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9 july ko Guru Dutt ka janmadin hai.mumkin hai patra-patrikaon,news chaneels aur filmy channels par unke sambandh mein apne-apne anaz mein har koi kuchh na kuchh likhe,bole aur bataye.aaj unhen aur unki filmon ko yaad karte hue sabhi ek hi raag alap rahe honge.bagair unki films dekhe,samjhe aur niji taur par aatmasaat kiye hi har koi tarif kar raha hota hai.waqt aa gaya hai ki ham Guru Dutt ka sahi moolyankan karen aur aaj ke sandarbh mein dekhen ki woh kitne prasangik aur mahtvapoorn hain.

main yahan unka likha ek lekh post kar raha hoon.yah lekh unhonne Screen ke liye likha tha.yah lekh mujhe Shashikant Kinikar ki pustak ‘Guru Dutt 1925-1964′ mein mila.pustak mein koi tarikh nahin di gayi hai,lekin lekh mein aaye dev anand aur geeta bali ke zikra se lagta hai ki 1955-56 ke aaspaas likha gaya hoga.is pustak mein unke aur bhi do lekh hain.agar koi unhen yahan …

iView Author:Gajendra S Shrotriya
(Jaipur, India)
EMAIL:gshrotriya[at] yahoo [dot] com

Title: Gulaal – moves into the final leg of production

2 days ago I had missed to catch the making of Gulaal at Chomu Palace.

I had reached there at Chomu Palace but to be told that the unit packed off around 4’O clock in the morning. All through the way I was excited about meeting Vasan and AK. Excitement was more for the reason that I would get to see these people at work.

A similar excitement I had when I was driving to Hotel Clark’s Amer in Jaipur around twenty years back.
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It was our BE Third year at MNIT. We used to organize an All India Basketball Tournament in which national teams participated. I was in the organizing committee. That day we were planning who to …

Murphy’s law (From Wiki):

“If there’s more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way.”

“Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” .

Murphy’s law , this is what one of the protagonist narrates at the very beginning of the movie, and what follows is almost proof to it.Checkmate tells a story of three young men from different backgrounds,duped by a fake financial company.They lose whatever money they had, money their family had earned ,the property they had, in short the only option they have is to recover their money in any damn possible way.So all three come together and plan , plan to recover their losses.The rest of the movie shows the execution of the plan and how each …

…..and a few more words for Mumbai industry

Final part of the interview of Director Prakash Jha(PJ), taken by Ajay Brahmatmaj (AB), is presented here.

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[Following is the translation of the Hindi Interview and may not do full justice to the original interview so to read the exact sayings of Prakash Jha, one should go through the original interview. This is simply a trial to expose the interview to those readers who can not read Hindi at all]
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AB: Which kind of influences you were having while making Daamul?

PJ: Impact of realistic cinema was certainly there. My own thinking and understanding was also developing continuously. I developed my own craft in direction and I conceived and further developed characters according to the necessity of that particular theme. Honestly speaking Daamul was the first film which followed my own liking and had my own style and touch. These four …

Second part of the interview of Director Prakash Jha(PJ), taken by Ajay Brahmatmaj (AB), is presented here.

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[Following is the translation of the Hindi Interview and may not do full justice to the original interview so to read the exact sayings of Prakash Jha, one should go through the original interview. This is simply a trial to expose the interview to those readers who can not read Hindi at all]
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AB: You still make documentaries but if we talk about feature films then how this journey was started and why and when did you think that you should make feature films?

PJ: I was thinking about making feature films also. I had written scripts for the two stories of Shaival, Kalchakra and Daamul. I was searching producers for Daamul. Man Mohan Shetty had become my friend by then. He said …

iView Author: Shashank Walia
(Delhi, India)
EMAIL: shashankwalia [at] live [dot]com

Vidhu Vinod Chopra - Where the maverick filmmaker goes wrong OR Am I confused ?
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Now nobody can ignore the contribution of Vidhu Vinod Chopra in bringing quality cinema to India after a decade of qualitative and creative block. He was one of the first few directors who dared to be different in that existing era of commercialization. He is over-confident, self obsessed but at the same time he is highly talented. The aesthetical and technical sense of this director is considered to be one of the finest in today’s time.

Starting with Murder at the Monkey Hill, his diploma film at FTII, it promised us an intelligent filmmaker in making. The film was a satirical pop up …

Recently I have revelled in the close encounters with the forgotten art of close-ups in couple of movies.

Before I talk of these movies up close let me just share some masala and trivia with you on these close-ups..

