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The Angrez is one film which most of the hyderabadi’s will be able to connect. The last authentic hyderabadi urdu-hindi-english speaking movie was “Hyderabad blues” and most of you guys out there must have seen it, but there was more than whats shown and spoken about hyderabad. I was born and bought up in Hyderabad and cafés over there are some what special because they have been there for many years and they hold a special place in history of Hyderabad and they are inexpensive places to hang out (My fav’s are alpha hotel, blue sea, paradise, hotel sohail and café bahar) all you need to do is to order a chai and that’s it… the place is yours for couple of hours, that’s what the main characters in this film do. But one day suddenly they get into a fight with Angrez (Not exactly English guys …

“It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember… and I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.” - American Beauty

Each day I go to UCLA campus to attend class I stop by at my place of worship. Even if it’s for a minute I enter my place of peace and give silent …

[This is a re-posting of a review originally posted here, on PFC, on January 21, 2008 at 7:38 pm]

No make happy?
Yes make happy?
No happy, no money!

As bizarre as it may sound, it has to be said that this is an excerpt of an important interaction between the leads in Nagesh Kukunoor’s Bombay to Bangkok, the making happy standing-in for copulation in Thai-English. While it could be presumed that a customer (Shreyas Talpade) is ensuring his money buy Sex from the Service (Thai actress Lena Christensen), it is the latter that mouths the aforementioned profundity. Honesty? Let’s wait some.

The very next sequence in the film reverses the roles where Shreyas Talpade’s con-man-doctor now embodies Service that prescribes Sex (Viagra) to his Customers. The Sexologist that he’s supposed to be is requested treatment to make happy their erection on old males’ Jeevan Dhara Ki Jwalamukhi. …

iView Author:
Sourav Bhuyan
Mumbai, India

EMAIL:
souravbhuyan[at]gmail[dot]com

My Petty Effort….

Iron Maiden is coming to India for the second time and playing live at the MMRDA grounds on the 1st of February.A red letter day for Bombay metalheads.

A year back I came across a documentary called “Metal:A Headbanger’s Journey”.This documentary had taken into account the origin of this particular genre of music called Heavy Metal and stretched over lot of other issues related to it.The documentary was interspersed with interviews of metalheads all over the world and also exclusive interviews.Well documented movie I must say. Sam Dunn,the Writer and the Director of the movie is making another documentary called “Global Metal”.It takes into account the reach of this genre of music in the world.Be it Iran,Brazil,India or Malaysia.

Last year in March, Iron Maiden arrived in Bangalore and blew the city into pieces. Sam …

A landscape no man could tame, the geography of nature’s wrath. Barren miles blasted by sun and lacerated by sandstorms, heathen lands cursed off even the most basic of nature’s bounties and claimed by the wild. Apocalypse acres where men and beast have perished of thirst and scorch, home to bandits and scorpions, where atoms are split in an experiment in holocaust, where Mad Max and other motorheads scourged and pillaged for petroleum and continued existence, where Riddley Walker came of age.

Survival is in raw instinct. The more animal the better.

Where then is God- the one who blesses and provides? What in the forsaken landscape inspires the idea of divine benevolence? What then is justice? What is morality?

Piercing existential questions chant in the soundtrack as a knife-wielding behemoth of a man gives chase to his heavily pregnant wife in the godforsaken terrain in jealous fury. In grave danger she runs …

iView Author:
ANAND KADAM
Bristol, UK

EMAIL:
anandk9 [at] yahoo [dot] com

It’s only words ….

Lyrics are the soul of any song..take them away the song is dead.
There are few songs which i constantly hear, even if i dont understand the meaning
completely or for that matter i have some different interpretation of the words ..these songs make
me nostalgic..make me smile.. make my eyes moist ….

1 ) Mera kuch samaan (Izaazat)

Gulzaar saab at its best.You can’t find better words then this to describe the feeling of a lonely
heart craving for someone’s love.To sing such a difficult song where in more of the words don’t
rhyme,you needed someone to translate the words into voice and Ashaji does complete justice
to Gulzaar saab’s lyrics.Someone asked me why is the word “samaan” used and should they have
…

Round Four

The movie to be reviewed by the ten contestants is SUNDAY
The backup movie review, if the main movie did not release in the city of any contestant was Anukokonda Oka Roju. - All contestants were given a 1000 word count limit to write their reviews within.

Here are the submitted reviews for Round Four! Contestants are listed in order of their rankings after Round Three. If two or more contestants share the same ranking, they are listed alphabetically.

