Sitcoms or Sexcoms?

India’s ministry of information and broadcasting regularly pulls up, and even bans, television channels for showing “offensive” content.

In May this year, the central (federal) ministry banned Comedy Central for a few days for violating Programming Code 1 (Offends against good taste or decency) in two shows telecast last year. The channel apparently telecast a show in which a man reportedly performed standup comedy with “suggestive gestures” which, according to the ministry, offended good taste or decency, was obscene, and denigrated women.

The ministry, in its order, maintained that the channel apologised for “inadvertently airing the aforesaid episode” due to “unintentional genuine error” and promised not to repeat it. I think the channel was let off with a stern warning for I don’t remember it going off the air.

But, talk about bureaucratic verbosity.

The I&B ministry takes its job seriously; in fact, so seriously that English channels are forced to blot out certain words that could offend Indian sensibility. Words like “sex,” “crap,” “shit,” and “penis" are taboo. So even before Joey, Raymond, Jerry, Frank, Chandler, Alan, Charlie or Sheldon are about to utter dirty words, their mouths are washed with soap and water. The words are either blanked out or substituted by less offending words, often with hilarious result.

Of the two censor weapons, I find blanking out words more annoying. You'd think the actor has had facial paralysis in mid-sentence. In a Friends episode, for instance, when Joey finds out that Chandler and Monica (now then let’s play it safe) are sleeping together, he bursts out: “You two were having sex!” Instead, what we hear is “You two were having ______” and you mouth the missing word silently. There isn’t an Indian viewer who didn’t score well in ‘Fill in the Blanks’ in school.

If I were to give the I&B ministry the remotest benefit of the doubt, it would be on account of the excessive use of cuss words, however banal, in most sitcoms and dramas, be it Two And A Half Men or Grey’s Anatomy where the word “sex” is par for the course because everybody is sleeping with somebody.

The Girl from Sunset Ranch by Amy Bell Marlowe (1914)

This review of a semi-western book is my contribution for Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

“If I could only clear dad's name!”

The Girl from Sunset Ranch, or Alone in a Great City, by Amy Bell Marlowe, a pen name of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, is classified as a western as well as for young readers, particularly girls. The 243-page book is a mixture of the two and will appeal to readers of both literary forms.

The story originates in the open and invigorating ranges of the west and plays out almost entirely in the narrow and stifling environment of the east. Caught between these opposite worlds is Helen Morrell, a lovely and kind-spirited 16-year old girl and the sole owner of Sunset Ranch, one of the few remaining great ranches of the west.

Helen was born on Sunset Ranch and brought up by her father, Prince Morrell, the wealthy cattle king who kept away from the public glare. He had a good reason. Years before he set up the ranch near Elberon, Montana, the cattleman, originally an Easterner, had fled New York to escape arrest after he was falsely accused of embezzling money from the bank account of the firm in which he was a major partner. 

"Here’s the very nicest girl
who ever came out of Montana."

As the years passed, Morrell, an honest gentleman, built his cattle ranch into a cattle empire and repaid all his firm’s creditors but could not remove the stain on his name. This pained him no end.

Then, one day, as Morrell is dying, he tells Helen about his past and appeals to her to go to New York and clear his name. The cattleman has another reason for sending his little girl eastward: he is afraid to leave his daughter alone behind—“in this rough place out here”—and wants her to grow up among people with refinement.

Helen, who never tires of mentioning how much she loves Sunset Ranch, has spent her childhood and early youth among cowpunchers, squaws, greasers, and half-breeds, simple folk who dote on her as much as her father did. In fact, Big Hen Billings, the whiskered giant foreman of the ranch, treats her like his own daughter. So trustworthy is he that Prince Morrell has made him executor and guardian of Helen.

Two months after her father’s death, the poor little rich girl heads east, by the transcontinental train, to keep a promise she made to a man she loved more than anyone in the world and the only family she ever knew.

In New York, the brave, kind, and open hearted Helen Morrell is confronted by a world far removed from the gentle plains of distant Montana. She discovers the dark side of the Great City; selfish and pompous relatives who live in a mansion on Madison Avenue and hate her presence, to the extent that she must enter and exit through the ‘lower’ door; the greedy man who framed her father: the old bookkeeper who worked in Morrell’s firm and now lives in abject poverty; and the old nurse with the soft skin and a kindly smile confined to the attic by her Uncle Starkweather and his three daughters, her cousins.

