Dark Horse, White Knight
THE FEVERISH speculation around a young person poised for stardom in Bollywood is one that only people who follow racehorses would understand: the endless studying of form, of bloodlines, of gossip from the stable. There’s no telling which odds-on favourite will stumble, or which robust survivor of indifference will astonish on a Friday evening. And...
manorama and more
Its very depressing to meet fascinating people and do a lousy job of the writing. A SLOW-PACED AND seductive noir film set in a fictional Rajasthani town called Lakhot, Manorama Six Feet Under barely made a ripple when it was first released in September 2007. Nearly a year later, people are still urging it on...
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang but slowly
An interview with the perfectly adorable Sriram Raghavan. ’S ODD THAT 44-year-old Sriram Raghavan’s better-known movies have been tales of wickedness that could not wait, people who snatched and were burnt. Raghavan’s best stories about himself are about lost opportunities and of waiting; but in noir — the last bastion of the morality tale —...
Imtiaz Ali
So apparently Imtiaz Ali’s appearance was a bit of a revelation to even some of my colleagues. Love in the afternoon, anyone? First published here. “I ONCE FELL IN LOVE with a Malayalee girl in Delhi. I had a terrible fever and couldn’t get out of bed. She lived across the wing and would come...
Khuda Ke Liye
Working on Sundays makes me grumpy and I still haven’t got my mojo back but you should go watch Khuda Ke Liye. THIS WEEKEND, as you wonder what movie to watch and as you sort by language and genre, you can add to your choices, a Pakistani film that moves seamlessly from English to Urdu...
The Siren Who Stayed Away
Sometimes I am terribly eager-beaver about an interview and then I screw up the writing. Here is Chitrangada Singh. WHEN CHITRANGADA first appeared on our horizons in 2005, she was set to make herself a thinking person’s pin-up. What could make a jholawala’s heart beat faster than a movie about politics, sex and sexual politics...
Memories of Murder
Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is one of the most satisfying movies I have seen in ages. This movie precedes Joon-Ho’s brilliant monster movie Gwoemul and has much of the same cast. Unlike Gwoemul it’s set in small-town Korea in the late 80s. A group of policemen with vastly varying degrees of competence try to...
this samoa doesnt even have the beach
7 am is a barbaric practice. Paying a 1000 rupees to travel 40 km in a matchbox is barbaric. Journalism is barbaric. Tandoori chicken and its variants are barbaric. This land is meant for___ (insert rude local name for community that your mother looks down upon and you only utter in your most private thoughts)...
The Notorious Bettie Page
To stay on the subject of porn and good cheer… The Notorious Bettie Page is a wonderful movie. The original Ms Page was a one-of-a-kind creature. In the 1950s she was famous equally for her cheesecake photos as well as for appearing in bondage magazines. In 7 years she appeared in more magazines than Marilyn...
I think he’s attempting reentry, sir
A James Bond movie marathon. Can there be anything more wonderful? All the cheesiness, all the corny pick-up lines, the globe-trotting, the discovery that every house has a man who has watched Goldfinger six times… surely nothing can be a better pick-me-up. In my scheme of things, it has been as good as the afternoon...
Ghost in the Shell 2
The second sequence is a very lovely piece of animation and also has killer music
Gwoemul — The Host
In the final scenes of Terry Pratchett’s Moving Pictures, new Discworld movie moghuls CMOT Dibbler and nephew Soll watch a huge image of a woman (a 50 foot image, to be exact) carry the Librarian (who is an orangutan) up a tower. As they watch the giant woman carrying the ape, they both remark worriedly...
