The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Nair, 2012-3) : The Six compromises of Mira Nair.

“If you don’t judge my gold chains, I’ll forget the Iron Chains” – ll cool J/ Brad Paisley  “Accidental racist”

Nair’s Reluctant Fundamentalist is very easy to make fun of (It does for Geopolitics what Kama sutra did for sex…..etc) but IMO the lesson that needs learning for every expatriate Indian not watching this  is no less important ,if probably likely lost as a whistle in the southern California  wind.

You take a stand and stick with it. It’s gotta be an honest stand and has got to be well thought out and clearly spelt out. You gotta tell the Big  bully where to get off, and what’s “ out of bounds”. You do it emotionally and show real consequences or else you end up with …..The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

The filming of the Mohsin Hamid novel has had a precarious road to production and took a couple of years, even if Mira Nair is one of India’s best known expat filmmakers. (I blame the Euro crisis  ).

I have decided that, instead of reviewing the ambitious sweep of intentions of the film, about a Pakistani alpha male whose relationship with wall street sours into mistrust, I will instead, list out Ms Nair’s six bourgeois compromises that add up into cinema killing mediocrity. I blame the Hollywood studio system for this .

The Six Compromises of Mira Nair:

Compromise 1 Its NOT about Terrorism. (because that would disturb the nice Lahore housewife/matron watching HBO)  Sure,  Muslims  from Lahore are all milk  and human kindness, even if they are Muslim fundamentalists that are angrily agitating about how much they hate America and Americans , but when you want to make a movie about a dude meeting a shadowy Pakistani dude  in a seedy Lahore cafe full of glowering  extremist types, you do NOT go all fuzzy and build back story for the chaiwallah. You make everybody menacing  until you can let the (fuzzy teddy bear) details emerge.

Compromise 2:  You can’t make an angry leftist novel into a sufi message of love. The reluctant fundamentalist  references the ideological war declared by wall street  on erstwhile leftism and  its global  assets, as motivation for the protagonist,in the book,  Chengez, walking away from his highly paid consulting position.  Mira Nair observed that she had replaced Neruda’s Chile in the novel  with a Sufi “cultured” Istanbul. Listen I understand bibi back home would rather visit  the tasselated ex-harems of Istanbul , and not Pinochet (even today)  bullet riddled Santiago, but did Mira realize she was ripping out the innards of a living novel and  preserving it in historical formaldehyde?

Compromise 3: Making it all about the wedding. We get it ok?  Pakistanis  get married and those weddings are full of culture and food. But revisiting your greatest hits in the middle of a terrorist drama  may feel to YOU , Ms Nair, like you want good things to happen to young Pakistani men, but to US, it feels like a cop out on the scale of a dadimaa’s response to everything is  to feed everyone.

Compromise 4:I’m not going to “Kate Hudson is fat and there’s no chemistry”….but Kate Hudson is fat and the sex scenes are embarrassing. I have seen  homemade porn that looked better. Mira there’s more things guys know to do than merely clutch (an overweight) white girl around her stomach and breathe on her neck. What’s the compromise here? I think she’s talking to Pakistani women in all these sex scenes, without being clear that she is doing so. It feels vaguely like the “reluctant fundamentalist” has no autonomy, needing to go from one Freudian Madonna to another. If THAT is why Czengez is not a terrorist (cuz he’s such a mama’s boy! ) it’s a stretch. In any case , the man could easily have been a secure lover and still have a sense of vulnerability. James bond has been pedaling that for AGES and still gets away with it.

