Silver Linings Playbook

To the countless fans of Ben Affleck’s Argo, this morning turned out to be exotic when the film won the Oscar award for the Best Film at the 85th Academy Awards. The film sidelined eight other nominees like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty, Les Miserables, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Django Unchained.

The much-vaunted Grand Indian Premiere of the worldwide hit David O Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook(SLP) where our own Anupam Kher stars alongside the formidable Robert de Niro, has been cancelled. Unceremoniously. Apparently the premiere’s Indian sponsors decided to back out at the last minute since SLP, a worldwide blockbuster expected to garner several Oscars next week, is not seen to be of much interest to Indian audiences.

Boy-bonding was at a premium during and after the New York premiere of David Russell’s <em>Silver Linings Playbook </em> which boasts of our own Anupam Kher in its cast of stalwarts, and those include the formidable Robert de Niro. Not only has Anupam formed a durable bonding with de Niro and is quietly making a documentary on him, Anupam seems to have also dug out a deep-seated camaraderie with the film’s lead, the hot-and-happening Bradley Cooper.

American heart-throb Bradley Cooper of Hangover fame has done a very interesting made-only-for-India sequence in his latest much-lauded film <em>Silver Linings Playbook</em>, especially for Indian audience. It’s a sequence wherein Bradley playing a lately-institutionalized guy trying to rehabilitate himself into normal family life, needed to express his rapturous sense of happiness. To articulate his feeling of gratitude and joy at the gift of life Cooper, who plays an American character not even remotely related to India or Hinduism, exclaims, ‘<em>Ganpati Bappa Mourya</em>’!

Anupam Kher’s much-applauded Hollywood film, David Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook has won the prestigious ‘People’s Choice’ award at the Toronto Film Festival. Those from the Indian Bollywood fraternity who attended the just-concluded Toronto Film Festival say Anupam’s role in Silver Linings Playbook is just about the best most substantial role by an Indian actor in a Hollywood film.