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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In the 80s, when you opened a film magazine you came across Gautam Rajadhyaksha’s name pretty often. I still remember one shot of Tina Munim curled up on a sunny window ledge with a cup of tea, smiling into the camera as if she had just woken up and found a friend. I remember cutting […]
There is something beautiful about hunger. Especially when it oozes out of an actor on the screen and sears you bone to soul. You see this hunger in actors who are destined for extraordinary success. In the way their eyes blaze, their bodies bristle, their nerves twitch. The way, they throw themselves into a role and turn it into a pulsing, […]
The Indian film industry is one of the largest in the world, and Indian cinema is unmatched in its variety. Tracing the history of Indian cinema through the traditional methods is not tedious – it is too gargantuan a task. This is just an attempt to revisit the Indian film history, and look at various […]
Katrina Kaif as a rock star (She struts in slow motion towards the camera in crazy boots, with smoke curling out of her lips, strumming a guitar). Katrina Kaif as another version (there have been many) of Geet in Jab We Met, ready to elope in the dead of the night with a phrase about […]
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. […]
At the end of every conflict, is a question. And an answer. Most of the times though when a conflict involves two genders, may be even a third gender, questions of honour, poverty fuelled desperation, rage and possibly violence against the weak or in response to the oppressors, there are no easy answers. At the […]
With tender fondness, I reminisce about the good old DD (yes, our own Doordarshan) days that formed an intrinsic part of my childhood. As I stroll down the memory lane, an era flashes by, of the 80s, untouched by the concept of channel flicking or the sway of TRPs. This was the time when television […]
Have you seen the size of a crow lately? I have been observing crows for quite some time now and I have come to believe that they have been growing in size in the last few years. Every morning I find a crow flying straight to my kitchen window as I begin to cook. Yesterday […]
My four-year-old eyes sparkled with wonder as I watched scene after scene unleash the magic of Mr India for the first time on the big screen. I watched it yesterday on television for the nth time and trust me, the magic has stayed alive. Who can forget Anil Kapoor as the ragged violinist with a […]
The hardest thing in the world is to find a story people have not heard before. And it is easy to see why Maria Susairaj’s story would make a Ram Gopal Varma excited about a narrative that even an Anurag Kashyap, who is fast becoming the master of dysfunction and human darkness, would not be […]
It was a toss between Shankar Jaikishan and RD Burman. The film was Teesri Manzil and it was left to Shammi Kapoor to decide who he wanted to compose music for the film. It was an unprecedented privilege for a Hindi film hero but nothing could be denied to Shammi Kapoor in the 60s. In […]
First things first. This is not the first time Prakash Jha has made a film on education. He made Hip Hip Hurray (1984), possibly the first Indian sports film set in a school. It was among other things, a comment on the equation between students and teachers. He never was a creative opportunist. Or someone […]