Happy Wednesday!!! Sorry, I forgot to put up this post until just now. It’s a confusing day.
I’ll start!
Reading: Started Carney’s House Party, also reading house ads as we get more serious about hunting (so stressful!).
Watching: I cracked and started Allen VS Farrow. I knew it would be fascinating and I wanted to wait until all the episodes were out, but I failed, last ep is this Sunday. Also, watching Poirot episodes with my parents, so soothing!
Thinking: Moving mostly!!! And also stuff like “is this really spring or is it the Chicago false spring?” “Should I buy more spring dresses or is that too soon?”
Listening: Shashi time!
Now, question for you!!!! What confusing celebrity story do you want a detailed researched 4 hour documentary about ala Allen vs. Farrow?
Hrithik versus Kangana. 100%. Or, alternatively, a 4 hour documentary on Shashi and Jennifer and their Awesome Perfection.
dontcallitbollywood 
Watching: Bombay Rose, the animated movie that is now on Netflix. It is wonderfully animated and has this wonderful world of sound that it really feels like it takes you to Bombay (even though I’ve never been there). It had this magical realism quality about it, and there is a love story there as well, as well as other amazing stuff. I recommend!
Reading: French poetry, believe it or not. I showed some of my poetry to a visiting teacher at my writing school and she compared my poetic style to Charles Baudelaire, the French romantic poet, which was a surprise.
Thinking: It is frightfully cold outside and yesterday it snowed and blew so much it was amazing. It is nice seeing those things from inside my warm home.
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I was going to brag about our nice spring weather, and then I looked at the forecast, and we are supposed to get snow again on Monday. Oh well. Summer will be here eventually.
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 10:30 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I watched Dharmadurai, a Vijay Sethupathi film, and liked it. A lot of things happen in the story, but what I liked the most was that a girl divorces her husband, and it was shown like: of course she is divorcing him because he is a bad person. Later she is in a live in relationship and have sex with Vijay Sethupathi and it’s also something normal. There are also scenes about dowry, and how terrible this custom is, and that the cool guys doesn’t want dowry, only the villains do. I don’t need more from a movie.
Yesterday I finished Ninnila Ninnila, a new telugu movie with Ashok Selvan, Ritu Varma and Nithiya Menen. I love all of them and was excited to watch this film but it was such a disappointment! It’s like a Koode but with very clumsy directing, unidimensional characters and the most annoying ghost ever (I literally wanted to kill her, she was so annoying!).
Today I checked what others say about it and was surprised because seems that everybody loves it. But why? I guess none of them saw Koode.
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Is it officially a remake of Koode or just a similar plot?
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 12:05 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Similar plot about a guy who has lost somebody and now sees the ghost of that person while falling in love with other woman. But the ghost is protaginist’s friend/girlfriend and not a sister. He also was a regular guy and not somebody with a sad past. And the most important – the ghost is unbearable and is there only because she doesn’t want to die, and not because she wants to help him to heal . + I swear she is the most childlish female character I have ever seen. Imagine an adult woman who acts like a 5 years old boy with ADHD.
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Oh! I saw a Christmas movie with this plot!
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Watching: Just finished re-watching Seasons 3 and 4 of the Good Place!
Reading: Trying to find Serena Singh Flips the Script and fingers crossed I do.
Thinking: I need to work, I need to work, I need to work.
Question! Have you ever watched a desi TV show? Not the cool ones, like Made in Heaven or Mentalhood, but the ones that run for a half hour every day and quickly disintegrate into meaninglessness? Like Jodha Akbar or Balika Vadhu (it ran for 11 years, I think)?
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I just rewatched The Good Place a few months ago! Such a fabulous show.
I have not watched a desi TV show! I have tried, but OMG, I just can’t. they are so slow, and so short at the same time.
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 1:42 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I tried watching one a friend told me about and the good part is that you can probably watch 70 episodes in 3 hours because you only really have to watch 10 minutes of one episode MAX to get what’s happening. And everyone is stereotype (Nerd, Cool, Bossy etc), so it’s very untaxing on your brain.
