With two recent high-profile remakes, it’s as good a time as any to discuss their enduring popularity. Two films released in January, one Hindi and one Tamil, raise the question of why, exactly, filmmakers opt for remakes. For some, it is the opportunity to transpose a hit from one language to another, one cultural milieu… [Read more…]
January 22, 2012
Artists from around the country gather to create new works and commemorate a great Indian painter. At the far end of the lobby of Vivanta by Taj – Fisherman’s Cove, Akkitham Narayanan is stooped over a canvas, trowel in hand, smoothing out the cobalt blues and the reddish browns and the whites that make up… [Read more…]
January 20, 2012
…the Golden Globes, for taking themselves less seriously than the Oscars, but also for rewarding talent more generously. For a week now, I have been reading articles about how nobody knows who the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) are, and why they are qualified to hand out the Golden Globes for achievement in cinema. Well,… [Read more…]
January 14, 2012
Arthur Christmas, the new animated feature from Aardman, the studio famous for its stop-motion pictures like Chicken Run and the Wallace & Gromit movies, glistens with a sheen that only a truckload of computers can buy. Gone are the slightly clunky characters that quivered through space as though negotiating a tract of land beset by… [Read more…]
January 14, 2012
Let’s begin with the father. Robert Ledgard, the protagonist of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, a plastic surgeon with godlike gifts, is struck by twin tragedies. His wife dies. Then his psychically scarred daughter, Norma, is institutionalised. After a visit to see his child, when she slinks into a closet and shuts the… [Read more…]
January 13, 2012
What has a critic’s stamp of approval got to do with your enjoyment? Um, absolutely nothing. Universal Pictures, them of the cosmic name constricted to a disappointingly earthly logo, announced recently that their hundredth-anniversary plans – a yearlong celebration – included the restoration of 13 films, which were All Quiet on the Western Front, The… [Read more…]
January 6, 2012
The best resolve for 2012? Don’t expect anything, especially from the movies. If it’s customary to welcome a new year not only by resolving to do right in the forthcoming months but also by learning from our wrongs in the months flown by, then the lesson is this: do not expect anything from any movie.… [Read more…]
December 31, 2011
Buried in a bean bag in a cabana by a tropical poolside, eyes glazed with sleep, stray lines of sweat staining the back of the T-shirt, it’s a little difficult to comprehend the power of a cyclone that just left Chennai gasping for breath, with only periodic emails from home a reminder of papers that… [Read more…]
December 30, 2011
The point of pop culture isn’t some imagined idea of quality – just a sense of throbbing with a common pulse. The last column of the year. Should I devote it to best-of lists? A more cohesive meditation on the cinema of a year that, at the end of this day, will vanish from the… [Read more…]
December 24, 2011
If movies were children, Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life would wind up at the top of Santa’s “nice” list. (The naughty Bad Santa, on the other hand, would get singled out for punishment.) Yet, at the time of its release, 1946, it wasn’t exactly rewarded with a basketful of goodies at the box office… [Read more…]
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January 27, 2012
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