• I was talking to a friend yesterday about Kamalhassan. Mostly, I was trying to express why the man doesn’t do it for me anymore. Aside: This is a pre-Dasavatharam post. I figure I’ll see the movie someday, but this analysis does not account for this latest data point. Then again, I do statistics for a

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  • The Dark Knight

    By far the most interesting thing about The Dark Knight is the fact that its principal conflict is not between Batman and the Joker. That particular face-off comes third. In second place is the fight between the Joker and Harvey Dent. Dent is, by all accounts, a straight arrow who has the guts to take

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  • Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na

    Two best friends (Jai and Aditi, played by Imran Khan and Genelia D’Souza ) spend two and a half hours realizing that they are in love with each other, while the world and its grandmother-in-law wait patiently for them to wake up and smell the coffee. That plot alone accounts for, I think, one third

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  • It starts with an accident —  a rich businessman (Saif Ali Khan) runs over a couple with his car, and is sentenced to take care of their children until they reach adulthood. Either that, or spend twenty years in the slammer. I don’t imagine too many judges who would think that sticking a bunch of

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  • George Carlin is dead. He has ceased to be. He has expired and gone on to meet his maker. He has shuffled off his mortal coil. He… As a Python fan, this is probably the best tribute I can pay to a comic I love. I first heard George Carlin on an airplane. I was

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  • Sarkar Raj

    There is the scene where you first see Sarkar. It comes right after some interesting dialogue on the nature of power wielded by the Nagre family. You see Subhash Nagre on his verandah in front of a cheering crowd on his birthday. His hands move up in a glow gesture that looks like part-benediction part-control,

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  • Ages ago, I took an undergraduate elective on Shakespeare along with two of my friends. We were probably the three most interested students in our class, and had a great deal of fun discussing the Bard on hot Wednesday afternoons over shikanji at the Sky Lawns. One of our assignments was to write a paper

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  • Kuruvi

    On the way back from the multiplex, I spent a considerable length of time trying to figure out what to put in my review of Kuruvi. I came up with nothing. I could claim that the movie was beyond even my capacity to describe it, but that would be dishonest. Truth: I just ran out

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  • My English curriculum in school was usually a collection of short stories. And what stories some of them were! Abridged prose versions of classics like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Greek mythology and what not. Stories like A table is a table, about an old man who decides to switch around the names of

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  • Much of the reason why we love good masala movies is their ability to surprise and delight us while still telling the same old story over and over again. In this respect, the last big fight sequence in Dhool ranks among the most delightful. It is not surprising for the hero to bash up a

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