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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A 1981 film Itni Si Baat (starring Sanjeev Kumar and Maushami Chatterjee) tried to flip the idea of a conventional marriage like a drippy omelette that crash lands on the chef’s face. So we had the husband burning the food and fumbling through daily domestic chores with a song, “Raja o Raja, tera baj gaya baaja, ” playing […]
In the mid 90s, Waheeda Rehman was negotiating a cusp in her life. After spending a few blissful decades in Bengaluru with husband Kanwaljit (with whom she had starred in the 1964 film Shagoon) in a sprawling hacienda called ‘Gharonda,’ raising two children, initiating an organic cereal brand with friend and neighbour Asharfa Sattar, she was […]
There is a reason why superheroes click. It is because they promise you absolute assurance in a rather unpredictable and occasionally dangerous world. That no matter how many explosions rip the world apart, you will be safe…if only in the confines of the movie theatre. Singham is one such muscle-bound- superhero, with an enviable waistline, […]
Like Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance, the evocative opening sequence of Reema Kagti Talaash tells (co-written by Zoya Akhtar) a story in a tightly spun, unforgettable montage. Here the story is of the dispossessed and the marginalised. Invisible to a rushing, glittering- on- the- surface megapolis. The old woman with nowhere to go. The drug addict and the dog. […]
“Main keh raha hoon, main keh raha hoon, main keh raha hoon!” Everytime I watch a wannabe film on adult relationships..I remember this Kulbhushan Kharbanda (he is on the phone with his neurotic actress girl friend who wants to know if he has broken the news of their affair to his wife) dialogue from […]
“Aajkal kisi ko wo toktaa nahin, chaahe kuchh bhi kijiye roktaa nahin ho rahi hai loot maar phat rahe hain bam aasmaan pe hai Khudaa aur zameen pe ham aajkal wo is taraf dekhtaa hai kam” (God no longer chides anyone No matter what we do..He just watches on.. all the mayhem..all the bomb blasts.. […]
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 […]
Shahrukh Khan. The young, gawky, painfully intense boy with big brown, melting eyes who came from nowhere and became an empire. Didn’t we love this story almost as much as we loved him? He was Raju who came to Mumbai to become a gentleman and became instead a superman. We did not love him because […]
It is futile to review a Salman Khan film. He defies the reasons why reviews are written. After Wanted and Dabangg and Ready, the template of a Salman hit has crystallised to include a few essentials. An unusual name. In the case of the film in question, it is Lovely Singh. A signature dance move. […]