Compromise 5: Not having a coherent message. The film does not trace a historical timeline among its chosen cities(New York, Lahore and Istanbul).  It does not want to define the Americans as anything mre than a reactionary overwhelming force for retribution in  Pakistan, It does not want to hold up a mirror to Pakistani bourgeois, in creating the vacuum that allowed everyone to  become fundamentalists, and it makes well meaning noises about how “good people are good” and “others shouldn’t misunderstand them” as terrorists.  News for you Mira, THE MIDDLE CLASS CAN HANDLE EXTREMISM AND VIOLENCE IN FILM. They have to negotiate bollywood’s stridency, Lollywood’s ham-handed messaging and Hollywood’s crafty propaganda.  As filmmaker you have a choice to make your analysis historical, and intellectual, or to entertain with a thriller…or you must be honest to the novel’s intentions. You can’t fall between the cracks in ALL these respects.

Compromise 6:  It’s the Geopolitics, Stupid! Lady you’re a filmmaker well respected in Europe, and who has made a few highly distributed films inside the Hollywood studio system, you can’t bury your head in the sand and pretend that even MAKING the film is NOT about geopolitics If you do, you have ALREADY given Constantinople away to the Christian hoards. Of course Samuel Huntington exists (specially in the context of the current crusades) Of course a “film about a Pakistani protagonist “ will not get financing in Europe or the US because it doesn’t fit the propaganda goals of the relevant commercial interests. Noam Chomsky’s filters are keeping you out. Just because you pretended this was not so, your job is no easier. So …I don’t know maybe you should have grown a pair and SPOKEN about what we don’t discuss in drawing rooms. Fundamentalism and who , precisely is responsible for it.

Mira Nair hasn’t lost it. The people  all round (studios, financiers, Bollywood, Hollywood, audience….) seem to think they know better. The perils of crowd sourcing your taste (as Mira seems to have done here, )  is that  you allow for confusion and diffusion of your already diffuse ideas, and it reflects in the vision of the reluctant filmmaker.

The Company You keep: Sundance, Kid. (Redford 2013)

I wrote “As a Legacy movie,”The Company you keep” is pretty much Robert Redford’s masterpiece. A worthy follow on to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid , and All the president’s men,” and I stared at it for two hours before falling asleep.

I didn’t fall asleep .

Words came to me all night and I was afraid the glorious insightful meaningful words would stop.Richly textured deeply significant meanings opened up one argument at a time and I was in a fever .It simply wouldn’t stop. if I have down here one third of all that I dreamed about , I will feel worthy of having sat in a theater and experienced depth of true cinematic genius.

THIS is why we make films.

Experience

As the film progresses, our throat is lumpy, not with manipulative emotionality, but with a recurring reaffirming. “This” our mind tells …. “This! This This!” . The experience that unfolds is more philosophical inquiry than drama. (there IS plenty of drama, but for those who dare go there, there are rich rewards in its philosophy).

It has been a while since I saw a movie that was made to ASK questions and lay out existential justifications that change way look at our same old world, not because we learnt something new –  just that one thought all this was extinct, this idealism, and had long since,started acting out on our dogmatic slumber.

THIS is not just any or ordinary movie.

Weather Underground

Are a near legendary group of leftist radicals that, in sixties went underground after a bank robbery they were carrying out went horribly wrong and they killed a security guard at bank. They have been on FBI’s most wanted list ever since, a fact that overlooks their contribution to leftist idealism as law behaves like an amoral and clinical ass with a long memory. Recently, as one of them was “discovered ” living a suburban mom lifestyle in upstate new york, interest in this underground organization was renewed in US , and fictionalized account here is based on a 2004 Neil Gordon novel structured like a 1970′s warner bros thriller about a man on run. Redford plays Jim Grant, a Jason bournesque character without superpowers (He could be introspectionman , I guess) who has to learn to invent identities as he moves from place to place in small town america (which is a well wrought character in film) . When Sharon Solarz (Susan sarandon) is arrested by FBI,  Grant is forced to go on lam, leaving his 8 year old daughter with his brother, and tracks down other people from the radical group who are now middle aged boomers in respectable occupations: one a college professor hiding his radicalism in plain sight, another a lumberjack in rural Wisconsin …and some rich in big sur from applying their sociopathy to good use in stock market…or running marijuana.

