February 19, 2013
OSCARS 2013: The Most Predictable Yet Most Interesting Race in Memory
On the last day of voting, Killough makes his final predictions....
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November 24, 2012
REVIEW: ‘Life of Pi’ Capsizes but Floats, Barely.
I’ll admit it: more often than not, I’m a sucker for extremely popular novels, and I loved Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi. I was passionate Cloud Atlas in an almost unseemly way, too, and I sobbed like a melancholic Victorian housewife at the end of The Kite Runner. But all three books have struggled to be translated successfully to the screen despite being handled by some of Hollywood’s most adept directors. That might be due to higher-than-usual expectations because of how I felt for the books, but I doubt it. I have wanted nothing more than these films to put the awesome back in awesomeness, and have forgiven them more than they deserved as a result.
I was particularly impressed with Life of Pi the book because it was written by a gora and I, James Killough, host of the 1993 Miss India Pageant, am one of those goras who feels he owns India, or at least huge swaths of it, and we are a jealous, proprietary lot. “You know more about my country than I do!” is a common phrase I’ll hear from an Indian I’ve just met. Two desi writers, Salam Rushdie and Shashi Tharoor (The Great Indian Novel), have been unwitting mentors for my own work. When I bust out truly whimsical lyrical Americanized Hobson-Jobson mala garlands of neologized sentences, that is purely their influence. So Martel didn’t have my permission to write his book, and I fought him tigerly for encroaching on my territory at first, but by the time I put it down, he had won his right to his India fair and square.
I also think Ang Lee ranks in the top ten directors working today. Relatively speaking, he gets to do what he wants in an industry where you seldom get to do what you want, or not what you set out to do, at least. Therefore, you would think that the equation of worthy book plus strong director would equal amazing film, but like Cloud Atlas and The Kite Runner before it, Life of Pi disappoints far more than it impresses.
April 30, 2012
Too Cool for School?
THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW
by James Killough
I had a brief email exchange over the weekend with our contributor Eric Baker in which he brought to my attention that our colleagues in the entertainment biz never leave comments on this blog, but rather send them to us in private emails. Sometimes I might get a “like” or a quick note when I post a link to a PFC piece on Facebook, but that’s still considered private. “It’s like being in a high school exclusively made up of cool kids,” I explained in my reply to Baker.
The 17-year-old star of "Life of Pi" is just how I imagined him from the book.
James Tuttle has similar experiences. For example, in a wee incident last year, he was taken to task by a friend of his, an Oscar-nominated actress, for using the word ‘retarded.’ She protested that he was too intelligent and articulate to need to resort to adjectives that disparaged mentally disabled people; a child of a friend of hers was one such person, etcetera. Even though I pointed out in a post of my own that the definition and etymology of ‘retarded’ was broad enough to excuse Tuttle’s use of it, the actress’ point was legitimate in light of where we are culturally with the bullying issue.