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A perfectly sunny day in the morning and by 12 it’s all cloudy and dark….the monsoons have left Bombay but this seemed so damn unlikely….this means that you are losing light even as you are just 2 hours into the shoot. A whole day to go….60 shots planned to be canned…..looks like a task ahead…Murphy’s ghost lurks only around movie shoots. It just seems to be the best playground to prove his maxim. Today too was no different but then the indomitable sprits that come together to make cinema happen just seem to overcome Murphy’s maxim.

As the day started Rajeev walked in looking as fresh as ever. No…no…no..no…Rajkumar does not want his HERO to look like this….this films needs him to be worried, exhausted, angry, frustrated, anxious but not fresh. Rajeev got in the zone quite quickly and throughout the day must have sprinted a half marathon atleast. It …

iView Author:
SRINIVAS N
(Mumbai, India)

EMAIL:
Witheld

May 28, 1923, 4.32 PM was a defining moment for the people of Andhra. No one has realized it that day but after a few years, everyone would feel the impact of the meteor that stuck them and their lives being changed forever. In a small village called Nimmakuru, Andhra Pradesh which was then a part of Madras state, a baby was born. The baby’s mother wished to name her son as Krishna but his uncle named him Taraka Ramudu, later changed to Taraka Rama Rao. Nandamuri Lakshmiah Chowdhury and Venkata Ramamma would never have dreamt even in their wildest dreams that on that day, they would be immortalized in the eyes of Telugu nation.

After finishing his school in Nimmakuru, Rama Rao’s uncle Ramaiah adopted him and took him to …

For three years in Amsterdam, I watched many movies on my computer. Movies I had never heard about. For the first one and half year, the only movie I saw in the theatres was Spiderman 2. Then one and half year later everything changed.

Amsterdam is rich in terms of art. It has many music halls, small theatres and huge multiplex. The biggest multiplex group is Pathe. It has 4 multiplex in Amsterdam alone with almost more than 35 screens between them but most of them running to absent audience. A ticket to a show costs 9 Euros, 4:50 Euros on a Saturday morning and 6:25 Euros for all Tuesday shows.

So if I watched 4 movies a month, my spending on movies would be 36 euros a month. If I wait a couple of months, renting the DVD for the same movie would cost me 3:50 Euros per …

Guess what I am going to be doing in the evening today..am jamming up with Rahman, and maybe me and Piyush Mishra mite just get to exercise our vocal chords on rythm. Am I nervous? Ha ha ha…Am sure it is going to be great fun. This is for Kaizad Gustad’s Bombil and Beatrice, in which Rahman has done the background score for. If at all anybody needs more information on this, you could visit the website or else if you just want to check out the trailers, then YouTube zindabad..

I am slightly low these days since Bhumika got married.. Kya kya sapne dekhe the maine uske akele mein? Ab tho main bhi Yoga seekh ke hi rahoonga, shit, I did not know that , that was the thing that could make me lose out on some good things in life..Anyway, wishing them both a good and fantastic and lovely …

OPINION NOT REVIEW.

The past fortnight has been extremely trying on the personal front. A much advertised dance performance was cancelled at the nth hour after three months of practice. To get me out of my funk Amina and Kulsoom decided to lend me some comedies straight from the pirated pavements of Pakistan. Having given ‘Hulchul’ and ‘Bhagam Bhag’ a very conscious miss, I found myself actually smiling at the foolishness of it all. I work hard, give my best, injustice is done, and no one gets to see what I am capable of, who cares, really?

Catching up with the all those much missed movies seemed a sensible option. Manorama SFU, on DVD. Suddenly I am sitting up seeing the fabulous art work and authentic props. The Indira Gandhi Canal and its ramifications, Marvelous Marwar and its colourful people, MSFU got it all so right. I did 11th and …

iView Author:
ARATI
(Mumbai, India)

EMAIL:
Witheld

Mention Berlin, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Pusan, Locarno, Sundance, Venice, Rome Film Festivals and most filmmakers (exceptions, of course, always being there) would have a dream of their film being selected for one of these revered international platforms. Having managed film festivals for my company for over two years now, I have a little experience, some apprehensions and few questions.

