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WALK THE LINE Directed by: James Mangold    Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Runtime: 136 min    ‘But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die’    As Johnny Cash’s voice reverberates around the penitentiary and the prisoners hoot and chant to his famous ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, the audience is inexplicably drawn to his dark good looks, his deep baritone, the way he holds the mike, and the way he tilts his head as he sings from the corner of his mouth. Joaquin Phoenix makes an amazing Johnny Cash in the movie, ‘Walk the Line’, as it traces his rise to fame from the early days in a cotton farm in Arkansas to his first record with Sun Records in Memphis where he recorded with the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.    Reese Witherspoon, as singer June Carter, is as dazzling as summer itself and is the life of the movie. The original Southern belle with a drawl and a cinnamon voice, she plays the love of Johnny’s life, with the tragic cliché of being married, but not to each other. The chemistry that they must have shared in real life is very visible on screen. Helping Johnny through his marriage that had hit rock-bottom, his addiction to amphetamines and his career careening downwards, June sticks by him through thick and thin, and eventually, heart-warmingly, it ends happily.        — MRH    Available at all    major DVD stores Water Directed by: Deepa Mehta    Cast: Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Waheeda Rehman, Raghuvir Yadav, John Abraham    Runtime: 117 min        ‘Water’, a film set in the 1930’s against the backdrop of India’s independence struggle against British colonial rule revolves around Chuiya, a Hindu girl widowed at nine and sent to live in an ashram, a dilapidated two-story house where fourteen widows live amidst the loneliness and the cruel discipline that a Hindu widow’s life entailed at the time.    Precocious Chuiya, on declaring that she doesn’t ‘want to be a stupid widow’, brings life to this dreary place where widows are sent to expiate bad karma, and to rid their families of the emotional and financial burdens they pose. The house is ruled by Madhumati, a fat widow in her seventies and her sidekick, Gilabi, a eunuch pimp, who not only keeps the widow supplied with marijuana, but also gossip, and introduces the younger ones to the oldest profession in the world.    A pretty story its not. Deepa Mehta, in what can be described as a cinematographic masterpiece, brings to life the extreme conditions of widowhood. The shorn heads, the once-a-day meals of rice and insipid vegetables and the ritual fasting, speak all too cruelly of the women who lost their husbands, and in the process, lost their own lives. Little Chuiya rebels at first, but slowly becomes resigned to the life as resiliently as only the very young can. She befriends Kalyani (Lisa Ray at her sparkling best), a young, restless widow who yearns for the world outside. Kalyani falls in love with Narayan (Jon Abraham), a law graduate who promises to free her. But of course, as is the case in real life, that doesn’t come around to be.    One of the most touching scenes in the movie is when Chuiya brings a dying widow a laddu, and then is filled with trepidation that she might not go to heaven, because she gave in to the gluttony of forbidden sweets.    The use of water as an element in the cinematography is breathtaking. The ending is bittersweet and true to life, in line with the rest of the movie. The love story is poignant. And when one looks at Chuiya, an old soul trapped in a young person’s body, one shudders and sighs in relief that times have changed somewhat.        — MRH    Available at all major DVD stores The definitive Pink Floyd radio documentaries Over a career spanning 35 years, the 60’s psychedelic-rock group Pink Floyd have undoubtedly become one of the greatest and most influential bands in rock history.    From small time gigs at London’s legendary UFO club that featured songs such as See Emily Play and Arnold Layne to the phenomenal successes of albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, the Floyd four continue, even today, to shape the consciousness of generations of young men and women. In July this year, the brainchild of the early Floyd records and a creative genius in his own right, Syd Barrett passed away quietly in his Cambridge home, nearly three decades after he slid into mental illness, fuelled by a singular diet of LSD that characterised his early years with the Floyd.    To commemorate his death, we pick this definitive series of radio-documentaries on Pink Floyd, posted on the BBC2 website and playable on the internet. For the Floyd junkies out there: this will solve the long-standing myth of whether Syd Barrett actually did visit the studio for a few minutes during one of the recording sessions for the album Wish You Were Here, years after he had left the band.    