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Rajkumar Gupta: “Kaun kehta hain ki aadmi apni kismat khud likhta hain?”

thani: “Kismat agar khud likh sakte, to usey kismat kyon kehte!”

Anurag Kashyap is India’s most provocative filmmaker. With his filmmaking, he creates avenues for scores of cinephiles to dream their cinematic dreams, and when that’s not satisfactorily accomplished he angers them enough to want to better his offending efforts. That is, when the said cinephile does not resort to the shortest possible route to his directorial debut - namely the remake.

It is to Rajkumar Gupta’s credit, and to the film’s superior craftmanship, that i refer to his debut feature Aamir as cinema. Nevertheless, a COUNTERFEIT one, if you know what i mean. The password is Cavite. I might as well review Cavite, and nobody would recognize the difference. To be fair to the nobody, in as many words, Aamir is a copy of Cavite [pronounced 'ka-vi-th-ey].

Of course, …

“India embraces the cinema of the whole world…In a future issue, I shall show why India is the creation of the whole world.”
Jean-Luc Godard

It has been 14 long years since an Indian Film has made the Competition Selection of the Cannes International Film Festival. And that particular Competition Selection, Shaji Karun’s second feature Swaham (1994), happens to be the only instance for the decade of the 90s. Around the time, some of Shaji Karun’s well wishers, prompted by Andrew Robinson’s comparison of the debut features, pompously declared that “there are only two Indian films - Pather Panchali (1955) & Piravi (1988). Period.” What is common to both the films, & the probable reason for the latter film’s exaltation, is a certain institution that has consistently, for the last six decades, managed to play world cinema’s official conscience-keeper & harbinger of the evolution of cinema itself - the Cannes International …

Friday April 11th 2008. Fame Adlabs Multiplex, Andheri, Mumbai - The 11.15 p.m. show.

Dan In Real Life is essentially a romantic comedy (romcom), albeit of the much-abused feel-good variety, a genre who’s abuser & the abused is ironically the very same entity – Hollywood.

Television’s Steve Carell & French thespian Juliette Binoche star in this film about a widowed-father-of-three-daughters, & a good-parenting columnist, finding love in a least likely source - his younger brother’s girlfriend Marie (Binoche). The first indicator of this love, you’ll notice, happens to be an unlikely one too.

Film opens with Steve Carell’s Dan shaking his morning l’ennui off the bed, & starting the day with sorting clothes for/from wash. One particular curious piece of clothing, belonging to one of his daughters, seems to disturb Dan no end, considering his being a responsible single parent &, …