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Thai Contemporary: Review of KOH, InterContinental, Mumbai
When pregnancy cravings hit, you need something fantastic to stem the stomach-curling desire. Chef Ian Kittichai’s Koh at the InterContinental Marine Drive, seemed like a promising addition to my rather exclusive list, from the moment I heard Deepika Padukone tweeting about how great the food is and my own cousin mentioning the presence of the rather elusive massamun curry on the menu.
On a Thursday evening the Manhattan-style Asian bistro is filled with a lively crowd of familiar and international faces. Where Czar once pulsated with desi tracks, its replacement, Koh’s muted restro-lounge atmosphere is at once sophisticated and global. Propped with comfortable cushions on a table for two that’s too closely set to make it an intimate dining experience, I’m floored by the facing glass wall mural created by Thai artist Patcharapon ‘Alex’ Tangruen. The mural defines the space and cuisine – traditional roots, contemporary accents. You suspect you won’t taste the conventional here, even if the chef has drawn from the flavours of his youth: his own mother’s kitchen.
Evocative fresh fruit signature cocktails with antioxidants (Gojiberry bellinis) set the tone for the flavourful and delicately-spiced food. Steamed edamame dusted with sea salt and Thai spices for the table, followed by appetizers that make you not want to save room for the mains. ‘Chocolat’ baby back ribs (coated with dusky chocolate), an unrivalled palate-opener, juxtaposed in quick succession with stems of stout lemon grass covered with flame-grilled chicken accented with coconut and cilantro make for a delicious first offering. In fine contrast is the hand-pounded rock corn minced with spices, and the tofu…. So, I confess, I hate tofu. Even Morimoto’s tofu couldn’t convert me, but I feel unable to turn down the mild-mannered and unassuming Chef Kittichai’s suggestion of a jasmine tea-smoked tofu. Surprisingly, it lacks tofu’s usual rude texture and it is smooth as butter. The aubergine dish, though tasty enough, has a tough skin texture, leaving it difficult to manipulate while eating. After soaking in the stunning Koh golden corn gumbo – hand-pressed corn swirling in coconut broth laced with Thai basil oil; we’re all set to move to entrees.
Composed of a wide variety of freshly-imported greens and vegetables (I add crisp water chestnuts), the ‘Paneang Curry’ is perfect for my taste buds, while what the general Indian palate may scream for is the hot stone curry-spiced rice – which is akin to a Thai biryani. My husband, Sahil, takes the chef’s apt suggestion and goes with the Chilean sea bass coated with a yellow-bean glaze: a fresh offering that lives up to its promise. You are surprised how easily the hours get eaten up while you are being gastronomically appeased. In entirety, the meal leaves nothing wanting, especially when topped off with the luscious valhorna chocolate dessert accompanied by Thai coffee ice cream. Oh and did I mention the coconut cheesecake? Absolutely lovely. My only regret is being physically unable to sample all the tempting flavours on the menu – but that’s for another evening, another craving.
Koh Notes
- Chef Kittichai’s favourite ingredient that shares its home with India and Thailand is cumin.
- All the ingredients at Koh are imported: meats thrice weekly from different parts of the world, vegetables thrice weekly from Bangkok and Chiang Mai and condiments weekly from Bangkok.
- Come October, Koh plans to add a Jain version to the already extensive menu and its varied vegetarian offerings.
- When travelling you can sample Ian Kittichai’s cooking at Kittichai in Manhattan, Restaurant Murmuri in Barcelona and the gastro bar Hyde and Seek in Bangkok.
Published in Verve Magazine, October 2010
What's Wrong With Anjaana Anjaani?
