Category: Column
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Column: Censorship, Udta Punjab and the $*&@#@ state of Indian cinema
The masterful Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi once used a fine analogy to describe the shapeshifting state of censorship in his country. “The restrictions and censorship in Iran are a bit like the British weather: one day it’s sunny, the next day it’s raining. You just have to hope you walk out into the sunshine.” In…
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Why I thought Prince was The Joker
When I was eight years old, I thought Prince was The Joker. Allow me to explain this childhood delusion: The year was 1989. Tim Burton’s glorious and groundbreaking Batman movie was yet to hit our VHS libraries, and this was a time before teaser trailers and trailers teasing teaser trailers. All we had to go…
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Oscar column: Why we should be glad Mad Max didn’t win Best Picture
Cinematic history and myths are, more often than not, shaped by the better loser. Best Picture may sound like it, but it isn’t the biggest prize a film can win on Oscar night.
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Tribute: Raising a bowler hat to Saeed Jaffrey
The first time I saw Saeed Jaffrey I refused to believe he was an actor. Shekhar Kapoor’s Masoom released when I was two years old, and soon became one of the few Hindi film VHS tapes in our house, one often played to placate children because of the Lakdi Ki Kaathi song. In the film…
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Column: That Sholay coin-toss and the role of chance in storytelling
It is temptingly easy to dismiss the cinematic coin-toss as a bit of chicanery, just another convenient plotting trope. Characters go down one road when they so easily could have strolled down another, and the road they choose is the one picked by the writers, with heads or tails (or neither) doing the rationalising for…
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Column: Diamonds Are Forever
A column written to celebrate James Bond finally finding himself one helluva woman. ~ “I frequently wince at the word ‘cougar’ because of the way it has been appropriated by the media—like a polite, acceptable term for MILF—but it admittedly helps us look at these agile huntresses allowing for more grace than, say, we do when…
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Column: Scandal Point-less
It’s bloody hard to create controversy, you know? Yes, I know it’s all done for release-dates and ratings and eyeballs, and you’re right, naturally, but the very act of it — of summoning up scandal or sparking off a storm — is damn near impossible in this day and age. Just think, if you will,…
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Column: Why we must start a culture of spoiler-shaming
Like in Game Of Thrones, nobody’s innocent. We’ve all casually — or intentionally — let out details about what someone else may not have seen or read. Sometimes it’s purely inadvertent, like when an intern once called me up, found out I was watching Top Gun and asked “ooh, is Goose dead yet?,” understandable given…
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