What caught me by surprise was that the film's depiction of Bombay* is so cynical, right from the beginning. Raj Kapoor first meets Dharmanand on the way to Bombay and is signalled that this is how people in the big city are: deceptive, greedy and selfish. When he finally does reach Bombay, the first person he speaks to, the beggar, gives him the crudest advice possible: to start begging because an educated, honest person won't find a job. It's so…
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C'mon C'mon 2021
Like a warm embrace. Like everything will be okay. Like it may be tough times now, but that will pass. Like having a childlike wonder infused into adult weariness. Like a perpetual inquisitiveness accompanied us in our daily lives. Like the God's eye view, being in awe of what you've created. Like music that comforts. Like a fortunate accident. Like having written. Like blah ba-blah blah blah.
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The End 2024
I want to say this is a decent attempt but Oppenheimer's jump to fiction isn't successful. There is a certain amount of nervousness and distance between the characters that is inbuilt to the premise but the film is filled with air that sucks out any sort of friction or tempo to proceedings.
At one point, it does feel like Oppenheimer is going for the same (fertile) ground that he has already covered in The Act of Killing but for me…
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Monsters University 2013
This being a prequel and releasing once Pixar’s stocks had begun to fall did it slight harm in how folks judged it. As prequels go, they’re rarely better. And yea, that Newman theme does go hard.
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All We Imagine as Light 2024
There’s a scene in the middle of the first hour where Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) have a conversation inside their small house, ubiquitous in the city of Bombay, but Payal Kapadia and cinematographer Ranabir Das’ camera leaves them to themselves and instead roams the city. The camera lingers from the skyline on neighbouring buildings with their lit apartments, wide shots of the city with the metro trailing between buildings like a snake making its path through a…
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Merry Christmas 2024
If I were a millionaire I’d land money into Sriram Raghavan’s lap and let him make his kinda film—a type that no other filmmaker currently can create—for the rest of his lifetime. Absolute king behaviour dropping a movie-of-the-year contender in the second week of 2024.
Just recently I was ranting with a friend about the lack of Bombay in the Hindi films of recent times, and Raghavan decides to cheat on his lifelong love, Pune, to give us this love…
