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Petta functions wonderfully as a supercut of Rajni’s filmography, set to old தமிழ் film music. The Mullum Malarum references abound, obviously – with a name like Kaali, that’s almost a given. One of them comes right at the end and is an absolute beauty. But there are so many others that much of the pleasure…
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Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Middle East… Wise Man 2: You had one job. One. Job. Wise Man 3: Sorry Wise Man 2: How difficult could it have been? I remember specifically asking you to get fleece pyjamas. I distinctly remember the feeling of my lips moving when I said that to you. Fleece pyjamas. How…
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One of the now-inevitable sideshows that accompany most big releases is the group of people objecting to something in the film and taking their grievance to court. Sometimes it’s religion (Kevin Smith’s irreverent religious comedy Dogma comes to mind), sometimes it’s the depiction of real life personalities (too many to count), sometimes it’s the misrepresentation of government…
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Please, please go watch this film before reading my blog post. What an amazing, amazing film this is! I didn’t get to see it during its theatrical release, and I had the dubious fortune of being laid up with an infection on Deepavali evening, so it was just me and the TV at home. (Not…
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Consider the prefix “Once upon a time in” that is affixed in the English subtitle that appears during the opening credits. Here’s a director who has pretty much announced, right at the start, that he’s attempting to do to the bylanes of a fisherman’s slum in North Chennai, what Sergio Leone did to Manhattan’s Lower East…
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The most interesting scene in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, for me, is the one where Ayan (Ranbir) meets Tahir (Shahrukh) for the first time. Shahrukh’s lines in this scene are so unbearably pretentious that one would want to throw something at the screen, were it not immediately apparent that he’s very deliberately hamming it up.…
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There is a long, unbroken take early in Kaala that serves to introduce the eponymous character’s family. It ends with some playful banter between a few characters, after which you get The Song. (You know, the one that’s a paean to The Hero and has been such a staple of big-budget hero-centric Thamizh cinema that,…
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I felt a strange sort of dissonance while reading Devi Yesodharan’s Empire. The story is told from the point of view of two major characters, and while the inner monologues and the descriptive sentences feel exquisite, the dialogue itself feels stilted. Does the fact that Thamizh is my mother-tongue have a part to play in how…
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Let me begin by talking about the weakest couple of scenes in The Post, the ones that made me so angry I could spit. At the beginning of the final act of the film, Katharine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post, makes the decision to side with her editor Ben Bradlee to publish an…
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