The film resolves around core beliefs of radicalism passing glowingly worshipful judgement of the idealism underlying it and pronouncing hagiography on all its protagonists, thus leaving weather underground as Redford found it.

In a world where films only seem to get made to “expose” feet of clay ( Dreamers, Barbarian invasions) , the vote of confidence is timely and well appreciated. leftism in film harkens back to American themes of radical revolution and activism, something we never see in film. American radicalism has a pragmatic edge that has changed world often. It also remembers some old enmities  American saboteurs and anarchists were the raison d itre for the FBI in 1920′s and 30′s.

Ethics

” The Company you Keep” is a socratic inquiry into ethics. The question posited is: In a world where state has lost it, what is ethical behavior for Man.  Without getting overly talky, the film sets out bite sized ethical dilemmas to each disciple .

What results is much more than an expiation of innocence. we see damning indictment of amoral state.

The state by being amoral has allowed itself to be a weapon , given that it has deadly force, for people that would act willfully in evil ways (genocide, repression, selective prosecutions of innocent to serve system which generates much evil). Faced with this, an ethical individual must act to protect his and himself . The choices he makes creates space in his ecosystem. While people make mistakes and shit happens, to everyone,  one’s personal history is created very verifyably , by and their actions AND their words take responsibility for why they have emerged way they are.

If we live like this, its enough and meaningful. If we die on our feet doing this, still have acted with virtue. The highest Socratic ideal.

Magnum opus.

Thus unfolds the magnum opus that adumbrates the halo( Sundance)  of Redford’s greatest films – Milagro bean field wars, All President’s men, Conspirator….Butch Cassidy and Sundance kid. Redford is able to successfully evoke mythology of first and idealism of President’s Men. He brings benefit of his 78 years to keep the film real and the eye that sees sees an america that could have been, can be  and is, all too fleeting.

The camera (Adriano Goldman: Sin nombre) is a master class in how to use colors and images in a story. Deeply introspective narrative. Bressonian in its depth . Almost religious in its conviction. (If religion is about human ethics, then film is deeply religious.)

The acting is nuanced and deep. Spectacular performances from Redford, Shia La boef, Susan Sarandon, Nick nolte, Chris cooper, Terrence Howard, Staley Tucci, Brit Marling (she’s spectacular) , Sam howard…..Everyone seems to understand that they are depicting living Gods.

If there is one film that answers John Wayne , Ronald Reagan brand of cowboy capitalism through a dose of realism, some of which is magic (specially those parts featuring children, whom we should teach well), it is this one. We come out believing that great things are possible, and that makes this an american film  of John Ford Frank Bozarge variety.

I didn’t go into this film expecting to worship it so.There are docu-dramas  about all manners of people.Where “The company you keep “ succeeds is in its John updike quality of describing a historic sweep of events filtered in lens of  idealism of the 60′s radicals. While we all like to admire people of sixties for their blind courage and sheer guts (and sex and drugs and rock and roll) most of us don’t know , in any detail, radical philosophy that fueled intelligent successful kids to dedicate lives full of meaning to the Idea. The  film constructs narrative for Barack Obama leftist.

Barack Obama and his leftists

The film also damns in a tongue in cheek way,the  LEADER of the Barack Obama leftists. It informs his minions: their leader is now the enemy (if we  HAVE done a deal with devil, we have to ACT, often, like devil). The play of words also indicates that “The company you keep ” Obama ‘s is FBI/CIA(there is a clinical efficient and ruthless black man heading manhunt for Jim Grant who doesn’t know or care just precisely whom  law enforcement “should” protect. The absolute way in which Grant is defined by his crime, in Redford’s view comes from the immoral and the amoral state apparatus thus. in this respect we could be living this story in Soviet union, Nazi Germany or any or totalitarian state, which film indicates , America ALREADY IS BECOME….except for our children.

Teach our children well

So Redford succeeds in this film by being able to separate idealism from the crowded souks of memory and regret…and mistakes people make, and presenting narrative for ready consumption, for whoever will go there. film can be “just a manhunt thriller” if  you don’t…which brings us to remembered history.