“Such a thing as inhospitality could not be imagined by Helen Morrell. A begging Indian was never turned away from Sunset Ranch. A perfect stranger—even a sheepman—would be hospitably treated in Montana. Her cousins hadn't the decencies of red Indians.”

Helen is shocked but does not lose hope and returns hatred with love at every turn. The pretty cowgirl, who hasn't told anyone that she is the owner of Sunset Ranch and thousands upon thousands of acres of grazing land or is worth more than half-a-million dollars, finds warmth and hospitality on Madison Street, the underbelly of New York, in her friendship with a poor Russian girl. Later, she meets a young handsome lawyer whom she had rescued after he fell off the cliff near her ranch and who now helps her clear her father’s name. In the end Helen is only too glad to return to Sunset Ranch, back to doing the things she loves doing, "roping steers, breaking ponies, and riding bareback like an Indian."

Final word
The Girl from the Sunset Ranch is a delightful and charming story of a girl with strong moral values and one who is mature far beyond her young age. An interesting element in the book is the many different ways in which Helen, her foreman, Big Hen Billings, her Jewish friend from Madison Street, and her three cousins speak, which brings the narrative alive.

For me, the key aspect of this book was Amy Bell Marlowe’s constant comparison between life in the west and in the east, as evident in the hospitality of Sunset Ranch and the unfriendliness of Starkweather Mansion and the way the homeless and the outsider are treated in the two opposite poles of America. I got the impression that Marlowe came from the Frontier for the pseudonymous writer never loses an opportunity to belittle the east. The west is where the best is could well be the tagline of this book.

About the author
An article on Wikipedia says that Amy Bell Marlowe was a pseudonym used by the Stratemeyer Syndicate which published this and other books as part of the ‘Amy Bell Marlowe's Books for Girls’ series. The Syndicate was founded by Edward Stratemeyer and is best known for producing the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Rover Boys, and Tom Swift series.

Other books by Amy Bell Marlowe are Frances of the Ranges, or The Old Ranchman's Treasure, 1915; The Girls of Hillcrest Farm, or The Secret of the Rocks, 1914; A Little Miss Nobody, or With the Girls of Pinewood Hall, 1914; and Wyn's Camping Days, or The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club, 1914.

Unusual terms
Taking a leaf from the excellent blog published by Ron Scheer, a noted expert on westerns, especially frontier fiction, I reproduce below some of the unusual words I came across in the book. The meanings are courtesy internet.

1. Coulees: applied rather loosely to different landforms, all of which refer to a kind of valley or drainage zone.

2. Greenie: a newcomer, a greenhorn

3. Tenderfoot: an inexperienced person

4. Mazouma: Hebrew for money

5. Chee: a word used for emphasis when talking about something good

Just Between Friends (1986) and Stepmom (1998)

The husband, the wife, and the other woman is the theme of the films under review this Tuesday, for Overlooked Films, Audio & Video over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

Take a good look at the two posters. You’ll notice that the names of the male actors appear after those of the female actors. In fact, you’ll also notice that the male actors are nowhere in the main picture frame. That is because the films are more about the women and less about the men. Yet, the men are very much there, though, almost by accident. But, take them out and there would be neither a story nor a film in either case. 

The men are caught between two women who love them (or loved them) and who stake a legitimate claim to their families, their children, and their future. It may seem as if Just Between Friends and Stepmom is about the proverbial “husband, wife, and the other woman’ and while they are to a considerable extent, the films are really about the relationship between the women and their coming to terms with the reality that they love (or loved) the same men—their lives entwined by a twist of fate.

The relationship that Holly Davis (Mary Tyler Moore) and Sandy Dunlap (Christine Lahti) share in Just Between Friends is identical to the one that Jackie Harrison (Susan Sarandon) and Isabel Kelly (Julia Roberts) share in Stepmom.

