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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There is something about actor, director and veteran theatre exponent Aamir Raza Husain that reminds you of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. In the ornate coffee shop of one of the city’s oldest hotels, a beam of sunlight finds the Padma Shree awardee as he says, “I don’t always like the spotlight. And I […]
25 years after it was released, there may be many sequels but Aashiqui (1990) still stands for something unrepeatable, though it began as an attempt to cash on the Nadeem Shravan music bank with T-Series. The film began as a narrative woven around the songs and could have gone horribly wrong. Starting with the […]
“He was chewing on his paan, slowly and thinking. Thick jets of sticky, tobacco-mixed gob was swishing in his mouth. He felt as if his teeth were grinding his thoughts and blending them with his saliva.Maybe that was why he didn’t wish to spit out the gob of chewed-up paan.’’ Muhammad Umar Memon’s translation of […]
Indian television does not usually allow a great deal of space for symbolism and subtlety but sometimes while surfing channels, you come across something that is done right, with a certain amount of empathy. Epic Channel for instance is replaying Tagore’s memorable fiction and even though nobody can redo Charulata after what Ray imbued the […]
Actor, author, columnist, passionate aesthete, Padma Shri Tom Alter has just arrived in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore to deliver a lecture on ‘Sports & Arts in Modern India’. If he is tired, it doesn’t show because Tom is used to being many things all at once. Over the last few days, he has […]
Nikhil Advani’s Katti Batti reminded me of one of his earlier films, Salaam-e-Ishq which had moments of real resonance interspersed with what can be only described as visual white noise. Like that strange scene in a foreign location (London?) where Salman Khan appears with a make-believe baraat to woo Priyanka Chopra. What was that, really? […]
For all its commercial heft and cinematic records, Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay did not win any awards except one for editing. Editor MS Shinde who gave an incredible finesse to the blockbuster with his taut sense of timing and understatement, was the only one in the film crew to have won a popular award. And yet […]
The idea of entitlement is not new to the Indian film industry. Nor is the hegemony fuelled by privileged stars and their coteries. So it took someone of Nawazuddin Siddqui’s talent, 15 years to land his first solo lead in Manjhi (though he played a pivotal part in Gangs of Wasseypur) but all it took […]
Many years ago, actor Matt Damon ‘dumped’ (yes, that is the word that was bandied around) Minnie Driver, his co-star in Good Will Hunting and then girlfriend, on The Oprah Winfrey Show and even though those were relatively innocent times (and private relationships were not managed or mismanaged in full public view to the extent […]
We cannot let go of her. Of her parents. Or their tragedy. Or the speculations about what could have happened on the night of 15-16 May, 2008 in an upper-middle class Noida home. And so (they changed the ‘w’ in the title to ‘v,’ just in case) a film about her death will hit the […]
Recently, when the story of a child abuse scandal in Pakistan was broken, 400 video recordings of more than 280 children being forced to have sex, were discovered. Just another form of porn, that is also distributed and consumed. In 2013, according to reports, the Shakti Mills rapists made the survivor watch clippings of […]
Rebecca Ferguson in a gold gown, climbing towards a precarious vantage point so that she can disrupt an opera with a stray bullet. Yes, the camera lingers on those sculpted legs, the sinewy shoulders but it is to drive home the fact that this woman is liquid steel. When someone calls Tom Cruise the manifestation […]