I had great expectations from Anjaana Anjaani - based on the phenomenal music and energy during the promos and videos. With the reviews sounding disappointing, I still went to watch it out of sheer curiosity and I came back wondering what it is that Indian film audiences want in a movie. Agreed, the premise of the movie was about suicide, but there are hardly any dark elements in the film, except for when PC actually tries to kill herself, and is nearly successful. The film technically is slick - good camera work, nice styling and locales, power-packed performance from Priyanka Chopra (PC) and a very credible performance from Ranbir Kapoor, who one has to admit, can definitely act. He lived the role, though possibly with less zest than PC simply because of the nature of their onscreen characters. The dialogues are good for most part, some even quite crisp, and the story at least has a different premise, which is more than what we can say for the other generic love stories being made lately. In fact, it's grim premise has genuine resonance with a contemporary youth - they tend to go into depths over love or money, and finding meaning in their lives becomes a lost cause. And finding that meaning when living out what they believe are their last days, with the person they least expect to, is existential in it's execution. Were this to have been a Hollywood film, the same multiplex audience would have probably accepted it as a different kind of chick-flick and watched it. In Indian cinema, it is rejected in concept. There were parts that were slow and dragged, but that can be expected from any film. Overall though, I thought it worked - more than many of the big-banner love stories of this year - and yet it fared under expectations. I'm truly at a loss to figure out what it is that people found lacking in the film, especially when people go to watch movies like Housefull and Golmaal etc. I believe the Indian audiences demand sheer drama in romance, or mindless humour. Actually, it still remains a mystery to see why certain films work and others don't. I'm curious to see the fate of Jhootha Hi Sahi - Abbas Tyrewala's next, after Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na, which I felt was a small big film. A simple premise, filled with so much promise and character. Easily a film watchable multiple times, particularly because of the freshness of the casting and the sharp editing. Does Abbas manage it again, without Aamir?
Of Age and Time
Published: Verve Magazine, Nerve, August 2010
It evolved from a Caucasian play to Parsi characterisation – making it appealingly familiar in the Indian context. Sitanshi Talati-Parikh goes behind the scenes, previewing The Game, an endearing two-person tragicomedy
Mindless in the Desert: SATC-2 is actually just a spoof of itself!
How is it possible that Hollywood cannot see how stupid it makes Americans look when it creates movies like Sex and the City-2? I mean you start out with four relatively intelligent, well-read and well-travelled (we hope) women: a writer, a lawyer, a PR person and an art curator. How can these women who’ve spent years in their respective professions behave like such complete imbeciles? Well actually, Miranda and Charlotte do behave themselves, but the queen bees of the foursome, Carrie and Samantha act like absolute idiots.
I get that Samantha is Samantha – deliciously irreverent when it comes to sex and society. But I also get that while she flirts outrageously, and takes home a lot of goody bags, she generally doesn’t act like a moron in her home city. It seems that lack of hormones and hot flashes makes her go a little insane. She flagrantly flaunts social codes (which are a religious and legal issue in the middle east), while being the business guest of the sheikh who has kindly flown her friends and her first class in complete luxury to his home country, so that she can think about representing him in a PR capacity. It appears that Samantha could do with some PR of her own – and some re-training in the way to behave in public; not like a hormonal teenager on heat. And you can argue that that’s just Samantha – but is it? Did she become a top PR executive by showing hordes of conservative men her middle finger, breasts and her latest lay’s boner? I’m not really sure. It just seems that she’s finally becoming senile. Where even her Samantha-ness is no longer acceptable.
Do Americans really know so little of other cultures and behave this silly when they travel? What they do in New York is not really acceptable in Abu Dhabi! And flaunting social norms is not funny, it’s just stupid. Why does Hollywood not understand that when they make movies like this, they are not ridiculing the closed cultures of the world while heralding the joys of the librated ones, they are only proving that Americans can be really socially inept, culturally dumb and truly lacking in common sense, basic decency and courtesy and in any amount of general knowledge? And Americans are not really like this – the ones I’ve met are genuinely interested in other cultures and politely respectful of them. So who are these Americans that Michael Patrick King is idolising on big screen? What happened to the girls who regaled us with their smart repartees, chic appearance and layered conversations? The girls who may have used the metaphor of sex, but were making important observations about society, life, men and people. These are not the women we see now – the women now are haggard, bitchy, unable to learn from their lives’ many lessons and choose to regularly regress to inept teenage-world.