While a tragedy helps close friends Holly and Sandy bury their differences and come together in Just Between friends, the terminal illness of Jackie and her gracious acceptance of her ex-husband’s girlfriend, Isabel, helps the two women bond in Stepmom. On her part Isabel accepts Jackie’s natural instinct to raise her children the way she wants and tries to fit into that role as best as she can. 

Chip Davis (Ted Danson) and Luke Harrison (Ed Harris) are two fine men, caring husbands (ex in the case of Luke), and doting fathers. Chip loves his wife Holly in Just Between Friends while Luke is considerate towards his ailing ex-wife Jackie who lives with him, their two children, and his new flame, Isabel, in Stepmom.

Directors Allan Burns and Chris Columbus handle the relationships between the two pairs of women with great sensitivity. There is mutual respect, understanding, sympathy, and even compassion between the women. For instance, in a Thanksgiving scene in Stepmom (I think), Isabel is about to click a family photo of Jackie, Luke and their two children when Jackie beckons Isabel to join them. Isabel sits with the family on the couch and is pleasantly surprised when Jackie puts an arm around her, as all five of them smile into the camera.

Just Between Friends and Stepmom are two very nice films and what makes them a touch more special is the excellent casting, especially Mary Tyler Moore and Susan Sarandon as the wronged wives who never actually grieve over the cruel blow fate deals them.

Recommended

Reading Habits #2: Do you have a plan?

I'd like to think I do, but I don't. I read all kinds of books. There is no proper system or pattern. I read almost everyday though the number of pages may vary. There are times when I don't read anything at all. This lack of discipline in my reading habit is responsible for the fewer books I read every month. Where others read as many as eight to 10 books, sometimes more, a month and even review them, I'm unreasonably ecstatic if I read more than five books. So far that has happened only once this year.

A major drawback in this attitude towards reading is half-read books. On last count I'd three unfinished books. However, I'm confident that I'll get them out of the way by Diwali in November.

The reason I didn't complete these books is because I probably got tired of them and picked up something more fast paced. In recent memory, two books I read over a long period of time were Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy and Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I quite forgot that I was reading them. They are some of the finest books I've read.

One of my biggest challenges is which books to read and from which category. I can never decide. I vacillate between mystery, western, espionage, war, thriller, humour, classic, and general fiction, like one giant pendulum. The moment my left hand picks up a mystery, my right is already edging towards a western. I want to read them all...at the same time. And I'm not even talking about non-fiction.

There's an even bigger dilemma: will I ever read the books I want to read before I die? Not without a plan.

Perhaps, I can make my task easier by looking up 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a literary reference book compiled by more than 100 literary critics worldwide and edited by Peter Boxall, Professor of English at Sussex University. I discovered this book online yesterday. I think it covers fiction in all the important genres. 50, 100 or 1,001... whatever the listings I still have to read the books and the sooner I start the better for my  book reading score.

What about you? Do you have a reading plan?

July 16, 2013: Reading Habits #1

Kurt Russell in Executive Decision (1996)

I offer this film for Tuesday's Overlooked Film, Audio & Video meme over at Todd Mason's blog Sweet Freedom.

The movies I do, if we make them well, will be fun to watch. They may not be the best movie of the year, and I may not be your favourite actor, but people come up to me all the time and say, “I like the movies you do”.
— From Personal Quotes, IMDb

Kurt Russell has played a law enforcer in several films. He has been a cop, a detective, a sheriff, an intelligence analyst, and an army officer in a film and television career spanning nearly five decades. He acts well and his films are entertaining. In spite of the success of many of his films, he is largely forgotten as a cinematic hero. I don't hear much about him nowadays.

I like Russell as an actor because he has a strong, yet unassuming, presence on screen and I'm tempted to compare him with the likes of Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, and Russell Crowe, each of whom have made more blockbusters than he has, with the exception of Tombstone (1993). 

Kurt Russell doesn't have many cult favourites though he thinks otherwise.

For some reason, I remember the 62-year old actor most for his films of the 1990s which, aside from Tombstone, include Soldier, Escape from L.A., Executive Decision, Stargate, Unlawful Entry, and Backdraft.

I don't recall seeing any of his 1980's films, barring Tequila Sunrise and Tango & Cash, and I have always wanted to see Escape from New York, a futuristic film he shares with veterans Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, and Donald Pleasence.