Up to a point (usually the 70 episode mark). Then it gets REALLY, REALLY weird.
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After watching the movie, then the mini series, then the movie again, I’m now reading Pride & Prejudice. My English teacher friend/neighbor had a copy, I didn’t even have to buy it.
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But you already know how it ends!!!! Why even bother reading the book 🙂
(as you suspected, the miniseries is almost word for word from the book. I think the Darcy voice overs were kind of edited together bits from elsewhere, but nothing new. The Wright movie I think is also mostly stuff from the book, he just cut out huge sections).
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 3:07 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Even the miniseries didn’t include the whole book. I get to read passages and visualize the different ways the different adaptations did it, and compare it to my own imagination. Also, it takes me a while to adapt to Austin’s language. So having the movie background was really useful for the first 20 pages as I acclimated myself to the speech.
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I really love spending time with Austen. Her words are wonderful, her eye for humanity, and she has a deft touch for story too. With Dickens when they make a movie it’s like they’re clearing away all the excess and trying to get at the form of the thing. But with Austen her books are sufficient unto themselves, the films kind of dance on top of them. Reading the books is a feeling of oh, that’s what they were trying to do.
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2/3 through the book and I have to give Joe Wright credit for turning Elizabeth in to a full person and known character for me right away. She is harder for me to grasp in the book.
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Have you read Bridget Jones’ Diary? Obviously the plot is sort of based on P & P, but one really subtle thing I think it grasped is that Lizzie is an unreliable narrator. She under and over values herself in different ways (doesn’t realize how charming and pretty she is, but also thinks she is more worldy wise than she is). Watching a movie, it’s easier for us to see that, to see Darcy and others reacting to Lizzie and her being unconscious. But in the book it’s a lot harder to convey. On the other hand, I think Bridget Jones the movie missed that point entirely and went with the unreliable narrators perspective on herself (chubby, awkward, unattractive) instead of picking up on the responses of people around he that show she is really something different.
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 11:56 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Not much to report this week. Still watching Peaky Blinders, thinking about Cillian Murphy’s face and how if you’re going to make a series with a lot of close-ups of your highly intelligent gangster looking poker faced it’s helpful to cast someone with fascinating bone structure and killer blue eyes. I do really respect the way the series shows the aftermath of WWI. The main characters all survived the trenches and they’re varying degrees of messed up in the head along with being competent killers and not afraid to die because some part of them is already dead. What does it do to a society to have a large portion of your able bodied men walking around like that? In the background you have the Irish war of independence and the rise of communism and clashes between striking workers and bosses, all the men who came back fighting on different fronts and the war is the constant point of reference – who went, who didn’t, who was too young and got to grow up without being a soldier. Anyway, it’s better than I expected and the seasons are only six episodes long so we’re speeding right through. First season was great, second was good, third I didn’t like as much, fourth is good again (Adrian Brody doing a full on Marlon Brando impression as a mafioso from NY). Also, the director loves Helen McCrory, she plays Cillian’s aunt who ran the business while the men were away and she gets all kinds of juicy character development and the camera spends almost as much time lingering on her face as it does on his.
(Also just learned she’s married to Damian Lewis from Homeland and that blew my mind a bit. And her character got to have a brief fling with Dr. Bashir from Deep Space Nine!) For a gangster series the women get a lot of agency and proper scenes and storylines. And the family all come from gypsies so that’s another interesting angle as well. Not in the DCIB comfort food zone I know, but there’s a lot there if you can not mind the blood :).
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Oh, and for celebrity documentary I’m going to go trashy and say the Jennifer Anniston-Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie triangle. Angelina has so much past, and Brad and Jennifer were in business together with their production house. I think they all turned out to be interesting enough individuals that I can’t get over the fact that they were entangled in this classic catty way.
