Link Ch. 8 – Great Bollywood Example

UPDATE – New version of clip with good subtitles.

I showed a great clip from the Bollywood musical Mohabbatein today in class.  It’s a wonderful way to get across the idea of what the masala or “spice” movies are like.

The masala movies feature several musical numbers, a strong male hero, a coy heroine, and an obvious villain. The movies have as many as ten separate storylines—in contrast to American movies, which typically tell one or two stories.

One reason for the musical numbers in Indian films is that they help break through language barriers. India alone has more than twenty-five languages. Anupam Sharma, who works in the Indian movie industry, says that Bollywood movies touch people throughout the world: “Because of the distances and different dialects in India, music is the universal language.”

When it comes to romance and sex, Bollywood films tend to be far more conservative than American films. “India is still clinging on to its social values, which explains Bollywood’s success everywhere but in America,” said Priya Joshi, an Indian cinema scholar. “Bollywood films don’t have any kissing in them or tend not to. Warner Bros. used to make movies like this in the past. . . . If it’s ready to return to its roots, then it’s ready for Bollywood.”

Here’s the clip.  It runs about 9 minutes and has English subtitles for some of the lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAo8zRrSHTw
UPDATE: Slumdog Millionaire actress loses everything in slum fire.

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You talkin’ to me? 150 great movie lines & catch-phrases

/Film posted a great collection of movie lines and catch-phrases today.  Quotable quotes ranging from Apocalypse Now (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning….” to Zombieland (“Time to nut up or shut up.”)  You can read the complete list at /Film.

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Team Coco on the iPad2

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Kathleen Parker for my commentary students

My commentary and blogging students are reading Kathleen Parker for class next week.  Here are some good places to start.  (And if you are not in my class, Kathleen Parker is a much better columnist than she was sidekick for Elliot Spitzer…)  And you might find interesting the fuss Parker (and Chris Buckley) created when the two center conservative columnists endorsed Obama for president.

UPDATE: Interview with Kathleen Parker on C-SPAN’s Q&A program

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Thinking about media change (and iPads)

It hasn’t been a productive day today.  My main interest has been following all the news about the new iPad 2 announced over the lunch hour. I’m impressed by it, and absolutely certain I did the right thing in waiting a year for the version 2.0 of the iPad to come out.  But in the mean time, there has been some interesting media “think pieces”  out there worth taking a look at:

  • GQ – The Day The Movies Died
    Mark Harris takes a look at what’s wrong with the movies today, and with a single paragraph nails it:

    [L]et’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a
    4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

    He prefaces this with a lengthy introduction on how Hollywood couldn’t believe that Christopher Nolan’s
    Inception would be a success.  I mean, it had bankable stars, the director of the decade, and was a sci-fi action movie.  What was wrong with it?  It was original….
  • Daring Fireball – Dealing With Apple’s 30 Percent Commission
    DF’s John Gruber gives us an exhaustive, if not exhausting, analysis of Apple’s controversial policy of charging a 30 percent commission on all subscriptions sold through iTunes or in-app purchases.  If you really are interested in new-media economics, you need to read his take on it.  Great followup to what we were looking at a couple of weeks ago.

    Also, some additional analysis of Gruber’s arguments by the Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

  • USA Today – Growth of “Indie” Writers
    With the success of Amazon’s Kindle as both a hardware platform and as software that runs on almost any type of computer or mobile device, there is actually now a market for e-books.  And authors like Amanda Hocking are making good money selling their books at a low cost without the involvement of a traditional publisher.  Hocking writes paranormal books for young adults, and she reportedly sold 450,000 copies on Amazon.com in January.  Her big advantage?  She gets to keep 70 percent of the cover price of all her books sold, rather than the more typical 15-30 percent offered by publishers.
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Columnists for my commentary class

Here are links to a number of columnists and columnist index pages from newspapers around the country for my commentary writing students, and anyone else who’s interested.

National Columnists

Commentary from newspapers around the United States:

Commentary from Nebraska newspapers:
Note: Many of the posts here are letters to the editor.  They are interesting, but they are not newspaper columns. If you use this link, check what you are reading carefully.

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Oscars, the day after

An array of links, inspired by last night’s Academy Awards:

And finally… A link back to a post I did in December about the Bechdel Test on the relevance of women’s roles in movies.  Fascinating way to analyze how important women are in a movie.

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

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Commentary Through Impersonation: Wisconsin & Arizona

There’s been quite a fuss going on about a journalist from an alternative news source calling up a conservative politician and then impersonating a someone the politician would feel was sympathetic.   The alt journalist then uses the material from his ill-gained interview and uses it to make the politician look bad.  Once the interview is published, the Society of Professional Journalists talks about how unethical the deception was.  Meanwhile, the rest of the news media talks on and on about the deception, and the original prankster gets a big laugh over all the attention his gained by flouting journalistic convention.

Wisconsin Governor Scott WalkerYou would be excused if you thought I was talking about how Ian Murphy editor of the Buffalo Beast impersonated billionaire David Koch in order to talk with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  And you would be right.

But I was also talking about a similar situation that took place 21 years ago.

Arizona Governor Jan BrewerAs I wrote about last year, in the spring of 1990 then Arizona state senator (now governor) Jan Brewer proposed a bill that would require the labeling of record albums that portrayed sexual content in a violent context, violence, Satanism, murder, morbid violence, or the use of illegal drugs. It would also have made it crime to sell these offensive albums to minors.

The music reviewer for the Phoenix-area alternative newspaper New Times taped a series of interviews with the senator while pretending to be from the Mesa Tribune, a local conservative daily.

With the material from the taped interviews, the music critic constructed a rap tape based on the group W.A.S.P.’s song “F*** Like a Beast” using Senator Brewer’s voice. He then played this tape over a sound system at noon at the state Capitol. For several weeks, stories about the conflict continued to surface across Arizona and national media. The fuss finally died when Brewer withdrew her bill from consideration.

The punking of Governors Walker and Brewer, and the subsequent media fusses over them, serves as a great reminder of Truth #4 of the Seven Truths They Don’t Want You To Know About The Media – Nothing’s New:  Everything that happens in the past will happen again.

A thoughtful person might also ask how being deceptive in search of a satirical story compares to being deceptive while working on a serious story, such as ABC’s investigation of misconduct in food handling at Food Lion stores?

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Radiohead vs. Dave Brubeck – Five Step

A Radiohead / Dave Brubeck mashup by Overdub.  Brilliant!

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