In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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From the first still I saw of this movie, where Tom Cruise is shirtless, wearing pants that are faintly Godless, head turned over his shoulder, leaning backwards with one hand straining towards something, like the Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I knew Mr Cruise had found his Moment. *** The […]
Enter the crime scene: Oscars 2012. The sleuths: the audience. The perp unmasked: Angelina Jolie. After years of wondering whether the lady’s People’s Champion banner was just a tad exaggerated, with one out-thrust leg, a husky laugh and speaking dialogue as though instead of presenting an award she was in a soft porn movie, Ms […]
George Clooney has one of those faces that you trust. He could have gone in another direction and become your friendly neighbourhood axe murderer where the next day’s newspaper would have led with: “He was such a nice man, always had a kind word, we would never have believed….” Fortunately for both him and us, […]
Living in India, as all Indians know, is a daily struggle between you and your God. If you’re poor, it’s for survival; if you’re not, it’s for the patience to deal with the lack of fundamental civic services and civil liberties. Through it all, we ask that perennially pesky question to our Maker that […]
We Hollywood groupies are a spoiled lot. Just because Ricky Gervais made the Golden Globes lip-smackingly outrageous last year, we expected him to stay true to his irreverent form this year. What we got instead were insults that were cringe-making, with no trace of 2011’s ‘there’s a grain of truth here so suck it up, […]
All hail Emperor Clooney! The Ides of March is such a smart movie. It explains politics the way Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos – with flair. It distills pure entertainment from a subject most of us find either aggravating or plain dull. And then to make it Shakespearean where you delve into what drives character […]
Hiring Mickey Rourke is always a problem. No, not because of the substance abuse or that, like a child, he will speak with no filter whatsoever between his brain and his mouth, but because if you put him in a movie, all the viewer will recall is Him. And if Tarsem The Cell Singh is […]
I had an epiphany at the Metallica concert in Bangalore a few days ago. If I was an Auntie in the crowd, Metallica was made up of Uncles. That made me feel much better as I looked around and saw rockers with vomit matted on their hair and lying prone in the thick, wet mud […]
The Couture Council of Fashion Institute of Technology presented Italian designer Valentino Garavani with the 2011 Couture Council Award for artistry, this September at Lincoln Center. We reproduce here a piece that was written when the designer announced his retirement in September 2007. He’s named after one and his signature red has been called everything […]
Religion is the saddest of all crutches, more so than Love and Hope. Yet I dare anyone to watch Ben-Hur and not feel a twinge of faith stir in the deepest recesses. By that, of course, I mean an understanding of what Jesus, like Lau Tsu perhaps, stood for. Made in 1959, this film, like […]
What The Godfather is to the male of the species, An Affair to Remember is to those who propagate the species. It makes women believe in that crazy little thing called love. Without us identifying with and holding up as ideal this paean to pure emotion, entirely devoid of, thank God, realistic flourishes, you would […]