SARTORIAL-WEAR designer Amir Adnan claims he enjoys watching movies, although he hasn’t seen any lately. However, what he did see only a night before the interview took place was Chicken Run, for, brace yourself for this, Amir Adnan claims he loves to watch animation!
Says the designer, “I think fairy tales and cartoons are a wonderful way of communicating with people. They take you away from a world of reality to a world of fantasy, and are very therapeutic. That’s what psychiatrists do too — they make you alienate yourself from the problem and see it from a different perspective. It’s all about role playing. I do it all the time with my kids. If I feel they’ve done something wrong, instead of lecturing them, I make up stories to tell them at night, in which a character does something similar, and so artfully convey to them that it wasn’t the right way to behave.”
It comes as no surprise then that Adnan’s favourite movie is Shrek. In fact, so hung up is Adnan on fantasy and sci-fi flicks that he claims he wanted to “Become something like Walt Disney. That was my first love, so much so that I wrote many folk tales that I became familiar with during my travels within the country, with the intent to make cartoons and dramas based on them, not to mention an amusement park — our version of Walt Disney. I probably will, at some point in time.”
Adnan’s non-animation favourites include Yentle, a vintage film starring Barbara Streisand; Transporter, which he saw while travelling in a coach from Lahore to Islamabad; Bringing Down the House and Braveheart. He says he loves watching horror movies as well.
As for Pakistani movies, Adnan claims he hasn’t seen one for a long time, but adds, “Anything of Mussarrat Shaheen is a treat to watch. Munawwar Zareef was fabulous, too.”
However, he “generally dreads” Indian commercial movies and laughs, “I’m always fighting to shut them when they’re being watched at home. I find them too obvious, predictable and mushy, so I don’t enjoy them.” He admits, however, seeing parts of Kal Ho Na Ho, although he claims he “Abhors Shahrukh Khan”. He has also seen Lisa Ray’s murder mystery, Kasoor, and says he used to enjoy the old Indian movies of Dilip Kumar.
Adnan does have a taste for Indian alternate cinema though, and recalls a couple of movies he thoroughly enjoyed. One was Anjali, an Indian art movie of the late 1980s which he found had “an intense theme. It’s about a special 10-year-old child who seems like a two-year old. They actually cast a retarded child in the film.” The other film was Gidh with Smita Patil. “It was about a sex goddess and how parents of girls who couldn’t get married left them at a mandir for prostitution.” Adnan claims that his favourite Indian actors are Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi.
A fan of semi-classical music, Adnan claims he enjoys listening to “anyone who can take out raags.” Strangely enough, he also enjoys “Madame’s Punjabi lecherous numbers!” His favourite singers include Farida Khanum, Nayyara Noor, Tina Sani and Shakila Khorasanee, although he says he is unhappy about the fact that the last “doesn’t sing ghazals anymore.” He is also full of praise for Ali Zafar and says he enjoys all his songs, including of course, everyone’s favourite Channo. Says Adnan “I like some of Fuzon’s numbers, too, when they use their voice, and not lose their direction and become pop. Technically, I find them very sound and good.”
Although Adnan used to listen to English ditties a lot in the past, he says he doesn’t hear them too much now. “I liked Barbara Streisand, Nat King Cole, Lopez, Frank Sinatra and Tina Turner — the equivalents of today’s semi-classicalists. Clearly, I am not into too much noise.” He confesses he doesn’t remember song titles too well, but does mention a few classics that are among his favourites, such as Strangers in the Night, Past the Magic Dragon and Wishing Well. Adnan says he also likes Arabic and Persian music and is specially fond of Khanum Bagosh.
Like many from the world of glitz and glamour, Amir Adnan finds that he doesn’t get too much time to read and confesses he hasn’t read in a long while. However, from among the books he has read, his favourite is Of Love and Other Demons by Nobel prize-wining author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “I loved the way he describes every scene in it. The book is about how life treats you and a family gets disintegrated. It’s a slim book but the individual treatment of each character in it is brilliant.”
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, which he read as a teenager, is another of Adnan’s favourites. However, he says about the author, “Gibran writes about realistic issues that one can relate to, but I feel he only points out the problems in life. He doesn’t offer us any solutions. His perception is brilliant, though.”
SARTORIAL-WEAR designer Amir Adnan claims he enjoys watching movies, although he hasn’t seen any lately. However, what he did see only a night before the interview took place was Chicken Run, for, brace yourself for this, Amir Adnan claims he loves to watch animation!
