Or why it’s time we understood that the planet’s biggest film awards are less about honouring the best in cinema than hunkering down in front of an entertainment channel to recognise movies that made us feel good. Of this, we are all agreed. My mead can be your poison. If tastes did not differ, we… [Read more…]
February 25, 2012
Michel Hazanavicius, the puckish creator of The Artist, opens his film with tongue folded firmly in cheek. We, the audience for The Artist inside a movie hall, are watching a movie whose introductory scene shows the inside of a movie hall whose audience is – like us – watching a movie. In other words, the… [Read more…]
February 24, 2012
The fiery path to self-destructive behaviour doesn’t always originate at the movie hall. I submitted, recently, to a brief interview about the probability that Agneepath caused a young Chennai schoolboy to plunge a knife into his teacher to avenge himself of an apparent slight. The question, in other words, was the oft-repeated one: Do violent… [Read more…]
February 19, 2012
On the occasion of his first ever exhibition in the city, Raghu Rai holds forth on dancing boulders and the multiplicity of moments. A quintet of priests in Tirupathi, foreheads slathered with religious markings, rests under a Garuda with soaring wings and clasped hands. Nearby, a joyous family, adults and children, hold hands in Kanyakumari,… [Read more…]
February 18, 2012
Some fifty per cent of the mischievously titled Kadhalil Sodhappuvadhu Eppidi is astonishingly good. First-time director Balaji Mohan (Wiki informs me that he’s all of 24) makes a romantic comedy not just about the couple, but also around them, inviting us to laugh at the amorous misadventures of a host of men and women, young… [Read more…]
February 18, 2012
What time did you read this review? If an interrogator, tomorrow, buttonholed you with this question, you might reply, “While having lunch. Two-ish, maybe?” But a Hollywood thriller has little use for such waffling. Daniel Espinosa’s Safe House informs us that the events under consideration kicked off, on a Thursday, at 1:53 p.m., and when,… [Read more…]
February 17, 2012
Who says a rom-com – even one with big-name stars – cannot be shaped with an invigorating voice and vision? But why is it in Hindi? Romantic comedies aren’t the most bountiful breeding grounds for fresh talent. The terrain is terrifyingly minimal, allowing little scope for ambiguity, and like a schoolboy poised before a xylophone… [Read more…]
February 16, 2012
Let’s acknowledge, first, the genuine attempt by director Karan Malhotra to infuse into his film the sensibility of Bombay cinema, not Bollywood – the Hindi cinema of the nineteen-seventies and eighties that Amitabh Bachchan transformed into a blood-spattered battlefield, both literally and metaphorically, in the mind. (Agneepath begins in 1977.) This cinema was no longer… [Read more…]
February 13, 2012
Whitney Houston, August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, every schoolgirl who ever ascended a competition stage to showcase her vocal chops sought refuge in the Whitney Houston oeuvre. Houston, the 48-year-old R&B star who regularly stormed the pop charts and who died last Saturday from undisclosed causes, was to… [Read more…]
February 11, 2012
Seen from one end, War Horse is quintessential Spielberg, a greatest-hits package from the most successful filmmaker of all time. Its narrative cement – the mysterious attachment between a young human and a non-human wrenched from its parent – is derived from E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. The band of brothers wending their way through a… [Read more…]
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February 25, 2012
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