby team. Freeman as Mandela has been rumored for years, but as Ebert said this week, this rugby-themed Eastwood movie is not what I would have expected.

∞

Of course, my favorite movie where the main character is called Clint Eastwood is still Back to the Future III.

Avatar Expectations

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 2 Comments

Ebert just pushed my expectations through the roof:

Watching “Avatar,” I felt sort of the same as when I saw “Star Wars” in 1977. That was another movie I walked into with uncertain expectations. James Cameron‘s film has been the subject of relentlessly dubious advance buzz, just as his “Titanic” was. Once again, he has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely.

“Avatar” is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It’s a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeating viewings. It invents a new language, Na’vi, as “Lord of the Rings” did, although mercifully I doubt this one can be spoken by humans, even teenage humans. It creates new movie stars. It is an Event, one of those films you feel you must see to keep up with the conversation.

Next week can’t come soon enough.

P.S. Just saw The Princess and the Frog. Highly recommended. More later

Our Little Harmonica

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 6 Comments

And now to show my face on the blog. I picked up the Harmonica earlier this year. I can do the simple stuff, can’t bend a note yet and only do a pale imitation of a vibrato.

But here’s me doing the theme from Sholay (1975):

Sholay theme from Devanshu Mehta on Vimeo.

And then “Aaj Kal Tere Mere Pyaar ke Charche” from Brahmachari (1968), with a lot of mistakes and a faulty harmonica (not to mention a faulty harmonica player):

Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche – Harmonica from Devanshu Mehta on Vimeo.

Any other suggestions for Hindi songs that sound good on the Harmonica?

A Very Old Ping Pong Game of Ideas

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 3 Comments

Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source, channeling Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City, highly recommended), mentions something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now:

a deep ping-pong game of ideas runs long and strong under the US-India connection: from Thoreau’s ecstatic reading of the Bhagavad Gita to Gandhi’s reading of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s reading of Gandhi to Barack Obama’s reading of Gandhi through King and his White House embrace of Prime Minister Singh last week.

I’ve lived all but one year of my life in three states: Obama’s, Gandhi’s and Thoreau’s. Though Hawai’i, Kansas, Indonesia, and Kenya claim Obama as their own. Which says a lot.