Last week, I saw Executive Decision again because I love action movies. Only the possibility of a headache and a prolonged bout of inertia prevent me from watching, back to back, films like Air Force One, Commando, Terminator 2, Predator, and Independence Day. I have already seen them more than once.

Directed by Stuart Baird, a film editor of considerable repute, Executive Decision is the story of an Athens-Washington 747 airliner hijacked by Middle Eastern terrorists led by Nagi Hassan, played by the redoubtable David Suchet.

Dr. David Grant (Kurt Russell), an intelligence officer in the Pentagon, accompanies a commando unit headed by Lt. Colonel Austin Travis (Steven Seagal) who dies as the military crew is transferred to the airliner in a daring mid-air operation. No longer in the reckoning, Seagal’s cameo is understandable.

Rat (John Leguizamo) takes charge of the unit which, apart from Grant, includes a seriously injured military bomb expert, two commandos, and Dennis Cahill (Oliver Platt), who, as a timid computer engineer, livens up the proceedings. In her nominal role, Flight Attendant Jean (Halle Berry) nearly risks her life doing an inside job for the commando unit.

Together, they must find the bomb, defuse it, and eliminate the terrorists before the airliner is blown out of the sky by American fighter planes, to prevent it from entering US air space. The title of the film refers to a presidential order to that effect.

Nagi Hassan has hijacked the plane to seek the release of terrorist mastermind El Sayed Jaffa (Andreas Katsulas). Grant, however, suspects that Hassan has a more sinister and terrifying motive behind the hijacking. He is convinced that Hassan plans to detonate the bomb over the United States and wipe out the eastern seaboard.

Nagi Hassan (David Suchet) to his men: Allah has chosen us for a task far greater than Jaffa's freedom. We are the true soldiers of Islam. Our destiny is to deliver the vengeance of Allah into the belly of the infidel.

Rat and his men are initially sceptical of Grant, of his relative inexperience in matters of the military, and his contribution to the secret operation. Once on board the hijacked airliner, however, they soon realise that they couldn't have known about the bomb or overpowered the terrorists without intelligence inputs from the tuxedo-clad Pentagon officer.

Dr. David Grant (Kurt Russell) to the unit: Look, I'm not telling you how to do your job, but if that DZ5 is on board, there's gonna be a bomb attached to it, and you GODDAMN well better find it!

This is what Kurt Russell said about the movie: “When I read 'Executive Decision', it was a real page-turner. I read scripts for the movies more than I do for the characters. I've read lots of characters I'd like to play, but I didn't enjoy the movie itself that much. I liked the fun of 'Executive Decision', you know.”

If Executive Decision was a novel, it would have been a page-turner, right down to the last scene when (the mascara-eyed) Kurt Russell is forced to land the badly-damaged 747 at Dallas International Airport, with some ill-timed humour which takes the pressure off both Kurt Russell and Halle Berry inside the cockpit, as well as the viewers. The film lacks suspense but on the whole it is a good entertainer.

Recommended, both for the underrated Kurt Russell and some decent action.

Robert De Niro as Hosni Mubarak

I couldn't resist this rather silly post but I like conjuring up separated-at-birth scenarios. If ever a film was made on the life of Hosni Mubarak, the actor most suited to play the deposed Egyptian president, I think, would be Robert De Niro. Just make sure they have their sunglasses on. Not that I'd want to watch a biopic on Mubarak but then they made more than one film on Idi Amin who was a more colourful, barbaric, and cruel dictator.

Who's next? James Earl Jones as Robert Mugabe? They're both in their 80s. It's worth a shot.

A visit to a book fair on Independence Day

On holidays, the best place to visit in Mumbai is the once bustling central business district in south Mumbai. The offices are closed, there’re fewer cars on the road, still fewer pedestrians on the footpaths, and plenty of room on the wide and sweeping promenade fronting the Arabian Sea at Marine Drive, popularly known as Queen’s Necklace because of its shape. It stretches from land’s end at Nariman Point, once the hub of banking and commercial activity, to Chowpatty, a flat beach located about 3 km (4.8 miles) away. This is VIP territory as the offices and homes of government ministers and secretaries, police and municipal commissioners, influential businessmen and industrialists, and assorted celebrities are located in the area. As a result it is the cleanest and most well-maintained part of the city.

