Seeking: Fireworks at the box office
festive feel when Ayaan is all charged-up with the decorations and sweets. He is growing up and he recently took the initiative to decorate the house for my birthday city like Mumbai the vibe is different. Here, too, I do meet and greet people, but ideally it is only at home.” of gossip, Diwali clashes at the box office are a feast to look forward to, every year. Especially, when everyone around the films is talking about how unfair the people around the other film are being! For instance, Shah Rukh was called all sorts of mean things when he was trying to pit his huge film Om Shanti Om against newbies Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor’s Saawariya. Of course, his PR got into action and turned it into a fight between the directors instead and Sanjay Leela Bhansali had to stop giving Farah Khan friendly hugs at press conferences. Of course, things could have got worse like it did for Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Shivaay, with Kajol and Karan Johar going on record and giving each other gaalis. They have patched up now, in time for Season Six of K Jo’s popular soap opera (can’t call it a chat show any more now, can we?) Koffee With Karan.
These clashes, however, work best when there are two Khans involved — like it did for Salman Khan’s Jaan-EMan and SRK’s Don; the speculations around the fight went past Christmas, Eid right onto the next Diwali, when SRK was back to threatening Devgn’s Son Of Sardar.
Box office ki Diwali?
If these Diwali releases are potent enough to affect personal equations, the figures they must be gathering have to be huge. An average Diwali release has to gross above Rs 150 crore if it knows what is good for the box office. It has to average the losses through the year for its production house and make a tidy profit. While that is too much of expectation, with Netflix, globe-trotting and the insane rate of popcorn in the theatres — the Diwali releases are actually taking a beating. So while just last year we had Golmaal Again making a tidy sum of Rs. 311 crore at the box office,Thugs Of Hindostan with a Rs 350 crore budget needs to make way past Rs 500 crore at the box office. Given it is the first time Aamir Khan and Amitabh Bachchan will be seen in a film together, hopes for the moolah are shining bright. Eventually, when the real figures start to show, we will know if Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge has a competitor or not. Till then, let there be light.
Ayoung cowboy (James Franco) has just had a harrowing escape from the hangman’s noose when he is caught once again by a posse. With a noose around his neck, he smirks at a sobbing, about-to-belynched fellow convict:
“First time?”
This priceless, chuckle-evoking, black humour moment from
a six-part Western anthology directed by the famous Coen brothers, made me wonder: Why were the funny moments/ films at the recently-concluded MAMI film festival so few and far between? I have been attending film festivals for 25 years now and if festival films were a representative of the world today, it could well be concluded that we are living in a largely violent and selfserving world. In the latest MAMI, the dystopian factor is pushed even further by provocateur Lars Von Trier’s
in which serial killer Jack (played with ice-in-his-veins Matt Dillon) makes a money pouch carved from the breast of a woman he has killed and stored in a walk-in freezer along with scores of other dead, dismembered and disfigured victims.
Festival films don’t look at the past with nostalgia-hued, rose-tinted glasses either. The tale I found particularly heart-breaking in
is the starklysans-dialogue story called Meal Ticket. Liam Neeson plays a travelling-bystagecoach manager whose star attraction is a hapless young artist with no arms or legs (Harry Melling) but with the talent to flawlessly spout poems like Shelley’s Ozymandias and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. The manager collects the money from people in remote Western villages who pay to listen to these speeches, and he feeds and nurses the limbless orator with his own hands. But when the impresario finds a more crowdpleasing option — a hen that can pick numbers on which people gamble — the manager and the orator’s strictly symbiotic relationship is threatened. The look on the orator's face when he