America remembers its history through lens of its most successful. often there is no meaning in high concept fast food  boutique burger place that is STILL making money, when there’s a Carl Jr open down road. Ceasar Chavez is remembered( black FBI Agent is named Cornelius, Chavez inspired leader of ” planet of Apes”) but only through lens of Dream Act.

How shall we, then teach history? It is unacceptable that the only way we can talk idealism to our children is by winning and becoming that which we despise.The  film does not address mistakes our children will make , or even mistakes we made from accepting narrative histories from our parents, but at least it makes an effort (A for effort) at philosophical reflectiveness. If it makes more people introspect over these matters I think Redford would have succeeded way beyond anybody’s wildest sci-fi imaginations.

Vedala Ulagam (1948, full movie)

T R Mahalingam, Kamala Lakshman…etc.

On why Paradesi (Bala 2013) isn’t winning awards..A master class.

Paradesi was released to theaters in March of 2013. Many people DIDn’t think it was a bad idea. there were no howls of “Oh what a terrible movie” “Bala has lost his brains making a film full of melodramatic tragedy” in fact people all seemed to think it was a rather good idea. lots of people seemed to think it was an important movie. dudes who spoke polished english in india (peter) called it a “master class in film making” . Anurag kashyap, who fancies himself an art film maker decided not only to put his money where his mouth is , and distribute the film in North India but also said “ the film created an authentic sense of time and space” which seems like the appropriate thing to say for a film that has the resume of Paradesi. So do we have a classic the scale of ghatak or mrinal sen film on our hands? why isn’t paradesi going to cannes and why didn’t it sweep the Indian national awards (it won one for costume design)? is it too early to judge ? should we wait for time to tell?

I can venture some early answers(it has been only a week  since the release) . First off I think the film is definitely an important film. I have not seen so many industry insiders agree that a film so contrary to current prevailing entertainment theory that nevertheless  is made in mainstream cliché , is something worth watching criticproof, and maybe emulating. Secondly, I think the production value of Paradesi makes it a message film that can be the model for building audiences for bollywood. For an industry that has recently become no more than an appendage of the hollywood studio distribution/ production sweatshop system, the bala film offers filmmakers  in the subcontinent a new reason for making movies. To tell stories/ history. I wish this catches on , because there is nothing more fascinating to me than listening to stories from India. and for the third, after the misfire that was kadal, and experiences of some star scions (I’m looking at you aishwarya rajinikanth) who thought themselves rather more important than they really were, Paradesi’s mere existence (success or not, national award or no) is proof that the system has more to it substantively than mere superstar marketing or Baradwaj Rangan’s Maniratnam/Kamalahasan worship. It doesn’t matter that Bala is considered one of the top director talents of Tamil nadu. Tamil cinema has destroyed better directors without a conscience. Mahendran Bharatiraja Balumahendra…Rajiv menon (the director)…mani ratnam (mark I) ,  or more recently Balaji Shaktivel…. I see paradesi as bala’s fight for relevance in an industry filled by Vallavans. ( I support bala in this, too).

Quite apart from the takeaway for the audience that they should watch “quality cinema” Paradesi also serves a “teri meherbaniyan” effect on the tamil film industry. No star scion made paradesi happen (murali was a flop actor, and doesn’t count) the only HUGE ego the film serves is Bala’s. it still is praised for its “realism”(whatever that means) and its “Truth”. AND THE AUDIENCE STILL WENT TO WATCH PEOPLE SUFFER AND PRAISED IT. Why this doesn’t translate to mega bucks is a different question (and a question you will have to PAY me in percentages for an answer) but its awesome the goodwill this film has generated everywhere it was seen.

SO ..do we have Godard?

not quite. Bala , who plays in almost ALL his movies well within his limitations (and specially so in Paradesi) is no pusher of the cinematic line. his greatest films have still been very mainstream in their treatment. (by mainstream I mean visual/ verbal cliché and corners cut in producing the film) There is an impatience he demonstrates in realizing his directorial vision.

