The plot is simple: On The Times of India, I found this very short summary! “Shoebite” traces the life of John Pereira, a man in his early 60s who sets out on a journey of self-discovery and penance that leads him to rediscover his love for his wife in the fag end of their marriage.”
I must admit that these only few words as well as the presence of Amitabh-ji in that film were enough to made me thrill with excitement! A road-movie for love! Life is a route scattered with bumps, holes, bends and obstacles. Shoebite…lovebite… I was already dreaming of Great Bachchan walking on the difficult path of existentialism! Indian landscapes… Lonely adventures…
But it would be too good to be true!
The film was shot in 2008 and has never released!
The reason?
This is due to a sad story of rights. Once the film was made, UTV Motion Pictures – the Indian production company – realized that the film couldn’t go out because the 20th Century Fox had opposed:
“Fox says the rights are with them, and they wish to make the film with Denzel Washington, but much before that we had already completed the film on the assurance that the rights were cleared.”
(Amitabh Bachchan explains in his blog/ quoted on Gomolo.com )
Night Shyamalan
Actually, the original script, untitled Labor of Love, was written by director Manoj Night Shyamalan in 1993 and sold to the Fox in 2001! Can you imagine? Mister Shyamalan! The Sixth-sense-guy, the UFO of Hollywood, this accursed genius whose movies always twist smartly between the blockbuster masterpiece and the art-house film failure – or between the blockbuster failure and the art-house masterpiece… !
Unfortunately, at that time, Fox didn’t want the young American director to achieve this project. Thus, 13 years later, the situation is more or less stuck, an Indian film has been shot with an Indian superstar, Sircar and UTV will be allowed to release Shoebite only once the Hollywood movie is out!
Despair and anger:
You can easily imagine Shoojit Sircar’s despair and anger!
“Our film is like our child and I feel even production house should treat them the same way. For me, ‘Shoebite’ not getting release is like a miscarriage. I had cried a lot and I was very upset about it,” he said on The Times of India.com
Sircar and Bachchan on the shooting of Shoebite
And you can imagine my own despair!
Because, you see, I’m part of these women who swoon as soon as they see the brushy chest of the Angry Young Man or the pepper-and-salt beard of Big B.! I was so overwhelmed by Black,- the real masterpiece of Sanjay Leela Bhansali in which Mr Bachchan plays the role of a man suffering from Alzheimer disease– that I felt extremely frustrated when I realized I would not see Shoebite before I become the heroine of a Karan Johar film!
Film Black with Rani Mukherjee
A glimmer of hope:
Currently, a glimmer of hope seems to be rising in the sky of the Indian cinema. Rumours say that Shyamalan would be working on his script… but I am a little doubtful…
“(…) a spokesperson from the Hollywood studio says, “We don’t have the film on our official slate this year but if Shyamalan is working on it, it would be great!” (Mid-Day.com) I’m sorry but that’s the kind of statement which means everything and nothing!
In the meanwhile you can go and read more information about Shyamalan’s story where many details are given. (eg. Scriptshadow) In the American version, the main character is called Maurice and he walks through the USA of course, to show how much he loves his wife, whereas she actually died in a car crash.
So now, what we can only do is to keep on hoping and say: Show Must go On!
What about watching Shyamalan’s After Earth starring Will Smith?
Sircar’s Madras Café is going out on the 23rd of August. It seems to be a marvel! I find John Abraham better and better!
A few days ago, I published a strange picture on my blog. You remember how we laughed at Big B wearing Louis 14’s slippers and a skiing-puffa jacket!
I’ve just discovered where this picture is from!
It was actually taken from a calendar, a bit like Pirelli calendar, but in India, and less sexy of course! Photographer Dabboo Ratnani invited la crème de la crème from Bollywood to strike the pose for 2013, – I note that refined Aamir Khan didn’t take part to this “no-smile-shooting fiesta”. I must admit I hate that kind of calendars. I can’t imagine waking up every morning and finding myself face to face with Hrithik Roshan‘s abdominals stuck on the door of my fridge!
Anyway!
Once more, it is a little sad to see that these superstars still can’t get rid of the gender clichés : guys pose on a motorbike, wearing sunglasses, open shirts or showing such impressive muscles that even Poppeye would choke on his spinach! As for the girls, that’s not better! They are often half naked and their eyes seem to say “Take me now” to the camera! Basically, I have nothing against cigars and half-naked women, but it is so common!
