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If you’re in the entertainment industry, sooner or later you’ll find yourself to be a door-to-door salesman, albeit in various forms. And unlike most 9-to-5ers you may not have the technical qualifications on a resume to back you up, which is when it becomes even more necessary to realize the power of words. The power of conversation can hold the power to intrigue, to sell your talent and your ideas to an audience whom you may be meeting for the very first time.

An actor may try to convince a producer or director to use their talent. A writer/director may try to convince a producer that their screenplay is the best thing since sliced bread. A producer may try to do the same with his film to a distributor. Straddling the line between …

Caution: Terrible mix of Hindi and English.

Hindi filmone desh aur videsh me bahot bada maqaam haasil kar liye hai. Aaj hindi filmo ki oonchi imaarat jo hum dekh rahe hai usme bahot saari chhoti chhoti intein (bricks) lagi huyi hain. Isme se ek int nikal jaaye to imaarat ko kuchh jyaada farq nahi padega par inhi sab inton ki vajah se yeh imaarat aaj itni badi aur majboot hai.

Yeh sab inte hai hindi filmo ke character actors. Nahi mein Pran, Omprakash, Nirupa roy jaise famous character actors ki baat nahi kar raha. Unhe to sab jaante hai par aaj unki baat karni hai jo hamein poorani filmo me har doosri film me nazar aate hai par unhe hum notice nahi karte hai. Unki tasveer hum dekhe to ek hi second me pehchaan lete hai par unka naam hum nahi jaante. Barso tak unhone hero ya heroine ke baap, …

Folks,
Got the news about the Sanjay Dutt verdict. While I do feel bad for the guy, the fact of the matter is, from a legal and a “justice for all” perspective, it is heartening to know that no one, least of all the bollywood types is above the law. The Dutt saga has been a constant one on self pity (he could not handle his success, his mom passed away, etc, etc). Other than Nargis’s passing away, all of his other issues are self created. It is not as if he has had major hurdles to overcome to make a livelihood, battles to fight or had anyone doing wrong things to him, so his “I had a tough life” is hard to buy, when 88% of the Indian population has a tougher life to pass every day and don’t resort to AK named guns to resolve those issues. Also one feels …

This has probably been one of the most terrible starts to a week. The world has lost two great filmmakers - Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, each of whom influenced the world cinema in their own unique ways. As one of the critics truly said - ” the last links to the golden era of European art films are no more”. To top it all Sanjay Dutt has been put behind bars for six years.

The moment I heard of Bergman’s death, my thoughts wandered away to his first movie that I ever saw. I was 15 and had pleaded my 5 year elder cousin to take me along to a friend’s party. Among the haze of marijuana, music and who-was-banging-whom-talks there was a 21 inch television in the corner playing a VHS tape. The film wasn’t even in English, was subtitled and mostly set in one place. I wasn’t allowed …

There was a time when Basti sagas were the mainstay of Bollywood. A multicultural boilpot of ethnic stereotypes would come under large scale oppression only for a hero to rise and challenge the bulldozers single handedly or in tandem with a colorful ensemble in the name of livelihood, dignity and a prime piece of real estate. The early version of Amitabh’s angry young man persona was forged in the basti and as time went on and the urban landscape began to head upwards, the basti genre was subjected to revisionism resulting in Amol Palekar-Farooq Shaikh slice of life. Once the 80s hit, Hindi films for the lack of imagination tried to mine the most of the 70s angst, scrapping rock bottom and bordering on kitsch and the basti saga was wrung dry and inevitably slipped into B and C grade territory. At around the same time a new urban hero …

Never been a fan of the city….Delhi. They say big roads and big house…what’s the use if you cannot get out on it and of it unless you have a vehicle of your own. Hate the rick guys….got into fights this time too. The past ten days were split between abusing them in chaste Tamil, watching some path breaking cinema….meeting my HERO “Paruthiveeran” and meeting up with some of the brightest minds who are going to hit Indian cinema like a tornado in a few months to come. Just came back a few hours ago.

It all started when Ayesha Mohan [I call her Ayesha Kauffman these days], the lead of Gulal wanting Anurag Kashyap to discuss her script. She was to leave for Delhi and so was Anurag in a couple of days and it was decided it will be done there. We …i.e Tani [AK’s AD] and Me …

iVIEW AUTHOR:
Kartick Sitaraman (Bombay, India)

email: kartics [at] gmail.com

I went to this movie purely because I try to follow small films, representative of the independent movement, to whatever extent possible. One good reason being, while we have witnessed a slow but sure change in the industry, to make a film like BBF and put it out there still takes some sort of conviction (read: BALLS) on part of the producer / distributor - and that I respect.

