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Browsing All Posts published on »December, 2011«
Happy new year
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 […]
Lights, Camera, Conversation… “The unqualified joys of lowbrow sensations”
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 […]
Showcase: Nice guys do finish first
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 […]
“Don 2 “… Don’t!
December 24, 2011
The depressingly underwhelming (and numbingly long) Don 2 is less about Farhan Akhtar’s commitment to plot and character than hairstyling and haberdashery. Watch Shah Rukh Khan, in the opening scenes, resembling the world’s nattiest Naga sadhu. Behold Om Puri, gratefully grown out of his simian buzz cut in the earlier movie. See Lara Dutta’s ripe […]
Lights, Camera, Conversation… “A lavish spread of cinema”
December 23, 2011
In the jam-packed schedules of film festivals, is it possible to savour the films you see? To some extent, yes. To some people in Chennai, this weekend portends nothing but sleep, blissful sleep that will not be interrupted by an alarm meant to drive them to a morning screening, followed by others in the afternoon […]
A Navroz by any other name…
December 23, 2011
A Carnatic-music concert can be enjoyed even if you think Kapi is a darkly aromatic bean. Honest! Here’s something you will not find in a concert of western classical music that has just begun to play Mozart’s Symphony No. 40: a member of the audience, face flushed with the smugness of discovery, whispering to his […]
“MI4 – Ghost Protocol”… Heist bidder
December 17, 2011
The sumptuous fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise wants us to know that it knows we know what to expect. The director, Brad Bird, is ready for us. We expect that the titles will play over the length of a fuse that’s been lit. So just before, he has his leading man instruct a […]
A citizen of two cultures
December 17, 2011
For a brief while, Sir Mark Tully considered affiliation to the Church of England, but he joined the BBC instead. Priesthood’s loss was political journalism’s gain. He moved to Delhi in 1964 as India Correspondent. He was the Chief of Bureau, BBC, New Delhi, for twenty-two years, was knighted in 2002 and was awarded the […]
Game!
December 17, 2011
That’s not just the name of an underwhelming Abhishek Bachchan movie. It’s also how you’d describe a troublingly agenda-free Abhishek Bachchan interview. I am seated on a sofa inside one of the rooms in a five-star hotel. (Perhaps it’s a six-star. I can never say with these things.) I am seated on this sofa because […]
Lights, Camera, Conversation… “The critic who played with fire”
December 16, 2011
Do early reviews make a difference to the marketing of a movie? Not to some of us, at least. What is the value of a critical opinion? A lot, apparently, at least in the US. The New Yorker critic David Denby saw David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at a screening for the […]
A world of cinema
December 11, 2011
133 films from 53 countries. Plus, the Indian Panorama. Plus, Tamil films in competition. The 9th Chennai International Film Festival has it all. Long before a film festival prints its official bulletin – that thumb-thick catalogue with glossy pictures and synopses to help you decide which 11 a.m. screening is likely to prove most rewarding […]
Rossellini, Fellini and their sister Nalini
December 10, 2011
On the eve of the 9th Chennai International Film Festival, Kamal Haasan explains why these events are important and how they’ve changed his life. Do you remember the first foreign film you saw? I consider even Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the John Wayne movies as foreign films. That was probably the first […]
“New Year’s Eve”…Sappy new year
December 10, 2011
Last February, director Garry Marshall rounded up a mammoth cast for Valentine’s Day, a sprawling romantic dramedy requiring not so much the direction of actors as the directing of traffic. This December, he’s rounded up a mammoth cast for New Year’s Eve, a sprawling romantic dramedy requiring not so much the direction of actors as […]
Showcase: A portal to a private world
December 10, 2011
The glass-half-empty aspect of the Hsiao-hsien Hou retrospective at the 9th Chennai International Film Festival (14-22 December 2011) is the absence of the dreamy Flight of the Red Balloon. But lovers of languorously paced cinema will claim that the glass is half full simply because of this rare opportunity to sample the Taiwanese auteur’s films […]
Lights, Camera, Conversation… “The other side of happily-ever-after”
December 9, 2011
Films on subjects that make us sick to the stomach aren’t easy to watch, but then spinach doesn’t taste like sorbet either. I was asked, recently, to view two films – David Schwimmer’s Trust and Nicole Kassell’s The Woodsman – that dealt, in their own ways, with the very troubling reality of child sexual abuse, […]
Goodbye, guide
December 4, 2011
RK Narayan was famously miffed about the vulgarities perpetrated on his novel on its way to the screen, but even he would have admitted that there was no better actor to play Raju Guide. Dev Anand, of course, was a big star by then, and big-budget mainstream movies about adulterous heroines who left their husbands […]
“The Dirty Picture”… Breast wishes
December 4, 2011
All films are destined to be watched by two audiences, one that identifies with the characters and nods in empathy, recognising a story that’s about them, about their life experiences, and another that merely relates to the characters and sees the story as something that’s happening to someone else.
Margazhi tingle
December 3, 2011
It’s December. It’s The Season. The regulars know what to do, what to expect. And for the music-loving tourist who doesn’t, a crash course is inevitable, beginning with the gentle instruction that sa-ri isn’t just six yards of local attire. The emails have begun to trickle in. A friend from Seattle, who is visiting Madras […]
Showcase: The king of kitsch
December 3, 2011
Ken Russell, who passed away this week, is being regarded in the obituaries as a cinematic provocateur. He wasn’t the only one, of course. Russ Meyers and John Waters, for instance, were no slouches when it came to sticking a gleeful pin into the balloon of artistic propriety. But while they reveled in the merely […]
Lights, Camera, Conversation… “Summer’s over, it’s awards season now”
December 2, 2011
It’s raining awards in the US. As for us, should we consider this proven model of making people go see movies they otherwise wouldn’t see? What is our equivalent of the Oscars? Every year, this question sits on my lips as I watch awards season unfurl across the US, a big red carpet snaking all […]
Baradwaj Rangan 
December 31, 2011
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