tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post7921062664119047254..comments2024-02-01T01:23:04.509-08:00Comments on Dolce and Namak Talk Indian Movies: 2 Degrees of Separation: The French Romantic Hero in TollywoodDolce and Namakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-63859490126614360412010-09-13T11:14:03.616-07:002010-09-13T11:14:03.616-07:00If you ever do the inapropriate dream sequence or ...If you ever do the inapropriate dream sequence or slap post you should watch more of Tarak's movies. He does a lot of heroine slapping. Naaga has the best inapropriate dream seqeunce. He just sees his Father being burned alive as he gets carted off to jail. Perfect time for a love song! I did a review on my Blog.jjakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05299064826947363725noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-45352155234139055262010-09-13T09:59:37.220-07:002010-09-13T09:59:37.220-07:00Swati, you actually read all our banter!?! Hats of...Swati, you actually read all our banter!?! Hats off to YOU, lady!! :) And I see you've already discovered Jjake's blog, awesome, I was just going to recommend it to you! I think you'll fit right in with all of us around here! :)Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-5914931792836807442010-09-13T07:45:35.899-07:002010-09-13T07:45:35.899-07:00this is so insanely innovative that i can only dof...this is so insanely innovative that i can only doff my imaginary hat at you :D and LOVE this whole exchange between all you southie aficionados! lol!!! <br />slaps and kisses - all an integral part of the southie hero's wooing technique ;)Swati Sapnahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10542220359921937139noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-82541946049363194772010-09-11T18:24:51.111-07:002010-09-11T18:24:51.111-07:00ok haha! the blogpost can't come soon enough :...ok haha! the blogpost can't come soon enough :)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-78141088154786221972010-09-11T08:58:24.818-07:002010-09-11T08:58:24.818-07:00Ramesh, but of course! :) I will make sure to find...Ramesh, but of course! :) I will make sure to find visual evidence!<br /><br />Nicki, hey girl, what's up? Thank you for the praise, and shame on you for reading Dumbass instead of Dumas. :) Chi chi chi chi chi! :D But that's ok, I won't stay mad too long because I know you love our Southie heroes just as much as Dumas would if he were alive today ;)Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-73379964936401787202010-09-10T16:01:59.639-07:002010-09-10T16:01:59.639-07:00a rules of post slap dream sequences must necessar...a rules of post slap dream sequences must necessarily include video clip illustrations.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-84419019672181291942010-09-10T07:30:50.192-07:002010-09-10T07:30:50.192-07:00Love the collaboration with jjake!
You two gave ...Love the collaboration with jjake! <br /><br />You two gave it a lot of thought and I can not compare.<br /><br />Everytime I saw Dumas name, I thought about Dumbass...sorry :D Just had to say that.<br /><br />You know I <3 you cause I don't take anything too seriously too :D<br /><br />Great job, like always!Nickihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17535320732377404085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-62637775114165308022010-09-09T20:34:48.394-07:002010-09-09T20:34:48.394-07:00LMAO! I'm choking to death here!
I almost ag...LMAO! I'm choking to death here! <br /><br />I almost agree with that last sentence there (and I will definitely use "evil patriarchal slap" in reviews from now on! :)), unless we're talking about Hansika being at the end of that slap in which case, even though I think of myself as a right thinking person, I will probably enojoy it deep down inside. :P<br /><br />And because I'm watching Chiranjeevi's "Hitler" right now, I have to add there is one more type of slap: when the hero slaps the girl who finds it an appropriate time to reach over and kiss him after whining for a bit. WTF!!!... Words fail me...<br /><br />Random thought: I should do a post one day about when a dream sequence is an appropriate response... and when it's not. :)Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-32675402738807044032010-09-09T20:19:25.689-07:002010-09-09T20:19:25.689-07:00there are two types of slaps, lets be clear one is...there are two types of slaps, lets be clear one is when the hero,whose like this big hormonal dog,does to attract girl's attention. the appropriate response to this is a dream sequence with skimpily clad extras.<br /><br />the other is this evil patriarchal slap that the villain/ henchperson gives, which should be roundly condemned by all right thinking people.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-70284331819827564102010-09-09T19:35:35.214-07:002010-09-09T19:35:35.214-07:00Hah! Unless the villain's mother is even more ...Hah! Unless the villain's mother is even more badass than the villain and does the job herself (a la Desamuduru and possibly Yamadonga, though I can't remember who was slapping that poor girl the most in YD, I think it was a free-for-all...)Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-81987666192649945012010-09-09T19:29:38.313-07:002010-09-09T19:29:38.313-07:00yeah where better to bond (and unite in your hatre...yeah where better to bond (and unite in your hatred for the villain/ love for the son/beau ) than tied up in a villains lair! also, even a tollywood villain wouldnt DARE molest a heroine in front of his elders...so mum serves her purpose..Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-87462914345669775472010-09-09T19:10:15.215-07:002010-09-09T19:10:15.215-07:00ROFL You guys are making my night!
