Hollywood must be filled with great minds, because every so often, the thinking is alarmingly alike. In 1992, for instance, the studios thought that the time was ripe for two separate mega-productions about the unveiling of America – hence, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery and 1492: Conquest of Paradise. At other times – and barely months… [Read more…]
June 2, 2012
Kiran Nagarkar is not fond of critics. Nor does he care for computers. The outsider, however, he likes very, very much. The Wednesday Kiran Nagarkar is due to launch his latest book in Chennai, he is smarting from a bad review. It dogs him like a malignant shadow, nipping occasionally into our conversation – he… [Read more…]
June 2, 2012
The director of ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner’ returns with his most anticipated movie in years. While one part of the population complains that Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is being sold on the basis of little more than its visuals, and the hint of a heroine (Noomi Rapace) in the future, the rest of us sit back… [Read more…]
June 1, 2012
Sneak peeks into upcoming movies are almost always futile attempts to make us interested. Where’s the vibe? People seem to be of the opinion that the third installment of the Men in Black series is better than the second one, but I cannot add to the chorus. I can hardly remember what the earlier films… [Read more…]
May 29, 2012
In her introduction to A Critical Study of Deepa Mehta’s Trilogy: Fire, Earth and Water, the author Manju Jaidka informs us that her “endeavour has been to produce a concise, focused study that avoids the bane of excessive jargon” – and in the next paragraph she speaks of the “chronotopic specificities of the stories that… [Read more…]
May 26, 2012
I have this theory that George Lucas is responsible for Liam Neeson’s late-career transformation into what a gossip-rag hack might term “the thinking man’s action star.” (The furiously entertaining Jason Statham, on the other hand, would be the popcorn-muncher’s action star.) The turning point I talk about is, of course, the widely reviled Star Wars:… [Read more…]
May 25, 2012
Ram Gopal Varma leaves the audience behind and launches into increasingly idiosyncratic ways of telling stories. Most films are essentially reconfigurations of what we’ve seen earlier, what we’ve heard – there’s very little cinema, anymore, that’s capable of shocking us with never-before content. That a pall of familiarity cloaks the opening sequence of Ram Gopal… [Read more…]
May 25, 2012
Raattinam opens with a vague act of violence in an elevator – vague because we don’t know, yet, who the beaters are, who the beaten are – and it segues, in flashback, to Tuticorin, showing us a powerful politician named Annachi and the people around who dare not refuse his ruling. Then we move to… [Read more…]
May 19, 2012
Dame Judi Dench, as that imperious name suggests, is who you call upon to glower on screen, to peer down from her perch at mere mortals. She scowled magnificently as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love and terrified all of England, and as M in the latter-day Bond movies, she was less the empress… [Read more…]
May 18, 2012
‘Superman’ onwards, the screen has sagged with the torment of superheroes, which is why ‘The Avengers’ is such a relief – if only till the upcoming ‘Batman’ movie. The big news of last week was The Avengers, which became the first film in Hollywood history to earn over $100 million in its second weekend in… [Read more…]
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June 2, 2012
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