Well, I like a couple of photos all the same:
Anyway, I’ve always had a little crush on Akshay Kumar
As usual, I didn’t recognize Kajol! But she has a lovely smile…and an ugly dress! But she looks like Cinderella: “I’m coming back from a bal on a dirty pumpkin.” I like it!
Shahrukh, the new fragrance by Christian Dior…
But what I really prefer is the back cover of the calendar showing plenty of little photos of Ratnani, his models, and his family, I guess…
Let’s have fun and let’s make Indian photo-cocktails!
To have a delicious Indian Photo-Cocktail, pour a famous character, an animal, a film and a hobby into a blender! Shake! And that’s it! See the picture from the mixture!
1) This is an amazing piece of news for all these people who type “Amitabh Bachchan dead” on their search engines and arrive on my blog. So, I can tell you this: AMITABH BACHCHAN IS NOT DEAD! He writes on his blog, on twitter, everyday everywhere! Maybe his posts are sometimes a little deadly boring but no, Big B. is safe and sound!
2) Shahrukh Khan is not dead either but he smokes too much and drinks too much coffee. But his tweets are fun!
21 sept: Made coffee for myself…added salt instead of sugar. Tasted like soup from Hell! A lesser man would get off coffee for ever…but I’m C.one.
22 sept: Little mercies of life…cab friend allows me to smoke…aaah to be a movie star. Will I get arrested? Oups!
3) Salman and Katrina are cute in this advert for Amul!
4) And finally: Goodnight! The old man from Jodhpur is sleeping! (I think everybody who has visited the Fort of Jodhpur has taken a picture of him!)
Many Indians have already been on the cover of Time Magazine, this well-known American weekly that most of us have bought to try to improve our English and to be more cultured but who have never managed to read the least article to the end because it was too difficult and too economically oriented.
Mahatma Gandhi is the champion, of course, since he has appeared three times but only before the date of his death.
Being named Gandhi (Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi) would have seemed to be the condition sine qua non to have your portrait on the cover of this magazine if Sachin Tendulkar and his gold cricket-bat hadn’t had this honour too. I find this picture really beautiful, which is unuasual for the Time!
Very few Bollywood actors have had this tremendous honour which means that you have some kind of power or influence in the international society. Only three. Who? Raj Kapoor? Nooooooo! Amitabh Bachchan? You’re freezing! Shahrukh Khan? Ah ah ah! Stop pulling my leg! It’s ticklish*!
No, the winners are:
In 2003, Aishwarya Rai (Between you and me, I don’t really know what she has done to be on this cover. Apart from acting in marvellous Devdas and in this stupid remake of Pride andPrejudice… I must have missed an episode…or I suppose she has been the best representative of this new generation of artists who managed to cross the Indian borders to make their mark worldwide. )
In 1976, Parveen Babi was also on the cover… everybody knows who Parveen Babi was, of course! So, if you already know her, I don’t need to tell you that she was a famous Bollywwood actress and a model in the 70s and 80s and that according to Wikipedia, she had a little canari in her head as she accused Amitabh Bachchan of trying to kill her. She finally died alone at home, in 2005.
And in 2012, the third Bollywood star on the Time cover is Aamiiiir Khaaaan! (I know, there was no suspens, the picture is above and it is the title of my post!) He is not a starlet from Bollywood, he hasn’t slept with Danny Denzongpa and has never had the role of Elizabeth Bennet in the film adaptation of a Jane Austen’s novel. No, he is the hoster of Satyamev Jayate I have already written about here. I like the headline: Khan’s Quest which summarizes what I think of Aamir Khan, a man who just tries to go forwards, a man who wants to add a new piece to the jigsaw puzzle of the Indian society but who doesn’t seem to despair even if his piece is tiny.
The patient warrior…
Your intention please!I’ve just discovered that Shahrukh Khan had already featured on a Time-cover BUT… it was just for a 2004 Special Issue called Asia’s Heroes. Better than nothing…
I had already suspected that Amitabh Bachchan was a geek when he had started to wear these huge thick-framed glasses which are his trademark now! But as I always refuse to judge a book by its cover or a man by his glasses, I only had the conviction of his geekiness when I discovered his blog!
