Love In The Time Of Cholera

Verbose, overtly descriptive with meagre smatterings of dialogue, irritating flashes forwards and backwards through time, an annoying amount of foreshadowing, inhumanly long paragraphs leading to chapters of unholy length and what is surely the death blow for a love story: Unlikeable Romantic Leads (She's Cold, He's Creepy)-By all accounts, this reader should have hated Love In The Time Of Cholera.

But surely, slowly and insidiously, Marquez worked his magic, reeling me in when I had no idea of being hooked, an Omniscient narrator not so much creating a world, but convincing me that one exists and inviting me to partake of it's peoples' lives and loves as they live through a change of century, civil wars, modernisation and the titular epidemic.

Like Atonement, Cholera is deceptively sly, convincing you that it's a love story, while cunningly suggesting at times, that it's anything but.

Florentino Ariza's unrequited love for Fermina Daza (has there ever been a more brutal rejection of a man's love by a woman in fiction?) , like the best Love Stories, spans decades, but it's apparently no deterrant to various, transitionary liasons with lonely and widowed women (622 in all) culminating in a tragic and frankly, despicable Humbert- like seduction of a young Lolita left in his charge.

But in spite of it, you are carried feverishly along the "will they or won't they" Love Story Suspense Arc , hoping for a joyful resolution to Florentino's 51 year wait.

Marquez masterfully chronicles love in all it's blissfull and painful guises; feverish adolescent passion, the treacherous minefield of tangled and conflicted emotions in a long marriage, fleeting happiness snatched from all too brief affairs not to mention erotic and romantic fulfillment in old age.

If Atonement was metafiction couched in the language of a Doomed Romance, Cholera is a dense meditation on Love and Relationships ensconced comfortably, even deceptively, in the tropes of an Epic Romance.

Sensual, Tragic, Funny, Surreal and most of all, Hearbreakingly Romantic, "El amor en los tiempos del cólera'' is terrific.

4 stars.

The Last Detective

My introduction to Robert Crais was via Hostage, his first stand-alone book after 8 novels featuring wise-cracking, Hawaian shirt loving PI Elvis Cole and tough and taciturn partner Joe Pike.

Hostage was a crackling read, introducing some pretty nifty twists to the whole hostage/negotiator scenario. It spurred me to pick up LA Requiem, 8th in the Cole/Pike series, but no handicap as they're all pretty stand-alone, barring a few developments on its' heroes' personal front that stretches across a few books.

As Crais himself mentiones in his web-site, start with his stand alone's and discover Cole/Pike via Requiem as it's the book that elevated a series of wise-cracking PI capers to serious Crime Thriller category, ratcheting Crais up to breathe that rarefied air in the stratosphere where heavyweight practicioner's of the craft like Michael Connelly ply their trade.

Like Connelly, Crais's novels are set in LA, and feature a complex hero navigating between plots creeping with tension and increasingly precarious relationships.

When The Last Detective opens, you learn events in LA Requiem have scarred both our heroes;

Tough as nails Joe Pike now nurses a bad arm, a result of being shot in the back, twice. "The bullets shattered his shoulder blade, spraying bone fragments like shrapnel through his left lung and the surrounding muscles and nerve".

And hunting an Alaskan Brown Bear (the largest predator on land) in the wilderness, Joe feels something he's rarely felt: fear

Elvis Cole is navigating an emotional minefield as his relationship with ex-Baton Rouge lawyer Lucy Chenier is becoming increasingly tenuous as she struggles to accept the fact that both Cole and Pike have a tendency to draw violence to them. She wants normal and the self-confessed World's Greatest Detective doesn't do normal.

And things are about to get worse....

Baby-sitting Lucy's 10-year old son Ben while she's away covering a trial, Cole is rail-roaded into every parent's worst nightmare when Ben is kidnapped right under his nose.

Enter the police, with chain smoking Carol Starkey ( a returning character from Crais' stand-alone Demolition Angel) and sex-obsessed criminalist John Chen (from Requiem) not to mention ever reliable and lethally effective Joe Pike to help and Lucy's obnoxious ex-husband and Ben's father, Richard to hinder and obstruct.

Tension mounts as the kidnappers are found to be linked to Cole's past as an Army Ranger in the Vietnam war, who allege Ben's kidnapping is retribution for atrocities Cole committed during his Tour of Duty...

Dodging the police who urge him to stay off the case, incurring Lucy's mounting anger when he doesn't while staying one step ahead of Richard, his oily lawyer Leland Myers and a duo of hired goons, Elvis and Joe race against time to locate Ben.

Multiple viewpoints (narratives switch from Cole's to Pike's, to Ben's and even the kidnappers' and plus an Omniscient overview in flashbacks to Cole's childhood and Vietnam Tour ) keep the plot hurtling along at breakneck pace.

If there's a weakness, it's that the twist in the plot can be figured out early and there's little or no complexity to the bad guys, although the trio of kidnappers, a scarred African and 2 ex-mercenaries are suitably menacing to up the chill factor (especially in a flashback account detailing their atrocities in Sierra Leone).

And my own Pet Peeve is that Crais, like Connelly and so many other writers in this genre, keep saddling their essentially lone wolf heroes with love interests only to have the relationship go belly up a few books later. Why do these women attach themselves to men knowing full well what they do, only to turn around and castigate them later for it?

