Siddharth Pillai | PassionforCinema

It all happened with Arnold's raised Austrian finger gently descendin into a pool of molten iron.. then there was Ben Hur's chariot race, the ghost by the stairs in Evil Dead, Sreenivasan's guy next door, shilpa shetty giving to UP- Bihar, Mumbai ka Bhai kaun.... I was in. Suckered. Seduced.

Siddharth Pillai's Blog

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9: 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-PTOOF!
Shane Acker, all said and done, sure got one thing right. If you’re going to make an addendum to one of the most beloved artifacts in the pop culture universe and if you don’t want to commit a McG-sized (Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Terminator Salvation) motion picture embarrassment, the guy you take notes from is the one and only Mr. James Cameron. When faced...
by Siddharth Pillai at September 9th, 2009 at 08:09 am
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Plan 9 from Dimension X
The delusional is our only hope.’ – Chairman Mick Farren If you’re looking for reality in the cinema (whatever that may be), if your delicate senses are offended by the grotesque pageantry of the human imagination, if you like to strut around all-goody-two-shoes trying to uphold the merits of practicality… well, take a hike honey....
by Siddharth Pillai at September 2nd, 2009 at 12:09 am
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Khopadi ke Antariksh Ki Devi: Patala Bhairavi
Captain’s Log: 2.2.2201 The Command and crew of Explopod 9 finds itself in a unique position commonly referred to by gin’d up gumshoes as ‘nothing to lose’. If the crew were any more than a peg-legged scarecrow remains of a man and a fresh-faced beardless stripling, one could expect a mutiny. But as bad karma or plain good old bad luck would have it, Explopod...
by Siddharth Pillai at August 29th, 2009 at 01:08 am
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The Bone Carnival Blues
Gene Loomis: Y’know, it’s hard to believe you’re a grown-up. Ruth Corday: No kidding. Lawrence Woolsey: You think grown-ups have it all figured out? That’s just a hustle, kid. Grown-ups are making it up as they go along, just like you. You remember that, and you’ll do fine. – Joe...
by Siddharth Pillai at August 20th, 2009 at 12:08 am
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Maps from Beyond Dark Corners
As to why one embarks on making a habit of alcohol consumption, I do suppose there are reasons. In the beginning you can pretty much get it down to a face or two- women, boss, co-workers, friends- sometimes all of it rolled up into one face fatale but as the months and years swim by, the reasons pretty much cease to matter. Or more accurately, they change. The pub, the...
by Siddharth Pillai at August 13th, 2009 at 07:08 am
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Spirits of the Laboratory: Bela Lugosi
Eureka! He screamed and fanciful Archimedes ran buck naked through the markets of Athens. Unfortunately, modern science and modern society offer no such avenues for sheer unadulterated giddy celebration. All it offered me was a pat in the back by my trusty man-servant Lug (formerly Jeanine) who with one final lobotomy still pending (we’re still awaiting an appropriate...
by Siddharth Pillai at August 6th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
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The Naked Kiss: Exploits of a Heart Torn Out The Chest
The body accounts for no sin. Between life and death, it is merely a soft machine on which we’ve hitched a ride. What lies beyond those two known constants is the stuff of debates on the grand revelation- paradise, hell, reincarnation, darkness or the great ecstasy. What lies tucked in between, the soft stuff, is the stuff of life. “I really believe that it’s the...
by Siddharth Pillai at July 17th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
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I Love You: Positively Disturbing Scenes from the Mall
“So you know the words by heart. You can play the tune blindfolded. You can even wear that black leather jacket, chew a cigar, sharp shoes…. keep your hat on. But the question remains- Can you feel the blues? Do you have the soul for it?” - Toots Sweet Life can be one helluva drag. We all live with that. Or there’s that gun under the pillow. Too messy,...
by Siddharth Pillai at May 8th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
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Naan Kadavul: Exterminate All the Brutes!
Before I descend into the maddening chaos of Naan Kadavul and try to put into so many words the twisted, discordant scapes it evoked in my head, and lest I lose myself again somewhere between the nightmare and the ecstasy, I would like to declare the enigmatic Bala’s latest opus to be not just an instance of powerful even revolutionary cinema but of cinema itself...
by Siddharth Pillai at March 6th, 2009 at 06:03 pm
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Dead Man: On the Horizon or In your Head
They would like you to believe in a world that is ‘flat’. No, it is not even such a wondrous idea as that of an immense intergalactic road-roller flattening our planet into a double-spread. No, it is not the idea of our planet floating thin and weightless in outer space ether like a discarded spectral love-letter blown by strong melancholy gusts of wind. They...
