The Factual Opinion

Romancing The Stone: The Simplicity of Form And Language

I haven't read the Parker books - I’m putting that right out here so you’ll know that this commentary will not be comparing and contrasting Richard Stark’s “The Hunter” with Darwyn Cooke’s illustrated adaptation. I will say that I would have to imagine that a fan of Stark would be immensely pleased and satisfied with Cooke’s version, if only because I can't imagine a reason they wouldn't be.

Illustrated using only black, a muted blue and cream color tones as a palette, the first 13 pages are completely without text (except for a few lines on the first page). If you can, you should read the inside cover bit “Donald Westlake on Parker" before launching into the book. It was the perfect set-up for me to then watch, or rather “read”, as Parker staunchly, heavily, and cold-heartedly walked across the George Washington Bridge. Can a person really draw someone walking cold-heartedly? Apparently Darwyn Cooke can. 

It’s funny. I’m not one to read noir, or pulp, or crime. Given a choice between those sorts of novels and some sort of relationship-y Oprahesque book (yes, I just made up an adjective; and you know exactly what it means, don’t you?), I would usually pick the latter. But when it comes to comic books, when given a choice, I always reach for the most noir type book available. And I’m always pleased. When I was writing The Virgin Read, I probably read at least 100 comics. Often, when it came time to pick something I'd never read before for the new week's column, I’d make a selection and then hear, “you’ve read that already.”“I have? Are you sure?” My point isn't an, "of course, how forgettable some of the things are, what trash". I'm bringing it up, because just the other day, someone was talking about The Spirit and they started to give me hints to remind me about it. But I didn't need hints. I remember reading The Spirit. The cover had that woman in a red dress, and she was being dipped by a man in an overcoat, hat and mask. I remember that comic perfectly. I loved that one.

So, you’d think I’d read noir more often than I do. So when the opportunity to check one out, one that happened to be by the same person (Darwyn Cooke) who came up with that issue of The Spirit, I went for it.

I was fascinated and drawn in by those first 13 pages. Most of it is drawn either from Parker’s point-of-view, or from a camera or person just behind him, and I couldn't wait to talk about it, I emailed my editor (husband) right away just to tell him about it. I was sitting there thinking about what to say about that part, because I feel like I overuse the word “cinematic” in describing comics. So, in an effort to tell you my experience using a different word, I found each and every frame - observant. I’m especially fond of the series of panels depicting a waitress behind the counter at a diner which begins on the bottom of page 13 and through page 14. I learned so much about Parker from those frames, and the only part of him in those panels are his hands. I learned that he’s good looking enough that a waitress would immediately start flirting with him. I learned that he’s not only uninterested in that sort of thing, but wholly unapologetic about it, when he selfishly, coldly deals with her by taking her cigarette, ripping off the filter, and blowing smoke in her face as he takes off. I fell for that page hard.

And frankly, I fell for the rest of the book, too. I love that we finally see him on page 20, right after he washes his face and looks at himself in the mirror. I love the details, like the stains on his shirt that he covers when he closes his jacket, and then tracing every moment of his journey as he scams his way through banks and slowly buys his way back to life. 

I won’t take this whole post to eke my way through all the pages and tell you all of my favorite moments.  But I’ll tell you that I was continually entertained by how Parker’s cold, calculated way of operating was so clearly illustrated, not just by the text, but by the pictures. I’m specifically thinking of when Parker tells Bronson that if he says “no”, Parker will kill Carter. The series of frames of Bronson saying no and Parker reaching for the gun and immediately shooting Carter in the face are stunning. I love that we don’t see the gore, just a shooting from the back of the chair. It that doesn’t make the moment and less powerful and shocking, if anything, it makes it more so. It's so fast, so simple and direct.

 
In fact, I like that most of the violence is illustrated from faraway or in the dark. Because the actual moment of violence isn’t what makes this story....it’s the tension, the build up. The illustrations of each person’s facial expressions, their body language and mannerisms are what kept me interested and on the edge of my seat.  The violence itself is just the end result and release of all that tension. I think it’s a perfect choice to focus on the build-up instead. I’m sure hundreds of artists could have made a version of Parker where the focus is all pf the blood and guts and violence. I’m so happy to enjoy the book this way instead.

