Houston's diversity

MFAH celebrates work of Indian Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore in movieseries

Rabindranath Tagore
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, left,Marian Luntz
Photo by Ruchi Mukherjee
Moviegoers browse therough handicrafts and books from Santiniketan
Photo by Ruchi Mukherjee
TSH president Raja Banga, left, Debleena Banerji
Photo by Ruchi Mukherjee

As the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore influenced many notables, including Mahatma Gandhi, Audrey Hepburn, Satyajit Ray, Albert Einstein, and Indira Gandhi. Yet he is quite unknown to many.

However, Tagore's anonymity was bridged during recent events at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. To mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, the museum hosted the works of Tagore and of legendary film director Satyajit Ray. The event, which also celebrated the 90th anniversary of Ray's birth, kicked-off last week with Ray's documentary about Tagore and a screening of Ray's most famous work Charulata (The Lonely Wife), based on a Tagore novel, on Friday night.

MFAH curator of film and video Marian Luntz and Houston-based writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni introduced the intercultural audience to Ray and Tagore. In a conversation, Divakaruni, who hails from Calcutta now called Kolkata, said the movie had made a great attempt to explain the rich cultural heritage of the state of Bengal. "For instance, the main protagonist might be a simple bored housewife but she is very intelligent and a vivid reader who discovers her passion as a writer," Divakaruni explained.

Tagore, who was born in 1861 in India, started his career with a brief stay in England in an attempt to study law, but he returned to India, and instead pursued a career as a writer, playwright, songwriter, poet, philosopher and educator. His most acclaimed work is a selection of poems, Gitanjal, that has been translated into English from his native language Bengali. Also a social reformer, Rabindranath started an experimental school at Shantiniketan where he instilled his Upanishadic ideals of education.

He participated in the Indian nationalist movement which made Gandhi, the political father of modern India, his devoted friend. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honor in protest against British policies in India. Although Tagore wrote successfully in all literary genres, he is remembered mostly as a poet.

The Lonely Wife (Charulata) is based on "Nastanirh (The Broken Nest)," a story by Tagore and set in Kolkata in the late 19th century when the Bengal renaissance was at its peak and India was under British rule. The film was Ray's twelfth feature film and the director's favorite. It was a stand out among Ray's films and explores the emergence of the modern woman in the upper-class of colonial India. One can not help but draw parallels with Ibsen's A Doll's House.

The context is suggestive with details like the opening sequence where the young wife Charulata is moving from one window to another in her house, observing the activities of the outside world through the window blinds using opera glasses. She feels like a caged bird in her mansion with a keen curiosity and desire to know the outside world.

The evening, which drew an audience of more than 300, was made possible through The Tagore Society of Houston. Surajit Dasgupta from The Tagore Society told the audience that a scholarship program started by the society helps graduate students in the Department of English at the University of Houston study Tagore for a semester. The Tagore Scholarship Grant program sponsors 11 students this year.

During a reception after the movie, the crowd discussed the movie, sipped wine and browsed through handicrafts from Santiniketan, including Indian tunics, jewelry and books of Tagore.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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