Miranda and Charlotte’s troubles are actually real and funny – they deserved more room to mature and grow, but instead the story got sucked into the vortex of Carrie’s stupidity and Samantha’s ridiculous faux pas. Carrie is just being plain ridiculous – she is tired of the relationship in its current form, she takes time off from their house, but when Big tries to intervene and asks for some time off too, she freaks out and goes and makes out with an ex-boyfriend. I mean really? Do these girls never grow up? What Carrie did when she was 20 and 30 is not really still acceptable at 45+! Does she never learn from her mistakes? Or is the writer so unimaginative that he can’t move or think beyond the usual troubles of the 4 girls? Where is the Carrie who only believed in the love of her life, and went through men trying to find happiness but unable to do so, because she truly loved another? Her affair with Big (when she was dating Aidan) was allowed, because he was the man she loved. Why would she cheat on the man she loves with Aidan? Just because he was too tired to go out to party with her after a long day at work and bought her a plasma TV instead of jewellery? Is she really that shallow?
And the clothes! The styling! What an eyesore! What the show had been known for, renowned for, were the supremely stylish clothes and looks. What have they done here? They’ve taken the brightest, gaudiest fabrics possible, stuck on extremely shiny, often pointy things, added the most garish of accessories that made them look like Christmas trees at best, and called them clothes. I can possibly accept that 4 of the 750 clothes actually looked reasonable, and the only good thing to come out of this is that Miranda got a makeover. The plain Jane of the series and the tubby-mommy of the first movie looked the best of the lot here. Carrie should have thought about mummifying her look from the series and staying cryogenically frozen. She has not aged well, and well, botox doesn’t work for everyone.
The movie would have truly worked as a spoof of the show and the series – outlandish clothes, haggard-looking women, absolutely no story, weak dialogues, stupid characters, social faux pas galore, trivialisation of social rules and a caricature of American intelligence (or the lack of).
I thought the first movie did injustice to the supremely brilliant shows, but in retrospect that movie was Oscar-material compared to this hunk of junk that fans of the show were forced to sit through for 146 minutes! Maybe King needs to think about handing the writing over to Darren Star – who put together 94 episodes of the show that won 8 golden globes. This movie, I’d be happy if it won a Razzie. Two funny lines and four decent outfits do not a movie make. I may just have to burn the box set of the Sex and the City after the incredibly bad taste this movie left in my mind and soul, ruining the iconic characters forever. I hope King gets the message and lets everything and everybody rest in peace, without a third piece of torture barraging our mind and the cities.
nine hundred and ninety-nine: review of Nine
Writer's block. Oh my god, how many times does a creative person look for inspiration, and fail more often than he/she succeeds? But in Nine, Daniel Day-Lewis so beautifully portrays the lost child within, the-boy-that-yearns-to-be-a-child-that-yearns-to-be-a-man, the Freudian (maybe even Oedipal) angst, the emptiness when words fail him, the pain of a missing story, the desperate search for a muse and the haunting of a woman wronged. Well many women were wronged by him - and they loved him in the way women get attracted to a project and they wallow in the misery of being a part of that project. The man that has failed in many ways and looks for redemption - from the one woman who can give it to him.
The layers of the movie are as many as the title of this blog post, okay maybe I exaggerate, but trying to catch the many levels at which it works, the complex characterization of each person...all admirably portrayed through one-song-and-a-few-lines-scene each. Each character, each woman comes alive within that tight frame that she is allowed. And through each of them, Lewis' failings are unearthed.
Possibly the weakest area of the movie also has some of its strengths - weak or bland dialogue intersperses with some very powerful lines, often spoken so simply that you want to reach and catch them before they float away. Judi Dench gets more than a handful of those and Marion Cotillard suffers from less than her share (which she makes up for with great expressions). Nicole Kidman gets a briefer scene than what one would expect but gets some great lines and moments. Oh and the songs - what should have been the strength of the musical nearly becomes its undoing - lacking rhythm and poise, the lyrics are more often than not uninspiring; but the score survives and the women make it watchable.