To play the files you need the free and downloadable Real Player (www.real.com). For the radio documentaries, type in http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/r2music/documentaries/ pinkfloyd.shtml. Alternately log on to www.newagebd.com/slate and click on the Briefly Slated, section and then scroll down to find the link, then click on it to be redirected to the site.        – MH Virgin Radio Classic Rock As far as online radio rock stations go Virgin’s classic rock station is the web’s rock authority. If you’re serious about your music and don’t like supermarket pop such as Britney Spears or shitty boy bands elbowing into the playlist, this is the station for you. There’s always a lot of Led Zeppelin, Queen and David Bowie, and of course Pink Floyd, but you’ll never get bored with the music because there’ll always be something obscure by Lynyrd Skynyrd or Jefferson Airplane that you haven’t heard for more than a decade. The fantastic thing about this station is that they have three different bandwidth categories, so you can even listen to it on a modem connection or its broadband equivalent in Dhaka. Basically, even if your internet’s slow, don’t worry, it’s likely that you’ll be able to listen without too many skips. The other fantastic thing about the station is that you have the option to listen to it on your iTunes or WinAmp and even on a standard, bundled, Windows Media Player (if you don’t have any other). But better still, you can play the music on the station’s own online player, which displays the name of the song, the name of the band, upcoming shows, and even allows you to request tracks. Personally, I’ve stopped making playlists for Fridays or when friends come over. I just log on to Classic Rock and sit back and enjoy playlists that I wouldn’t change a single song on. To log in, just type in www.virginradio.co.uk/classicrock and then the ‘Listen Now’ button on the page.        – MH Would you let your mother choose your husband? A mother who won’t address her husband by his first name and tells her daughter ‘I don’t want you to be happy, I want you to be married,’ is a sharp contrast to the daughter herself, Anju, a twenty-six year old living the sophisticated ‘Umrican’ lifestyle in cosmopolitan New York, light years away from the crème de la crème of traditional Bombay. And while Anju embraces the idea of ‘falling in love’, the notion does not exist in her family. Such is the backdrop of Kavita Daswani’s For Matrimonial Purposes, a witty and light-hearted story revolving around an age-old dilemma.    Any single girl in her mid-twenties can relate to this book. The total harassment of being scrutinised in front of strange men (and their mothers and grandmothers and their second cousins twice removed), being asked to served tea, and then being rejected because of skin colour is the humiliation that almost every girl, in South Asia, has faced or dreads facing.    Anju’s suitors are hilarious, her cousins get married in the most flamboyant manner, and her mother consults astrologers, family priests, all in the hope of marital bliss for her daughter. But the story goes further than that: it’s about cross-cultural identities, about the confusion of having dual lives, poles apart from each other, about mixed feelings over one’s own identity, and about trying to keep it all together. The difference is, it uses humour as a tool to relay a message, which would otherwise be very depressing, in a situation where you can either laugh or cry. It chooses to do the former.        — MRH        For Matrimonial Purposes    Kavita Daswani    ISBN 81-7223-553-4    Tk 500    Available at Words ‘n’ Pages The abominable snowman My own quest for the Yeti started in Thamel when I bought this book at a quaint little bookstore. More than the yeti itself, it was the fact that Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb the Everest without bottled oxygen, and the first to summit the world’s fourteen highest peaks, was the author. But on a solo climb in 1986, he saw something that seemed more frightening than ascending the Everest without oxygen.    In 1986, in the deep recesses of the mountains of Tibet he saw the yeti, commonly called the abominable snowman, and ‘the creature towered menacingly, its face a grey shadow, its body a black outline. Covered with hair, it stood upright on two short legs and had powerful arms.’ Over the next eleven years, Messner made it his life’s mission to unravel the truth about the yeti, travelling through Nepal, India and Tibet.    Over that course of time he discovered the animal on which the myth is based, known as a chemo, and which he concludes is a type of brown bear. So even as the conclusion comes as a disappointment to those like me, who like to think that there are things beyond the realm of scientific explanations, Messner’s adventure through snowy peaks and crevices, where he gets lost, gets arrested, and sleeps in tents, knowing fully well that the creature could be around is worth the read. A history of the Chinese eradication of Tibetan culture is also depicted, giving the readers a chance to see beyond the yeti, and into the other secrets that the Himalayas hold.        — MRH        My quest for the yeti    Reinhold Messner    ISBN 0-330-39086    Available at: all majour bookstores