Jjake, you mak...ROFL You guys are making my night!<br /><br />Jjake, you make a good point: why carry your weapon when someone else can carry it for you! :D (In fact I vaguely remember most Romantic heroes having some valet or servant of sorts to carry their shit around).<br /><br />Ramesh, I would LOVE to see that blogpost!!! :) And I never wondered why the Southie hero needs a mom, it's clearly so that the bad guys can blackmail him when they find both his mom AND the heroine conveniently huddled together and not really making an effort to run and hide. Not to mention that the bad guy, even if he had a mom, would probably off her himself, so blackmail doesn't quite work both ways.Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-60104289405873038202010-09-09T18:56:22.647-07:002010-09-09T18:56:22.647-07:00anger. deffly anger cleansed and taught him the wa...anger. deffly anger cleansed and taught him the way of the sword( bushido). (nods earnestly)<br /><br />remind me to write a blogpost about the south indian hero and jean paul sartre's ideas about cleansing anger.<br /><br />besides i think you missed why a south indian hero needs a mum. Its so that the south indian heroine has someone to go to, you know, in case the tough guy starts getting..um.. rough...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-2979851292178568822010-09-09T18:51:55.041-07:002010-09-09T18:51:55.041-07:00That's easy: Tolly Heroes come by ass-kicking,...That's easy: Tolly Heroes come by ass-kicking, machete wielding, bad-assness, naturally. And they have super powers and most likely god on their side. I do want to point out that Tarak in Simhadri does have an axe. However,someone else kept it and tossed it to him whenever he needed it so he never did carry it about.jjakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05299064826947363725noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-75658725574431420722010-09-09T18:42:07.635-07:002010-09-09T18:42:07.635-07:00Ok, seriously Ramesh (haha, I stalked your blog, s...Ok, seriously Ramesh (haha, I stalked your blog, so I can stop calling you rameshram now ;)) you will be responsible if I die of a cough attack soon. I laughed so hard when I read that last one (couldn't stop laughing at the fact that the bad guy ABSOLUTELY has to be without a mum!) that my poor flu-infested lungs just couldn't take it anymore. Dude, if the rules for classical Tamil poetry are as funny as this, I need to read them! :D<br /><br />But it does make me wonder, if the hero (going home to his mum) never had a machete, where did he learn to be so good with it?Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-13992732082408760112010-09-09T18:01:07.416-07:002010-09-09T18:01:07.416-07:00"why it is that all the Romantic heroes have ..."why it is that all the Romantic heroes have a sword that they would give their life for but not a single one of the Tolly boys owns a machete"<br /><br />ooh i know the answer to that one! only bad guys without mums to go home to own a machete. besides a <open hand closing to arthritic clicks and snaps followed by a lot of bish-es can take out an army of machetes.<br /><br />besides, a true south indian hero can always BORROW a machete from a bad guy (without a mum) after beating him up..<br /><br />these areinvariant conventions like AK Ramanujan's rules for classical tamil poetry.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-707783518951863672010-09-09T15:16:20.601-07:002010-09-09T15:16:20.601-07:00Ghanan, you always manage to make me smile :) Than...Ghanan, you always manage to make me smile :) Thank you for the enthusiasm and now I really hope to not disappoint you (having a hardcore fan comes with some heavy responsibility, eh?) :D <br /><br />Glad you liked this post, there's so much more that should have gone in there, and since you've probably read all these novels too, next time I'm in France we can debate about why it is that all the Romantic heroes have a sword that they would give their life for but not a single one of the Tolly boys owns a machete :P Or some other similar life and death matter, surely we can come up with other existential questions like that :)<br /><br />Don't forget to check out Jjake's post as well! and speaking of which: <br />Jjake, I take it you were just as surprised as me to find out what the Indian boys learn in school :D We were so born on the wrong continents!... Chi!! :)Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-33279607453723081272010-09-09T03:31:56.209-07:002010-09-09T03:31:56.209-07:00I have no insightful reference to feed to this won...I have no insightful reference to feed to this wonderful discussion, I just wanna say :<br />Dolce, you absolutly rock !! <br />This post is a total delight. <br /><br />As I told you on BW?, I was already a fan, and this one didn't fail to make me a hardcore one. (the fact that I'm french has nothing to do with it. Or maybe a little. But nevermind. It rocks, no matter what. )<br /><br />What an absolute delight !Ghanannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-42961993400842863552010-09-08T19:49:25.865-07:002010-09-08T19:49:25.865-07:00jjake
