Gangs Of Wasseypur at Lincoln Center
Some notes from mid-January, 2015:
Saw both parts of Anurag Kashyap's masterpiece, Gangs of Wasseypur today in a rare back-to-back screening at Lincoln Center. It's a multi-generational Hindi crime-family saga that can easily be compared—favorably—to The Godfather for its scope and ambition. Wasseypur is a complex, nuanced screenplay with a real sense of life as it is lived in a wholly corrupt state. The characters bleed, sweat, fuck, swear, and kill, then run for their lives. There aren’t any heroes.
It went by so quickly I forgot I was sitting in the dark for five-and-a-half hours, and I've seen both parts before. Once again it made me realize just what a movie star Nawazuddin Siddiqui has become: you can't look away from him. His naiveté, his awkwardness, in the courting of future wife Huma Qureshi is funny and touching at the same time (she's great, too!) Siddiqui can switch from tears to terrifying explosions of violence in a hearbeat and does so frequently; when he is finally called upon to act (like young Michael Corleone in the Bronx restaurant in Godfather I) his commitment to the shedding of blood is total and irrevocable.
But there are so many great performances in this movie, like Manoj Bajpai’s second-generation gangster Sardar Khan and his two unforgettable wives, Richa Chadda and Reema Sen. (Sen is chilling in one of the movie’s last shots.)
Props to Lincoln Center for bringing in this great film in what I'm sure will be a very short re-release, at least here in the US. To me Kashyap is the brightest light of the new Mumbai cinema that has made irrelevant all the outdated cliches about Bollywood. Someday NYC will notice, though that day hasn’t yet come: including Carolyn there were only six people in the audience. I know the long running time of Wasseypur is a problem but the same thing happened a few years ago during Lincoln Center’s Guru Dutt retrospective (unbelievably, the first ever in the US fifty years after his death). We saw a classic every night along with a very small group of lucky New Yorkers.
Latte by the Chrysler Building, Garrison
This photo was taken in the small structure near the house that we called the gazebo. It was reached by a six-foot bridge extending from the deck, was screened on all sides, and had the shape of an irregular pentagon. Due to its location on a steeply sloped granite ridge, treetops bordered its southern edge. Direct sunlight would only reach the structure in the late afternoon, and that was only after the spindly younger trees had been pruned. There was a lovely slate floor that replaced the original gravel; the gravel was home to chiggers that would attack ankles.
The gazebo was my favorite part of the property. I read there and worked on music with the laptop studio that was gradually replacing the more conventional setup in my basement office. Below I’ve posted my version of the main theme from Mondo Cane, entirely recorded in the gazebo.
This 1962 Italian film kicked off the mondo genre. I quote from the IMDb’s description: a collection of mostly real archive footage displaying mankind at its most depraved and perverse.
Dozens of these films were made in the wake of
Mondo Cane’s success.
The soundtrack consists of lush and romantic orchestral themes that are an odd match to the footage. This particular theme from the film was adapted by Kai Winding and turned into a pop hit in 1963 under the title More.
Lyrics were
soon added and other adaptations followed, and within a couple of years the tune had become a standard. The original melody is written by Nino Oliviero and Liz Ortolani; Ortolani was hired to compose the score for the infamous Cannibal Holocaust as a
direct result of his work on Mondo Cane, and both composers enjoyed long film and television careers.
Theme From a Mondo Cane Remake (More)
In wait, Garrison
Abandoned mall
