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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Ray devised an innovative way to work around Apu’s stiffness and awkward gait. Like much of his journey into making the film, this also is a lesson for wannabe filmmakers: “I had learnt a lesson. All my preparations over the years… had finally produced this one shot and it was difficult to imagine anything more […]
It’s a well known fact that Ray was a master film maker who was revered, practically worshipped, in the West – especially Hollywood (list of his admirers include Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, James Ivory, Elia Kazan, Danny Boyle, Wes Anderson…). What’s little known is the fact that this man (arguably) had a hand in the making […]
Satyajit Ray, as a rule, visited the movies every Saturday afternoon. In this he was accompanied by a handful of like-minded ‘film-buffs’ he met and befriended. One of them was Bansi Chandragupta, who was destined to be Ray’s Art Director [a relationship that went on to collaborate on the most remarkable of Ray’s works upto Pratidwandi/The Adversary […]
Like all great endeavours, the timeless Pather Panchali by the legendary Satyajit Ray faced many obstacles on the way to immortality.Well, how this excellent story by Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee made its way onto the celluloid is an engrossing, fascinating tale in itself. Here goes…. As most of us know, Ray started off as an advertising professional. In June, 1943, he joined D.J. Keymer & Co. as a Junior […]
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes(1970) is one of Billy Wilder‘s least known works. It is one of the ‘revealed’ Holmes stories, and is not part of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon. The film takes a satirical look at the Holmes-Watson equation, and, as the name suggests, touches upon the private life of the genius […]
Harishchandrachi Factory, if you haven’t seen it till date is strongly reminiscent of Malgudi Days, DD serials of yore, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee oeuvre of films, the feeling of snugging into the quilt to hear Grandma tell a story. In short, the Good Old Days. Days when films were not merely about form or technique, but […]
Some believe 80’s to be the worst period in the history of Indian cinema. I beg to differ – but only a wee bit. My early film viewing experience is mostly spread across late 80s- early 90s so I could safely say I’ve had the best (or worst) of both the decades. The 80s had indeed reached the […]
Are you looking for a DVD of the Apu Trilogy? Log on to a site called “Movie Mail” (http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/film/12274/The-Apu-Trilogy-(Box-Set)/) and buy it online for 26.99 GBP…Or do you prefer Ritwik Ghatak? Get DVDs for The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) or A River Called Titas (Titas Ekti Nodir Nam) from the BFI website (http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk) at 10.99 GBP each. All loaded with […]
In an age when film makers masquarade as reformers, it is only apt that one remember the flag bearers of the REAL New Wave in Indian Cinema that had its inception in the early 50’s through the mid 70’s. A beacon of this New Wave was Ritwik Ghatak. The Anarchist. The Rebel. The quintessential Bengali […]
In the Golden Age of Hollywood, India represented little more than a mystical land of Rajahs, snake charmers, nubile princesses and elephants. Cannot really blame them – our own cinema of the time was filled with Rajahs and princesses of our own! In Hollywood, this image held sway till as late as the 60s, with […]
All new baddies In the first two decades post Independence, our screen baddies were largely understated in their amorous overtures to the fairer sex. However, as the 70’s with the hippies and counterculture burst into the scene, there came ‘liberation’ from the shackles of tradition, and holding back, in every sense of the term, was […]
As I sat watching Golmaal 3 with a roomful of guffawing and rollicking humans, trying my best to roar with laughter, and hating my inability to do so, the scene that really had me in splits was Mithunda (wearing a delightful toupee) facing off with his girlfriend’s ameer baap, ‘Prem Chopra’ (played by who else: […]