The old cameramen who have gone to seed or become inactive don’t leave an opportunity to narrate how they used to relish lighting up for a close-up especially the heroine’s..And how they used to take hours together to light it up..And few of them brag that heroines literally used to lagao maska to them to light up their faces in close-ups..Have you ever heard of close-up couch..Well few of the cameramen boasted of laying the heroines for giving them a close-up that lighted up the marquee..It was like fulfilling their wish to be a diva or a Cleopetra whose face is supposed to have launched thousand ships!

The modern technology is …

At IFFLA this year, PFC finally got the chance to meet the director of two films that were highly appreciated by the critics and the audience alike. The films being OFFICE TIGERS & SHOT in BOMBAY and the director Liz Mermin.

OFFICE TIGERS was featured in 2007 and it was shown to a packed house. A docu-feature about a call-center in Chennai, the challenges, the management and people evoked very sharp and enthusiastic response so much so that the CEO of OFFICE TIGER invited for the QnA became an instant celebrity.

Mainak already did a through analysis of Shot in Bombay here and to add to it, the movie makes an instant reaction impossible to curtail through lucid story telling and attractive tit-bits into the unglamorous world behind the camera.

The following interview was conducted by TEAM PFC at the Portico of Arch Lights, LA. A big THANKS to Saurabh Dixit, the cameraman …

I arrived at the location a full 37 minutes after the witching hour, figuring I’ll still be the first. IST and all. But no, Badmash and Evelyn were standing outside the bar. From their unbridled disappointment at seeing me, I figured they were PFC.

We air kissed our hellos (Not), got a round of drinks and headed to the patio, It was Evelyn’s wedding anniversary, yet she said husband can wait. A PFC Meetup is more important, and hung out with us for most of the evening, while waiting on her husband to pick her up.

It was a small and intimate group and PFC author Shripriya put in a cameo.

I would be lying if I said that I was disappointed with the turn out. Not the folks that came(they were fun, and charming) …

DEMOCRATIC NOIR CINEMA - RAJIV RAI !!!

Whenever we talk about Noir Cinema (I still have no idea what it means except that Manorama is a noir of sorts), i always used to think why not any other indian film which is noir ?

Then some days ago i chanced upon this classic video from the film Tridev titled Gali Gali mein phirta hai …

Pls pls pls pls pls pls watch this video to fully appreciate the post

I had a hard time explaining the concept of “democratic noir cinema” to a friend.

Why Democratic ? Whats democratic about this video ? Hows it noir ? Just a bunch of villans dancing to the tempting sangeeta bijlani..sangeeta seducing everyone.

In true noir sense, the song begins with the juxtaposition of the femme fetale’s lips (seduction) and the stoic expressions of Jackie Shroff …

That urban Bengali cinema has been dead meat for the last couple of decades is as widespread a phenomenon as the very existence of Bengalis across the face of the earth. Rituparno Ghosh, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Aparna Sen, yes folks you are very good film-makers and we critics love your work but sadly the people haven’t turned up to watch your stuff. A couple of non resident Bengalis in Houston may have your DVDs flown down but Calcuttans don’t queue up at the theatres for a Dosar or a Kaalpurush or a 15 Park Avenue.
But maybe someone out there has found the impossible formula of how to get Bengalis back to the cinemas. In Calcutta and elsewhere. Perhaps, fingers crossed and wood touched, it’s finally happening!
Dutt’s the man, Anjan Dutt. Mrinal Sen’s favourite actor, a musical phenomenon, a failed Bollywood film-maker, Dutt knows what he is saying when he says …

BACKGROUND SCORES IN HINDI MOVIES

As hindi movies are full of songs, the music directors and film makers do not concentrate on background music. Hindi movies are not giving as much importance as foreign movies are giving. Somehow trends are changing. Now our technically confident directors and music directors take background score in consideration while planing the scenes.

In 80s and 90s there were some readymade tunes which filmmakers/music directors used to play for particular scene like comedy, chase, tragedy, love, action etc.

One of the frequently used tune was used in Ghayal for opening sequence in jail….

In early 90s directors straightly lifted background scores of Hollywood movies for ex. Mohra- When sunil shetty is fighting with other prisoners in jail…then background score is lifted from Terminator’s signature tune.