His blog has been existed since April 2008. BigBlog used to be on a platform called BIGADDA but it had to move – I can’t tell you more about this complicated issue which apparently made the actor a bit upset – but now, abigcaddabri!, abigcaddabra!, it is on Tumblr: Bachchan Bol, and Big B has become Sir Bachchan, which I think is nicer than this maxi hamburger name that his fans and the journalists give him all the time.
(Click on the picture to see where they are from)
A style that nobody can reproduce:
Amitabh Bachchan loves writing on his blog! It seems to have become a vital need to communicate with his millions of followers; all these people he calls his extended family, or his Ef! – It took me a long time to understand what these two letters meant!
Sir Bachchan writes almost everyday! So often that I wondered if he didn’t have ghost secretaries in a secret
Sir Bachchan’s new blog
attic.
But the actor has got a style of his own, a style that you can’t reproduce! A mixture of poetry (his dad’s legacy, I guess), subtle humour and everyday’s philosophy. Sometimes, the sentences are a little complex, the vocabulary very novelistic, even pompous and I often have to concentrate or read them twice. Most of the time, his posts are rather long, but I cannot criticize this point; it would be like Roquefort who would say « Hey! You, stinky! » to Camembert. To those who don’t understand my cheesy comparison, I just mean that I think writing long posts on a blog is a drawback because people may not read the article till the end. I remember a rude and pretentious guy on a forum who had just read the first two lines from one of my three-page articles and who ruthlessly smashed all my work down without reading the rest of the text!
Well, what was I saying?
Oh, yes! Amitabh Bachchan writes long posts! But it doesn’t matter because everybody reads them, the longer, the better, because he is Amitabh Bachchan and Amitabh Bachchan is a Bollygood geek, oups, I mean, a Bollywood god or I would rather say a Bollywood Monarch by divine right and I know you know it but when you are Amitabh Bachchan everybody listens to everything you say, watches everything you do and reads everything you write.
A new kind of religion…
By the way, what does Amitabh Bachchan write?
Sir B writes about his universe; about his numerous projects, his shootings, his promotion events, his family, his friends, his Ef, his charities, the weather, life, death…India. Bachchan doesn’t live in the care bears’ world but he knows how to remain polite and friendly. Like other superstars such as Shahrukh Khan, he is aware of the influence he has on people and knows that a king or a god must be a patriarch and a model. So, he writes to his Ef tenderly, and even if he is attacked as any blogger who has success can be – I remember the day when he had made a post after one of his muslim friends’ death, he had received many offencive comments from moderate, tolerant and open-minded… morons – he always manages to lose control as a real gentleman.
A few extracts from the thousands of posts:
12th of July: A tribute to wrestler-actor Darah Singh who died a few days ago:
An ocean full of memories flash by on such occasions. As kids in School in the 50’s we had admired and looked up to this man of super human strength. His name and his talk provoked immense awe. He was the World Champion wrestler, his exploits in the ring were spoken off in disbelief and wonder. His bouts in the ring with his challenger King Kong was a renowned feature and each time they had their fights in Delhi at the National Stadium, we would scramble to get tickets somehow to go and watch him defeat his opponents !
4thof July Day 1538: Big B sends an SOS:
HELLO ALL !! URGENT !! HALF MY POST DAY 1538 SUDDENLY HAS DISAPPEARED AFTER POSTING .. CAN SOMEONE RETRIEVE IT AND SEND IT TO ME .. I KNOW SOME READ IT AND COMMENTED TOO ON TWITTER … SO PLEASE I AM MST DISTRESSED … !!! HELP AB
Shanouk is guarding the Rolls!
19th of June. Day 1523: Big B. introduces his Ef a new member of his family!
Oh ! almost forgot the most exciting part of the day – an encounter with my niece’s little pup … a Shih Tzu .. the cutest pup I ever saw. Fell in love with it immediately, as did Shanouk !
(By the way, Shanouk is Sir Bachchan’s pet…the donkey-sized doggie on the picture on the left…)
5th of May. Day 1478: Big B. tells the concerts he gave in the 80s:
For Wembley I invited SriDevi to join us along with Neelam … and for the first time on stage, Salman and Aamir ! This was not the Salman and Aamir of today. It was them 20 years ago. It was the first time they were going to a concert. SriDevi and I performed ‘Jumma Chumma’ on stage with dancers from New York some of whom performed at Radio City in NYC for the Rockettes !! We had elephants, horses, motor bikes riding on to the stage, and me dropping from the roof of the stadium some 60 ‘ high in a basket, screaming ‘ari o Jumma …’.