I liked the story, the setting, the world into which I was being taken and had completely surrendered myself to the maker even before the Dawson family moved out of the ‘padha’, which is where the story begins. The film is essentially about a 100 yr old building in Kolkata which is so seriously dilapidated, in its bricks as much as in its inhabitants, its sustenance is under …

We boil at different degrees. But the bubbles are always there, beneath the surface calm. Waiting for the right temperature or the wrong provocation. My threshold varies. There are mornings when, like Kilgore, I love the smell of Napalm. I want to get blown up, teeter on that edge and fall off into a glorious abyss. And then there are days when I’m weaker than English tea, and the provocations in form of insults flung by aliases and pseudonyms shake the very root of my faith. The many manifestations of rage.

But, before I spew any further, let me answer the ubiquitous questions that assail all of my writings. ‘What the hell is she writing about?’ I’m writing about anger. ‘What’s the point of this post?’ It’s an attempt to analyse why we usually fire all our rage in the wrong direction. ‘Is she trying to be clever or sarcastic?’ …

This week’s Sunday 100 turns to a word which could lead to many different plot interpretations…

Witness

In 100 words exactly.

The American Film Institute regularly takes a poll of 1500 filmmakers, writers and historians on the top hundred films of all time. The films are all American, and viewers may not agree with some of the choices, but after all is said and done, it is still a phenomenal selection of cinema….

Most of the scripts are available for online viewing at www.script-o-rama.com, as well as many, many others.

Listed below are the results:

1. “Citizen Kane” (1941)

2. “The Godfather” (1972)

3. “Casablanca” (1942)

4. “Raging Bull” (1980)

5. “Singin’ In The Rain” (1952)

6. “Gone With The Wind” (1939)

7. “Lawrence Of Arabia” (1962)

8. “Schindler’s List” (1993)

9. “Vertigo” (1958)

10. “The Wizard Of Oz” (1939)

11. “City Lights” (1931)

12. “The Searchers” (1956)

13. “Star Wars” (1977)

14. “Psycho” (1960)

15. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)

16. “Sunset Blvd.” (1950)

17. “The Graduate” (1967)

18. …

It’s the irony of this field…fanatics from various states come to this industry with a dream. But not everyone ends up being what he wanted to…..some guys who wanted to be a director are cutting soaps as an editor, some who wanted to be an actor are serving water in production houses. As soon as you’ll enter a place like lokhandwala, suddenly you’ll find a very different crowd around you… Its not a typical mumbai crowd….because majority are these aspirant or so called strugglers and professionals are non-mumbaikars. So whether its Fun Republic, Adarsh Nagar, Barista, Mhada Colony. Their talks, gesture, behaviour, appearance everything is lil filmy.

Last week I had to edit a low budget AV for my architect friend….so I hired a small time FCP studio at lokhandwala…I dint realize Jaisa daam vaisa kaam…. the editor I got was a hardcore bengali babu named ‘Jeetdada’….speaks in fullon bengali …

I was actually planning to publish this post after some time, but thought it apt to post it now seeing the reactions to Pratim’s post on Aamir Khan and ‘Memento.’ Perhaps it will help clear the air about ‘Memento’ and Murugadoss.

When I met A.R. Murugadoss a couple of weeks ago, he was getting ready to go to South Africa to scout for locations to shoot the Hindi version of ‘Ghajini’, starring Aamir Khan. But he graciously sat down for a chat, asking his assistants to hold all calls. (Actually, he is now shooting in Mumbai, and will be leaving for South Africa in a day or two on a month-long schedule.)

Murugadoss actually wanted to start work on the Hindi version soon after finishing the Tamil version of ‘Ghajini’ in 2005, and even approached some Bollywood stars but in vain. “I showed it to many top stars there (though he refused …

If I go back ten years I remember a sleazy, apologetic emotion I felt around watching David Dhawan films. They had a kindergarten script, a lousy look, a no-claim execution, and a general lack of obsession written all over. They went through various ups and downs, as the genre underwent many transformations itself, from slapstick to pajama-naara-khatiya jokes to marital/infidelity/double role capers to plain schtick and nonsensical fun.

I hardly bothered to watch the Govinda-Dhawan films after their screen demise a couple of years back. And Salman Khanwas hardly a substitute, it was funny but nothing close to the mediocrity-fun that the original pair churned out. The last memorable time I had at the premise was at “Deewana Mastana”. I still remember this day when we had a huge argument in our school group over watching Judwaa over Hero No. 1, there were all sorts of reasoning and …

This is my first post for PFC (ahem ahem). This should be fun and please be tender :-)

I did not put up that rather profane title for this post to get your attention but meant it. If it got some guys as an added bonus to read it, then fantastic

I am trying to simply highlight a rather true piece of data about a lot of people from my generation. We are part of a family and do have a lot of friends and relatives around us but we all have one umbilical cord connection to the world of films.