And I just loved the ending. Is it the writing or the art that I love? I don’t know how to pry them apart at this point. Parker’s wits and cunning while he dismantles each and every planted person who was out to get him, and the way they are each shown - the guy not drinking his coke or the woman with her Pan Am bag - I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. I honestly didn’t know how it would all end, and every single move was thrilling. I loved being able to “watch” a chase. In other comics, I often get lost when chase scenes are drawn. I don’t know if it’s just me or the illustrations in those cases, but things become unclear very fast. That wasn't so here at all.

The clarity in each and every frame of the whole book is what makes this so fun to read. What I am supposed to notice and “get” in each frame is obvious in a way that isn't patronizing, but it's so direct that I ultimately recognize that I'm not used to comics that read this effortlessly. Each frame has a point to make, but it moves the story along. When the text is more sufficient then a picture, there’s more text.

It’s the perfect blend, and perhaps the perfect book for the comic book form. I'm in this one, and I'm in as deep as it gets.

-Nina Stone, 2010

Too Many Movies: I'm Pretty Sure He's One Of Those Psychic Dogs

This week, Martin Brown plugs into The Social Network, Matthew J. Brady offroads into Herzog, by way of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? and Joe McCulloch wraps Bollywood blockbuster Veer-Zaara in his twisted eyestems.

The Social Network
The West Wing < Sportsnight, 2010
Spoiling Like Your Daddy, Martin Brown 

Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is the creator and founder of Facebook. Marylin Delpy (Rashida Jones) is a young lawyer in the firm representing Zuckerberg in two lawsuits—one brought by his ex-best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, your new Spiderman), who wants to be recognized as Facebook’s co-founder; another involving twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played brilliantly by Armie Hammer), who claim that Zuckerberg based his website on their idea. Up until the very end of The Social Network, Jones’ role has been simply to observe Zuckerberg from two seats away at his hearings, look at him with a mixture of pity and admiration, and offer him some of her salad.

In the final moments of the film, Delpy and Zuckerberg are alone together in a conference room, and Delpy is apprising him of whether or not the hearings are going his way. She candidly lets Zuckerberg know how he would come off to a jury in an actual trial. “You’re not an asshole,” she tells him, “You’re just trying really hard to be one,” and it’s supposed to be an insight into Zuckerberg’s character—as if Delpy has been the one person the entire time who has been able to see Zuckerberg for who he truly is.

First of all, the line is a straight jack move. Howard Korder’s Boys’ Life is a play about three dudes struggling with early adulthood. Over the course of the play, Jack, the alpha of the group bullies his friends, talks horrifically about his wife, and contemplates an affair. In the final minutes of the play, we get our first glimpse of Jack’s wife, and she’s obviously head over heels in love with the guy. Drunk at a party, she comes up to Jack, puts her arms around him and ends the play telling him, “You’re not the worst man in the world.” “I’m not?” “No you’re not,” she says, “I’m afraid you’re just not. But you’d like to be…”

Back when Aaron Sorkin was writing for the stage, he and Korder ran in the same circles. Sorkin’s A Few Good Men premiered on Broadway the year after Boys’ Life ran in Lincoln Center, and the dude who played Jack in Boys’ Life played Col. Jack Ross (the Kevin Bacon role) in A Few Good Men. Of course, Sorkin has always cannibalized every source at his disposal for his own material—other writers, religious texts, 12-step literature, whatever—and, for the most part, he makes good on the adage that good artists borrow while great artists steal.

But in a film that’s at least partly about the theft of intellectual property, it’s interesting that Sorkin would completely lift his 11th hour dramatic revelation from one of his contemporaries. The Winklevoss subplot of The Social Network involves a group of upper-class Harvard kids suing Zuckerberg for stealing their initial idea—essentially MySpace for people with a harvard.edu email address—and turning it into Facebook. At the hearing, Zuckerberg tells them, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” It’s not hard to figure out whose side Sorkin would come down on in this argument.

One major problem with The Social Network is that Zuckerberg is clearly Sorkin’s protagonist, but not director David Fincher’s. In the hands of Fincher and Eisenberg, Zuckerberg has a nearly-Asperger’s level lack of social skills, which makes him almost impossible to root for. The “asshole” line at the end is meant to mirror a line in the opening scene, in which Erica Albright (Rooney Mora) is breaking up with him. “You’re going to think that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd,” she tells Zuckerberg, “It’s because you’re an asshole.” That we believe, because we’ve just watched him completely railroad her for an entire conversation.