by Siddharth Pillai at January 13th, 2009 at 02:01 am
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Burn After Reading: Wise Men say,”Fools Rush In”
I hate every ape I see, From chimpan-A to chimpanzee, No, you’ll never make a monkey out of me! - Planet of the Apes: The Musical, A Fish Called Selma, Simpsons Season 7 The Art of Foolishness. Sure it took integrity, painstaking, back breaking, gravity defying work to paint the Glory of God and his creation up on the sprawling roof of the Sistine Chapel but it...
by Siddharth Pillai at December 24th, 2008 at 03:12 am
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Maharathi: Murder is in the Details (Zero Spoiler Review)
Rarely have I seen Bollywood dole out such measured doses. Deft execution, a perfect pitch and in a low key. Shivam Nair’s sophomore flick ‘Maharathi’ hardly qualifies as great or even memorable but it packs in moments of perfection, moments where all the elements in a frame come together and achieve an impossibly low-key crescendo that is the hallmark...
by Siddharth Pillai at December 5th, 2008 at 03:12 am
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Turkish Delight: Only For Adults or Those in the Grip of Mad Love or Those who have once been and now Remember Vividly
Young, mad love is some kind of a veritable monster. To hold her by the waist turn her full circle dizzy in the head intense surge through the viens your six senses overload with an electric pulse reality dissolves into your being you into her and she into yours the moment, the now is within the two of you. The universe gone bonkers. Lips smash into each other with a...
by Siddharth Pillai at December 4th, 2008 at 04:12 am
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Hey Ram: Sanity, Love, Pretty Eyes & a Better Tomorrow
The first reaction is an implosion of the senses. The ugliness of the news flash assaults you like a charged bolt of lightning and the fever-pitch commentary fills your head, cramming in like a high tide of so many disjointed fragments. Shock-awe-reality-unreality-fear-disbelief. The calculation is quick, an almost frantic juggling, as your mortal human head reels in...
by Siddharth Pillai at November 28th, 2008 at 09:11 pm
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Un Flic (A Cop): Dirty Mouth don’t care about the Truth but tells Beautiful Lies
Chapter 1 The Truth about Bob Dylan “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie” An essential quandary of the world delivered with an impossibly terse memorable elliptical paradoxical swing at the big void that asserts and negates itself at one and the same time. In other words, Typical Dylan. (shrugs) He further underscores the impossibility improbability...
by Siddharth Pillai at November 13th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
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Down by Law: The Loneliness of Jim Jarmusch
Not that it would make any difference. But if only for the sake of morale, you are willing to admit that it’s a welcome shade of orange that breaks east at the horizon of what has been a roughandtumble one hell of fucked up night. A dull weariness works on your bones, your mind swirls in and out of a strange daze that threatens to rot you from within, and frankly,...
by Siddharth Pillai at October 23rd, 2008 at 05:10 am
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Samsara: Boner Nirvana
It could have been a simple, minimalistic, resonating fable on the nature of human desire and renunciation, something out of a slightly perverse Jataka Tale (one hidden by a secret society of megalomaniac monks?? The Buddha Code anyone?), with even a smarter-than-your-average animal thrown in for a not-so-subtle-metaphor. But Director Pan Nalin seems more inclined to peddle...
by Siddharth Pillai at August 30th, 2008 at 05:08 am
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From Beyond: Gods, Monsters and That Sexual Feeling
‘It’s running itself’ Jeffery Comb playing the poor and unfortunate Crawford Tillinghast channels from the high camp of the horror classics of Hammer, Castle and Whale pedigree as he unleashes a scream of pure terror into Stuart Gordon’s astutely judged close up. ‘Something’s Coming’ Ted Sorrel’s Dr. Pretorius, grins a malicious grin in reply that only...
by Siddharth Pillai at July 16th, 2008 at 12:07 am
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Zabriskie Point: She Looks a River when She Talks of Rain
The night before was the one everyone had feared they had coming for quite sometime now. Global warming, atomic holocaust, communal violence, civil strife… the reasons had multiplied and there was some awareness and intuitions but nobody wants to the spoil the show when the going’s great. “Look here,” said the clown,” How would you like a hamburger?”...
by Siddharth Pillai at July 2nd, 2008 at 07:07 am
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The Ruling Class: Love Freedom Schizophrenia Fear Loathing
It was one of those schools that managed to tick about just enough boxes that’ll get them a license/grant/sanction to keep the institution running, teachers and staff employed and kids educated enough to sign their names, recite ‘Babes in the Wood’, do the origami, know their Gandhis, Nehrus and noble gases and pass out of the standard 10 with (as the school...
