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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Director Carlos Saldanha’s Rio is like a pop-up picture book where every leaf is velvet, every bird feather is silk and every page is a carnival. Here imagination is an emerald jungle that we can inhabit with jewel eyed macaws or simians who text “oo oo..aa aa” to their cronies and swagger around in stolen, human baubles. And a city where bull dogs do the samba in shiny briefs […]
There is a certain honest-to-goodness quality about actor Soni Razdan that translates into a commitment to the moment no matter what she does. Be it the vulnerable fierceness she exuded in Mahesh Bhatt’s film Saraansh or the comically mean daughter-in-law she created in Ramesh Sippy’s Buniyaad. Be it the struggle to stay afloat financially during […]
The night I heard of Navin Nischol’s death, I watched Parwana (1971) on YouTube. Yes, the same film where he played the hero and Amitabh Bachchan, the second lead. The irony. Years later Navin Nischol played the second lead in Desh Premi (1982) where Bachchan, a superstar by now, was already playing a double role. […]
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor has quietly passed into the night. And it is time to dust all the cliches about her and air them. Her marriages. The big love storms. Her near misses and then the two Oscars. Richard Burton. Richard Burton again. And the others. The diamonds. Her staunch friendships with the oddballs in pain. James Dean. […]
So Aamir Khan has turned 46. In a youth obsessed country, a man on the top of his game still and going as far as to play a 20 something IIT student convincingly in a film, is interesting to watch. I interviewed Aamir Khan in the wake of Lagaan‘s Oscar resonant success many years […]
A great actor’s face is like an ocean under an ever changing sky. Reflecting every cloud. Every sun beam. So in the gaze of a gifted actor, even a flicker of hope, a blink of empathy, a tear just about to form itself in the memory of a loss, reveals to you a life story, the flash of a soul. […]
No one uses the SnorriCam (a camera contraption rigged to an actor’s body) like Darren Aronofsky or can plumb actors to scrape their gut for a life-changing performance like he does. Natalie Portman’s Nina in Black Swan is not a character you see from a distance. You inhabit her and she inhabits you. Her skeletal body, […]
How does she reconcile a rockstar voice with the full moon bindi and the jasmine gajra and the glorious Kanjeevaram? Usha Uthup just does. More than 30 years down the line, she is still the mistress of sweet ironies. A darling once again of mainstream Hindi film music fans after her star vocal turn in Saat […]
There are two ways to carry the burden of winning. Either you drop the F-word like Melissa Leo or you climb on the back of the chairs in celebratory abandon like Roberto Benigni and proclaim without saying it that life is beautiful. Somehow the second bit is more wonderful to watch and more elevating. To win an award […]
Aanand L Rai’s cheeky Tanu Weds Manu begins with the nostalgia evoking voice of Ameen Sayani announcing farmayashi names of the protagonists and the song, ‘Bhor aayi gaya andhiyara’ from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi. We see a time dappled home in Kanpur that hasn’t been painted in a while, getting ready for a guest while the patriarch sits blissfully lost in […]
A story about the black widow of six dysfunctional husbands could have been filmed like a grisly chapter out of Manohar Kahaniyan or a blood and gore spill in a Ramsay horror film. And yet in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Saat Khoon Maaf, you find startling strands of brilliance like,”Zyada kabhi zyada nahin hota..hamesha kam hi hota hai..aur jo kam mein jeena […]
There are life stories and there is life. Lived with passion, heart and soul. In all its entirety, its dizzying highs, its crashing lows. Accepted with all its flaws, hurts, blows. Loved despite its imperfection. Film and television director Vinta Nanda lives her life deeply and nothing gets to that core where hope is eternal. Vinta has the guileless innocence […]