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Partly translated in English~ but fully in Español at Cinencuentro.

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For those fathers who always play down their worries and fears.

我想你,爸。

I’m not gonna lie to you ‘coz it’s obvious. I’m dying to watch Haider because of Tabu, and because it’s Vishal Bhardwaj… and Shakespeare, and the trilogy finally completed. I’m also not entirely sold on Shahid Kapoor, but I haven’t seen much of his work and he was sorta okay in Jab We Met. Haven’t seen Kaminey yet.

But he does look extra super duper sexy with clipped hair and facial hair.

shahid-kapoor-haider

As Zoolander would say, Really REALLY RIDICULOUSLY GOOD LOOKING.

I just ran into this NDTV Walk the Talk interview that Tabu did – should be in between 2004 – that aired in Jan’05 where she gets into the various films that she’s done in various languages. She mentions that she’s got a flare for languages (!!!) and that she’s fluent in Telugu, and had picked up Marathi. She also mentioned she’s done films in Malayalam (which she says she doesn’t understand when doing her lines), Kannada, and Tamil.

And… and… and… she took three months of Spanish. There. LOL

From what I’ve been able to see from Hindi, at least, Spanish conjugation won’t be much of a head-scratching problem. I don’t know exactly how much Spanish she could’ve picked up in that period of time, considering I know people who gave up Spanish after a couple of months because of verb conjugation (especially from the ‘to be’ and ‘to have’)- it could be the same from Tabu. xD

It also depends on whether she tried Castilian (The Spanish with a Spain accent) or Spanish (with any variation of Latin American accent), because the different sounds for ‘s,’ ‘c,’ and ‘z’ may frustrate some.

So now I wonder how that went for her. xD

When I was prepping my bias list [1], I noticed that sometimes I preferred my biases in snapshots over proper photoshoots, especially because I was actually looking for photos in color over black and white. Tabu was one of them. I have this image of her being all intense and such, but from interviews she really comes off (and tries hard) to appear super laid-back and cute.

In event photos she kinda shows up with arms crossed, but lately I’ve seen some pics of her laughing and having a good time. In this snap for the screening of Filmistaan, she looks super at ease. And she has a smartphone (looks like an iPhone) with a simple pink case! Can’t get any more girly than that really. LOL

tabu-filmistaan-screening

I saw the Filmistaan trailer a while back, and it looked funny. Vidya and her husband were there for the screening (considering it’s UTV) it’s not biggie. Tabu’s there probably because Haider is produced and distributed by UTV too, and Nimrat Kaur (who looked fly as well) was in The Lunchbox which is also produced by it. Of course, the both of them could’ve shown up because they wanted to watch it.

Sridevi’s lovely crowd-pleasing English Vinglish is going to Japan [Trailer, if you don’t believe me], and for a moment there I thought they might actually super-dub it [1] but no~ Japan is getting it subbed after 3 Idiots got a nod for Best Foreign Film in the last edition of the Japanese Academy Awards. For promotions of the film, they want to use this image of her 1993 film Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja:

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OH~ GODDDDDDDD

And it’s serious too- like, they totally mean to promote EV with Sridevi in yellow-face without a hint of irony. I wonder what Japanese people would think other than “oh, these silly foreigners,” I don’t know who the audience for the film is in Japan, somehow I don’t picture Japanese housewives going to watch a non-Japanese non-Hollywood (ft. Depp or DiCaprio or Pitt or Cruise) flick with subtitles, but maybe I’m underestimating them.

For casual watchers of “this is Chinese/Japanese/Korean” arguments online or real life, Sridevi’s attire though wanting to be Japanese is obviously more Chinese-inspired, like Disney’s Mulan’s match-making attire wanting to be Chinese but obviously Japanese-inspired.

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I was being a diligent updater and news reporter when I ran into my first Indian boyband.

