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Part Deux.

…Apart from a little respect, here goes.

The first time I was ever slapped was for singing
“ Aaraysu ko boi paaraysu kunnanu……kOkaythukeLindi konDagaali… ”
This song is basically a very clothes weary heroine’s ostensible lament ruing her blouse flying away leaving her bereft of raiment with a very eager hero.
Despite the breezy tune, All that innuendo!

At 5 I did not understand the seething anger that led my mother to award me with a
One Tight Slap since the whole of Barkatpura could be heard humming it.
My audience constituted of some neighbourhood friends, boys of course. At their egging, I went on singing and acting with a lot of feeling and emotion, hoping someone would notice my talent.

But for a very protective grandmother, I would have been beaten black and blue AND gotten locked up in the bathroom as would happen often if I made mischief [which …

This week it’s time for Suparn Verma’s script of Chhal, directed by Hansal Mehta. Suparn was gracious enough to email us the script. Please do note that the script is a rough initial draft and may be a different from the final draft that was shot eventually.

Hansal has this interesting story about him meeting Suparn for the first time. Rediff was doing this online chat thing with Manoj Bajpai and Suparn was sent to get it done. If I remember correctly the incident Hansal related to us, since Manoj didn’t have a net connection (it was still the late nineties) it was being done at Hansal’s place, since Hansal is the guy for techie matters (He’s a software engineer and graduated the same year I joined the college). Hansal found this thin (and about to bald, my comment not Hansal’s) guy with extra extra hyperactive energy in him who was …

iView Author:
Srinivas N (Mumbai, India)

Email :
srinivasn77[at]gmail.com

My joyride in a Time Machine !

Lumiere and his brother would never have imagined the great advances made by the motion picture industry even in their wildest dreams.

From Mitchell Cameras to the latest Arri 535’s & Panaflex’s Millennium series apart from the advancements made in HD technology, we have come a long way in capturing moving pictures!

From the common flip books, hand drawn animation to the latest in computer animation technology, we have taken huge strides in technology!

So what’s in store for us in the future? Say, 50 years from now, how would the cinema industry work? What kind of technological advances one could expect? I don’t know if I would be alive to see that day but I definitely would want to think what can happen!

Will the traditional way …

There is this quiet passage in Padmarajan’s Thoovanathumbikal, where Jayakrishnan ,the film’s protagonist seats himself, and quips gently to Thangal (a more benign version of the “archetypical pimp” in movies) , “You guys don’t know me. There was this one woman I loved and she left me. If I loose Clara too I would end up ruining myself”..

It is the line, “You guys don’t know me” , that is the truest line in the film. We really dont know Jayakrishnan completely. Right from its onset to a certain point in the film, we the viewer, in conjunction with the allied characters in the film make a conscious effort to know Jayakrishnan. And despite our strenous advances, Jayakrishnan remains an arcane entity.

We see him, in the opening scene arguing vehemently with a local over petty money. Padmarajan introduces Rishi, a friend of Jayakrishnan’s who runs an electrical shop in the …

Choreographer turned director Farah Khan’s first venture Main Hoon Na came out in 2004 and was presented as a tribute to decades of Bollywood cinema. One could watch the film with amusement if one could muster enough forbearance for the director’s very passionate tribute to Bollywood. However, while her first film requested the audience’s indulgence, Farah Khan’s second film Om Shanti Om demands a greater sacrifice – of every bit of reason, intelligence and cinematic taste.

This film is about a junior artist Om (Shahrukh Khan) who along with his friend Pappu Master (Shreyas Talpade) dreams of making it big. He also adores the reigning heartthrob Shanti (Deepika Padukone) and risks his life to save her. But Shanti is secretly married to the villainous producer, Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal) and is expecting his child. She wants to go public with the relationship which does not suit Mehra’s scheme of things, so …

This Unni could have been named Murali. And why not, as Murali Nair – the one who had debuted with a Cannes Camera d’Or-winning Marana Simhasanam (The Death’s Throne) in 1999 – draws from his own childhood to come up with this delectable mix of innocent storytelling and subtle comments on the societal prejudices as seen through a child’s eyes.

Yes, Nair makes it more tantalizing by telling his audiences - as he did following a screening of his latest film at the 29th Festival of 3 Continents film festival in Nantes in France to an audience comprising yours truly as one of the minority adults amidst a gaggle of highly-curious French school children who seemed overawed after viewing this tale set in rural Kerala – that yes, there are autobiographical elements in his film, but they come with a generous doze of fictional elements. “Which one of the kids …

IN MUMBAI

Please bare with my knowledge of grammer and tenses.

It’s around 5.30 in the morning. I am opening door of my train compartment. Sudden fishy smell captures my nose. The particular Mumbai smell… I have come to Mumbai for an official work. I will spend four whole days in this dream city. Though before this I have visited Mumbai two times but this time I am more mature and more filmy to understand Mumbai.