This is a relationship where we are not sure of the giveback from our parents the films but we are definitely the Bastard children of this. We pine, wait, kick, pull and wail, wait all to seek escapism in its deep folds. This gives us a kick, a sense of joy …

(updated) I shall be jotting down a series of musings to raise questions about the different conceptions of Indian cinema floated by living room “experts”, academics, and practitioners. I would like to put forth the various imaginations of Indian cinema. Some of them are grounded persuasively, while others use a logic that looks plausible — at least on the surface — but on digging deeper throws up more questions. The idea here is to not belittle them but to use them to inform about the various ways we inform ourselves and others about what cinema is. In other words, the makings of an “essentialist” argument about cinema and society.
The first one I would like to explore is the culture/tradition argument.
In the absence of sound empirical evidence on which to conceptualise the Indian film form, various models of its evolution have been propounded – some grounded in study of the film …

I was looking forward to watching ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’, the documentary by Sanjay Kak at Prithvi on the 30th and i get this email today:

“Dear Friends, We write to bring to your notice yet another violation of the freedom of expression in India. On Friday, 27 July 2007, a posse of policemen attached to the Dadar police station in Bombay broke into a private screening of Sanjay Kak’s documentary, ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’, and confiscated the DVD. The screening, which was hosted by the Vikalp group of independent filmmakers, was intended to bring to a Bombay audience an eloquent cinematic argument for dialogue beyond anguish and antagonism; for an understanding of the ‘Kashmir issue’ in human and cultural terms. Kak’s ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’ dwells on the experience of the Kashmiri people during the protracted period of strife they have suffered — with equal elements of militancy, State repression, criminal violence, and a struggle for self-articulation. According to …

I wonder if it is that difficult to put some thought on the way that the characters will age when you show a timespan in a film. In Hum, it is referred again and again that “fifteen years have passed” and then you show that in those fifteen years,a toddler has become as old as Rajnikanth and not only that, he is now married and has a 8-9 year old daughter.

I remember seeing “Hum tere aashiq hain” recently on television, where Om Shiv Puri goes to jail leaving two new-born babies behind. How many years he spent there is not mentioned but when he comes out, one of the babies has become a surgeon (played by Jeetendra) who is supposed to have passed his FRCS while the other baby is a sweet-sixteen Hema Malini.

In Aandhi, Sanjeev Kumar and Suchitra Sen age like twenty years in a span of just nine years …

At the heart of the human condition lies a vast emptiness. An emptiness that we try to fill with the things of life….actions,events,people,memories…. Here on the physical plane, the closest manifestation of that endless expanse is the desert, where shamans, mystics and truth seekers of all persuasions have gone since the beginning of time to be one with all that is and all that will be. Somehow the desert has an uncanny power to merge all vestiges of the past, present and future until it is simply beheld as an absolute. ‘The Sheltering Sky’ manages to capture this ephemeral and intangible quality in a way that has seldom been seen before.

The legendary director-cinematographer team that gave us seminal and historic works like ‘Il Conformista’, ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and ‘The Last Emperor’ , in the early nineties created a lush Moroccan dreamscape adapted from a …

Mumbai rains played truant almost throughout July..Then suddendly today it started raining again..Not raining..But pouring..It hardly drizzles in Mumbai.

Whether it becomes Shanghai or not one thing is for sure, Mumbai scores over it in terms of rainfall. It receives almost the double the amount in Shanghai.For your gyan the average annual rainfall of 2120mm is almost double of Shanghai’s 1143 mm. Moreover no other global cities match Mumbai’s average.

‘Another unique aspect of Mumbai rains is that no other city handles as many intense rainy spells. Hongkong and Shanghai get six to seven months of rain, while Mumbai piles up its staggering average in just three very wet months.’ So much and such muck for Mumbai rains.

You might wonder what is the link between Mumbai rains and Bollywood.It’s said that Mumbai ki barsaat aur producer ki baat ka kabhi bharosa nahin kiya ja sakta( Mumbai rains and producers’ claim can’t …

(Note: This piece is written by Khushboo Ranka. Both Anand & Khushboo post their essays under the nick Recyclewala.)

Monty Python and their Cinema.

Circa 1970. War, blind faith, ignorance, intolerance, institutionalized blandness, monotonous cinema, extreme capitalism, aberrations of socialism and most importantly, failure at finding the meaning of life. The answer? Monty Python. This merry band of one American and five Oxbridge guys went on to break the rules they knew and bend the ones that they had made. Their informed irreverence masqueraded under an almost childish disregard for everything sacrosanct. They were a product of their times and yet timeless; having proven themselves as the rightful heirs of the British comic legacy from Shakespeare to Spike Milligan.

Monty Python is a team of actor/writers, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman. Though some of them had worked together before, they actually came together …