yes, dumas, robert louis stevenson,kipling...jjake <br /><br />yes, dumas, robert louis stevenson,kipling.some lambs tales from shakesphere, and the obligatory hardy eliot and dickens.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-41691357876091517892010-09-08T18:39:18.588-07:002010-09-08T18:39:18.588-07:00oh youre welcome! keep up the great work!oh youre welcome! keep up the great work!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-74154824371079959502010-09-08T18:36:43.560-07:002010-09-08T18:36:43.560-07:00Wow Nice conversation you're having over here....Wow Nice conversation you're having over here. So Dumas was read in High School in India? Very Cool! We too were stuck with Dickenson and the even more depressing Steinbeck. Fortunetly for me my Dad loved Dumas when he was a kid and passed them on to my sisters and I when we were quite young. I think I read the 3 Musketeers just for fun when I was about 12. Anyway I don't have anything to add to your discussion except that I enjoyed reading it. :-)jjakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05299064826947363725noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-83363538134234722002010-09-08T09:59:35.364-07:002010-09-08T09:59:35.364-07:00Oooh... this is interesting information you just p...Oooh... this is interesting information you just pointed out, Rameshram! You lucky bums got to do this for school? I would have given my left arm to "study" Dumas and Zevaco instead of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and whatever that superdepressing Dickens novel was (Bleak House? Oliver Twist? Whichever, they're all depressing when you're at that age! :P).<br /><br />You know, I'll be honest, I never gave enough credit to the similarities to take them as intentional, I just thought it was the same prototype resurfacing in different cultures, but you're making me rethink this... If these stereotypes are more ingrained in the social psyche than I thought, then that makes the Southie hero even cooler (now that he has an almost official European background :P). More power to Dumas! <br /><br />By the way, I love this:<br />"a southie hero does not have to go on a journey and grow up and see the world to have exciting adventures. Adventure and romance seek him out when he is cutting a chai at the local tea shop with his homies"<br />:D That just put a huge smile on my face! So true!<br />And that's another thing that the French Romantic mass hero has over the class hero who is full of angst and ideals and always in search of the better world which he never finds. That's what I like about the mass hero: he doesn't need that much, he's just happy with what he has (unless he's Mahesh in one of his super-brooding roles ;)), and when he's not happy, he solves all the world's problems with another badass fight. :D<br /><br />I think we also see in these movies what we want to see, which is why I like them: there are many cultural parallels that can be made (which is sort of what I'm trying to show with this whole 2 Degrees of Separation series) if one is willing to take their brain along, but at the same time, they're written in such a way that it's digestible for everyone even if the brain is on vacation that day.<br /><br />But seriously thank you for the cultural insight, I never would have known this and this conversation is really making my day! :)Dolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-80264056468851639212010-09-08T09:03:30.083-07:002010-09-08T09:03:30.083-07:00Oh no no, not patronizig at all. I guess I should ...Oh no no, not patronizig at all. I guess I should have said they have access to french lit in english/ the local language..not in french.<br /><br />when we were growing up, we used to have(forced to) read "non detail" books in school which were all "count of monte cristo" "three musketeers"..etc. we liked these better than the thomas hardys(mournful) and charles dickenses(boooring) that we had to read, so I guess french romanticism has a very differrent association in indian adolescent schoolboy mythology than it does with your common american schoolboy.