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YES! I would LOVE that!!!! Especially because I actually like all 3 people involved. And now that Brad is giving all these great interviews about his alcoholism and how it has affected his whole adult life, that would be such a fascinating new level to it.
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:51 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I love texts that truly deal with the aftermath of war!!! There’s more and more 1950s set BBC shows (Father Brown, Call the Midwife, etc.) and I love the way they dig into post-war as part of the setting. Older people with PTSD, rubble from bombings, etc. etc. Even kids who grew up in the uncertainty of wartime and now have odd scars and needs.
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:36 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Yes! I’ve had a long standing personal fascination with WWI (the unrelenting tragedy of it, the impact on art, the roaring 20s and Prohibition and the societal upheaval of the interwar period), it’s exciting to see more shows and movies set in that period. I went down a Cillian Murphy rabbit hole last night, and by coincidence he’s played several characters in stories set around or right after WWI (along with one traumatized WWII soldier in Dunkirk). Maybe it’s his face, or his knack for conveying submerged sadness with an undernote of menace.
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He must be one of the most striking faces on screen! I remember going through a Cillian Murphy phase with the Batman films, Inception, 28 Days Later and Red Eye.
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Also, Hrithik did an incense ad, which is short and brings me happiness. 🙂
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Oooo, he’s keeping the grey in his hair!
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 2:52 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Ha–I hadn’t actually realized that his birthday was coming up! But I guess the mood was in the air nonetheless, because we have definitely gotten an early start on Shashi season in our household ( ; We usually have movie night on Sunday. Last week our neighbor came over and we watched “Deewaar.” He really really liked it, so we are planning on “Kaalaa Patthar” for this weekend. (I figured that was most similar kind of thing to “Deewaar,” for a newbie–?) And on my own I’ve rewatched “Trishul,” “Paap aur Punya,” “Suhaag,” and the very, very terrible Prime print of “Aa Gale Lag Jaa” over the past ten days or so. Roller! Skating!
Now that I realize that there is official reason to celebrate, I will suggest doing “Kalyug” with just the family. It is a favorite of ours, but takes some real investment of time and thought and emotional bandwidth. I would say we probably only watch it about once a year anyway.
By the way, do you know “Ghungroo”? It came to mind as a particularly excellent Shashi performance the other day, but then I briefly doubted my own memory that it existed at all, since I went to check the spelling and there wasn’t even a Wikipedia article. I dug it up on Einthusan, but haven’t rewatched yet. Hopefully it is as I remember–! It’s later for him, 1983.
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I haven’t seen nearly enough Shashi movies!!! Of the ones you list out, not only have I not seen Ghungroo, I haven’t even see Kaala Patthar or Kalyug.
But I am glad to hear your family is celebrating this joyous season in the proper way.
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 8:47 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Oh, “Kaalaa Patthar” is a must-watch for so many reasons! Salim-Javed, Yash Chopra, Rajesh Roshan, Shashitabh, and a great Shatrughan Sinha performance that nearly steals the whole show. It is one of those ’70s social dramas, I think one of the very best. Prime has it right now.
“Kalyug” is my favorite Mahabharata take, with Shashi as Karna (as it should be). Don’t know if it is streaming anywhere, since we have it on DVD. “Utsav” is a kind of similar film in that it is also based on folkloric material, a little more fun and lighthearted overall, but with Shashi in a very negative role.
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Not watching but really wanting to watch Jathi Ratnalu. It’s been getting good reviews. Only thing – Should I go to the theaters or not???
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If my vaccine tomorrow works out, I can go to theaters again! And report back to all of you!!!!
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For some reason, I’m going through a phase where I’m only interested in watching British period dramas! Since Bridgerton, I’ve watched Sanditon, Miss Scarlet and the Duke, White Princess, Northanger Abbey and currently watching Howards End. Also rewatching The Americans. Next I plan to watch Medici. I want to go through all the Austen adaptations I haven’t yet seen, maybe rewatch the ones I have. I’m up for more suggestions.
