Lata Mangeshkar (1929-2022)

Many people in the west may not have heard the above name but this force of nature has died at the age of 92 after testing positive for covid-19. She was a giant in the Indian film and music world, as can be seen in the response to the news of her death.

Lata Mangeshkar, one of India’s most beloved singers, has been cremated in Mumbai with full state honours.

Mangeshkar, whose voice was the soundtrack to hundreds of Bollywood films, died aged 92 on Sunday.

PM Narendra Modi and stars of the entertainment industry attended the funeral, where large crowds gathered to pay their respects.

Her extraordinary career spanned more than half a century and she recorded thousands of songs in 36 languages.

Two days of national mourning will follow the funeral and the national flag will be flown at half-mast throughout the country.

She was what we used to call a ‘playback singer‘ in that it was her voice that was heard in the songs in films while the actor lip-synced the words. India is a nation of many languages but whatever the language of the film and whoever were the actors, it was a pretty safe bet that the singing of the female lead in the film was being done by Mangeshkar. Given that so many Indian films feature multiple songs, she was everywhere, recording thousands of songs. Even I, who watched hardly any Indian films, knew about her and could recognize her distinctive voice.

Here is an example of her singing.

No more daft detectives!

Over a decade ago ago, I wrote a post titled No more daft women! about one of my pet peeves when watching police procedural shows. While I like the detective and suspense story genre in general, one thing that annoys me is the use of a common trope and that is to have a female character, despite being expressly warned to be careful, do something unbelievably stupid that puts her life and the lives of others in danger. The ‘daft women’ phrase was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock asking “Is the woman daft?” to a screenwriter who was describing just such a development when they were working on The Birds.

But what is worse is when detectives, who should definitely know better, do something similar. I noticed this in two shows that I watched recently. In the first, two detectives investigating multiple missing persons whom they suspect were victims of a serial killer, stumble across a trapdoor covered by earth and leaves in the woods and upon lifting open the heavy lid, discover steps leading down and an awful stench emanating, suggesting the presence of decomposing bodies. So what do they do? Do they call for backup? Does one detective stay on guard outside while the other goes down? After all, the killer might be lurking nearby. No, they both climb down into the hole. If the killer had been around, all they would have had to do was simply close the lid, cover it up, and the two detectives would have joined the list of missing persons. Daft detectives.
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What is Ricky Gervais’s problem?

Comedian Ricky Gervais seems to have gone off the rails in a big way. After his breakthrough series The Office and the enjoyable film The Invention Of Lying, he seems to have run out of ideas and resorted to what other comedians have done in that same situation and that is resort too cheap jokes targeting marginalized groups.

I wrote before about his Netflix stand up special that I stopped watching when he began with an extended riff where he repeatedly dead-named Caitlyn Jenner, presumably as a response to him being criticized for doing so when he hosted the Golden Globes. Rather than. take the occasion to redeem himself, he doubled down, and seemed smugly proud for doing so.

But that is not all. He has written, directed, and stars in a comedy-drama series on Netflix called After Life where he plays a reporter for a small town weekly community free newspaper. He is deeply grieving over the death of his wife from cancer, so much so that he was suicidal at one point and often acts like a jerk towards other people. The series was getting very good reviews and I decided to watch it, thinking that perhaps he had learned something from the criticisms of his Netflix show.
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Sidney Poitier (1927-2022)

The acting legend has died at the age of 94.

Among the many films of his that I saw, I loved A Raisin in the Sun (1961), Lilies of the FieldTo Sir With Love (1967). The film I utterly disliked was one that received great acclaim, and that was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) where he played the fiancee of a white woman and had to overcome the latent prejudices of her liberal parents. He had to play an almost impossibly accomplished and personally flawless person in the film, in order to gain acceptance.

The main problem he faced was that he entered the film world as an almost illiterate immigrant from the Bahamas (though he was born in Miami when his parents were visiting briefly) during Jim Crow and racial unrest in the US. After struggling tremendously, he was one of the first main black leads and was mindful that he would be taken as a representative of black people. Hence his roles almost always was that of a good guy. It must have irked him that he could not broaden his acting range and play edgy or even outright villainous roles, like his peers Robert Mitchum or Richard Widmark. He had the kind of looks, easy grace, on-screen charm and charisma that made him eminently watchable, like Cary Grant, who also never played the bad guy.
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TV Review: Death to 2021

The year 2021 started out with some hope and optimism. The Democrats just barely won control of the US Senate and thus supposedly would be able to get some things done. Donald Trump would be out of office in three weeks. Vaccines were going to be available soon that would enable us to emerge from the pandemic.

But things did not work out that way. Trump has gone full bore bonkers with his claim that the election was stolen and enough of his cult believe him to cause problems. Two Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema seem determined to side with Republicans in opposing efforts to improve the lives of many people. And new covid-19 variants have emerged that, coupled with inexplicably stupid resistance to taking them and other pandemic resistance measures, has seen the number of cases rise sharply at the end of the year.

