Jai Arjun Singh

This is a sort of behind-the-scenes/making-of the movie "Jaane bhi do Yaaro" in print. It delves into the travails of producing a film on an extremely low budget, as well as the reasons behind its cult status. It reminds me of that line from the movie "Bowfinger" where someone goes "But movies cost millions of dollars to make" and Steve Martin's character replies "That's after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash, every movie costs $2,184." Kundan Shah was Bowfinger like two whole decades before it even came out.

The book is a short one, but the paperback is nevertheless thick at over 270 pages, thanks to double-spaced paragraphs and low per-line word-count. If they'd kept to the default, the book would not have been more than a hundred and fifty pages. That said, it is reasonably well researched, well written and therefore engaging - engagement, of course a function of interest, as much as writing.

My take-away was a peek into the world of film-making, the process behind just about everything from script to the final edit. It's close to 35 years now since the movie released, so this one is of course dated material and trivia meant for die-hard fans only.

I wanted to give it 4 stars, but the extra 1 would be a result of my strong bias stemming from how much I like the film and any talk around it. I take away 1 to balance that, because Goodreads won't allow me to take away only half. For me, this is a three-and-a-half star book.

… (mer)

Like all anthologies, some essays were a better read than the others - but that's stating the obvious. One essay by Sidin Vadukut was all I could identify with. The rest were a tad too academic for me. I felt the need to watch the movies immediately so that I could make better sense of what I was reading in the book, but of course that was a limitation - you can't do two things at once. So, this might be a better read if you have already, actually seen the movies some of them were talking about. I made a list of them to acquire, at any rate, and might go back to the essays some day. I am not sure if that might happen. In the meanwhile, having read the book already, it did very little for me.… (mer)

Jai Arjun Singh is a movie and book reviewer whom I both admire and envy. I picked up this book solely to experience his write ups as those on his blog and other newspapers. However, I was disappointed in this book.

Yes, some chapters were nice - Kamila Shamshie's langauge of movie and prose, Jai Arjun's write up about horror genre. There was one about yester year's vamp.

Two chapters that could have been more effectively interesting had they been bit concise and less rambling - one on Finnish movies by Kiarostami brothers by Anjum Hassan and other on dreamlike sequences by Rajoshri.

Sidin's chapter was more of anecdotal - about his brush with movies while growing up in Dubai. Though this chapter much less to do with theme of 'what movies do to writers' (it was more a personal history kind of memoir) - frankly it came as an respite amongst later rambling chapters.

Last but not least - thanks to this book I was reminded to check writer Manil Suri's Helen dance at Brooklyn book festival. Since stage seems to be set in open - his performance seems no less than daring. He writes his experience in an chapter how he arranged to dress in Helen drag as part of his presentation where he was asked to take up a risk. His performance can be watched on youtube here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHTEhBJcZok.… (mer)