Pink Sauce

One of the joys of Netflix is that it gives you easy access to world cinema. As such I've been able to enjoy Bollywood and South Asian films. The latest one of those is in fact a series. The Ba***ds of Bollywood is a satirical action comedy lampooning, you've guessed it, the Indian film industry. It is a fast-paced roller-coaster of a romp (sometimes even too fast, in the slightly manic way that seems characteristic of that cinema) that mixes genres to very entertaining results. Though that largely passed me by, the secondary cast includes big names of Bollywood playing themselves (sometimes/always(?) with a musical soundbite referencing their most famous work announcing their appearance). Even Shah Rukh Khan is in there!* There could have been more big dancing set pieces (there is only a half-hearted attempt at one) and the soundtrack was a little too Europeanised for my taste (having spent time photographing in south Asian clubs, I have developed some preferences). But these ...

For a number of years people have been warning of the rise of far right ideology in the media and political spheres. We were told that we were over-reacting, that there was nothing to worry about. Well, it turns out there was something to worry about after all. This week, a rising member of the Tory party (Katie Lam MP) explained how she wanted to change the rules for people with Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) to be able to deport us should we earn less than £39,000 a year (the median salary in the UK is £32,000), and/or had "taken from society" by claiming any kind of benefit (anything from jobseekers allowance to maternity leave, or state pension). This would affect about 3.5 million people (what amounts to 5% of the UK population: your friends and partners). Comparisons have been unfavourably made with the, at the time, unprecedented scale of Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 70s (less than 30,000 people were in the end affected. Ironically they were ...

No one dead who loved you  Would wish your future years dismembered  Against the rocks of their departure.  They would not sentence you to the guilt of betrayal  For any moment they weren’t uppermost in your mind  Nor would they wish you whittled down like a stick  To pick the stony teeth in the open mouth of abject misery,  Daily, until you are nothing left.  No one dead who loved you  Would want your still-breathing carcass  To be lost in the wilderness  That spans the two worlds of the living and the dead,  Where you are neither dead nor living.  They would not applaud your misery,  But would weep to watch their loss  Made pointless by the waste of you.  The dead become a part of us; our skin, our bones, our thinking;  Their existence is continuous in us  And the best we do in everything  As we move on from the moment of their passing.  Step back from the graveside where nothing flower...

Tick, Tick... BOOM! (by and on Netflix), titled after one of its hero's musicals, is the film directorial debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the acclaimed creator of Hamilton . Perhaps appropriately, it is about musical theatre and, itself, turns into a musical; covering the few days, in early 1990, leading to star-crossed composer Jonathan Larson's 30 birthday.  At that time, Larson, who went on to write Rent , was in the throes of completing his first musical, on which he had been working for eight years, before a crucial showcase in front major players in the industry. With social puritanism and the AIDS epidemic as background – with close friends getting infected, or sick; some of them dying, Larson, a straight man, struggles to write a final key song for his show, while confronting existential questions about creativity, his life choices, and his priorities. The film features numerous examples of Larson's work meshed into the narrative of those few days. Some are part o...

Having just was watched ( and reviewed )  Paris Police 1900, I find it interesting to be presented with another series with very similar theme to indulge in a little comparison.  Ridley Road, also available on iPlayer and only 4 episode long, is set in 1960s Britain, where a Jewish ingenue finds herself infiltrating the ranks of the National Socialist Movement (the British Nazis). There is actually a fairly similar subplot in Paris Police 1900.  In both cases historical events and characters are drafted in to anchor the narrative, and in both cases, the viewer is presented with a quality piece of television drawing on past events to entertain and potentially illuminate a worrying aspect of our current society. I think it is no coincidence that those two series should appear at this particular moment in time. That is however where the similarities stop. Where Paris Police 1900 is dark and dangerous, even brutal at times, Ridley Road is solid and safe. It offers al...

Paris Police 1900 is a French series currently on iPlayer, that somehow only took about 6 months (rather than the usual 2 years) to make it across the channel (who said Brexit made exchanges more difficult?!). The series is set in... err... Paris, in 1899. On the surface it is a gory police thriller, following the meandering investigation of the murder and dismemberment of a young woman. So far, so Nordic Noir; were it not for the 'exotic' setting, and the lack a truly central investigative figure. While the handsome Inspecteur Jouin is suitably aloof and monosyllabic, and works as the connecting character in the story, he isn't a dominating presence in the narrative, which includes a number of interrelated subplots with their own leads. Crucially, as made abundantly clear by the jaw-dropping(!) opening scene, the makers of the show have created an unique, and unprecedented portrait of a not-so-Belle Époque, as, literally, a fin-de-siècle society, decadent, violent, crue...

This is a brain dump written as soon as I got home from the show. More a more cogent review (which I completely agree with), check out:  Review: The Normal Heart at National Theatre , by Hailey Bachrach. I know lots of people have been raving about this production of Larry Kramer's largely autobiographical play at the National Theatre, but I was disappointed. Despite being fairly wordy and rather on the long side (at 2hr40), it did sustain my interest and I was never bored. The performances are great (loved Liz Carr) but it's not a great piece of writing to beginning with (the structure is anaemic and it ends very abruptly), and some very questionable directorial decisions didn't help.   The Olivier Theatre has been set up to be in the round (centered around the revolve as a the stage), but the director didn't seem to bother to take that into account one bit (it could have been as simple a flipping the switch and have the stage going round all the time, if he really co...

Green Book, currently on iPlayer, is the heart-warming tale of an unlikely friendship between a famous sophisticated black musician and a rough-around-the-edges Italian-American self-styled bullshitter. It is based on a true story. This is a story of prejudices overcome and differences accepted. It is also about privilege. But, rather than being preachy and worthy, as it could so easily have been, it is, most of the time, funny, and just utterly lovely. The film came under criticism when it was released for embracing a white saviour trope, but I think this is overlooking the extent to which both characters learn from each other and end up changing each other's outlooks. It is perhaps in some ways utopian or overly optimistic in its presentation of race relations in 1960s America (or indeed in the 'Western' world nowadays) but it can't hurt to dream for a couple of hours. The performances by the two leads are great too and the film looks beautiful. This middle-class ...