Great camera work and cinematographic vision, love the bleary red-darkness of the film and the meshing storylines between fantasy, past and present. The little boy crawling back into the man...surreal at times, existentialist in its soul, but the film redeems itself from its weaknesses, just like the protagonist.
Karthik calling Krishna
Cinema in Transition - Dinosaurs in the Park
I told myself that another review would be pointless, especially after I'd seen the movie so late. After all, I'm not surprised that I am disappointed with the film. Inauthenticity (especially to the syndrome), over-the-top performances, over-dramatization, continuity errors and inconsistency are all a part of this so-called "Bollywood cinema" that we make exceptions for. We make those exceptions because they entertain us, because they star the larger-than-life actors and because they work so marvelously with cinematography, locations and dream-scapes, that we succumb to them. All along understanding that nothing can be 100%, nothing can be perfect. Nothing that is real will translate well on screen and will make us feel good about oursleves, or send us back truly entertained. That's because 'realistic' cinema at a point of time was grimy, gritty and dark. Barjatya, Johar and others of their ilk brought a slice-of-life drama from an ordinary life and made it extraordinary with heightened emotions and colourful scapes. And there was a time when this really worked. I've seen Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Dilwale Dulhaniya..., Kuch Kuch Hota Hai etc an umpteen number of times. Barjatya slowly realised that his kind of cinema had become a dinosaur - it was too sweet to digest, and in its inherent unreality (there may be very few families actually like the ones he portrayed), in his inherent moralising and ethical trip, he was alienting an audience that once loved him. That's because too much of a good thing can be bad, especially if your pulse remains on what you want to say, and not on what your audience wants to hear. Karan Johar brought a younger sensibility to Barjatya's cinema - a youthful exuberance, the pain of love all candy-flossed into "happy times". And he succeeded - his movies evolving with his own evolving thoughts and sensibilities, and his courage to be bolder with his themes on screen. But while his themes are generally relevant to the time and often have an important message to deliver, his films are still packaged in unreality.
But Johar remained true to what he wanted to say - that one man can be larger than life. And that man, for most part was Shah Rukh Khan. What makes it difficult, is that Shah Rukh, himself, is larger-than-life as a person and an actor. When he begins to play a character that demands that, he cannot - shouldn't - act it out - he's being himself, with some character trait variations. And if he tries to act in these situations, which he often does, he tends to go over-the-top. Both Johar and Khan then fall prey to insulting the intelligence of the audience who have now been trained to understand and accept subtle nuances and acting. Can you identify with Khan? Or do you watch him because after all these years, Shah Rukh remains emminently watchable? Does the character come alive, or does one recall Shah Rukh as Rizwan Khan? The correct role for Shah Rukh is that of underplayed emotions - that in Swades and Chak De: the kind that make you wonder what he's thinking, that make you stretch your mind to understand him; not one that is blatant and obvious. Om Shanti Om was a travesty (albeit a successful one), and unfortunately Shah Rukh associates himself with the kind of cinema that leaves his potential unexplored. Farhan Akhtar changed everything. I would blame him for the fall of unreality and the rise of realistic candyfloss. The moment Dil Chahta Hai hit the screens - a film still considered seminal in many ways - he changed the notion of what people expected from Hindi cinema. He gave them real life, real dialogues, real people, real emotions, real insecurities, actual incidents picked up from real life and then blended with just enough glamour and colour to become believable and likeable all at the same time. He still admits using everyday dialogues, often arguing with lyricist-father Javed Akhtar over using everyday language in his works. Akhtar just realised that it is important to connect with the film, and the youth that he represented would expect this, having been exposed to international (not just hollywood) cinema that creates easily-identifiable characters. Maybe that's why he wanted to recreate Don for today, and maybe that's why that is one of his most melodramatic films