I started maintaining a list of all the movies I have seen (in theatres that is, movies on television are not worth the effort) since the time I was 15. This has met with sufficient enough ridicule for me to extend this to my other passion – reading. A recent examination of the list confirms what I been feeling over the past few months, a lot of my reading is non-fiction nowadays. I have thinking about this, wondering what might be behind this. Is it a natural growth path in one’s reading habits (I have to do a random survey of friends for this), or is it that a lot of what i look for in reading these days is knowledge and information rather than entertainment. Is entertainment something I have reserved for only movies and television and can books hope to catch up with that. Inherent in this is an assumption that books can’t offer entertainment on the same scale as movies. That assumption sucks. So I guess I have been reading the wrong books. I am caught in an age and frame of min...

Movie Review of “House of Flying Daggers” Its funny writing a review of a movie, nearly two years after it was released to much acclaim. It is a pity that HOFD took so much time to come to India . And it is an even bigger pity that it runs only for a couple of shows in Bangalore , the other slots being taken by an Indian Indiana Jones movie called “Naksha”. HOFD has a gossamer storyline. It is the time of anarchy during the Tang dynasty, late ninth century. Various rebel groups are fighting the government and HOFD is one of the leading bunch of anarchists. A policeman, Jin, is sent to a brothel called Peony Pavilion in disguise to check out intelligence that a rebel is hiding there. There he runs into Mei, a blind courtesan, who is arrested after a dazzling dance sequence (the Echo Dance) on the presumption that she is the daughter of a leader of HOFD who was killed by the police. She is later helped to escape by Jin himself, who is acting as a mole to follow Mei to the HOFD. J...

At a time when protest has become pedestrian with the current national obsession being something like whether Sourav Ganguly should be wearing boxers or Y-fronts, here comes a movie which recoups some of that lost glory, and where protest is pedestalised. RDB is a very significant (and I do not use that term lightly) movie in that it has succeeded commercialy and has become a cult movie despite it being a very serious and topical movie. The Story The movie revolves around a gang of four – DJ (Aamir Khan), Karan (Siddharth), Aslam (Kunal Kapoor) and Sukhi (Sharman Joshi). DJ, actually named Daljeet, is a Sikh and almost bordering on the lunatic. He has been out of college for a few years but hangs around there because he is scared of the world outside. This is actually a clever attempt to make Aamir act like a college kid though he does not look like one. Sukhi is DJ’s booze-um buddy. Karan is the strong and silent type while Aslam is a bit of a poet. Apart from Karan, most ...

Iqbal It is very easy to make a bad movie about sports because it is "apparently" very easy to make a good movie about sports. Sports, by its very nature, offer all the elements which you need in a good screenplay – which can for simplicity be divided into "conflicts" and "resolution". Conflicts can be class conflicts (Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, Breaking away etc.), underdogs versus leaders (Lagaan, Rocky), good versus evil (Escape to Victory) etc. You have tears, joys, struggles, adulations, suspense etc; everything you need in a good melodrama. Probably the last Ashes series or the 2001 Ind-Aus cricket series was as good as a movie. Against this backdrop, most writers tend to ignore that you need a good screenplay to bind things together. Iqbal in that sense was better than many other recent sports movies. There was a decent script, good acting and a general feel good factor. In fact it was quite an entertaining movie. The issue i have with Nag...

Black “Look Ravi (cameraman), can I have some blue lighting from up there with a golden ray through the window. I am making a beautiful narcissistic movie and need some chiaroscuro lighting” “And you ice cream guy, can you wear an overcoat. This is Shimla, everyone here wears overcoats” “Michelle, stop using eating with your fingers and eat with a fork and spoon. This is India . See your Indian teacher Mr. Sahai, he also uses a fork and spoon”. In the most artificial movie since Devdas, Black is an experience in dishonesty. Over-the-top filmmaking, without any character development, time or place perspective, emotional sensibilities etc., is fine in a commercial entertainment movie but when you are making a human interest kind of movie, subject matter has to take frontseat. While in Iqbal being handicapped was effectively used to elevate the material, here being handicapped just takes a backseat to a crassness in direction which is unpardonable. For effective In...