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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Ordinary people do not interest Hindi cinema anymore and that is why even if Mani Ratnam’s artifice free protagonists from OK Kanmani (who did not think it was necessary to interrupt their love story to endorse Vero Moda, Coca Cola and Anita Dongre’s wedding wear) are channelled in Ok Jaanu (a Karan Johar production), they […]
It is official. The award for the most unlikable male character of 2016 will be shared by Ranbir Kapoor’s Ayan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Ranveer Singh’s Dharam in Befikre. These are clueless boys with the emotional and intellectual depth of a nine-year-old with the tumultuous hormones of a teenager and are paired with […]
How easy it is to judge folks whose shoes we have not walked in. The largely lonely battle Karan Johar fought to save his film from hyper nationalist bullies and his desperate video which I could not bring myself to watch, the patriotism tax of Rs five crore and the backlash that followed did not […]
American satirist Sarah Silverman recently sat down with New Yorker’s editor Andy Borowitz and said that Trump was infact a mirror of a section of the American society that believes in the xenophobic, narrow version of American nationalism. A nationalism that hates, excludes and wants to always be ‘Number One.” In what she asked, […]
While channel surfing a few days back, I saw Mika Singh punning upon Diana Penty’s surname and adding to good effect, “And Mika Kaccha!” I guarantee that you will not hear anyone in the film fraternity rising up in instinctive disgust over this comment just as most of them kept quiet when Salman Khan rose […]
Watching Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) is like reading a book you are slowly but surely falling in love with. A book that you read curled up in a window seat on a rainy day, with a cup of tea by your side, hoping that the story will never end because it makes you taste […]
The closest we came to hearing jazz in a Hindi film in the ‘70s, was when Amitabh Bachchan’s dock-worker turned underworld apprentice Vijay, smoked away his foreboding in a bar; and Parveen Babi in a red gown slithered close to him with ‘I am falling in love with stranger’ playing in the background. The film […]
Purple Skies, a documentary about lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders was recently screened at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival and the film’s director Sridhar Rangayan, also a profound thought leader of the LGBT movement and a conversation starter as far as gay rights go in India, was in town. When the award-winning filmmaker, editor of India’s […]
In Milan Lutheria’s Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, a female protagonist relived the ultimate male fantasy of the 70s by wearing a knotted and polka-dotted Bobby blouse. The nostalgia for Bobby is so strong that when Twinkle or Tina Khanna was styled for her debut film Barsaat, she wore minis and blouses inspired from […]
Society in India is coming of age. It has begun to openly acknowledge the word ‘gay,’ before kids and in movies etc. Unfortunately our minds are not open enough to accommodate and treat the gay community with the same respect that we accord to heterosexuals. There is a subtle stigma attached to this word which […]
Guilt today is a global media event. So when Lance Armstrong finally answered the big question about his integrity in the widely televised interview with a, “I’m not the most believable guy in the world right now,” Oprah Winfrey almost brought back her under-performing OWN network from the brink. Lance could have given a newspaper […]
So faint strains of Along Came Polly and possibly Forces Of Nature and the memory of Salman Khan’s “Shit, I love her” from Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and SRK’s jubilant cry of Koi Mil Gaya (A Karan Johar film without a Kuch Kuch Hota Hai reference? Unlikely!) and a lot of slickly packaged moments turn Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu into a […]