Like a dry gin's twist

Ennui and angst in the heartland. I remember many and many a year ago (in a kingdom by some cornfields) a philosophy professor named Lenny who was arguably the hippest and smartest of a wave of hip, smart, young profs who hit campus at roughly the same time. Lenny had curly hair and a penchant for Wittgenstein and East Coast punk bands of the late 70s. He always used to tell me "Exertion fights depression. When I'm feeling angsty, I lift weights." One summer he went back to Boston to work on his novel and apparently, while there, had some Troubles (presumably with a woman--Lenny's problems always revolved around women or logical positivism). When he hit campus again a week or so before classes started, he had arms like a young Marlon Brando. I stared at him for a second and said "Rough summer?" He answered "Sport, you have no idea."

My own solution for a stress-filled past week was to eat some cactus fruit sorbet with a dear friend and watch a Bollywood remake of Death Takes a Holiday called Yamagola, starring the always stunning Jayaprada.

A few notes:

Like any good Bollywood "remake", Yamagola (1974 or 75 I think) bears roughly the same relationship to Death Takes a Holiday that The Beverly Hillbillies bears to The Diamond as Big as the Ritz*. In the original 1930something Hollywood drama, death, quite literally, takes a holiday. As in death is this dashingly handsome man who gets sick of being death and decides to walk the earth as a normal dude for a little while. Naturally, he falls in love and complications ensue. Meet Joe Black, of course, featuring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins (and highlighting the full glory of their hair plastered back with some kind of nuclear strength pomade), is the "truest" (read: most derivative) remake of the film.

Yamagola, on the other hand, is a film about a boy and a girl who are in love. Naturally, the girl's father (who is wealthy and corrupt), has the boy killed. The boy goes to heaven where there are some gods and goddesses and lots of singing and dancing and he seems pretty happy. But then he goes to hell (I still don't know why) where he's also pretty happy. Not at first, but later, you see, after he teaches the other denizens of hell about communism and workers' rights. Having effectively unionized hell, he finds himself banned from both heaven and hell so he assembles an army of his old friends in hell (where the security is roughly as lax as Willard Old Timey Aeroport on a Sunday afternoon, apparently). Then he goes back to earth and messes around with his old girlfriend's father.

So, there are literally no similarities between Yamagola and the movie it purports to "remake", which is actually fine because, even though the sap in me loved Death Takes a Holiday, I also happen to be a guy who loves garish costumes, rhythmic chanting, seemingly random intervals of fervent dancing, and millions and millions of gods and demons and vintage Bollywood actresses.

And cactus fruit sorbet. And port. Lots of port. I can't emphasize enough how much more sense the all singing all dancing version of Hell made after the third or fifth glass.

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* In Fitzgerald's charming fairytale, a man is shooting at a squirrel for dinner and accidentally discovers a mountain that is, in fact, one large, completely flawless, diamond. In The Beverly Hillbillies, a man named Jed (a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed) is shootin' at some food (again, a squirrel) and up from the ground come a bubblin' crude. Oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea.

I'm always stupefied more people haven't made this connection.