Word: ratnam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Aishwarya Rai was greeted with a bouquet of roses from a city official and audience cries of "We love you, Ash!" Abhishek Bachchan, a rising actor and son of Indian film legend Amitabh Bachchan, enters to girlish squeals not heard since Hrithik Roshan last went topless in public. Mani Ratnam, who is internationally the most revered writer-director of Indian films, said a few words. Composer A R Rahman, whose hundred or so film scores have made him arguably the world's all-time top-selling recording artist, appeared but remained silent. The house lights dimmed and Guru began...
...ritzy premiere such as this would typically take place in Mumbai (Bombay) or in Ratnam's home town Chennai (Madras). But Bollywood films have eyes to be as popular in America as in India, Indonesia, the Middle East and North Africa, where they dominate cinematic culture. So the principals of Guru had come 7,800 miles to the Empire 25 theater just off Times Square in New York City to flack their film this weekend. (They'd been in Toronto the evening before.) Then Abhishek and Ash flew back to India, where, in a flourish that Brad and Angelina might...
...That story indicates the art-film vs. popular-movie split at Cannes. Tsui Hark is invited to serve on the jury; yet not one of his (or any other Hong Kong maestro's) action movies ever appeared in the competition. Nor did exceptional films by India's Mani Ratnam, Japan's Takashi Miike and Korea's Chang Yoon Hyun. It seems not to have occurred to Cannes that a continent containing nearly half the world's population?and many of its most avid moviegoers?might be producing some movies worth watching, and cheering, at an international film festival...
...studied music at Oxford and returned to Madras to write jingles for an ad agency. In 1992 Tamil director Mani Ratnam chose Rahman, then 26, to be musical director of the movie Roja. Scoring an Indian film means writing the songs (with a lyricist) as well as composing and conducting the background music. Rahman proved a master of it all. His songs were recognizably Indian but paraded a world of musical influences, from raga to reggae, from Broadway to Ennio Morricone, with each tune heightening the film's drama...
Soon Rahman added commissions for Hindi (Bollywood) films to his workload. In songs for Ratnam's Bombay and Dil Se, and for the Hindi films Vishwavidhaata, Taal and Lagaan, he created a body of work unparalleled, at least in the '90s, for ravishing melodic ingenuity. "I wanted to produce film songs," he says, "that go beyond language or culture." They went beyond India too. As Western film cultists discovered India's pop cinema, they realized that along with the ferocious emoting and delirious dances, there was a master composer--the man Indians call the Mozart of Madras...