But Crais redeems The Last Detective with a white knuckle, sweaty palmed, adrenaline thumping showdown that's guaranteed to notch up heartbeats.

A book to be gulped down in one sitting. It's that addictive.

The Last Detective is certainly not my last Cole/Pike book.

Starting The Forgotten Man, the next Elvis Cole mystery.

Keep you posted...

Billa (2007)

So, is this what it's come down to? A disenchantment so severe at the state of Tamil films that you snatch at it's miniscule positives with the savagery of a parched soul offered a jug of cool water.

I am trying my level best to write about how cool Billa is.

Now, there are differing levels of cool, of course. I'm not talking about the stratospheric type of cool that's achieved through the use of inventive, pop culture laced dialogue and shifting timelines a la Tarantino in Pulp Fiction , or ground breaking visual effects that has the most jaded action fan dropping his jaw in The Matrix or 300.

No, this is cool that is scaled way,way, waaaaaaay down the "hot" index, and contextualised within the colossally rigid tropes of a Tamil movie. This is after all, a genre that spawns endless cookie cutter melodramas that are often loud, obnoxious, misogynistic, simplistic and hypocritically Puritan.

So, to find a film that actually boasts some semblance of style, that actually takes the trouble to coat it's frames with a patina of glossy sheen, dress up it's actors in chic garbs, and have them strut like seasoned denizens of the catwalk, is a revelation.

I mean, the above is by now Standard Issue in Bollywood. But Kollywood??? An industry that still routinely pairs Geriatrics with girls fresh off the cusp of adolescence, passes off Dhanush as a hero and most criminally, still allows T.Rajendar to make movies??

I should be talking about how Billa(2007) successfully updates the old Rajini original( original in the loosest sense, as it was a remake of an Amitabh starrer in Hindi called Don, itself updated recently by Farhan Akthar with Shah Rukh Khan) for a modern audience, amping up the action and suspense while keeping the core storyline of a simple man forced to impersonate a ruthless criminal, intact.

I can't...because the film's a train wreck. And in sifting through the detritus, my meager haul of salvageable material are items that should remain in the background, visible to the eye but never overshadowing what should be the movie's main thrust: it's plot, action and suspense...in that order.

Instead, I find myself, for the sake of not writing a review that completely rubbishes the movie, talking about it's slick cinematography, drenching it's scenes in flashy, strobing monochrome images while trying my best (and failing) to ignore the fact that it's in the service of repetitive shots of people strutting towards or away from one another.

I'd like to tell you, that never before, have the sounds of cocking firearms and gunshots sounded so realistically in a Tamil movie, only to be negated by insipidly staged and amateurishly executed action scenes.

I'd like to tell you, that Ajith has never looked this cool before, clothed in designer couture and shades, but also, that despite it, he remains one of the most blandest actors in Tamil films today. See him deliver a line like "I'm back" with all the enthusiasm of a patient about to undergo triple Root Canals at the dentists', and explain to me how this charisma free, bland and weak voiced "actor" (he's the Tamil Kevin Costner) commands a formidable fan club and is dubbed, among other things, the "Ultimate Star".

I'd like to tell you that Nayanthara, fat and irritating in Ghajini, is now trim and svelte and pretty easy on the eye in a bikini, but that she unfortunately has to share screen time with a beached whale called Namitha.

Billa's biggest causalty is the complete dilution of the original's central concept of an ordinary streetwise man thrust into the high gloss and lethally treacherous world of international crime.

As cheesy as the original was (the multiple somersaults in the climax as each character makes a grab for an incriminating videotape is a sure cure for the Humour Challenged), Rajini's street performer, with betel juice dribbling down his chin, convinced you that even with swanky suits, gangster molls and hired underlings at his beck as Billa's double, nothing beat popping a paan and dancing a jig with his erstwhile cronies.

The current flick deals with the second Ajith's introduction and subsequent induction into a Police Officer's plan to impersonate Billa so perfunctorily you wonder why they even bothered with a song scene that was so skillfully inserted in the original (on the run from Billa's gang who discovers he's not the real deal, Rajini encounters his former friends, muses nostalgically on the simple life he once had, and then breaks into a song).

There's simply no context for the song in the remake. There is no delineation between the 2 roles (further damning evidence of Ajith's severely limited range), nothing to tell you that this is a streetwise pickpocket who'd rather dance in Batu Caves than throw lavish parties at his mansion.

There is an admirable economy in dialogue, a pleasant change from the often verbose fare that assails your ear in most Tamil flicks, and a courageous avoidance of anything even remotely resembling a romance between Nayanthara and Ajith, but a choppy approach to the screenplay makes it's relatively short (for a Tamil movie) running time of 2 hours seem at least 30 minutes longer. It tries to emulate the "Plot Twist" gimmick of the "Don" remake without daring to go the whole hog. So you're left with a weird hybrid that wants to stay true to the original, while jacking up the excitement via some modern plot twists, and failing miserably at both.

As an avid lover of movies (there's the word "flicks" after all in my blog title), I do tell myself every now and then not to limit my cine diet to Hollywood fare. And so I add variety to my viewing palate with a smattering of Chinese there, a grain of Korean here with side helpings of French, Spanish and Italian. To spice up the whole mixture, I should be heaping on generous portions of South Indian fare.

But on the basis of this latest foray into Tamil movies, I'll stick to the bland stuff. It's easier on the stomach....