according to this NYTimes article, people do not flock to the movies that are leading in the Oscar categories. why is that?
I think there might be a reason. what the academy looks for might not be what the audience look for. they have different tastes.
consider, Caviar in food, for example.very few people have a taste for Caviar. and though it is expensive, many people might not like it.
and so with the movies. some of them could only be appreciated by the ones who have a good taste for it.
so we hear that the dancing girl of Lahore have gone on a strike.
no country for dancing girls
Lahore is a culture rich city, and has been like that for centuries. the old Heera Mandi ( named after a sikh called Heera Singh, though literally it translates into diamond market) had been where the old “tawaif” or dancing girls culture was flourishing. the princes in the old days were sent to these dancers because not only were these people skilled at dancing, they could also talk in a refined, most elegant way. thus what came to be known as the “baazari talk” (specifically, talking in the most crude way. very close to dirty talk) is a misleading term. after all, these people talked in the most elegant way, with all the care taken about how to address people. it was gentleman’s talk in short.
the Heera Mandi still retains some of those aspects. if you go there, you will find women who dance and sing for a fee. and many of them have licenses. some, however, went into prostitution, sullying the name of the Heera mandi.
Ziaul Haq ( that man whose marks on our society would probably never be washed completely) thought that in order to appease the ultra-religious people, it was best to ban some activities. he banned dancing on television. and most of his policies had a negative impact on the dancers. famous Kathak (classical) dancers left the country. but his banning did not do good to the society. the prostitutes used to be in one particular area in Lahore. now, thanks to his policies, they are ubiquitous.
I have related this history precisely because in morality government policies seldom work. and is counter-productive. when the MMA or the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal came into power, it banned all such cultural activies in the NWFP. Eqbal Ahmed had called Afghanistan “a land without music“; precisely that was what the MMA wanted the NWFP to become. however, they were beaten by Technology. what the people could not watch in a live theater, they started watching on CDs. and those artists got a new breath of life in the form of those CDs. again the failure of government in things related to morality.
now what i can not understand is why something that is acceptable on film is certainly unacceptable live?( perhaps the same thing could be argued against the ban on prostitution in the united states, because porn is just paid sex on film). I must say that the quality of theater has gone down in pakistan, because all these theaters contain are naked jokes, ill written scripts and dances. and i have criticized their quality. but, still, it is not the government’s job to ban them. that should reside with the populace. and as we have seen, given the thriving nature of those theaters, it does not seem like the populace would like to get it banned.
well in the first place, he never went anywhere. but he has been out of the documentry scene for a while. he is back with a bank with his new documentry “SiCKO“. the documentry is about the US healthcare industry.
I have not watched the movie but I think the topic merited a documentry. the US healthcare has long been ripping the consumers off. through powerful lobbying they are able to keep the prices high. the same drugs are available in the neighboring countries at a fraction of the cost in the USA. A while ago an online drug company, based in Canada, that mailed prescription drugs was made illegal through lobbying.
as a result the US costs of medicine has been soaring. the USA now spends 15% of the GDP on its healthcare, the highest in the world. most of the cost is due to the inflation in the prices of medicine.
so IMO the documentry was long overdue. and I wont be surprised if it makes as big a splash as Farenheit 9/11.
it happens once in a while when a comic character dies.captain America went through many adventures until Marvel comics thought it was finally time to cut short his life at 66 years.
American cinema is very creative as far as the propaganda goes; this character was created as a propaganda tactic in the world war II. Charlie Chaplin was also a product of that time; his first film being the “great dictator”. i have another cartoon video “Nip the Nips” starring Bugs Bunny.
these characters achieved multiple targets; apart from instilling blind patriotism, they also created hatred in the minds of people against others such as the japanese and germans. for that the American people of Japanese descent had to go through rough times.it took a long time to erase that hate.
so while Captain America might have given some people laughs at times, we should remember their dark aspects too.
RIP, captain America.
ever seen a movie that had achieved a lot of success at the boxoffice but you did not like it on video. well i think there are a lot of movies like that that one can only enjoy on the big screen.
examples abound: pirates of the caribbean, Jurassic Park,Kill Bill and Lord of the rings are but a few of them. so next time when you rent out a movie and dont like it, it probably is one of those that are fun on the big screen only.
now some of you might know me as a movie junkie. and I do watch a lot of movies. But I always watch the ones that have the best reviews.
recently I watched “cars” and I Was a little disappointed. even it was rated higly by most of the sites and although it generated a lot of revenue, it did not really do anything for me.
The graphics were great as usual but the dialogues and the story lacked the punch, I think. the dialogues were not that exciting, not that funny.
I believe that I was expecting a lot of the Pixar, given their earlier installments. it was still a good movie. it was not upto the standards that they have set for themselves through installments like “Monsters Inc.”, “Toy Story 1 & 2” and such.
VOXMOODZ 