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…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You are browsing archives for
The world of Hindi films is largely driven by money and stars with a big following. Quite obviously the stakes are dangerously high when big films featuring big stars hit the screen. They may not deserve the hype that surrounds their releases but every media platform is milked dry to promote a lavishly mounted film. […]
Just a moment please. All those who are condescendingly comparing Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster with Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool would do well to remember Dhulia’s 2003 film Haasil, the precursor to most of the UP heartland stories we have heard subsequently. There was a rikshaw and cycle borne love story in a quirky small […]
Rajat Kapoor is not made for water-tight definitions. So yes, he acts in films and writes them and directs them too but then there is a theatre and the fact he acts on stage and yes, directs too. The one common thread in all pursuits is the need to tweak, deviate, be new, be alive […]
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 […]
A writer came to me with a script today and his own story was more interesting than the one he had written. I might have offended him by spending far more time listening to him about his own search for recognition than listening to the reams of material on his laptop he tried to engage me with. This young boy […]
One review called it a ‘preposterous-bad-action movie’ climax and the local RJ on a FM channel found it comic. For a reviewer on a TV channel, this was one scene indicating that the script was ‘begging for a rewrite.’ “Too bizarre, unnecessary and bordering on the ludicrous,” another review said. Yet another makes a direct […]
Damp, narrow lanes with houses huddled together. Peeling walls, fading patinas. Melding terraces. Halwai shops. A musty little bakery with unlabelled bread. Young girls and boys in clumsy cardigans. A young boy’s shelves packed with medals and trophies and books, some of them in Punjabi. Boxes of pinnis. Mustard and sugarcane fields and school girls […]
Far before the debate warmed up about pregnant heroines signing films at all, there was Sharmila Tagore, visibly pregnant and carrying Saif Ali Khan Pataudi through the shoot of Asit Sen’s Safar. Decades before film magazines wondered if a married heroine could pull off roles beyond her comfort zone, there was Ms Tagore again, playing […]
In the 70s and the 80s, when I was growing up in Patiala, a framed poster next to a small shop near Sheran Wala Gate (a prominent locality), routinely heralded the arrival of a new film in town. On my way to the school in rickshaw everyday, I would watch that poster, trying to guess the story line of the […]
The turning point in the shared history of Raj and Simran in Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ) comes when she finds herself in the same room as him after a night of drunken mindlessness and worries if she has done the unthinkable. He convinces her that she hasn’t and she collapses in a […]
When I watched Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna sometime in 2006, I wrote a sympathetic review of the film because I felt it was being panned for all the wrong reasons. Yes, the film could have been made more intimately and less lavishly. Amitabh Bachchan could have been more like himself and a little less like the cartoon strip […]