Script:

In paradesi, while the concept is high enough, the camera and production design is hurried. many ideas latent in the script, are but potential (for example , the very universal nature of the migration is never exploited or even indicated.this could be equally a story of slavery, of construction labor, migrant farm workers, humans smuggled, or high tech/outsourced shops…or indian migrants to the Gulf or malaysia/singapore). The lost opportunity is mostly because the script is myopic from being too pleased with itself. That prevents a good script and a high concept from becoming a great script and a collectible film.

Production design:

It feels like bala has never lived in or  near a drought prone village in his life. The thing you learn about villages if you have been in them is that there is a class structure (AND a caste structure) to how kudusais (mud huts with thatched roofs) are constructed in a village. The first half of the film seems to be shot in a kudusai disneyland of village egalitarianism. even that would be excusable  if they made the village a beautiful memory to contrast with the more stark “new world” squalor. (for example, people that move from a rose tinged village environ to a construction slum full of disease and pestilence  but that doesn’t seem to be the director’s vision , either. It feels like production design was let down from the director just not giving them a brief on the details he wanted covered. (to give you a reference, watch titas ik nadir naam (ghatak) for a ..uh..master class in production design and lighting).

Cinematography

The use of the burnt blue black theme is the first questionable choice.Not Questionable…per se, it’s random. why? Shyam benegal , in an earlier era used the tint to great effect in Bhoomika and using a tint is not necessarily a bad thing. But the rationale for applying the theme is not clear. did the team think the film would look more artistic with a tint? why not just shoot it in black and white? surely they didn’t think their film would look more high tech with the blue tint?!

There is an important reason for asking this question. If people are not ALREADY emotionally invested in the story (it’s not MY kids that are being sold into slavery. why should I care?) the tinting cheapens the film to pure manipulation for such people. so instead of separating the audience as “people who care” and “people who don’t” you are now separating the audience as ” people who care inspite of it being a manipulative film” and “people who are put off by emotional manipulation”

Finish

Great films need not have a great finish. there are many awesome films that are rough hewn and uncut. But it does make a difference that a film doesn’t come off looking like a mediocrely produced television soap. for instance synch sound is very important for  ”reality” and “authenticity”  dubbing artists having a ball overdubbing the uhhs and sobs all over the visual looks TERRIBLE. I’ had rather listen to silence than to anadi (or someone) moaning and signing her money’s worth just because they have a job. This brings me to director’s discretion.

Discretion

Means that there is an artistic intelligence intervening and mediating throughout the creative process of making a film.  The other term for this is “a director’s voice”  THIS is what wins films awards. It means that Bala doesn’t take a few months off after he hands the narrative over to his assistants to direct, after which he merely puts in “master touch” in one or two places. It means he “kannula valakkennaia oothindu  patthufies” (checks obsessively) every frame, sequence and sound  in the film to make it work , enriches it and deliver messages that he wants in the film.  As a talented director , I am sure Bala  has much more to say about the subject…and the world. I think it is more hurry and sloppiness from hubris that is keeping him from saying it effectively.

Disclaimer.

I am not saying that Paradesi would have been a MASTERPIECE if all these faults were corrected. I’m saying that more intelligent people who are into film as a passion would have paid it much more attention. as it is, the film is merely potentially a great film. As it is, because it’s heart is in the right place, I hope it inspires more talented people to make great art that people want to see.

Bala’s Paradesi(2012-13) : an Oppari : Relentless exploitation.

News was that Bala’s Paradesi  completed its production in the middle of 2012 . it waited for a release through diwali, pongal and now nearly to tamil new year. Maybe the tamil film industry needed to see some of its high profile projects crash and burn before it got into the mood to appreciate the unrelenting Indian – exploitation film that is Bala’s Paradesi.