Then we watch Zuckerberg act with destructive self-interest for the duration of the film. He treats everyone with contempt, except for Napster founder Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), who he idolizes for being an even bigger sociopath than he is. He consistently disregards the people who go to bat for him. The movie insinuates that Zuckerberg even goes to great lengths to get his Facebook partners in trouble—it’s implied that he gets Parker arrested and outs his best friend Saverin as an animal rights abuser to the Harvard paper. Even the moments that seem intended to humanize Zuckerberg—like when he claims to have defended some of Saverin’s actions to his lawyer—are played by Eisenberg as one big, long mind game. The two things that Zuckerberg has going for him are his genius with programming and his wit—and with Sorkin supplying his voice, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone with more surgical zings. Yet, it’s impossible to enjoy even Zuckerberg’s cleverest lines, because they come from such an unmitigated scumbag.

At the end, when Delpy tells him (and us) that he’s not an asshole, just acting like one, it’s supposed to be a revelation about Zuckerberg’s character, but it rings false. It comes off as just something Sorkin thought would be cool to have a character say. Worse, because it’s delivered by the one woman in The Social Network who is not portrayed through Zuckerberg’s eyes to be either a castrating bitch or a substance-abusing play toy, Delpy’s line serves as a kind of justification for his treatment of women. In Eisenberg’s hands, Zuckerberg is an unrepentant misogynist, spurred by his break-up with Erica Albright to immediately trash talk her on his LiveJournal, and seek revenge on her by creating a website called FaceMash, which allows Harvard boys to rank their coeds’ attractiveness. It becomes clear through the course of the film that Zuckerberg continues to be hung up on Erica, and his affection for her—which is really an obsession—drives him all the way to the final seconds of the film.

On its own, the final image is brilliant. Without giving too much away, it captures the ridiculousness and obsessive nature of a presumably common action. On the one hand, it hints that perhaps Zuckerberg is ready to stop demonizing women. But it also ascribes a subversive motivation to Zuckerberg’s actions—from the creation of FaceMash to the way he treats Saverin and the Winklevoss twins—as if all of his double dealings have been the result of him, like, getting his heart broke once. Coupled with Delpy’s line, it’s an insidious cliché—that underneath Zuckerberg’s abusive behavior is the heart of a sensitive little puppy dog.

It’s not Sorkin’s fault though—the line is supported by script, but it’s not supported by the movie. The script wants you to root for Zuckerberg, but Fincher and Eisenberg don’t. You could root for Saverin or the Winklevoss twins, but neither of them carry the through line of the movie. So you end up having to root for Facebook. And, in real life, every single person I know hates Facebook.

It’s almost as if Fincher and Eisenberg wanted to use The Social Network as a character study of someone with a borderline-pathological disregard for other people’s feelings—which is an intriguing idea, and one that you rarely, if ever, see in mainstream, big budget moviemaking. But that’s not the story that the script wants to tell. Sorkin wants to give Zuckerberg all kinds of character-y motives—he’s hurt by rejection, jealous of Saverin’s social status, pissed at the Winklevoss twins’ condescension toward him. But Fincher and Eisenberg want Zuckerberg to have a one hundred percent deflective personality, with absolutely no emotional attachment to anything, including his own creations. The movie is then a struggle between the two opposing points of view on its lead character.

That’s not to say that Aaron Sorkin is doing yeoman’s work with The Social Network, and that Fincher and Eisenberg are simply tanking his brilliant script. That’s definitely not the case. Sorkin’s job is to humanize the creation of a website, and he tries his ass off to do that. But at the end of the day, computer programmers simply create websites because that’s what computer programmers do, and the creation of Facebook is exactly as exciting as you’d expect stringing together a long series of letters and numbers to be.

This is a story about a guy with a good idea, and some other guys who want a piece of it. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors. Sorkin tries to obscure the simplicity of the plot by telling the story non-linearly, with the two hearings narrating Facebook’s creation myth (which Sorkin, via Jones’ character, practically admits at the end is 100% bullshit.) The hearings never go to trial because they’re completely straightforward. As great as Sorkin’s dialogue is, it can’t make up for the fact that the framing device is simply a bunch of people sitting in a conference room talking. So you have that juxtaposed with window dressing—Sorkin failing admirably to turn business and technology into entertainment. The fact that it’s all out of order and chopped into MTV-sized chunks diffuses the dramatic tension even further.

