Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner

Bollyposting

Tarja who is almost worringly head-over-heels with East-Asian TV has not wholly abandoned the subcontinent, so during the year we have managed to fit in few Bollywood evenings. So here is some of my backlog: 

First is Bunty aur Babli, a buddy-movie with Abhishek and Rani, where the former is dreaming of get-rich-quick schemes at home and latter wants to be Miss India. Instead they end up as grifters dreaming up stings to fool undeserving rich. All goes well until a police inspector played by Amitabh starts closing in. B&B was fun. The music was catchy, the plot could have been tighter and the ending less blah. Amitabh was campier than a row of tents with his shades and leather jacket, and Kajira Re, the number father and son performed with Aish (doing an item number) is one of my favourites ever. Both Abhishek and Amitabh are hilariously goofy and adorable. 

Fanaa of which I have been waiting mainly because Kajol, was a bit of a disapointment. The story is that of a blind girl falling in love with a tourist guide in New Delhi. The guide, Aamir, is really a terrorist preparing to do a job. Kajol melts Aamir’s heart, they marry and he pays for an operation to restore her sight. Before Kajol gets to see him, Aamir goes off to blow Rashtrapati Bhavan and is assumed dead. Years later on another job he stumbles wounded to a log cabin in Kashmir (Poland...) where Kajol and his son are now living. It takes awhile for Kajol to realize this is her husband, the army is closing in, and the movie ends with Kajol calling the cops and Aamir getting shot. Blood on snow. Kajol was as beautiful as ever, here is the tongue-twister song to prove it, but otherwise the film could have been better. Now it is not a “serious” take on conflicting loyalties, but neiter is it a true masala entertaiment, it falls somewhere in between and does not really work. 

Omkara, a remake of Othello with Ajay Devgan and Kareena Kapoor was better than I expected. I liked Kareena, thought Shaif Ali Khan was excellent as Langda (Iago) and even with his Bollywood moustache, Ajay was menacingly sexy Omkara (Othello). The problem of the production for me is the transfer. In this version, Omkara is enforcer for a political party in notoriously corrupt Uttar Pradesh, basically a goonda. Thus, at least in these western eyes, he is a bad guy from the beginning. The tension between a noble general and a madly jealous husband is missing. Omkara is just a sad tale of a violent man acting violently towards his love, not the grand drama of Shakespeare’s play. Also, only in Bollywood you would make a musical scene out of this.

Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, the long a waited new film from Karan was very karan-like, as Tumhi Dekho Naa sort of proves. Expensive melodrama with lots of violins and the exotic New York. The plot is a story of two couples, Sharhrukh and Preity, and Abishek and Rani, and what happens when Rani and Shahrukh fall in love and have an affair. This is heavy stuff for a blockbuster film in India, and Rani and Sharukh have to suffer a lot to get to the inevitable happy ending. I was sort of meh about it all.

Next up: Don, Jaaneman and Krrish

Why Muffins?

Posted by Sari

Most excellent author and translator J. Pekka Mäkelä threw a  meme at us asking why the blog is called "Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner".

In the last years of the last millenium Jukka and I played around with an idea of a web journal of sorts, something that would have essays and reviews and whatnot, but never got around doing anything about it. What made us take the leap was Jukka's cancer. We had lots of friends both in Finland and abroad, so a blog seemed like a good way of keeping everybody updated on his condition. So four years ago August 2003, we started this thing.

Naming it was surprisingly easy. Wilde's "The Importance of being Earnest" has always been one of my favourite plays, I have a habit of quoting from it almost as much as from Asterix. We were watching the new movie adaptation (With Rupert Everett and Colin Firth), when Jukka suggested that we might coin a name for the blog from one of my favorite scenes: Jack and Algy have been jilted by their sweethearts for pretending to be Ernest, and take the rejection in very different manner. Here is the scene from the classic 1952 version (beginning at 00.30).

We liked the symbolism of the name, of muffins representing life and the manner of eating the manner of living. We liked the juxtaposition of frivolous and serious, it resonated both to our own situation and to the fact that Wilde's most sparkling, shining play was written at a time his life was turning into a nightmare. And we liked the mental image of stuffing your face with muffins in agitation, so very unlike Algy. So that is why we have long unwieldy and silly name for our blog :-)