<br /><br />the point is, the familiarity with french classics sort of allowed us to define our heroes as something more than the noir-ish raymond chandler/ James hadley chase types of action hero populating western popular mythology these days.<br /><br />I personally think(knowing some of these charecters pretty well) that the experimentation with the "kind" of hero you create in a southie film is deliberate experimentation on the myth of the "hero" (a southie hero does not have to go on a journey and grow up and see the world to have exciting adventures. Adventure and romance seek him out when he is cutting a chai at the local tea shop with his homies.) people like Bala and jagalarmudi are writing their heroes witha fair bit of cultural sophistication, even if the audience is often comprised of truants from a high school liberal arts education.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-33229851343424050812010-09-08T07:41:46.497-07:002010-09-08T07:41:46.497-07:00Heya Rameshram,
I do try to not take myself too s...Heya Rameshram,<br /><br />I do try to not take myself too seriously, if I did, I'd come across as an even bigger snob than I already am ;) <br />I do all the research like I mean it, but I try to keep it fun and breezy when I write the post. Are you scolding me for it? ;)<br /><br />Interesting that they study French lit in highschool, we didn't until university, which is funny because you'd think in a country where French is the second foreign language taught in schools, you'd learn more about their literature. But that aside, I see your point about access to these works, I wasn't implying they don't have access to them (we do live in the global village after all) just that I can't imagine people (especially guys) in India reading all the French mass novels I was referring to, let alone see them as inspiration. Plus, even if people study what I call the "class literature" (Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire), that doesn't bring them any closer to the "mass literature". But of course nothing I say is definitive, I could be totally wrong in my assumptions. :)<br /><br />The other thing is, back when I was reading this stuff, all the boys were going ewwww, and then heading to Jules Verne at best (or at worst to Prince of Persia or a game of football ;)). Wondering if the way I wrote it came across as patronizing, that was not my intention, just saying that what is common for a girl my age from Europe cannot possibly be as common for a boy in India who will grow up to be a script writer/ film director. Everyone has access to this stuff, there's no denying that, it's whether or not they actually choose to read it (I guess the movies are indeed more popular than the books, so that would be a better potential source, but that's just another interpretation of the hero, usually through the prism of modern humour and sensibilities, which takes away from the original IMHO).<br /><br />What I think is closer to reality is that there is a certain archetype for this kind of hero that can be followed through the centuries as he picks up the different hues from each historical age and from each place. This particular one seems to have found his best representation during Romaticism which is why he was so popular then (and still is now). But that doesn't stop him from existing in modern avatars, and one of the most faithful ones IMO is indeed Tollywood. But that would have been a boring conclusion to end the post with, hai na? :DDolce and Namakhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13403089235872528987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3503508735843316282.post-63294937112593731822010-09-08T06:28:47.139-07:002010-09-08T06:28:47.139-07:00I sort of get the feeling that you are not taking ...I sort of get the feeling that you are not taking your very insightful analysis too seriously.<br /><br />In response to one of your points, yes they do teach victor hugo and guy de maupassaunt in high school curriculums in south india (sometimes in tamil and telugu) and indian filmmakers and audiences do have access to BBC TV serials of most classic authors.The connection may not be as far fetched as you assume, mostly because colonial( nepoleonic) france used to be a big player in tipu sultan south india- evidence of which you can still see in pondicherry and in nice/ champagne in all those cute french speaking expat indians.<br /><br />To paraphrase amitabh from bunty/bubbli, " yeh world hai na world?..."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com