But the eternal optimist in me hopes that this year will surprise me by turning out better than the current signs indicate.

In general, I am not a fan of year-end retrospectives or lists of various things such as best books, best films, and the like. One exception is a list of well-known people who died during the year, many of whom did not get much press attention at the time of their death and so I missed it. For example, I learned from that article that the celebrated Indian sprinter Milkha Singh had died at the age of 91. I remember him because of a very silly joke that I heard at the time when he came to Sri Lanka to compete in a meet. The joke went that as he was sitting by the side of the track after a race, someone came up to him and asked, “Are you relaxing?” To which he replied, “No, I am Milkha Singh.” That shows the kind of juvenile humor that appeals to me and sticks in my mind.
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Film review: Don’t Look Up (2021)

Netflix has just released a new star-studded dark comedy that sends up the current times in which we live. The film is allegorical, particularly of the Trump era.

The story begins with a graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence) who discovers that a 10 km wide comet is headed straight for the Earth and will collide with it in just over six months, destroying the planet. Along with her advisor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a top government scientist (Rob Morgan) they try to alert the Trump-like president (Meryl Streep) but she, along with her idiot son (Jonah Hill, no prizes for guessing who he is based on) who is her chief-of-staff, does not take the threat seriously enough and instead worries more about her poll numbers and how to use the news to her political advantage. The news media represented the form of a happy-talk TV show with co-anchors (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) also make light of the situation.
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The tricks of memory

I keep getting reminded of how unreliable memories can be, especially about things that happened a long time ago. While forgetting details and even entire incidents are common, more concerning is when we ‘remember’ things that did not happen. The latest such incident occurred when a few days ago I was watching the 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starring Danny Kaye. I was a huge fan of Kaye’s comedies as a boy, which often showcased his ability to sing comic songs, and this film had two of them. I recall watching it a long time ago and enjoying it so when I saw that it was streaming, I decided to take a second look.

The film is about a timid, milquetoast of a man who is bullied by his mother, his boss, and his fiancee and who escapes into daydreams where he is the hero of adventures. Like so many films that we recall from our childhood, it did not age well. (It was remade in 2013 with Ben Stiller in the title role). I would have stopped watching after about ten minutes but what kept me going was that I distinctly recalled that right at the beginning, while he is waiting at a traffic light, he daydreams that he is the pilot of a military plane that is flying through a major storm. Despite the dangerous conditions and the plane being buffeted by the strong winds, he remains calm and collected and his crew admiringly tell each other that they are confident that he is the one person who can pull them through. In the background, the engine makes a ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa sound, a recurring background machine sound in almost all his daydreams.
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Xenophobia and the story of Kabuliwala

We live in an age where many people are fleeing their native lands and seeking refuge in other countries. The causes for the creation of so many refugees are many, the most common being wars, economic hardships caused by climate change, and fears of persecution either as individuals or as members of some minority community that is being targeted by the majority community with the government either not doing anything about it or even condoning the abuses.

While I am technically not a refugee, I left Sri Lanka with my family because I fell into the last category. As such, it gives me a small window into the refugee mindset and know that leaving one’s country and all that is familiar for another land where one has to start afresh, sometimes not even knowing the language, is a very difficult decision, not made lightly. Hence refugees should be treated with compassion. But sadly that is often not the case. It is easy to view refugees as somehow threatening and many politicians have used them as an easy target to inflame nativist tendencies in the population to create hostility to the refugees.
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Why would you have live ammunition on a film set?

There has been a lot of coverage of actor Alec Baldwin firing a gun on a film set that resulted in killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. It appears that a single bullet went through Hutchins and then hit Souza who was standing behind her. It appears that Baldwin thought he was firing a gun that did not have live rounds.

There are so many questions that come to mind.

One is that this is a film set, not a hunting trip. Why are there any live rounds at all on the set? What purpose do they serve? And why did he point the gun at someone and fire it anyway? Was it a prank in order to startle them? This demonstrates how dangerous it is to point and fire any type of gun at anyone even in fun. There have been so many stories of people getting killed and injured because a gun that was thought to be fake or unloaded actually had live rounds.
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The rise and fall (and rise again?) of quicksand

Nearly four years ago, I had a post about quicksand. In it I mused how it used to be a common plot device in the books and films I watched and read as a boy but seemed to have faded from view. The 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia has a poignant scene with quicksand.

This week the program Radiolab had a segment on quicksand in which it turns out that my sense that quicksand was a significant feature of popular culture that has slowly disappeared has some empirical support. There is a database of films that have quicksand scenes in them and after starting out small in 1900 or so, the frequency of appearance increased, reaching a peak around 1960, and then decreasing again to the present day. That jibes with my personal experience.

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