So now Mumbai is about to reach.. I am seeing boards of Nai gaon, , Mira Road, Dahisar etc etc. Also seeing halogen bulbs images in the water from my train. The tall buildings, bastis, roads, rickshaws are looking so different in the early morning halogen bulbs. I can’t remember any film maker has captured beauty of mumbai’s early morning…. People are still in their houses. Borivali station comes Train stops. I have to land …

iView Author:
dabba (New York, USA)

Email :
withheld

Shah Rukh won but he’s no longer a Baazigar

Prediction - This post will get me more eyeballs than anything else I have written on PFC. The original title was “Strange Love: Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love SRK,” but I put my Producer hat on, and chose this for obvious reasons. Yet another warning. This post can be accused of a lot of things, but good journalism will not be one. This is anecdotalism at best, and naval gazing at worst, but considering the state of journalism today, I may not be that far off the mark. There is no research done whatsoever. There are plenty of books out there that do that. Please to be reading.

Saal - San Unnees sau 92 (tees ke oopar hindi main ginney nahi …

They say your first film will be an unforgettable experience also because of the tremendous vulnerability debutant filmmakers face on their films’ release and sheer lack of means they have to deal with all that may get unleashed. Dil Dosti Etc sauntered out on 28 September, and I felt my tiny apartment in Versova becoming an island, exposed to come what may!

As I was beginning my ‘first’ Friday, I got a call from the production office, saying MSN has praised the film to the skies, saying, Dil Dosti Etc is a beautiful comment on the pangs of growing up… The small commune I live around with was online too, and my co-writer, Pawan Sony called asking, ‘did you sneak in and write this review yourself? I can’t think of a better one!’ Ten minutes later came a text message from Alankrita, ‘Rediff pans the film’. I forwarded the …

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya, promised to be a unique love story. What it actually offers is, however, a frustratingly lifeless narrative with affected acting, artificially created emotions, and clichéd scenes & dialogues. There’s nothing distinctive, either positive or negative to make the film unique.

Saawariya is the story of a young singer Ranvir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) who on arrival in a new town falls in love with a mysterious, dusky girl, Sakina (Sonam Kapoor), from a Muslim carpet weaving family. As it turns out, Sakina has already given her heart to an equally mysterious man-in-black, Imaan (Salman Khan). She knows nothing about Imaan who has disappeared with a promise to return for her on Eid. So while Raj keeps his hopes alive wooing Sakina, a prostitute Gulab (Rani Mukherjee) pines for Raj. In the end, despite everyone’s misgivings, Imaan returns on Eid and Sakina goes away with him. For love’s sake(!), …

J’ACCUSE’,(I Accuse) screamed the old man at the audience exuding an impotent violence as he watched both the world and fate swoop down vulture-like on his hardworking, self-sacrificing daughter’s plight. It is a scene of tremendous provocation causing the audience, till then sitting comfortably in the auditorium ‘watching’ Ritwik Ghatak’s classic ballad of womanhood and sacrifice to reach out for their hearts and souls in panic. A scramble for emotions. An existential dilemma. How human are you? What can you do? There is an overawing claustrophobic misery as the audience comes to terms with its own helplessness. Then on, as the movie proceeds, one either harbors delusions of some kind of hope, nothing short of a miracle or has given in to the inevitable bleakness at the end.

With ‘Naal Pennungal’(Four Women) only his eleventh feature film in a career …

Veri in Tamil can be loosely translated as Passion-for/ Obsession-for etc. If this website, PassionForCinema, were to be in Tamil it would be called what i have titled this piece - Cinema Veri. And Cinema Veri can also be translated as Trippy Cinema which ‘Tamil M.A’ totally is.

Few films stay with you irrevocably for a particular impact. Like a certain expression, gesture or action. Every needle held by a girl would be an embarrassed recollection of a scary situation such as the one in Takashi Miike’s ‘Audition’. Or Belmondo’s lip-swagger in ‘Breathless’, Forest Whitaker’s SamuraiSword-like panache with his gun in ‘Ghost Dog’ etc. ‘Tamil M.A’ would be remembered for it’s oft-repeated, a measured honest-to-goodness-question posed to the protagonist by the love of his life - Nijamaa dhan sollariya? translating into ‘do you truthfully mean it?’. With its frequency as we proceed in the film we figure it to …

[I thought to start my posting at PFC with a review of No Smoking – Kashyap is a well-known figure here; but also because in a recent post he bemoans how people don’t get his film].
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The protagonist of No Smoking, K (John Abraham, in a namesake role as Franz Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial) is a smoker who refuses to give up. His family and friends try every means to get him off it while he cannot see what the fuss is all about. However, when his wife (Ayesha Takia) threatens to leave him for good, he agrees to get help from one Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal), referred to him by his best friend (Ranvir Shorey). Baba Bengali runs an underground quit smoking laboratory, and once caught in his scheme of things, life becomes a nightmare for K. K’s surreal journey from there on defies logic, and the world, with …

I was reading this article by Kartik, a very detailed review of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. It drew to a closure with the following query..
//Why can’t we have a similar adaptation of King Lear in bollywood, given India’s history of kings and sultans??? //

At the risk of sounding outlandish, I dont think it works that way. I find that statement to be a lame end to a nice analysis of an unquestionable masterpiece.