The Queen’s Necklace at Marine Drive.

In the suburb where I live, 22 km (35 miles) north of the city, the only places a family can visit on holidays are swanky malls, supermarkets, multiplexes, food courts, and restaurants, and all these are crowded and noisy. But there is only so much you can do in these places: buy stuff you don’t really need, watch a film you know you'll soon catch on cable, frantically look for a seat in a food court, await your turn outside a restaurant, or loiter about the mall and get in someone's way. People do this for fun every weekend.

Visiting relatives is a grim option. I don’t fancy it on a holiday and, I’m sure, neither do they. In Mumbai, you treasure your holidays and your privacy and the last thing you want is to be with people.

On Thursday, August 15, India’s 66th Independence Day, the family took the ‘local’ train to south Mumbai. Train because it is the fastest, quietest, and surest way to get to anywhere in the city. It took us half an hour by a fast train to reach Churchgate, the last station on the western line and a stone’s throw from the picturesque Queen’s Necklace. It would have taken close to an hour by road, much longer on a working day.

You’ll find the places we visited at the bottom of the map. 
© www.mumbainet.com

We first went to a popular book fair at the nearby Sunderbhai Hall at New Marine Lines, not far from my office. Ashish Book Centre, organisers of the book exhibition, had on sale over a million books in nearly all genres. Most of these books were selling at 50 to 85 per cent discount. People thronged the fiction, cookery, management, children and young adult, interior and architecture, and reference sections the most.

The only problem was finding a title you had in mind. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. While books were lined up or stacked in categories, the spines facing towards you, there was no method or pattern to it. They were all mixed up. I'm not sure the organisers know their books well.

The fiction category was impressive but in a disarray. I ran my fingers through row after row of books and saw many familiar names, some I’d read, some I hadn't, like Patricia Cornwell, Stuart Woods, Anne Perry, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, David Baldacci, Deborah Crombie, Danielle Steel, Stieg Larsson, Jeffrey Deaver and hundreds of others, both old and new authors.

Most novels were selling for Rs.50 or Rs.100 ($1 = Rs.62) and they were all in brand new condition. I picked up five books, put away four, and bought one—Me Tanner, You Jane, an Evan Tanner paperback by Lawrence Block, for Rs.50. I don’t come across his novels often. The others can wait another holiday, another book fair.

From Sunderbhai Hall, we took a taxi to Colaba Causeway, the famous shopping boulevard, where we ate at a small continental restaurant called Café Churchill. The wartime British prime minister glared at us from one of the walls. We had a meal of fish and chicken fingers with chips, burgers with chips, country style chicken and mixed grill, with grilled sauce and garnished with boiled egg, lemon and peach iced tea, and chocolate cake. On the way back to Churchgate station, we stopped at an old ice cream parlour called K. Rustom’s which serves slabs of ice cream tucked between thin biscuit slices. I spoiled it all by ordering a lime and lemon ice cream for myself. It tasted like orange peel.

Here I must mention that the places we went to were less than a kilometre from the places that were attacked by seaborne terrorists in November 2008. These were CST (Victoria Terminus), a major railway station, two 5-star hotels, a café frequented mostly by foreigners (a few buildings from Café Churchill), and a Jewish outreach centre.

Before I wind up our I-Day celebration, I’ll tell you what the Lawrence Block novel is about. I haven’t read it yet but here’s what it says on the back cover…

“It’s a jungle out there. Literally. At least for Evan Tanner, eternally sleepless sometime superspy, who finds himself in Africa on the trail of the AWOL ruler of tiny Modonoland. It seems the petty despot’s gone missing, and he’s taken the state treasury along with him. No stranger to impossible missions and international peril, Tanner’s been in over his head before. This time, however, he’s in imminent danger of being buried alive.”

I loved the first line of the book. In typical fashion, Lawrence Block writes, “I have never liked funerals. I can appreciate the advantages of conventionalizing one’s relationship with Death, but this appreciation has never advanced beyond the level of pure theory.”

I think I’m going to get to the book faster than I’d planned.