Bala is in no mood to finesse his oppari (funerial wail, dirge) with any context perspective or balance. The dead and the exploited own the Truth. When you cry for your dead you don’t care who’s looking and what they think of the spectacle you are making.

So who died?

There’s a clarity of analysis  you find in people celebrating grief (often in india) that gives them the permission to drop social niceties, rationalized kind thoughts and speak their mind about a subject. Bala cries, in Paradesi for the plantation dead of the last(british) colonial era. He does not draw any parelells to the current one that is in progress in india, and does not make any allusions to any current set of bad guys. He focuses on the Indian collaborators that sold a previous generation of hungry indians into foreign plantation slavery. He focuses on the sexual exploitation, the beating the disease the death and the pestilence of evangelical christianity that came with the exploitation. The film does not let up.when its over its like someone has cried themselves to sleep. It’s cathartic like that.

Universal Spiritual truths

As any exploitation film does, Bala’s Paradesi touches deep emotional chords of all people suffering from colonial exploitation. It is not only a recreation of a racial memory in indians, to which they should congregate and worship , it is also a unpreachy  reminder that evil IS among us and we DO live and work every day under it’s whiplash and that we should never forget. The film has no positive messages for anyone. when there’s a death of a dear one in the house, people tend to feel dark like that.

Almost certain flop.

The film  is going to be a highly rated collectible and an almost certain flop. It exposes the emasculated eunuchhood of its Indian audience rather than making them feel strong and powerful and all macho (nan kadavul) . It fills people with despair and in its frankness tells everyone how terrible the world around them really is. In today’s entertainment theory prevailing under current dispensations both Bollywood and hollywood, there is no place for cathartic tragedy. Everyone wants their captive audience motivated and cheerled into some form of sugar high, from their films. The season for indian-exploitation is not yet here. Even tamil film tragedies lived briefly from Oru thalai ragam to Nizzalgal and died…Heroes and Maniratnam took tamil films and gave it candyfloss. It’s difficult to wean audiences away from candyfloss.

On its merits

Paradesi is a leniar melodramatic soap opera on steroids about the perdition and ruin of a poor village, which sells itself wholesale into slavery to a white plantation owner (the white guys are cartoons raping, drinking with their women and behaving generally cartoonishly evily. The Indian collaborators are the True Enemy). In the process every last unthinkable happens to the indian village (pretty wives get molested by white people, their wages get stolen, they get infected , beaten their calf muscles cut off(so they cannot run away) burnt in unmarked pyres, killed by disease, neglect and malice. and their children get sold into slavery. All this happens to auditory and visual cues of men crying loudly as in a  death. The camera is workmanlike and a washed out blueish black and white theme is imposed on all the film.

Paradesi is a warning to the audience to heed the lessons of the past lest they be condemned to repeat it.On this count it may be too late. India is ruled and operated by foreign spies/agencies/interests. Indians abroad are in the terminal stages of the artificial famine. It’s like they blew tsunami sirens after everyone died.

I found myself joking to the other (few) people in the audience, wondering if anybody from the village got at least  green cards for all their trouble.

 

 

 

New reason to boycott 61 bollywood directors.

News is that the Big house  is putting together the staff in its service…and sixty one attended a “do” for the visiting ……mistuh candy. Now While Steven speilberg doesn’t have an entirely bad reputation, He IS credited, widely with destroying french and Japanese cinema. (of the 70′s / 80′s, and stealing willy nilly like Indiana Jones from a certain Indian film director. (don’t even ask if you don’t know).

Boycotting Big House-nigger films/people should be a matter of survival for Bollywood. Spread the word. ( in the end this wasn’t too long a list. I’m only calling for the boycott of 8 directors.   I am actually encouraging the association of Dreamworks/ big with  15 directors, and am charecterizing the others as out of work make work-ers or just attending a showbiz party.

