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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Years ago, I met Dia Mirza for a routine interview and the phrase that sprang instantly in my mind was, “silk and steel.” The steel is invisible though and only manifests in the resilience she has shown in keeping her soul and her dignity intact in an unforgiving business. What you do get to see is a […]
Ashish Vidyarthi does not like the easy way out, either in life or his work. A few weeks back, in Bangalore’s hallowed Ranga Shankara auditorium, he was pacing the stage restlessly before his solo performance in Nadira Babbar’s acclaimed Dayashankar Ki Diary. When asked for an interview, he was unwilling at first and understandably so because I had not seen the play […]
Almost 10 years ago, when I used to stretch my meagre salary to watch two, sometimes three films a week in single screen halls and review them for The New Indian Express in Bangalore, a certain day remains easier to recall than all the others. It was the day I watched Anil Sharma’s Gadar-Ek Prem Katha and Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan, back […]
So who was John Galt? Well, in a Marvel comic, he would have been a X -Man, possibly Magneto, recruiting the “others” who just like him are outsiders in the world because of their special abilities. Men and women who deserve their own alternate universe where they are not used for what they can do for the rest […]
It is hard to say if Anurag Kashyap Inc is intentionally subverting the vocabulary of romance in Hindi films but there is no deference towards it, either. So the sepia memory of Dev Anand running across glades and slopes under an open sky to the tune of Khoya Khoya Chand becomes a remix in Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan. The […]
Gulshan Devaiah’s big moment is here. And if he does not become one of the breakout stars of his generation, it will be because the world is askew. He was one of the few reasons why an underwhelming Dum Maro Dum had its moments. As a manipulative, street smart recruiter of the unsorted young in […]
There are broadly two types of contemporary ‘art-house’ Bengali films – a) Period films set in the past b) Films set in the present but the characters and the setting smelling primarily of nostalgia. Most recent Bengali films fall in either of the two categories. 2011 being Noble-laureate litterateur Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth year, there has been […]
One of my favourite moments in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth is Raj Kiran. Long before Shahrukh Khan appropriated Raj, Raj Kiran was Raj. The reason why we go back today to “koi yeh kaise bataye,” “tum itna jo muskura rahe ho” and “jhuki jhuki si nazar” is because the magic of Kaifi Azmi, Jagjit Singh and the devastating […]
First things first. It is the sheer tactile beauty of Kung Fu Panda 2 that takes you by the scruff and bounces you across the three dimensional world of a Chinese countryside. We float over trees and watch them meditate in swirly mists. We skim tapestries of green glades, smell the food in a rustic kitchen, fly over picture perfect villages, are hushed […]
If you remember the seven minutes of Shefali Shah in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, you will remember also that she was the only beam of credible innocence in the film. If you remember her in Meera Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, you will remember also that she was the luminous dark secret of the film, a girl suffocated with the enormity […]
It began with Emosanal Attyachar. When I watched Dev D a few years ago, I felt as if my insides had been churned and that Sarat Chandra Chatterjee had died once again. There was nothing wrong cinematically with the film. The first half was visceral and brutally honest about the messy, inner universe of love. The lust, the anger, the impulsive severings that […]
There is a moment in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides when Jack Sparrow says, “There should be a captain in there somewhere.” And by God, there is. There he is clambering ropes, trees, rocks, the limits of suspended disbelief, and making you believe even without the rather tame 3-D effects and the endless visual chicanery that […]