1. Praveen Gopal Krishnan (Bangalore, India)
Sunday: Sun-Dazed!

The strongest possible warning about this movie is what it calls itself - ‘Sunday’. You know that when they start naming movies after days of the week - a scheming marketing ploy hoping that you make a mistake …

iView Author:
NIREN BHATT
Mumbai, India

EMAIL:
nirenbhatt [at] yahoo.com

2007 : A Lyrical Summary

2007 had some interesting & enjoyable songs written, tops the list is the Album of “No Smoking”, there can be difference of opinions about film but not about the songs, particularly lyrics. I think its one of Gulzar’s best works in recent times, lyrics actually conveys more about the film than the film itself, it surpasses material strata of meaning and transcends to a different high.

“upale jaise sulagata hoon, kambakht dhue mein jalta hoon.” ,
“Jab nasha toot ta hai, kitne tukde gire hain”,
“ye jahaan faani hai, bulbula hai paani hai,
bulbulo pe rukna kya,
paani o pe behta ja, behta ja…”,

“pag dandio pe milna do din ki yaariya hain”…
“ye ashtray bharti jaa rahi hai”…

each and every song, each and every word…They don’t get any better than …

Shomsher Kukri, a recently made friend, cause he serves at Naz8 the stale popcorns, 24 time re-heated tea and samosa that look like the samosas have farted on themselves. Naz8 is the closest desi theater serving desi movies. oz being a weakly weekly, biweekly or sometimes triweekly visitor to this heaven on earth that needs inch by inch cleaning with a mop, floor cleaner and a tanker of antiseptic Dettol. Perhaps that’s one heaven that needs cleaning. Not counting the “real one”, which will of course needs a shit load of cleaning each heavenly day cause of the wasted condoms lying on the floor that the Taliban and other fundamental terrorists are using to fuck the 72 virgins. Or was it a 172? I don’t know man. All I see is God getting sleepless nights and banging on his walls… BANG BANG BANG “Could you keep it DOWN… (pause)… WHO …

Hi Folks,

On this rainy Northern California day (yes I miss my tennis, but yes we also need water so I can drink some and swim in some more), most people would think that I have lost it, if I write a post on film festivals and documentaries.

I am not about festivals and my only purpose to be involved in cinema is to write and see stories that can entertain (of course my definition of entertain is “thought provoke,” not necessarily, frivolous).

So why am I changing course now?

Actually I’m not, I have always maintained that documenatries and shorts need festivals (as they do the academic market) and while festivals may have become feature obsessed, the true “stars” of the festivals are these uncovered docs and shorts. And don’t get me wrong, I am not preaching here. I can tell you upfront, most docs and shorts, like most Mani Kaul and some …

Rohit Shetty’s Sunday has all the elements from his previous two films, there is action (Zameen), there is comedy (Golmaal) and there is his regular, Ajay Devgan. In many ways, Sunday is also in keeping with the recently born genre of big-budgeted and thinly-plotted comedies, only with bonus material thrown in – there is Arshad Warsi, one of our best comic actors and there is Irrfan Khan for the ‘multiplex’ audience who take pride in appreciating and patronizing serious actors. This mathematics – a carnival of genre and A-list actors – ensures that the film will not bomb like the way Bombay to Bangkok did.

Sehar (Ayesha Takia) is a dubbing artist for animation films who keeps having these harmless little lapses of memory, forgetting her keys and way to the office. But events take a serious turn when she realizes she has no memory of an entire Sunday, a …

One of the biggest problem that plagues Bollywood is the rampant plagiarism which is sadly seeped into it’s very essence. Everyone of us probably has war stories to tell of this particular affliction which we affectionately used to call DVDitis. I have two to share.

The first incident happened around the time we were doing costume trials for “Eklavya.” We had gone to meet Jimmy Shergill (who is one of the sweetest people I know) at the Marriot coz we needed to take some pictures of his own clothes which he wanted to wear in the film. He had some meetings in the hotel so he asked us to come over. Over coffee and general chit chat I happened to spy a DVD on the adjacent table covered by a piece of paper. I picked it up and it was a copy of the Cassel/Belucci starrer “The Apartment”.

What was really …

There’s a certain euphoria involved when one, as a viewer, realizes that one of your childhood heroes has actually brought back a character one eulogized as a kid, and has made a film for all those fans out there.

That’s precisely what ‘John Rambo’ is all about - a film for the fans of a character which has crossed the threshold and entered the realm of an icon.

