Browsing All Posts filed under »Cinema: English«

Bitty Ruminations 86 – Dunkirk

July 20, 2017

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I have a strange relationship with Christopher Nolan’s films. The last one I liked unabashedly, adored 100%, is The Prestige, which is the perfect “Nolan movie” in every way. It has his trademark gimmickry, but this gotcha-ness is folded beautifully into the story, which demands that gimmickry. I mean, it’s about seeing something you only […]

L’Age d'(Palme d’)Or

May 14, 2017

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If you got that headline (translation: if you are a film snob), you may be interested in my dispatches from Cannes during the next couple of weeks.  Will put up links here as they appear on Film Companion. Au Revoir les Enfants. (See, I did it again!) Dispatch 1: https://www.filmcompanion.in/article/the-caste-system-and-phantoms-from-the-past-cannes-2017 Dispatch 2: https://www.filmcompanion.in/article/cannes-2017-a-family-at-war-cultures-at-peace Dispatch 3: […]

Readers Write In #17: The Split Director

May 13, 2017

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M. Night Shyamalan’s first film was neither Wide Awake or The Sixth Sense. It was an indie drama known as Praying with Anger. Of course the film is not popular or even known that it existed unlike how the bad films by him are unpopularly remembered. Wikipedia describes the film as an exploration of a […]

The captain of the ship

February 11, 2017

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Sensing the director’s touch, at the recently concluded Bengaluru International Film Festival. At a film festival, the brochure is invaluable. It gives you a plot synopsis of the films being screened. It gives you a note about the filmmaker. This not only helps in deciding whether you want to give this particular film a shot, […]

“Allied”… A silly melodrama barely made watchable by its stars

January 6, 2017

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Spoilers ahead… It’s 1942. The French Morocco. A man parachutes into the desert. This is the opening of Robert Zemeckis’s Allied. But we quickly see that this is not your average spy thriller. For one, the dull roar of planes gives way to flutes and strings. Romance is in the air – and in the […]

Notes on song-and-dance cinema

December 17, 2016

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Musings on ‘La La Land’, a musical film that leaves us with thoughts about the musical genre. There’s a stunning stretch in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land – which I caught at the 13th Dubai International Film Festival, on a gorgeous big screen, in a theatre that looked like a la la land itself, with […]

An inglourious wish list

November 19, 2016

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Idle (and admittedly wild) ruminations on Quentin Tarantino’s next two films, which he’s announced will be his last two films. At the Jerusalem film festival this year, in July, Quentin Tarantino announced that he would retire after making his tenth film, which meant he’d be making two more. If the number suggests he has made […]

The Amateur’s Art #7 – “Juliet’s Shiva” (English, with English subs)

October 4, 2016

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See here for what this series is about. This short is by Nikkhil Menonn.

Movies, memories and everything in between

September 24, 2016

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Watching old films on the big screen is a form of travelling through time. Why don’t we have revival theatres? The US has them. Among the coming attractions at the Texas Theatre in Dallas is a screening of The Fly, to commemorate its 30th anniversary. The point isn’t that the film can be seen on […]

The Amateur’s Art #4 – “The Robbery” (English)

September 7, 2016

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See here for what this series is about. This short is by Thulasidasan Jeewaratinam. 

Box-office blues

August 6, 2016

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Thoughts on a summer season where a new ‘Star Trek’ movie or a new Spielberg movie no longer guarantees a blockbuster. Early on in the new Star Trek movie, Captain Kirk is in an existential funk. It’s the third (or maybe fourth) year of a five-year mission, and life on the Starship Enterprise has become […]

Deconstructing Woody

July 23, 2016

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Thoughts on Woody Allen as he completes half a century as filmmaker. And why ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ is his defining film. It’s hard to believe, today, that What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Woody Allen’s first film as director, began with a series of James Bondian action scenes (flamethrowers! murderous discs with serrated edges!). Harder to believe […]

The games city people play

July 16, 2016

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The recent Malayalam drama ‘Ozhivudivasathe Kali’ is the latest in a line of films that involve game-playing in the wilderness. I caught Ozhivudivasathe Kali (An Off-day Game), Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s acclaimed Malayalam drama, when it was released in Chennai last week. The story is set during an election day, a dry day, and it’s about […]

What do you do for an encore?

June 11, 2016

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Thoughts on ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass,’ ‘X-Men: Apocalypse,’ and sequel fatigue. J upiter Ascending, the sci-fi mega-flop from 2015, left me with quasi-philosophical thoughts. Had it actually been a good movie, these thoughts would have come from inside it, from what it’s about, from how it’s been made – but these were outside thoughts. I […]

Lights, camera… and action!

May 14, 2016

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Thoughts on fight sequences that are more than just… fight sequences. I sat glumly through the new Captain America movie. It was too long, and it took itself too seriously. There’s probably something to the theory that no post-9/11 superhero film can afford to be, you know, light and fun and nothing but escapist entertainment, […]

Still talking to us

April 30, 2016

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Forty years on, ‘Taxi Driver’ remains a stunning example of what a great director can do with an already great script. For a film that’s become all kinds of iconic, Taxi Driver has entered its forties with very little noise. It wasn’t until The Hollywood Reporter rounded up cast and crew for an “oral history” […]

Stalking point

April 23, 2016

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While celebrating ‘Fan’, let’s not forget Kamal Haasan’s ‘Uttama Villain’. Or the fact that these films can be made only in India. Watching Shah Rukh Khan’s Fan, I kept recalling Kamal Haasan’s Uttama Villain. Both films are not just about the characters these actors play (within the movie) but also about who these actors are […]

Old is cold?

April 16, 2016

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‘The Jungle Book’, like ‘The Revenant’, is a showcase for new technology that’s making it increasingly difficult to watch older films. Let’s begin with a quiz. You just have to name the film. It features an attack by a grizzly bear. The victim is a Caucasian man making a living in an unforgiving, inhospitable, bitterly […]

Stupor Men

April 2, 2016

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Another superhero movie. Another opportunity to complain about how humourlessness has come to define the genre. I’m not exactly a comic-book nut. It’s not that I know nothing. If you dropped the name Frank Miller, for instance, I’d know you’re not going on about a blunt-spoken flour-maker. But I wouldn’t be able to keep up […]

Chris rocked…

March 5, 2016

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… but what about the rest? aka, the award for the show most in need of revamping goes to… I didn’t expect much from the Oscar show. I missed the live telecast, and by the time I sat down for the rerun, I already knew who’d won the big awards. So I was surprised when […]

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