Shaft (1971)

Directed by Gordon Parks
US, 1971, color, 100 min.
With Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn, Charles Cioffi

Blurb from the HFA website: "No one could ignore the success of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, certainly not MGM, which was eager to capitalize on alt-art cinema when it could—leading to such unusual collaborations as a three-picture deal with Michelangelo Antonioni. It was easy enough to turn Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft into “the black private dick who’s machine to all the chicks.” And while Shaft may have turn revolutionary baadasssss cinema into blaxploitation, it also looked ahead to some of the great innovations and reestimations of genre cinema in the seventies: Tidyman wrote screenplays for The French Connection and High Plains Drifter and Isaac Hayes won an Oscar for his score. Along the way director Gordon Parks not only makes a cameo, but strategically places copies of Essence magazine in the film (Parks had co-founded it)."

Everybody loves a good drought: The human face of poverty in India

If you get a chance check out this incredible book I discovered in India called "Everybody loves a good drought: The human face of poverty in India" by Palagummi Sainath. Rather than being a dry, academic book doling out statistics or the grand pronouncements of a smart-ass deskbound writer it feels very real despite the angry writing.

It is a collection of stories that he filed for the Times of India from the 10 poorest districts in India (in Orissa, AP, Bihar, MP, Tamil Nadu and UP) over a period of 3-4 years in the early 90s and unlike anything I have ever read before about the "other India" that we always seem to be ashamed to talk about (i.e. the godforsaken-part-filled-with-millions-of-sorry-souls as I have been prone to describe it in the past).

As a generic sampler, check out these short online article that he wrote last year well before this years elections about AP, when many (including me) thought that Chandrababu Naidu was the greatest thing to happen to AP.

"Drought in the driver's seat": The worse things have become in Anantapur district, the more fancy cars have shown up in town. Drought, says P Sainath, is the organised plunder of the poor

"The bus to Mumbai": P Sainath joins migrants fleeing the desperate conditions in Mahbubnagar, seeking a meagre living in faraway places.