As we know sometimes background score plays more important role than dialogues. Background score can enhance effect of scene and overall movie. …

Recently Sarkar Raj got released. Historically, the Hindi film-goers community were divided into the one’s who think Gunda is an epic and other’s who think Gunda is a larger than life classic. But now a new division has crept into the ranks. People are now divided on whether Sarkar Raj will be the last torture to inflicted by RGV and others who think that RGV’s worst is yet to come. To clear the air, PFC TV (People Featured in Colour TeleVision) cornered Ramu for an interview. If you’ve never heard of PFC TV don’t fret. The number of people who have heard of the said channel is less than or equal to the number of people who loved Jimmy. Here is the transcript of the interview:
PFC TV: To start off with, how did you get the idea of Sarkar Raj. What was the genesis …

iView Author:
SUDDHASATYA GHOSH
(Kolkata, India)
EMAIL:
withheld

A few thoughts on Bengali cinema……

Passion for cinema has produced a few pages of Sudhir Mishra’s diary for readers and expectantly brilliances of Sudhir came out in open in that space.

Sudhir is a name in ‘so-called’ parallel cinema or in good cinema, if I am allowed to use Satyajit Ray’s coinage for it. As I went on reading it I faced a few questions and am trying to present those in my write.

Let me start with a cinema by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘Ali-Fear Eats the Soul’. It starts with an apparently incorrect title in original German. Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem was cast respectively as an old German woman …

Life is always changed in a blink of eyes, sufficiently a long time for a major event to happen. Easily going life takes a swift turn when an unpredictable event takes place.

This is the story of Siddhartha not Gautam the Budha but an ordinary young man, whose name is Siddhartha. But like Siddhartha he also comes across many situations which change his thoughts and though he does not get enlightenment but he does take a middle path and in the end follows (or he is forced to follow) the life as it comes to him.

Siddhartha is forced by the circumstances came in his life to leave his medical education in between because his father has been died and his family is unable to bear the cost of his education and now he has to take a job to support …

Assalam waaleikum
My boy’s back, and he goes by Tarsem
No video for R.E.M.
Or J.Lo and the Vinces in a bad fillum

It’s been a while since he rapped at ya
He got a dope rhyme,
but it won’t sell
No family’s dysfunctional
Or that other favorite;
repression
A visual fantasy, that’s his habit
And there’s a lil girl expressin.

If you get a chance, give it a dekko
and unlike The Cell,
You won’t need the blow.

Pardon my late May and newly 30 need to rap and keep it real. I have to re-assert my street cred what with all the punks getting a run of the place. I’m back bitches.

If there is one film you watch at the theater this year, this is it. It was raved about in Tornoto in 2006, had a preview screening at IFFLA 2008, and finally gets a wide release on May 30. Apparently, it is not enough to make an awesome film. …

[Caution – readers searching serious material may skip this as its more like swant sukhay (self satisfaction) activity but if anyone can connect then may revive similar kind of memories]

We read some times in the newspapers that somebody got a letter after 20-25 years. All of us may have some childhood memories and often visual memories which remain there in the mind but we can’t connect them with something because we don’t come across that thing again.

And sometimes it happens that we come across something and all the threads of the past memories join their branches and we feel happy on getting the whole package.

First memory : -

Till some years ago I used to hum following lines in the moments of sadness or whenever I felt dejected. Rather these lines used to come automatically out from my lips.

First line goes like this

Jab bhi ye dil udas …

He was trembling, no shivering– no, no quivering– no,no shaking !..“Moss, I am leaving ! Moley toh, idhar bahut risk ho gaya hai!! Mete, ye shahar ab rehne kay liye theek nahin!!!”

I was wondering at his nervousness but wondered more about the gibberish he was mumbling..And then he expressed his real fears..He was earlier scared by Raj Thackeray’s tirade against North Indians especially UPites and Biharis..But now he was completely terrorized after Uddhav Thackeray joined in the turf war by blasting anything and everything pronounced with letter B ! Then it dawned upon me what he meant actually ( Boss, I am leaving! Boley toh, idhar bahut risk ho gaya hai!! Bete, ye shehar ab rehne kay liye theek nahin !!!) .

Though he was from Punjab he was paranoid..He had this nagging feeling that the virus could spread..I tried to allay his apprehensions but he was unmoved.

Like a subprime …

Meeting Kundan Shah

Was evening when i got the call from him. He invited me over to his office in Bandra west. Reaching there, the area seemed straight out of the Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa’s catholic goan setting.

I rang the bell and waited darte darte. Was expecting an old man resting on his arm chair …. probably bittered by the world etc etc…

His assistant opened the door and asked me to wait. I was made to sit and a cup of tea awaited me. Not bothering to drink it, i preferred to instead look at wall which was adorned with posters of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, Kya Kehna, Hum to Mohabbat Karega, Teen Behanein (3 sisters, his yet unreleased film). There was somewhere a poster of Kaagaz Ke Phool..with a mesmerised Guru Dutt kissing an …