by Siddharth Pillai at June 26th, 2008 at 01:06 am
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The Happening: A Place Called Hokum
This one’s for ‘The Birds’, Hitchcock’s Daphne Du Maurier adaptation about a svelte blonde terrifically essayed by the director’s muse and sometime tempestuous obsession Tippi Hedren who visits a small sealocked town which suddenly finds itself under siege from the local birds who inexplicably go on a blind and murderous rampage. Under its apocalyptic nature’s...
by Siddharth Pillai at June 13th, 2008 at 11:06 am
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Sarkar Raj: Get Him While He’s Down Cause He’s Gonna Come Back with a Magnum and then You Gotta Ask Yourself:’Do I Feel Lucky?’ Well Do Ya, PUNK
A typical Ram Gopal Varma interview is always banal. Even as the media taxes its imagination trying to serve it up with choice tabloid bits, it is at best a politically correct, uneventful even lazy drawl lit up only when a glimmer of arrogance slips in or an apology or when he mentions a forthcoming project (another remake of Sholay!). However as opposed to Mahesh Bhatt...
by Siddharth Pillai at June 8th, 2008 at 02:06 pm
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Aamir: The City Screams Alone
‘Today there are opportunities for romance for you. You can make career moves that will bring you a much higher income. You’ll regret every word you say for some time to come. Obtaining and exchanging information takes on more emotional significance. Don’t be emotional; be practical in life.’ - Bangalore Times, Finolex Fortune for Libra, May 30, 2008 That evening,...
by Siddharth Pillai at June 6th, 2008 at 07:06 am
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Jannat: Indifferent Balls!
If timing was any kind of a horse, this one would be first past the finishing line. There would be no better time for a film like ‘Jannat’ to hit the screens than now when our nights and evenings are reeling with the spectacle of cricket at its most decadent. To call it ‘rife with possibilities’ is an understatement. Conceptually, this is a loaded gun. And it arrives...
by Siddharth Pillai at May 16th, 2008 at 02:05 pm
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Speed Racer: Judge The Candy by The Logo
Volkswagen boy walks out of the apple-red phone booth onto the empty noon road. He rests his elbows by the window of his ride and peruses his hair in the side mirror- James Dean stares back. Satisfied, he winks and then stares at his watch- in a half hour he’ll be picking up Miss Daisy Daffodil and they have a date at the picture house. He switches on the radio. The...
by Siddharth Pillai at May 9th, 2008 at 07:05 pm
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Tashan: Raste Ka Maal and the Cheap Thrill Machine
Just where does the Great Disco Under the Lungi that Krishnan Iyer MA, nariyalpaniwallah sings about in all dhinchak swagger and gibberish aandu-gundu accent exist? How does one decipher the Ku-Ku-Ku-Ku that allegedly exists behind the choli? What branch of physics, meta or otherwise can explain the never-ending ammunition in Chunkey Pandey’s six-shooter as he somersaults...
by Siddharth Pillai at May 6th, 2008 at 12:05 am
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Eastern Promises: The Way of the Flesh
I. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… the journey of the flesh. If there is indeed a soul or an immortal being it will pass on perhaps into another vessel of flesh, perhaps oblivion. But it is a realm still unknown. What is known is the body and that it will perish and rot. The flesh is a witness and victim of time. It is young and supple at birth. As it ages, it bears the...
by Siddharth Pillai at April 21st, 2008 at 11:04 pm
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Khuda Kay Liye (In The Name of God): A Flight of Reason
How do you create division among people? Etch a line with the tip of your shoe in the dust between them and give them opposite sides to belong to. The rift may not be immediate but gradually across time there will be category and classification. There will be further division, conflicting systems of belief and later, fanaticism and dogma. Before long the dust line you...
by Siddharth Pillai at April 10th, 2008 at 08:04 am
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Last Life in the Universe: Love and Longing in Dimension Blue
Miles from home, miles to go. Miles spent dozing in uncomfortable recline, in queues, eating out of sterile plastic containers, shuffling among strange faces in strange places, eyes open just till the laptop battery holds through. Continuous transit through a hyperreality where the sun never shines enough to out-bright the plastic white daze of the corridors of passage....
by Siddharth Pillai at April 2nd, 2008 at 02:04 am
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The Proposition: A Weary Traveller Has Blood On His Hands
Civilization and progress has its own flotsam-jetsam buried away and forgotten like old Ghost Towns. Hollow mines, empty wells, overgrown graveyards, hotels with broken windows, a junkyard carnival gathering rust and time ending up as faded black and white curios that grace the archives. Or they are woven into the ballad of a weary traveler. Original soldiers of fortune...
by Siddharth Pillai at March 22nd, 2008 at 12:03 pm