Kurosawa all through his life based his films based on two principles

1)The story is just a pretext to convey something interesting.
2)Plots are merely excuses to alter cinema the way a director wishes to see it..

For Kurosawa, King Lear was just incidental to the strides he wished to make while making RAN.
Like he had always maintained… “My films essentially ask the same question.. WHY CANT PEOPLE BE HAPPIER TOGETHER?”
Ran, probably adresses that question in the most perceptible manner of all …

iView Author:
Abhishek Asthana (Hyderabad, India)

Email :
abhishek.asthana [at] hotmail.com

Success is a double-edged sword!

Some months back I read the book review of ‘Orson Welles: A Biography’ by Barabara Leaming.

I have always known Welles as the creator of the great ‘Mars Attack’ hoax on radio. This article however was focussed on Orson Welles, the director of ‘Citizen Kane’ (for those who don’t know, this movie repeatedly tops the list of ‘Greatest Movies of All times’).

Barabara Leaming has argued that the initial acclaim that got associated with ‘Citizen Kane’ and hence with Welles has been a double edged sword for the prolific writer-actor-director-producer Welles. On one hand, it established him as one of the ‘greatest’ creative geniuses in the cinematic world and on the other it robbed him and the world of so much that he could have done. (She says that …

Congratulations to all the participants of the PFCOne Film Festival 2007. Thank you for taking up the challenge to make a one minute movie. Now it’s time to show them to the world. To the judges. And then wait… until December 5th, when the winners will be announced.

The festival starts on December 1st, 2007 when the movies are released for viewing on PFC.

Day 1, December 1, 2007

A Minute of Local Kung Fu by Kenny Basumatary
Tuppence worth of goodguy-vs-badguy kung-fu.

Ad Hominem by Ankur Pandey
“appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect.”

After 8 Years by Nikhil Singh
We decided to meet in future and take the story forward, but jab we met, hum rahe na hum, tum rahe na tum.

Alice by Pawan Vishwakarma
u dont loose untill u stop trying.

Are you listening? by Aashish Chopra
Spoken word video on the Impact of HIV/AIDS in India.

Breaking News by Amit Ashok Gokhale
How crazy people are …

iView Author:
Kapil Varindani (Bombay, India)

Email :
kapil.varindani [at] gmail.com

Khamosh Pani (2003)

Recently saw a Pakistani film - ‘Khamosh Pani’ …my first Paki film

The story of the film is set in the 70′ies in a small village called
Charkhi in Pakistani Punjab….

it revolves around the life of a simple,middle-aged woman, Ayesha[
Kiron Kher]… a widow and her young son Saleem,[Aamir Malik], a
frustrated youth,who in a quest to do something constructive gets
manipulated and falls victim to radical politics.

The story has its roots in the 1947 partition …when thousands of
people were slaughtered on both sides of the border… as the story
unfolds, it is revealed, that Ayesha who is a practicing Muslim was
originally a Sikh by birth … left behind during the partition… married
to one of her abductors… a victim of violence and fundamentalism who
unfortunately has to confront her tragic past and even more tragic
present.

What …

“When you think of what is true of India….the opposite is also true”
- John Kenneth Galbraith (progressive economist, liberal and former US ambassador to India)

So what’s true of India – a rapidly growing economy, burgeoning affluent middle class and a young vibrant working populace making its mark in a globalized economy? But then as Galbraith had accurately observed, the opposite is also true.

Do we know of this other India? Of over half million farmer suicides in the last decade, of a quarter of its 500 odd districts where the writ of the state has wilted in the face of naxalite terror, of sleeper terror cells spread across the country who strike at will with remarkable regularity and of large swathes of urban educated India where female foeticides has led to a skewed gender ratio (1000:900) worse than sub-Saharan regions.

This India pops up on odd …

It is said that “Psycho” (1960) gave birth to this new genre called “slasher” flicks. And with slashers was born the concept of the relentless, merciless killing machine, a la Leatherface (From Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Jason Voorhes (from Friday the 13th), Michael Myers (from Halloween), Freddy Krueger (from A Nightmare on Elm Street), to name just a few. Even the T1000 from Terminator 2; the eponymous Predator and Alien fall under the same category, though they did not feature in films which can be termed slashers.

What interests me most about these characters is the weapons they use: Leatherface uses a chainsaw; Jason a machete; Freddy has needles for fingers; Predator has an arsenal at his disposal, while the alien’s biggest weapon is its intelligence. The other similarity I have noticed among these …

Thanks to Navdeep, we have the script of Manorama Six Feet Under

We produce two versions of the script. One, where the dialogues were written in English. And the second where the dialogues are now in Hindi (written in Roman script).

This is more or less the final version of the script though Navdeep does mention that there were some changes mading during the shooting of the film and the Voiceovers which were done in post production.

As per your response to the script of No Smoking, we’ve put this one in Flashpaper.

As a request, may we ask those who link to scripts on PFC, to not directly link to the scripts on your own websites but to the post containing the scripts.

Meanwhile… here’s Manorama Six Feet Under written by Devika Bhagat and Navdeep Singh… Enjoy!

Manorama Six Feet Under (English Dialogues) by Devika Bhagat and Navdeep Singh

Manorama …