My first one being the most basic: Why do filmmakers send films to film festivals? Answers could vary from seeing their film with the best film connoisseurs and filmmakers in the world and adding equity to their film by having an “Internationally Approved” stamp, to finding prospective buyers for several world rights to business networking and satisfying your own prestige needs. You know, most of these film festivals are not-for-profit events. Meaning, it runs on sponsorships which …

What’s common between Laaga Chunri Mein Daag (LCMD) and No Smoking (NS)..
One could say there could be no commonality whatsoever..One is proverbial chalk and another a cheese..One represents the established order and another rebels against it..One is power-centric and the other, well,ah-ahem, ego-centric..One is so stained that any cleansing is ruled out..Another is exception to the rule that you can’t have smoke without fire..One has all the brazen motives and other all the bizarre metaphors.. One has all the clichés and another has all the confusion.. …

iView Author: SAAD NAWAB , Vadodara, India

EMAIL: saadnawab [at] gmail.com

Spirit of the beehive - A review ——

Looking into the eyes of a child will make us see more than we can manifest. To them the world is an illusion, an escape from all mandarins. Fantasy and imagination – are separate nuances delved differently for adults and children, the former not able to understand the latter.

Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive is widely regarded as the most important Spanish film of the 1970’s, taking place somewhere around the Castilian plain in Spain, 1940, in the wake of the civil war. A travelling film show comes to a village with a print of James Whales ‘Frankenstein’.

Two sisters Ana and Isabel watch the film and subsequently Ana wants …

iView Author: ADESH PRASAD , India

EMAIL: prasad_adesh [at] yahoo.co.in

After watching Jab we met the first thing that I could think, which could be associated with the film was, a loose elastic. And that made me very sad.

Although I think it has great dialogues. Smart dialogues to be precise. They are very funny, infact continuously funny like the situations. Humour is neither over the top nor its cheap, its just classy and charming. The scenes are realistically handled and the most amazing part is the kind of timing and restraint it exhibits. The scenes are handled the way you’d expect from any good film from any corner of the world.

Kareena Kapoor is surprisingly fabulous. I am amazed with the ease and maturity (with which as an actor) she handles her character. Suddenly …

Driving as fast as I could in the treacherous NYC traffic last Thursday I was thinking as hard as I could as to what I would have done if I were to remake Dombivilli Fast, that too in a language of which I knew all but 2 words. How would I even start to write the change in characters or change the sensibility to suit my target audience? How would I even trust the characters when I cannot understand them while they are giving a shot? How would I make it work? What would I have to face?

Nishikant Kamat is a director shows you lot less than what he is. He is fun to be with, very very personal and probably the most chilled out person I have met with lazy being the other very apt adjective. He is patient, loves to shop for shoes and his immediate desire is …

So much of discussion on no-Smoking on the PFC . I haven’t seen the movie and would love to see it in a theatre, for it reminds me of an erstwhile experience of having watched a movie that merged the real and the surreal together. This was the Thamizh movie, “Kudaikkul Mazhai” directed by R.Parthiban. It released in the year 2004 and I was in Bangalore watching it in a small theatre.

In the promos of the movie and trailers, there was no scene from the movie that was shown. It was just a talk by the director saying that this movie is a commercial poem. I thought, you can never scare the audience better than by saying such nonsense. I thought that this guy simply has gone crazy again(usually he does go crazy and makes nonsense movies while coming up with some absolute gems inbetween).Thamizh press started floating news as …

Standing in the queue at the ticket counter, I saw some people coming out of the earlier show. I kept staring at some of them, trying to figure out their reactions about the film (obviously having heard so-much and so less about the film and its maker). I saw these two peculiar gentlemen from Bihar mumbling about No Smoking – “Arre yeh film bahut aage ki soch ke saath banaya hai saala” (In their typical accent). I smiled and wondered if the film would work for me.

Yes. It did work.

I saw the late night show of Anurag Kashyap’s “No Smoking” in the theatre near my house. There were some cigarettes in my pocket, and I just wanted to smoke and enjoy it with the hangover of the film. But somehow I couldn’t light the cigarette. I didn’t even dare to. It was just a frightening thought and a …

I get into this car…it’s an engineering marvel…a state of the art dream machine…it’s got every thing put into it… what an automobile should have…you get in and the engineer stands right besides me and says…. “go figure how to ride it…I gave you the best of what’s available but it’s up to the driver to figure out how you drive it…let me test you”…but then there are those cars which give a great experience and while you are riding it you just enjoy the ride and don’t even think of the genius engineer who has designed….the man who has stayed in the background and let you enjoy his creation…give you the ride of a lifetime…

Am I even making sense here? Donno…When I see a Cinema Paradiso or the Munna Bhai series or Khosla Ka Ghosla…I enjoy my ride…just into the characters and don’t even know who the director or …

iView Author:
PANKAJNO.1 (Foster City, USA)

EMAIL:
pankajno1@gmail.com

Iview entry 1 : : Ha ha ha Ho ho ho… - How much Comedy!!!

We all love comedy, we wait for it in a movie to laugh on, we wait for such characters to come on screen when we see them on posters or pre-release publicity.

But how much comedy is worth, or better what kind of comedy is worth?