Essentially, Sorkin and Fincher are saddled with a dull story that happens to be extremely marketable. Thing is, these are two of the best dudes working in film—and the moments when The Social Network succeeds are a direct effect of the magnitude Sorkin and Fincher’s personalities. When Sorkin and Fincher’s visions come together, the film is mesmerizing—like when Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss appeal to the dean of students at Harvard for his help in bringing down Facebook. Dean Summers (played by Douglas Urbanski, who has no other acting credit, or even a picture, on IMDB) immediately sees the meeting as a waste of his time, and the back and forth between the twins and the dean is Sorkin at his most skilled. Normally, upper-class antagonists like the Winklevoss twins (portrayed so amazingly by Armie Hammer that it took me half the movie to realize it was the same guy in both roles) would be played as two-dimensional preps. It’s to Fincher and Hammer’s credit that they are not only Zuckerberg’s comedic foils, but also two of The Social Network’s most sympathetic characters.

To be fair, there are a ton of memorable moments and scenes in The Social Network (the story behind Saverin’s “abuse” of a chicken is another one that comes to mind). But as good as David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin are, and as hard as they work at it, they can’t overcome the fact that the story at the root of the film is not nearly as interesting as they’re making it out to be—it’s a two hour blockbuster that plays like a five hour documentary. They make it harder on themselves by working at cross-purposes with their protagonist—Sorkin trying to humanize him, Fincher trying to dehumanize him. Both Sorkin and Fincher’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network as a whole are often fleetingly entertaining, but ultimately feel tedious and empty—which is, ironically, a lot like Facebook itself.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
Werner Herzog, still kickin' it in 2010
Matthew J. Brady 

Michael Shannon is a fucking madman. I don't know if I've ever seen a guy who can play crazy so believably, or at least so intensely that it sure seems everyone around him believes it. He's a scary motherfucker, and his best roles see him intimidating people through the sheer force of his glare, a gaze that can burn holes in the scenery and turn people to his will, no matter how bizarre it seems. In real life, his characters are people that would make you want to run screaming, but on screen, he's compellingly creepy, somebody that you can't figure out, but seems to have some substance under the surface of insanity, a hint of why people would spend any time with him when he's so visibly, dangerously insane.

Shannon has found a perfect collaborator in Werner Herzog, who is no stranger to crazy intensity after years of working with Klaus Kinski. While this movie follows Shannon's character, an actor-turned-murderer-turned-apparent-hostage-taker, through various flashbacks involving his relationships with people before and after his mental breakdown, it also gives Herzog the chance to depict such amazing locales as the Peruvian jungle and a crowded village in western China, coming up with some typically incredible imagery. As beautiful as all that is, the best stuff all revolves around Shannon though, as Willem Dafoe, playing a police detective, interviews Chloe Sevigny and Udo Kier, playing his inexplicable fiancee (who would want to marry this guy?) and theater teacher/director, prompting flashbacks to the past and many moments with various levels of craziness, ranging from lines like "I'm gonna take my two best girls out for a drive...across the Coronado bridge at 90 miles an hour", to being convinced that God is the guy on the "Puritan Oatmeal" container, to angry recitation of lines from the audience of a performance of the play in which he has been replaced as an actor. He's pretty awesome to watch, and Herzog puts plenty of cool visuals around him, like moments when the actors freeze in place and stand still for a full minute or two at a time, or the camera swoops across the street in from of the house where the standoff is taking place. It's a weird-ass movie, but one that's pretty fascinating to watch. Herzog! Let's see more of this shit, Werner, I demand it!

Veer-Zaara
‘twas ever thus, 2004
Joe McCulloch 

In terms of simple engagement and the difficulties thereto, Indian popular cinema isn’t so different from Japanese comics; both are long-lived, well-developed, prolific traditions, bolstered by a sizable domestic audience attuned to particularized aesthetic traits. Both can also seem intimidating to the curious outsider, and not just because they’re big - they’re popular, which suggests some measure of soft dictation from the populace, given to all the popular trends and political fascinations that might ensure greater appeal, to say nothing of the proven moneymaking tropes as firm-set in the art as photographic capture or ink on paper. All the more confusing for the foreign viewer: you can ‘learn’ Béla Tarr or David B. in fairly short order - - though mastery is a different thing -- but who wants to bumble into nests of formulae and age-tested local expectations? Bollywood! Manga! It’s like running for public office where the election is also math class.

