Khalid Mohamed

Apr 04, 2011
Khalid Mohamed

Khalid Mohamed

On the party scene

H is parties were casual. No cloaked agenda. No celebrity guests pix featured in the day after’s newspapers. Just abundant food, choice spirits and crackling conversation.

Revisiting a classic after 70 years

Nostalgia has a certain lasting quality about it. Every movie Majnu remembers the exact time, date and venue associated with his first look at Casablanca — the classic 1942 romance which 70 years later will spawn a sequel, according to an official announcement by a major Hollywood studio. Naturally, there’s high anxiety that the follow-up will invoke the wrath of the film’s loyal constituency across the world.

What’s the story?

Original stories seem to be ignored like the plague in movieland. It’s always nice to have a Hollywood inspiration
Normally, I don’t dip into quotations and proverbs. Except while ticking off badly behaved children. But something was bugging me of late. And a chance discovery of a series of articles by a heavy-duty American screenwriter sorted out my bugaboo.

How brain boggling!

Here are examples of scenes and scripts lacking logic in the movies
While watching the movies, I’ve been zapped by certain baffling, puzzling, brain-busting elements. Here’s sharing some of the brain bogglers:

Mumbai fest to a game of roulette

Just imagine Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elia Kazan and Satyajit Ray, all seated at the dais to address a press conference. In fact, quite ironically, it was during the Emergency era, circa 1976, that India hosted its more unforgettable international film festival ever — not only in terms of the quality of the entries but also the never-again-equalled presence of master directors.

The ‘South’ story

Listen, I’m sure that actors from what is termed as “the South” in journalese, are distinctly audience-friendly. It’s just that they elect to debut, on the Bollywood front, in projects which give them short shrift. Self-publicity — a necessary evil — is also conspicuous by its absence.

Comeback wish-list

o two or three ways about it. You must have been meditating in the Himalayas, luxuriating in a Mumbai ocean resort, or hiding under the Hyderabad boulders, if you didn’t know that yesteryear’s Chandni has made a comeback.

The unknown world of Varsha Bhosle

Unnervingly telephatic perhaps, I had called Varsha Bhosle on Monday morning after losing touch for over a year. I only had her landline number since she had an aversion to cellphones, or so she said. The phone kept ringing. Reportedly, she had shot herself on Sunday night. Gone.

The feisty screen women of the 1950s

Senior writer, Monsieur Jean Marc Gonin from Le Figaro newspaper, Paris, wanted to know, “So… are your heroines changing?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Wonderful. That’s what we have been hearing. They are changing.”

Very baffling all this

Since time immemorial — and I can say that since I’ve been reporting on and reviewing films since I was in my diapers — there are severe misconceptions about what Bolly-journo’s life and times. And they haven’t altered right from the era of Amitabh Bachchan (which is when I entered the sin... scene), then on to the Khans (now that’s another story) to the jalebi-barfi ambience of Ranbir Kapoor today. So, here are 10 myths about the movie-journo tribe which keep setting my teeth on edge:

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I want to begin with a little story that was told to me by a leading executive at Aptech. He was exercising in a gym with a lot of younger people.

Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen didn’t make the cut. Neither did Shaji Karun’s Piravi, which bagged 31 international awards.

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