Atonement
The first half of Atonement is pretty and inclined to warm the cockles of anyone who likes World War II romances or English countryhouse movies. It’s a rare filmmaker who gets golden summers wrong. So we have amidst a lounging crowd of siblings, cousins and guests in a mansion, Briony Tallis, highly emotional thirteen-year old...
The Boy who made Advani Cry
AT THIS stage, one is losing count of the many unlikely people who have cried during Taare Zameen Par. Even if you begin watching it with grim determination to not cry, fifteen minutes in, you feel your face crumpling. Ishaan Awasthi taps into our purest, shallowest lode of tears, prodding at our collective sense of...
Everyone must watch
Anukokunda Oka Roju. I have watched it once on cable without subtitles and once sitting at night on the terrace of a building on Marine Drive with a bunch of people, none of whom understood Telugu. We all enjoyed it enormously. This time it had subtitles but I think mostly we enjoyed the tone and...
In praise of vegging, perhaps
Do you remember waking up in a sweat about some exam that you had forgotten to study for, only to remember that it has been three years since you had last written an exam? My current state is somewhat similiar. I lie on a couch determined to read murder mysteries and get up only to...
Sudhir Mishra
On a day that I am still bemoaning a major work-related fuckup, this is comforting to post. KHOYA KHOYA CHAND has all the trappings of an old-fashioned romance but when the lovers, Zafar and Nikhat, are in bed together for the first time, director Sudhir Mishra signals to us that he has no intention of...
Wax in Vain
Over the last week my gmail status has been “hot boys enge?”. This is my excuse. TWO WEEKS ago we saw Ranbir Kapoor draped atop a piano, caressed by a sheer curtain, romping about in a precariously tied towel of equivalent sheerness. The same weekend we saw Shah Rukh Khan cavorting tirelessly in what appeared...
What’s up, Doc?
A rather unfortunately named article. BHARATH MURTHY was only one of thousands who watched Mysore Mallige, a home video made by a young couple, that mysteriously appeared in the public domain in Bangalore a couple of years ago and became a porn classic. Murthy, however, made a documentary about Mysore Mallige, probing the huge sensation...
Stranger than Fiction
Alright so I think its unreasonable that a screenplay writer, born a mere four years before me, wrote Stranger than Fiction and has been engaged to Lucy Liu and now to a minor hot blonde from Lost. But what the hell, its an adorable movie and I have liked it even the third time. And...
Celebrity Bloggers
This one was so much fun to write but it was hilarious to read it in Hindi. YOU DON’T have to browse long to find a small graveyard of Indian celebrity blogs. From Rahul Bose to Nandita Das, most of these writers seem to have given up after a few entries and their tight-lipped posts...
Foreign Correspondent
I am a sucker for newspaper movies and this one was well…nice. I was extremely distracted but even with half an eye and half a pointy ear, some scenes stood out. The windmills, the chase under a canopy of dark umbrellas and the heart-breaking interrogation scene.
Marnie
Sean Connery begins at Tippi’s forehead, drags his open mouth down her cheek and then terrible faux kissing. Henceforth really bad movie kissing shall be known as the Marnie shot. Tippi was a lovely crazy, with a jagged edge….then Sean Connery had to go spoil it by playing shrink. Psychodrama does not age well.
Stage Fright
Hitchcock’s minor characters consistently interest me more than the rest of the cast. Perhaps it is just that they have better backchat. The mother in North by Northwest, the sister in Strangers on the Train and I positively love the heroine’s father (played by Alastair Sim) in Stage Fright.