Yet there’s always a few gateways marked off on the medium maps, and this -- a Romantic Saga, All Caps, concerning a strapping Indian rescue pilot (Veer) and a pampered Pakistani free spirit (Zaara) falling madly in love and encountering several noteworthy obstacles, predominantly stemming from Pakistan’s side of the border -- is an enduring favorite for the ‘00s. Maybe that’s because it’s so paradoxically immersed in history, coming from father-son arch-populists Yash & Aditya Chopra - the former serves as director, his one and only outing as such in the ‘00s, having headed Bollywood films for over half a century and founded production studio Yash Raj Films in 1970, while the latter is screenwriter, as he has been for many Yash Raj productions, although the three directorial credits of his own include 1995’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, arguably the defining work of Big Money Bollywood for a generation.

As such, it’s not so surprising that Veer-Zaara straddles the past and present. The star of the show is undoubtedly male lead Shah Rukh Khan, who also starred in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, and indeed has prominently appeared in every film Yash or Aditya Chopra has directed since 1993. Granted, that only adds up to six movies, but it nonetheless speaks to how closely the duo played a role in molding one of the biggest popular draws in the country; truly their fates are intertwined. Female lead Preity Zinta, meanwhile, represents a different angle: the year prior to Veer-Zaara, she had testified as to receiving extortion threats during the filming of an earlier picture -- a financier of which was accused (and later acquitted) of ties to organized crime -- and spent two months in witness protection. At the time of the film’s release she had become a columnist for BBC News Online, and a few years later began to withdraw from mainstream Hindi film -- the terms of art for lead performers are “hero” and “heroine,” by the way, which speaks mightily of presumptions -- to participate in the delightfully euphemistic “parallel cinema” of India, the non-mainstream.

Veer-Zaara, however, is very, very mainstream. Maybe several mainstreams, opening with a rather ’70s- style booming voiceover narration of story’s theme before honing in on SRK wandering through soft-focus pastures in a succession of immensely pastel outfits, the sun shining and a song singing before his unseen lady love is shot down. He wakes from this old-time dream in a Pakistani prison, but know that Yash Chopra is not announcing the death of the misty melodramatic romances upon which he made his name; rather, he intends to place a truly delirious ideal of love in direct combat with modernity, complete with supporting characters sputtering over how impossibly awesome and inspiring the nigh-mythic love of Veer & Zaara is, despite her arranged marriage to a sharply mustached Pakistan politico who damns our SRK to 22 merciless years in jail, That Yellow Bastard style, having replaced his identity with that of a loathed terrorist.

That’s kind of just the tip of the iceberg of tears, which sounds impossible, but AH - there’s your problem! Nothing is impossible in the face of true love! And, if the appeal of Bollywood so often lies in its comfort with stylization, its songs and colors, declarative ideals and ecstasy of movement, a swooning portrait of this sort -- not so far off from both old-fashioned Hollywood blockbusters and popular stage musicals, the latter perhaps giving the reluctant viewer an ‘in’ to all the singing and dancing -- provides for smooth entry, so intent it is on being as popular! and big! and old! yet! new! Its substance is that of countless other pictures, but that’s part of the gateway’s education education the Chopras pursue their goal with a zealousness-unto-shamelessness that provides for a spectacle all its own.

Not one dramatic revelation in this movie goes unaccompanied by a massive BUM BUUUM of thumping music, and hardly a tear-jerking opportunity is missed. Naturally the project is also starfucking of the highest order, so SRK stands always at the center of this maelstrom of passion, narrating a 90-minute how- we-met flashback to his lawyer -- of course, a young female lawyer betting it all on this one big case that might crack wide the boys’ club of Pakistani law, all to honor her dead father! -- and later delivering a crucial thumbs-up to instill just the confidence she needs to deliver a vital opening address to the court. Then there’s a teary-eyed climactic speech by the Man himself, which results in an honest-to-god slow clap, wherein one person begins applauding in a silent room, rising to his feet as the entire population of the room -- and perhaps, implicitly, the entire world -- gradually joins in the adulation.

