Great scenes

  • You might wonder why I did not list both Goodfellas scenes together in my previous post. Let me explain. Goodfellas and Satya are my favourite gangster movies of all time. They represent, in my opinion, the best of the genre in Hollywood and Hindi cinema. The two scenes I shall talk about here are somewhat

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  • Goodfellas tells the story of Henry Hill, an Irish-American growing up in Little Italy. It charts his history with the Mafia – fascination, involvement, ascent, incarceration and eventual descent into despair and betrayal. It is a story told with such energy and obvious skill. More than any other, this movie is why I worship Martin

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  • Tumko Na Bhool Paayenge is an action movie in the glorious tradition of Bollywood potboilers – a fairly racy plot, a nearly invincible hero and lots of ketchup. Did I mention a perfectly logical plot? I didn’t? Ah, well… The plot borrows a few pages from The Bourne Identity and adds its own masala to

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  • Despite its dismal box office performance, I thought Dum Dum Dum was a fairly well-crafted romantic comedy. It did have a slightly tedious second half, and the big conflict between the parental units seemed a little implausible, but I found it much better than the other Madhavan movie that came around the same time and

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  • Freeze Frame #51: Run

    Run was the movie that allowed Madhavan to break away from his romantic hero image and play an action hero. For the first half hour or so, you don’t even realize it: all you see is him chasing Meera Jasmine around, singing songs and doing his usual shtick. Then comes the scene in the subway,

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  • The thing about animated features is, even if the little details are new, the basic plot structure is cast in stone and rarely does any movie dare to violate it. Lilo and Stitch is no different in this regard. The plot involves an intergalactic federation sentencing a self-prclaimed evil genius to life imprisonment for having

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  • Freeze Frame #49: Frida

    Making movies about artists cannot be easy. The tougher the artist’s paintings are to understand, the more difficult it is to depict what inspired it. And to be able to present a picture of both the artist and the person underneath… that is even more difficult. Well nigh impossible, I’d say. And yet, this is

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  • A man and a woman meet regularly in an empty Paris apartment and have sex. They don’t know each other’s name, or anything about each other’s lives: the man insists on it. In there, they don’t need names, he says. They leave everything else behind and just bring to that apartment, some essence of themselves.

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  • Freeze Frame #44: Heat

    To me, Heat is essentially two scenes. One comes in the middle, the other at the end. Together, they represent what the movie is about. The big one is the conversation between Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) the thief and Joseph Hanna (Al Pacino) the cop over coffee at a diner. This is one of

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  • Was the working title of this movie Thirty nine progressively excruciating ways to embarass oneself? Most of the running time is devoted to Renee Zellweger moving from one embarassing situation to another, while a love triangle and assorted eccentric Brits hover in the background. Some of those moments work quite well, others not so much.

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