Review
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The effects of dilation of time Are magical, strange, and sublime. In your frame, this verse, Which you’ll see is not terse, Can be read in the same amount of time it takes someone else in another frame to read a similar sort of rhyme. — Courtesy: Physics limericks page on the Harvard University website…
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I suppose I ought to begin this review with a disclaimer of sorts: My views on God and religion are nobody else’s business but mine. A while ago, I wrote about Terry Pratchett’s Moving Pictures, and how his strategy for satire was to approach our world through the eyes of characters in a very different…
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To clarify: The latest installment of the Hunger Games series (I almost said trilogy, before I realized that you don’t make as much money with three movies as you do with four) is reasonably faithful to the book. I don’t necessarily mean in terms of whether every plot point in the film is exactly as…
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This blog post probably won’t make much sense to someone who hasn’t read Hamlet and watched Haider, for which I apologize in advance. For the record, both are worth doing, and an infinitely better use of your time than reading this. It helps, I think, to think of Haider as not so much an adaptation but a re-imagining of Hamlet. Sort of…
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A few years ago, I fell in love with a musical called Once. I would sometimes enthusiastically recommend it to people, only to be asked, “What’s it about?” I hate that question. Oh, it’s not an unreasonable question. Everyone asks that. I do too, when someone recommends a film to me. Trouble is, the films…
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For those of you who wondered about the radio silence: I have a daughter who is old enough to acknowledge me as something more significant than Random Tall Creature With Facial Hair, but not yet old enough to want to watch Citizen Kane with me and argue whether it’s the greatest film ever made. (Her…
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A famous actress — the Ms Meena of the title — returns to the little village she grew up in, presumably to shoot her last film. The villagers, most of whom live in reduced circumstances, hope that her visit will change things for the better. Much of their hope rests on the person of Ravi,…
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There’s a phrase often used in the context of cinema: suspension of disbelief. It is applied as much to the films of David Dhawan as to the slick, expensively-mounted, action-packed star vehicles that inundate the multiplexes every summer. With the former, it is used as an excuse — leave your brains behind and enjoy the…
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Thalaivaa begins, as all films in multiplexes do these days, with a fairly long and graphic advisory on the hazards of tobacco consumption. While I appreciate the thought, I cannot help but chuckle at the irony of placing it at the beginning of a film about an underworld don and the son who takes his…
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Spoilers ahead! Does that bother you? For a Rohit Shetty film, no less? Really? WhoWhat are you? It helps, I think, to think of Chennai Express as a Hindi film set in Tamil Nadu for the benefit of non-Tamilians. The film often feels like a distilled cinematic expression of the benign bewilderment with which the…
24 frames per second 