I know it sounds like I’m poking fun at Khan, but he’s an effective, charismatic performer, basically perfect at essaying a cheesy romantic galoot, and juuuust careful enough to stay on the good side of twitchily hamming his way through the post-prison nervous years of his character. In other words, he’s a consummate professional, entirely at ease in a world prone to fêting his inarguable magnificence. By far the best stretch of the movie is the flashback period after Intermission (that is, before the courtroom drama begins), when the plot shifts from Falling In Love to Winning Her Back. Zinta starts it off by writhing through a long dance sequence that doubles as a heavily coded masturbation extravaganza, seeing a shimmering vision of SRK in a leather jacket barging in on her daily life to perform family-appropriate seductive maneuvers.

After that it’s 45 nonstop minutes of virtually everyone in Pakistan getting blown off their feet by the unlimited romantic virtue and cast-iron moral fiber of cinema legend Shah Rukh Khan, who had resigned from his position with the Indian military -- hilariously presented onscreen as doing absolutely nothing other than rescuing citizens and travelers in peril -- all for the doomed pursuit of his lady love, whom he reunites with to the sound of pounding raindrops and chanted lyrics. Then her ambitious father is bedridden! How can she ruin her beloved parents by running off with his perfect, incredible man? God damn you, expectations of Pakistan!!

This leads to the cherry on top of Veer-Zaara. Not only does it epically congeal all sorts of vintage populist ingredients for modern delectation, but it quite fascinatingly traffics in popular politics. This is where the heroine, comes in. Adequately moony in luv but much more interesting as her increasingly feisty character ages, Zinta makes the best of a limited but duel role: that of romantic victory, and feminist triumph. Since everything needs to be big in this movie, Zaara’s outsized character serves to challenge notions of women’s roles in society, an image doubled by Rani Mukerji’s aforementioned attorney. Both of these characters are from Pakistan, and the nation thus characterized as most in need of throwing off its male-dominated nature. Oh sure, Special Guest Star Amitabh Bachchan (truly an icon of icons in Hindi pop cinema) shows some reluctance to countenance higher education for Indian women in the film’s first half, but literally all it takes is a nice speech from Zinta to cause a wholesale shift in his outlook. But let an Indian cross the border for the purposes of true romancin’, and oh shit - his dreadful treatment necessitates a formal apology from the courts of Pakistan at story’s end, the prosecuting attorney having made a devilish argument as to the superiority to the state over the individual.

It goes deeper: the title “Veer-Zaara,” consisting of the lead characters’ names, suggests not only a mythic saga, specifically a Punjab saga, in that the film concerns the Punjab region crossing from one nation to another, but some equanimity between characters, and thereby between the nations they represent. However, just as SRK is clearly the focus of the action, so is India. Zarra only meets Veer because her beloved dying governess wants her ashes returned to her homeland. So she journey’s from the ominous, looming walls of artificial Pakistan to a wildly agrarian throwback abridgement of India, where politics are local and minds are open. Sure, she keeps mentioning that her homeland is really nice too, but Chopra only depicts his own home, the home of his biggest audience. Hey, Pakistani parents are good-intentioned too… but given to facilitating horrible crimes to save face in front of a presumably ignorant, inflamed electorate. SRK blesses the ground of Pakistan at film’s end, but… he’s not going back.

As a result, the film behaves as basically a three-hour concern troll on the topic of Indio-Pakistani relations, insisting on a good moral “we’re all the same, we all have our faults” kind of theme, but burdening one nation with almost the entire burden of change. And I don’t even think this is intentional, although I also think that Yash & Aditya Chopra have a burden of their own, pop’s burden of beauteous appeal to the audience. So India is lovely and green, and other lands are built by hand, Punjab or not, and wherever the non-Hero and non-Heroine roles must occur, they are dispersed away from the audience. This too is a fascination and a hazard of pop culture at its most monied, flattery getting you everywhere. Veer confronts Zaara’s mother, once skeptical of this man’s intent, but finally overwhelmed by his goodness. “Is every son from your country like you?” she whispers, agog. He assures her that every Indian mother is like her, as the floor verily floods with reluctant foreign tears, on the soil that will damn him for decades, that will leave his parents dead without him, that will ruin Zaara and shame the law. The music swells! The camera pulls back! Oh, if only we all could have stars like this! If only!

-Martin Brown, Matthew J. Brady & Joe McCulloch, 2010