 

Notable absentees include Maniratnam, Vidhu vinod, Raj-Krishna, Banibrata pain, the telegus, the malayalams , Shahrukh khan’s stable, Salman Khan’s stable, many cinematographers, Sanjay gupta, etc…so this is probably just another showbiz party in bollywood….

linky

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/61-directors-meet-steven-spielberg-in-mumbai-can-you-identify-them/378291-8-66.html

picture:

http://static.ibnlive.in.com/ibnlive/pix/sitepix/03_2013/directors-630-march-12.jpg

The names :

1. Abhay Chopra : Who?

2. Abhishek Kapoor : multiplex

3. Anurag Kashyap : Hack

4. AR Murgadoss : BOYCOTT!!

5. Ashutosh Gowarikar : has been

6. Ayaan Mukherjee : yeah …no.

7. R Balki : Boycott Balki!!

8. Bejoy Nambiar : David…David?

9. David Dhawan : I used to like him  :(

10. Farah Khan : I’ll miss you farah.

11. Gauri Shinde :SRIDEVIIIIII!!!!!

12. Habib Faisal : Big House director ignore

13. Homi Adajania : Homi! I’ll miss you. Boycott!!!!

14. Indra Kumar : Makes white elephants

15. Javed Akhtar : has been.

16. Kabir Khan (unkind cut. FIGHT KABIR!!!!! )

17. Kapil Chopra Exactly what the big house needs for its weddings.

18. Karan Bhutani :who?

19. Karan Johar : has been

20. Karan Shah :who?

21. Kiran Rao : they can have her.

22. Kunal Deshmukh : nobody

23. Kunal Kohli : Yash chopra alumnus(you know what to do)

24. Madhur Bhandarkar : white elephants. welcome to him.

25. Mahesh Bhatt : poor mahesh. hope they fed hom well.

26. Milan Luthria : House director for BIGS. already boycotting.

27. Nagesh Kukunoor : has been

28. Nishikant Kamath :Big House director. already boycotting

29. Onir : nobody.

30. Padmashri Priyadarshan : flop director

31. Prabhudeva : poor prabhudeva hope someone gives him a job.

32. Prasoon Joshi : ARR’s inside man Boycott.

33. Rahul Bhatt : Mahesh’s son. ‘nough said

34. Rajkumar Gupta : Multiplex

35. Rajshree Ohja :  Nobody

36. Raju Hirani : FIGHT Raju!!!!!

37. Rakesh Roshan : Hritik’s dad. I’m sure he was invited from courtesy.

38. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra : Boycott.

39. Ramesh Sippy : has been

40. Ram Gopal Varma : never was.

41. Reema Kagti depressingly bad nobody.

42. Renzil D’Silva : well on his way to ecoming the next anurag kashyap in terms of all the flops he makes. theyre welcome to him.

43. Rohan Sippy  Industry party.

44. Rohit Dhawan : quota

45. Rohit Shetty Big House director

46. Sajid Khan  farah’s brother

47. Sanjay Leela Bhansali : give this guy work. he’s only hanging with speilberg because nobody is giving him work.

48. Shimit Amin : another make work attendence.

49. Shoojit Sircar : VVC alumnus.  needs work

50. Shyam Benegal : nobody takes him seriously as a filmmaker anymore.

51. Sriram Raghavan : Big house director. I will watch his movies, but pro’lly never take him too seriously.

52. Subhash Ghai : I think this is the best synergy for speilberg and ambani.

53. Sudhir Mishra : unemployed arthouser.

54. Sujoy Ghosh : promising talent. pity he has to be BOYCOTTED!

55. Tigmanshu Dhulia : is a House director for BIG. not to be confused with  Bedabrata pain, whos an awesone director).

56. Vikas Bahl :who?

57. Vikram Bhatt White elephant maker

58. Vikramaditya Motwane : wannabe cannes. encourage.

59. Vipul Shah perfect synergy! encourage the association!

60. Vishal Bhardwaj : on his way downhill.

61. Zoya Akhtar family quote (she’s someone’s daughter or something…)

Now A R Rahman wants to be…

Michael Jackson