First of all apologies for not posting a couple of write-ups I had promised from last week. While Chronicle was definitely a very impressive superhero/coming-of-age tale, Marina, the other film I saw left such an underwhelming impression on me that I couldn’t get myself to write about both. And you can add this week’s Dhoni [...]
I have an immense amount of respect for directors who give us dramas. Unlike any other, this is the genre that demands filmmakers to be at their skillful best. Essentially what they are presenting us is a window into the world of these characters they’ve written through which we view them for about two hours [...]
With Sideways, Alexander Payne may have been rewarded with a justly deserved Academy Award for screen-writing but even that film was just a sign of things to come. With The Descendants, Payne easily outdoes his work in the former film in every imaginable way. Sideways, as good as it was, still had minor problems and [...]
When the news first came out that 3 Idiots was going to be remade with Shankar at the helm and starring arguably the most mainstream actor working in Tamil cinema today, I was as apprehensive as anyone could be. 3 Idiots was a great entertainer striking almost all the right notes while also conveying a [...]
There has certainly been no dearth of masala directors over the past decade, most of whom have come and gone for the most part. For a while it looked like Dharani was going to be the best of the lot but that hope quickly fizzled out after just three great masala movies. Hari has always [...]
The best way to begin this blog will be to narrate a conversation I had with my mother and sister some time back (both feminists of the first order). As usual, they were opining about the difficulties of being the opposite gender in the superficial activities of day-to-day life with all the time taken to [...]
First of all, Happy New Year to everybody out there! After a few months where I was highly active, I’ve had quite a long gap for the past month or so. In case any of you have been wondering, it is because I’ve had to shift back from Dubai to Chennai. I’ve been largely busy [...]
After all the hype surrounding the Diwali releases, it is fair to say that the end-product was underwhelming. 7aum Arivu was entertaining but most definitely not worthy of the pre-release hype while Velayudham made no bones about what it was, an old-fashioned entertainer that at least proved to be better than Vijay’s recent fiascos. With [...]
The Five People You Meet Heaven is one of those books I’d been meaning to read for an eternity. I first came upon it when browsing Balaji’s blog a long time ago and was intrigued by the synopsis. I even rented it once but never was able to complete it. Determined to fix the oversight, [...]
