• I had heard a lot about Butch and Sundance, so I expected to find a gripping Western like A Fistful of Dollars or High Noon. I was quite surprised to find that it wasn’t anything like any of these movies. It was just about a couple of guys who liked to rob banks, and the…

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  • Music and Lyrics

    Music and Lyrics is what I’d call an easy rom-com. The humor is low key, the laughs aren’t forced, the movie’s amiable and friendly, and you walk out feeling content. The only part where I laughed out loud was during the music video that played over the opening credits. But I did have a good…

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  • Jailbird

    No, I’m not discussing Kurt Vonnegut, in case you were wondering. A colleague of mine who just got back from NY told me that, whenever Paris Hilton was mentioned on TV, the prefix “jailbird” was attached to her name. Sure, the girl must’ve found it a lot more difficult than The Simple Life in there.…

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  • The Prestige

    At one point, the narrator Cutter says of the audience that has just witnessed a magic trick being performed: “Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it. Because you don’t really want to know.” The Prestige tells the story of two magicians obsessed with each other’s downfall. But at a deeper level,…

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  • Naqaab

    What is it with Hindi movies and infidelity? For a while now, this has been the focus of a number of movies beginning with the execrable Murder. Abbas-Mustan’s latest thriller Naqaab is yet another in this series. Much bile has been vented about the tagline – The most shocking thriller of the year – in…

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  • Partner

    Yet another movie waiting to be made, and for a variety of reasons. Firstly, Hitch is one of the most obvious targets for a Hindi movie remake, and it was even more obvious to me, even while watching the original, that Govinda would do well in the Kevin James role. Secondly, if Govinda was making…

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  • Towards the end of Ghayal, Sunny Deol is chasing Amrish Puri, the man who destroyed his life. Amrish has a gun in his hand and points it at him. Sunny picks up a knife from the ground andstands there, boiling with rage. Mind you, they’re more than ten feet apart, so the idea of bringing…

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  • For those of you that regularly visit this blog (insofar as there are any that fit this description), the plethora of posts might come as a surprise. Since I refuse to blame myself for anything other than global warming, I blame Blogger. Here’s what happened: I had a whole bunch of little snippets written down…

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  • 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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