Like many others, I also can’t believe that it has been twenty years since the bow-wielding, machine-gun toting, bandanna wearing Rambo made its last appearance. Yes, it made me feel old, because I still remember watching Rambo III on a VHS. I also remember watching First Blood Part II in a small movie theater in Calcutta, called ‘Elite’. Don’t know if the hall is still there, considering the plethora of multiplexes mushrooming in the city I was born and brought up in.

I …

The desire for revenge stems from the mother of human follies. The expectation of fairness. I met some people last night at a bar (i get all my information/knowledge there) and found out that they got paid to study cooperation, fairness and altruism. I coughed bullshit and went on a rant about the humanities departments in universities and that I have greater use for my appendix.

I like to be right, but I love being wrong. I dug around a bit, and one particular study caught my eye. The link is posted below, but I will summarize it.

When monkeys are trained to perform a task with a reward (cucumber slice), they will perform with efficiency 90% of the time. When one monkey gets a greater reward (grape - monkeys love their grapes) for the same effort, the other monkeys were pissed off and refused to perform the task later …

“Thus pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find;
Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind,
Moves all nature to gladness and mirth.”

In matters detailing simple pleasures of life, Wordsworthji stood alone. A rainbow here, rows of daffodils there or a stray song of the solitary reaper and he would be in raptures. I don’t share his perpetual sunny disposition towards life but there are times when stray pleasures move me to gladness and mirth as well. And, dear reader (yes, by now you are in a minority of one so no plural), 1951 was a year which sprang stray pleasures in torrents.

Let me state it simply, 1951, in my not-so-humble opinion, is quite simply the best ever year of Hindi film music. So, forgive me, if I run out of superlatives here. Also, one additional request – if you have the …

iView Author:
SAAD NAWAB
Vadodara, India

EMAIL:
saadnawab [at] gmail.com

Title of the article - John Rambo: A toast to the 80’s

Oh My God! Oh My God! Woohoo! Kill them all!!!

That was me shouting and cheering in the theater as I was watching John Rambo, the fourth and possibly final chapter in the Rambo franchise. I was seven or eight years old when I first got to watch First Blood. Hell, my life consisted of watching Rambo, Robocop and Predator. Ah, those were the days. I guess the 80’s was a time period for such mindless fun. I can still remember that line, “They drew first blood….”. This review will clearly be a dumbed down fan boy reaction…

After numerous scripts and delays and further delays due to MGM saying yes to Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone finally landed up in the writers and directors chair …

iView Author:
MADHAV MATHUR (Singapore)

E-mail:
WITHHELD

Title - The Proverbial Break has landed

I am a stranger in my own life. Things around me are not the same. I believe I am experiencing what the elders call, euphoria.Most of you must be thinking something along the lines of “who the hell is this guy?”

My name is Madhav. I live and work in Singapore. By day I work in a bank and by night, I write and make films.

After the PFCOne competition, where we submitted a film called “Puddle Jumper”, I mustered all my courage and approached Anurag with my idea for a film. That’s right, I met Anurag through PFC. I have written a book and think that it would kick monumental butt as a movie. Fortunately Anurag feels the same way about it.

We discussed the idea through email at …

I did not have much expectation as I walked into the theater. Golmaal was an ok movie with some humour but bits of it were quite forced. So I really did not expect any great change but was totally disheartened to find out that Money is one of the greatest enemies of creativity. This film more than proves the point.

Why money? Well every popular Director (more or less, some have deviated from this rule, thankfully) in India has gone through this path. They enter the industry with a punch (some really good). The first film they do has a lot of hunger and a really tight budget. They stretch every single rupee doled out by the producer to 120-140 paisa and there is a certain amount of Junoon in making that film. If the film ends up becoming a mass entertainer like Golmaal & makes bucket loads of money, et …

Seems times are changing at last - for the better, and fast. After all these years of scouring the film festivals and pirated DVD shops (unless we have deep pockets to splurge on the highly-priced original DVDs of foreign films), it seems 2008 is bringing some happy tidings for us, the lovers of world cinema (that is, anything that comes from outside the country minus Hollywood).

Suddenly, Indian companies have started taking marketing rights for a large number of world cinema and at least two dedicated channels to telecast cinema of that kind are readying for launch. And, trust the French to do it - more and more French films are being screened, at least in Delhi and Mumbai, screened mostly free of cost through tie ups with multiplex chains, to introduce the casual moviegoer to the variety that rides with their cinema (hope other countries would also have as …