World cinema
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Over the past few months, I have watched three wonderful films that have made a deep impression on me. All three involve strong women who start from humble backgrounds and work their way up. The men along the way are sometimes supportive, sometimes not. But these stories are not really about women versus men —
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Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard is such a skilfully made film in its individual moments that one almost doesn’t notice what a manipulative piece of filmmaking it is. Every word of the script seems to have been written with the sole intention of getting the viewer to exercise his tear ducts. And yet, some individual moments
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Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat has a brilliant section about the protagonists making a list of things to take with them on the boat trip. The first list they make turns out to have so many items that the boat would likely sink under the weight of it all. Then one of
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A man stands at a street corner with his guitar, singing. During the day, when people pass by and are likely to drop a coin or two into his box, he sings popular numbers that they may have heard. It is after dark that he starts singing his own stuff. Whether or not his music is to
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Towards the end of Caramel, Nadine Labaki’s debut feature that follows the fortunes of four women who work in a beauty salon in Beirut, is a moment of heartbreaking duplicity that conveys far more than it depicts. It features Jamale (played with barely restrained desperation by Gisele Aouad), a has-been actress hoping for a second
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Full disclosure: The idea of a movie about God’s silence doesn’t set my pulse racing, despite whatever I have led you to believe about my tastes in cinema. In my defence however, I will state that it doesn’t turn me off to the point of not watching it. So I slipped in the DVD and
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When you watch enough comedies, you begin to get a sense of what they are like. And sooner or later, those ideas congeal into something approximating what a comedy should be like. So it is a pleasant surprise when you come across something that does’t quite fit the mold. I had that experience while watching M.
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I am currently in Seoul, S.Korea, working here on a long term assignment. Been here for close to 3 months, and must say, am enjoying the stay out here, though had some really weird experiences too. Now coming to movie watching, as far as Indian movies are concerned , the only way is by DVD,
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Eighty-odd movies to choose from, including Oscar winners, multi-starrers and the like. And what do I pick? A nice little little French rom-com called Hors de prix. That it stars Audrey Tautou might make things easier to understand. This, however, is no Amelie. Tautou stars as a high-class hooker Irene (I’ve seen the term adventuress
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