4 guys behind some hidden treasure…
3 guys behind 1 girl
4 jobless guys’ bla bla bla
3 guys …one dumb… one smart… one has a side-love-story… bla bla…

Confusions, cross connections, melodrama…. ok so we got many movies with different stories, different characters, different drama… but isn’t that enough. It has become a rat race, every other director trying to cash in here.

And then talk about quality of the comedy, is it a …

Reading the critic(s) reviews, fellow PFCian blogs and Anurag’s comments over the past few days has been a tremendous experience. I wonder if we in India have ever had such an intense debate over the worthiness of a film. But then there never was a PFC. I am sure that this whole discussion will continue for some more days. It’s not the first time that a film with which cine-goers had so much expectations from, has disappointed (atleast for a majority). It’s not the first time that the audience found it hard to make a sense of the movie and it’s not the first time that the critics have unanimously panned a movie. I would have loved to see Anurag humbly accept that he went wrong with the film just like Kevin Smith did with “MallRats”. Instead he has gone the Ram Gopal Verma way proclaiming how he doesn’t …

A plastically real and hilariously warm love story.

Written by: Nancy Oliver.
Directed by: Craig Gillespie.
Starring: Ryan Gosling.

As opening credits fade, Lars (Ryan Gosling) is seen watching from a window. His neighbour, Karin (Emily Mortimer), comes in and invites him for lunch. He promises and never shows up. Gus (Paul Schneider), Karin’s husband, wins 5$ bet with her. Lars goes to the office. Doesn’t talk with anybody. Lars comes home and sits on the bed and is frozen in a stare on the empty wall. Six weeks later Lars knocks on Gus and Karin’s door and invites them to meet his girlfriend, Bianca, who is half Brazilian half danish, and bound to a wheel chair. She is religious and so Lars and Bianca decide not to sleep on the same bed. If this isn’t intriguing enough then what happens after that is hilariously shocking. Lars is in love with a …

“Jab Nasha Toot.ta hai
kitne tukade gire hain

Hosh chun.ne lage hum
hum bhi kya sarfire hain”

The song kept playing inside me, when I came out of the Cinema hall after watching No Smoking.. and it moved to my lips too while driving back to home.. (while others had “phoonk diye” on their lips) Unlike JG or MSFU, where the director helped me to solve the puzzle before I left the theater, here I found defeated by Anurag.. You won Bro.. but I took the puzzle home with me in an effort to solve it whenever possible.. I have not given up.. The challenge is not over yet.. A similar feeling was there 8 years earlier when I came out after watching Hu Tu Tu (My heart said its good while my mind was not satisfied) but I could solve the puzzle in its second screening.. With …

Warning: This is not a review. This is an extremely personal letter to K - the protagonist of No Smoking. No one forces you to read, leave alone comment!

Dear K,

Hey! I saw the film they made about you. It’s about your smoking habit, they think. I don’t think so. It didn’t have an email address to reach you so I am posting the letter here.

You know, when I was getting into the auto rickshaw to get to watch No Smoking, a madman followed me. I ignored him and he started to follow all the way into the rickshaw. The other side of the rickshaw was blocked as well. The driver was a bit stumped and took time to react, he thought that man was with me, but I panicked for I didn’t know him. The auto rickshaw man took charge and began hurling the choicest abuses at once. …

DISCLAIMER: The opinion in this article is entirely mine and bears no viewpoints of any other author of PFC. If this piece of writing hurts anybody, I sincerely apologise for the same.

The best way, according to me, to understand a film director is to watch his films together. You understand his creativity across the reels. You understand his sensibility beyond one story. You understand his understanding of the medium in general.

I remember how I watched all the Almodovar films back to back, over a week. I watched all the Coen Brothers movies one after the other. Even for Guru Dutt I saw everything from Baazi to Kaagaz Ke Phool without a David Dhawan or a Wachowski Brothers break. And it is such a joy when you can feel the same warmth in the frames, the same glow in the faces, the same layers in the folds. It is NOT …

Exactly !!!

I’ve been blogging abt no smoking and visiting the sets … ive had the pleasure of intertacting with the team and the cast crew during and after the shooting. I loved the process. I was lucky enough to read the script, be a pat of the shooting, and watch the rough cut as well (with othe pfc waalas and mr sudhir mishra as company)…

I loved the rough cut despite the abscence of special effects… bad sound quality….

What’s more, i was there for a flash 2 sec cameo in the film too…. (yeah yeah mom and dad. im there in the final edit)

I will be always greatful to Mr kashyap for such a wonderful experience.

After watching no smoking last nite …. few things i learnt …. what to do and what not to do .. for US .. for ME .. for all those …