14th of April. Day 1457: Talks about the danger of Twitter
One innocent tweet about the visit to the doctor saw an entire fleet of vans from the media collecting outside Jalsa and worse, following me to the hospital –
And so on, and so forth!
Vogging and Twitting!
More recently, I’ve realised that Bachchan writes but he can also speak on his new blog! I thought it was the
Allo? Amitabhji?
audio version of his posts for blind people but actually it isn’t. Indeed, once or twice a week, Sir Bachchan records a message from his mobile phone which is sent to his followers’s own cellulars. It is called Bachchan Bol ( Bolna (बोलना) means to speak) and it is a Vog, (Vocal Blog). It is a new way to communicate for the star and an excellent idea considering that only 121 million Indians use the Internet whereas about 900 million mobile phones are in use in the country!
But that’s not all, folks! Like many celebrities, the actor is on Twitter too! 3 million followers! He tweets his moods, what he is doing and he also publishes philosophical frases about life such as: Mosquitoes have killed more humans than all the wars in history » (Tweet July 12th). Astounding, isn’t it? And there, he happens to let himself go, taking time to answer his critics: Dear peron who called me « dirty minded », if you’re not dirty minded, how’d you understand what I mean? » (Tweet T 803 July 12th) Houlala! The angry young man has returned!
Am I an Ef?
To be sincere, I don’t read Sir Bachchan’s blog and Tweets dedicatedly but I visit it regularly. So when I go to BBB (Big B’s Blog!!! Oh Please! Make an effort, I can’t explain everything!), I read a few articles at random, except when they are about sports, or when they go like this: « The normalcy that one hopes will accrue at the time of conveying or loading thoughts for those that wait patiently to hear, fails. Despite strong efforts, deep time consumed thinking, one just succumbs to the eventuality and in great despair, resigns himself. »(8th of July Day 1541) You know what I mean? Hopefully, for simple minds like me, Amitabhji also publishes photos…I should say posters: his huge dog, his huge public, his huge portraits of himself, pictures of the huge shootings… It is hugely worth a look!
(The article continues after the photos…)
Lord’s Day:
Sunday Crowdy Sunday…
Before leaving you, I wanted to talk to you about someting I discovered while I was reading Mr Bachchan’s blog. I must admit I was stunned!
I realized that on Sundays at 6 pm, in his villa Jalsa in Mumbai, the actor goes to his garden, climbs up a small wooden stage and then the security staff opens the gates and a huge crowd of people standing in the street (99% are men, a few children and women are at the front) starts to wave and shout, and take pictures of the star. It reminds me of the Moghol Emperors who went to their window every evening to exhibit themselves to the people. Finally, even if that makes me perplexed, and contrary to what the media feared, this strange kinglike rite certainly proves that despite so much communication on the web and elsewhere, Amitabh Bachchan has not lost his mystique.
« …at 70 do you really think anyone cares about your mystique !!« (AB 14th April, Day 1457)
Little M. (Ah! Ah!)
Post Typing: I show you this video found on youtube. One of Bachchanji’s Sunday sessions. I can’t really explain why but I find this scene disturbing.
But why, why didn’t they vote for me? That’s unfair! Only my goldfish love me!
The 10 nominees left in this historical poll are (drum roll, drum roll…):
AB Vajpayee (Politician)
Indira Gandhi (Prime Minister)
APJ Abdul Kalam (Scientist and President of India)
Lata Mangeshkar ( Playback Singer)
Mother Teresa (Religious personnality)
Sachin Tendulkar (Cricket Player)
Jawaharlal Nerhu (Prime Minister)
JRD Tata (Businessman)
Dr BR Ambedkar (Politician)
Vallabhbhai Patel (A great figure in India independence and deputy Prime Minister)
Two of my three faves have remained in the list: Tata and Ambedkhar but Ray has disappeared.
A few names were expected: Mother Teresa and Jawaharlal Nerhu. It is interesting to notice that the only person representing the world of cinema and music is Lata Mangeshkar, a famous playback singer considered as the nightingale of India.
Have you seen Shoebite, by Shoojit Sircar?
A Message To India 