Have you seen Northanger Abbey with Felicity Jones? It’s such a charming one, it’s a shame I hadn’t watched it earlier because I’m not familiar with the novel. It’s such a different subject than Austen’s usual, but I was pleasantly surprised that the romance is so delightful and light-hearted! Tilney and Catherine are attracted to each other from the moment they meet, don’t attempt to hide it and their story progresses without any major drama or obstacle, it’s all so cute. Tilney might be my fav Austen hero now.
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North and South! If you haven’t seen it, you MUST. The hero is all hard and heartless, but really not, secretly he wants to better himself and cares about people. And it has one of the all time swooniest ending scenes.
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 7:07 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Of course, it’s a favorite! It’s the reason I’ll be a fan of RA forever.
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OOH! Now I have two new shows to watch: Miss Scarlet and the Duke and Northanger Abbey! Thank you! I loved Northanger Abbey the book but had no idea that there was a series. White Princess got a bit too dark for me, especially the ending. If you liked it though, you should check out White Queen and Spanish Princess.
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I didn’t know about this NA adaptation specifically, but I know every Austen work has been adapted multiple times, I just have to seek them out! I’m so glad I did, next is Mansfield Park, though I’m bracing for it to be dark. I was interested in White Princess specifically for a good enemies-to-lovers story, and Lizzie was great, both the character and Jodie Comer. But Henry got on my last nerve, he had literally no character development, kept whining about how nobody loves him from start to finish, ugh! You’re the freaking king of England, behave like one! I don’t want to watch Spanish Princess because knowing the kind of person Henry VIII was, I’m not going to buy any of his love stories. Maybe I’ll see White Queen.
Please watch Miss Scarlet and the Duke! There’s so much tension and banter between the leads, with the backdrop of crime-solving, it was the perfect show for me. It’s one of the few instances where I wanted the leads to get together, yet I’m glad they didn’t yet, because he has to grow and change his mentality to deserve her. I’m so glad it’s getting a 2nd season. Oh and also watch Sanditon, if you haven’t, just imagine the ending on your own!
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Just an FYI, I am not recommending White Queen or Spanish Princess. I was not a fan of any of them because they were way too dark and messy for me! My sister wanted to watch them so I watched it with her but it was not for me. Yes, Henry was awful in White Princess! Also, Lizzie’s actions at the end just gutted me. Teddy just made me cry.
On the other hand, I could watch North & South and Pride and Prejudice over and over again! Swooney men, strong female lead, so much romantic tension and happy endings!!!
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Oh also, I want to watch Sandition just not the last 10-15 minutes of it! I obviously read about the ending since everyone HATED IT. Do you think I should just stop when they kiss and just assume that that’s the end and they live happily ever after!
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The thing is, if you only care about the central couple’s story, you might want to stop after the kiss. But then you’d miss the story of another character, who we hate at the beginning and totally root for by the end, which has a lovely resolution. So you’ve to decide for yourself!
N&S is a comfort watch of mine as well, which is weird since it has a lot of sadness! Which P&P – series or movie? I don’t know if it’s sacrilege, but I prefer the movie. I watched both around the same time and don’t remember a thing from the series, but have watched the movie a few more times.
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We just had this discussion on Margaret’s P&P post. It took me forever to watch the P&P movie because I was determined to hate it and then I ended up loving it! I have seen the movie more then the series too. Although, I do love Colin Firth in the series so much!
N&S has a lot of sadness but for some reason I can handle it and I just love that it does such a great job showing the point of view of a business man vs the union leader and does justice to both point of views. It sort of reminds me of 1970s Indian movies with their social messages. Where as I could not deal with the sadness in Downton Abbey after the while. I am probably one of the few people that just stopped caring/liking that show after a while.
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Just jumping in to say I also got tired of Downton Abbey. For me it was the early seasons I just couldn’t take, I can’t “enjoy” WWI. The later seasons I liked more, but I still have no urge to rewatch them. Except for Rose’s storylines, because those are pretty much 100% happy.
On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 10:07 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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