to date. In much the same manner, Imtiaz Ali brought a freshness to the characters and dialogues, because he picked them up from real life. Jab We Met was not larger-than-life - it was life-sized. Zoya Akhtar exorcised a ghost with her first film - the desire to spoof this very sort of over-the-top Bollywood and its myriad idiosyncrasies. Dibakar Banerjee, Vishal Bharadwaj, Anurag Kashyap, Abhishek Kapoor, Shimit Amin, Ayan Mukherjee... are all the new breed: they pick up real life and make it real on screen, even if with their own brand of cinematic overtures. Maybe, that's why an older audience still remains faithful to 'Bollywood' cinema, and in the younger audience lies the huge fan-following of this new breed of cinema-makers. After all, if you want to make epics, you do it with epic characters like the way Ashutosh Gowarikar would, or in some ways Sanjay Bhansali would; not making real people epic-sized. Even when Bhansali tried to make real people larger-than-life, it didn't work. The audience must be given some credit - they don't need things hammered into their head, they do generally, get it; and they don't identify with emotions worn on the sleeve at all times. While Johar's themes work, messages are important and cinema continues to have an audience; if he chooses to have critical acclaim rather than the loyal-popular vote and choose not to go the way of Barjatya, he must reinvent his own cinema, tone down his own emotions and learn the art of underplaying with subtlety, rather than overplaying with blatancy.Saawariya: Review
Published: Verve Magazine, Screen, December 2007
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s fantastical and surreal Saawariya is a lyrical odyssey that could have been explosive as a theatrical performance or a stage musical, opines Sitanshi Talati-Parikh
Evolving the vibrant medium of cinema a notch further has been considered the auteur of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. In his latest offering, Saawariya, he draws from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story, White Nights, where a vibrant youth enters a snowy, mystical hillside town only to be carried away in a fantastical love affair over four surreal nights. Despite the gaps being filled by a good soundtrack, the lyrical odyssey stretches and the story is not a perfect flow through the frames and between the songs. It would have worked better, had the songs been half the number, the scenes more tightly wound and the characters allowed to develop fully. Alternatively, this could have been explosive as a theatrical performance or stage musical.With Saawariya, the film-maker brings a superb theatrical effect to light. Drawing from the paintings of Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Fred R Wagner and William Louis Sonntag, visualiser Ravi Chandran has made Omung Kumar’s stylised sets come alive, with the use of space lights (a first for India). Add that to excellent costumes by Reza Shariffi (Ranbir Kapoor) and Anuradha Vakil (Rani Mukerji, Sonam Kapoor), the look of Saawariya is larger than life. The movie, however, doesn’t work evocatively, even if it does enchant. His multi-hued extravaganza just misses the exacting moment, when a painting comes to life.The beautiful canvas may just be too well crafted. As the actors appear on this canvas to enact a sequence of events, the space appears too perfectly composed, too posturised, leaving the characters distant from the audience. As Sakina (Sonam) drifts past on the waters with her arm extended, it is dramatic and unreal at the same time. Suddenly that feeling changes, when accosted with Lillianji (Zohra Sehgal) and Gulabji (Mukerji). They spring to life and the film abruptly loses its dream-like detached quality. Raj (Ranbir) splits between the gaps and opens up on screen, as an identifiable character, but one is unable to get a lasting feel of his emotions as they scatter across the canvas.The fresh, lively faces of the newcomers light up the screen. Ranbir exceeds expectations, while Sonam Kapoor shows potential. The lack of chemistry between them, if intentional, works at a subterranean level, to hint that it is a doomed love story, but the missing chemistry – between Imaan (Salman Khan) and Sakina – has no explanation. It is easier to be moved by Lillianji’s grief, as she is left alone, than it is to sympathise with the protagonists.Bhansali’s experimental cinema is always a welcome change from the mundane histrionics of mass cinema. Whether the audience is able to accept the shortcomings of Saawariya in light of its positive movement towards evolutionary cinema that breaks with convention, is left to be seen.