Admittedly, I clicked on the link because I was curious with the name Meiyang Chang [1] in the Sony Music India channel… which is how I saw this version of Azul Azul’s La Bomba [MV] LOL

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I’ve been binging on Madhuri Dixit clips once again because it’s her birthday! I’ve been watching her clips from Devdas multiple times just tonight- I think this is the first time I decided to search for the clips in the best resolution possible. This is the first time I catch the EROSNOW 1080 clips, so I just noticed how cleaned up the image is- like, this is the first time I’m seeing the Devdas print without the orange tint. LOL

So… if EROS has the cleaned up print in high resolution~~~ why the heck aren’t they’re releasing it on Bluray already? I’ve only seen the film once, but it looks odd without the weird coloring… like they cleaned it up and color corrected it wrong. xD Anyway, I’ve settled for a lot of Hindi DVDs already — the YRF DVDs are particularly decent — but I won’t settle for less from Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Being able to just stream the movie is not enough either!

Because look at her! She owns it, and you sorta wish SRK wasn’t overacting so much in it because he’s ruining my mood in here. And I’ve learned to love SRK, but come on!

With that song~ Maar Dala~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX1ro0AJk_I

How can I not add the pretty of that to my collection? PLEASE!

Don’t make me do questionable things for high resolution video!

So… I thought I was wrong [1], but now I’m not so sure.

One of my pet-peeves with Indian cinema (and Chinese… and Russian) is when some sort of dubbing is involved. The Russians, of course, are the worst offenders of that when they just slap some Russian over-dubbed without even caring if it’s a man talking over a female character. It’s not even like it’s properly dubbed, it’s just lazily slapped onto the original track without even lowering the audio.

Then the Chinese mess around with you because you got Hong Kong actors that don’t necessarily speak proper Mandarin working with Mainland actors who wouldn’t necessarily speak proper Cantonese (or at all). The result? You don’t exactly know which one is the original audio track. The way I go about it is to choose always Cantonese when film is set in Hong Kong, and go for Mandarin in most epics. Anything historical epic HK production pre-97 also gets the Cantonese favoritism. xD

India has suchhhhhh an array of languages that I’m not entirely familiar with that it would mean little to choose one language over the other, unless you’re bothered with lips syncing. Though Hindi now sounds familiar, I must admit. What bothers me is that I get accustomed to people’s voices. It seems people in India find certain voices more appealing than others, and could -in a whim- dubbed you over. One of the reasons I can’t stand Ghulam is because it bothers me that Rani’s dubbed voice doesn’t match my idea of Rani.

Tabu has done a bit of non-Hindi films, and though her acting can be epic- Telugu dubbing, man. I know and I like Tabu’s voice, and it freaks me out a little how different the dubbing voice can be. As a general dubbing rule, companies tend to go for voices that are similar to the original audio… or they go for someone with a similar flare. Not generally in Indian cinema.

All this talk is because I found a clip of Vidya Balan from Urumi, for which I complained that they probably dubbed their voices. However, in the clip, it sounds… almost like Vidya. For a very long moment I thought it was her, until I read the comments… now, I’m not sure. LOL

If it’s dubbed, it’s the best dubbed I’ve seen. It’s a Japanese super-dub!

If it’s Vidya’s voice, she apparently speaks perfect Malayalam for the movie.

… or what I think it’s an upcoming issue of Filmfare, anyway.

tabu-filmfare-2014-haider

I just ran into this lovely photo from the Filmfare editor’s Twitter account [1][2], and if you zoom into the images, you sorta can read those first two pages. Otherwise, I did a search and found nothing yet. According to the main quote, the most note-worthy thing Tabu said was “Apart from a child, a man can give me diamonds,” which is not, considering that she says she wanted to learn ballet. Now THAT is interesting!

In general, prima ballerinas are thought to be small… though that is apparently changing now that people are taller. Imagine a danseur that is 5’11 or 6 feet tall with a prima ballerina that is only 5’2. If Tabu had problems with her height in an industry that could pull off camera tricks, I can’t imagine if she had follow through with ballet.

Other notable comments from the images were the ones she made about her moving from Hyderabad to Mumbai. It’s interesting because it goes so in contrast to her early interviews. And she hasn’t read Shakespeare. I hated reading unfiltered-yet-translated Shakespeare in school. LOL Anyway, having said all of that, Haider is really one of my anticipated films this year :)

Oh-oh, and she wants to do an action film where she does her stunts. While watching Jai Ho, I wanted her to go all Mama Bear before she had to call Salman- like, THAT would have made the movie actually a lot better. It wouldn’t have made sense with anything in her current backstory, but they could’ve made it work. Tabu just hitting bad guys.

*May22’14 Update*

Interview is up!