India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
India Uncut Nugget 28
Schmuck! You shortchanged yourself. What studio head tells a director to make a picture longer? Only a nut like me. You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie.Robert Evans, Hollywood mogul, shouting at Francis Ford Coppola after the first screening of "The Godfather."
I found this quote in an excellent feature in the Guardian by Peter Bradshaw on how extremely long modern Hollywood films are getting. He's upset that "The Da Vinci Code" was "a pitiless two-and-a-half hours." Peter, dude, if you're in Mumbai anytime soon, gimme a buzz and I'll take you for a Yashraj film or two. They you'll know 'pitiless'!
Nah, actually I agree with Bradshaw, and the greatest movie-watching experiences of my life have come watching the ten one-hour films in "The Decalogue," Krzysztof Kieslowski's masterpiece. In India, strangely, we have a taste for the longer stuff. Are our lives are so wretched that we need more of the escapism? Nah.
(Link via email from Kind Friend.)
More Nuggets and Aphorisms here.
Update (June 22): Karthik PG writes in:
We have liking for longer films coz in places like Chennai you can spend more time away from the sun.Heh. Yes, I remember as a student in Poona I spent many hours every day in summer in the British Council Library on FC Road, not because I loved books (though I did), but because it was air-conditioned. Immense relief would come on entering.
Sorry, that last sentence reads kind of strange, doesn't it?
