Sapera: huh? I've clearly mentioned the TV sho...
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Article : Phantoms in tunnels, and the quiet creepiness of the first Hannibal Lecter film
Commented Date: 5/17/2013 12:23:41 AM
Sapera: huh? I've clearly mentioned the TV show, with a link to its Wikipedia page.
Radhika: yes, that was hurriedly written - I meant...
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Article : Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)
Commented Date: 5/11/2013 12:10:16 PM
Radhika: yes, that was hurriedly written - I meant "silent performance" as a description of the scene as it played out, not to indicate that Purandar wasn't actually speaking.
Aparna: it could be a combination of many reasons,...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/11/2013 8:53:14 AM
Aparna: it could be a combination of many reasons, including cultural ones (as I've written in the piece, Ray had an upbringing rooted in classical western and Bengali literature). My point really is that I would have expected a large-hearted artist like Ray to be a little more accommodating of other forms and idioms, especially given the knack for genre writing that he showed in his own stories. Also, the condescension wasn't directed only at commercial Hindi cinema.
Rahul: thanks. In light of what you say, I see a d...
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Article : Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)
Commented Date: 5/10/2013 3:26:35 AM
Rahul: thanks. In light of what you say, I see a definite similarity between the two men in Kashyap's film and Purandar and his spectral guru in Banerjee's film. It makes for an intriguing design, including the visual similarity of the two older men hunched up while giving gyaan to their wards (though of course I know that Kashyap and Banerjee didn't plan it that way).
it was also the worst kind of endorsement of ce...
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Article : Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)
Commented Date: 5/9/2013 2:26:51 AM
it was also the worst kind of endorsement of celebrity culture which reduces the fan to a groveling insect whom the deity miraculously gives darshan to...Deepa: disagree. I think Kashyap is a little more aware of the ambiguities inherent in the Ram-Shabari story. And I thought there were various conflicting emotions and attitudes (nostalgia, irreverence, adoration, self-parody) mixed up in this story. Not a straight endorsement by any means.As for the celebrity culture and the milli(...)
Pessimist Fool: thanks for the comment - fair poin...
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Article : Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)
Commented Date: 5/8/2013 11:38:08 PM
Pessimist Fool: thanks for the comment - fair points, but my reading of the film was that it wasn't as maudlin as many others seem to think. If you look at the possibility that Kashyap is using Bachchan in a somewhat parodic way, the cameo isn't really inappropriate.Not sure about the Slumdog Millionaire comparison - the real Bachchan didn't participate in that scene, which automatically means the effect was very different.
Anonymous, Shrikanth: you both lose. Let's end...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/7/2013 3:57:59 AM
Anonymous, Shrikanth: you both lose. Let's end this particular thread of the conversation now, please?
most of the Hollywood mainstream filmmakers wer...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 11:34:21 PM
most of the Hollywood mainstream filmmakers were craftsmen - not auteurs. We had to wait till the era of Robert Altman for the situation to change.Disagree. "Auteur" is a pliable word, but you'd have to employ an exceedingly narrow definition of it to include Altman while excluding Hawks, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Tony Mann, Nick Ray, and many others. And if you're going to emphasise the "most of" in your comment, well, how exactly did that si(...)
Anonymous: not sure what you're saying. My com...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 12:43:11 PM
Anonymous: not sure what you're saying. My comment was a response to the comment by A Movie Lover.Also, you did say "mainstream Hollywood shines brighter" and then used GWCTD as an example of that brightness. Either way, let's roll up this particular strand of the discussion now?
Otherwise, its exactly the same kind of passive...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 10:11:15 AM
Otherwise, its exactly the same kind of passive disdain that you've accused Ray of having against mainstream movies. A movie lover: how? The disdain I was talking about is towards an entire category or "type" of film, while my feelings about GWCTD is a criticism of one particular movie.Obviously not going to do a detailed review here, but: I thought it was a drab, static film, weighed down by its own social consciousness. (This, by the way, is an accusation often level(...)
Anon: again, though I hesitate to pick on individu...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 7:26:13 AM
Anon: again, though I hesitate to pick on individual films as examples...Remember "Guess who's coming to Dinner"Yes. A very poor film in most ways, perfectly representative of the sort of film that Farber called elephant art, and definitely not the kind of mainstream Hollywood movie Shrikanth and I are referring to here (though again, I can't speak for Shrikanth's view of this particular film). And personally I don't think most of Peck's "political(...)
Pessimist Fool: speaking for myself, I'm talki...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 5:00:57 AM
Pessimist Fool: speaking for myself, I'm talking about Ray's patronising attitude to commercial and genre cinema in general, not towards the weaker entries in that cinema. I mentioned his review of the Hitchcock book, for example. (I've written about that at greater length in this post, btw.) And in the context of Hindi cinema, there is his inability to appreciate the episodic structures and melodramatic idioms of Hindi cinema and how they flowed from tropes of Parsi the(...)
...which not only Ray even Nagarkar couldn'...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 5:00:57 AM
...which not only Ray even Nagarkar couldn't help but ridiculeAgain, this is somewhat beside the point as far as I'm concerned. Many people express snobbery towards commercial Hindi cinema, and from what I know of Nagarkar (through a close friend of his who learnt a lot about cinema from him), he has a very narrow view of what "good" or "serious" cinema is. So no surprise there.
as well as conditional, half-baked praise for o...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 2:26:37 AM
as well as conditional, half-baked praise for old HollywoodTo clarify: "conditional" based on things like genre and subject matter. Which is a strange way of assessing cinema - especially given that Ray had a special fondness for Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne himself. (Rushdie has that nice story about Ray jumping up from his chair in excitement when Rushdie told him GGBB was his favourite of his films.)This could, of course, mean that Ray himself might not agree with the thesis I(...)
Anonymous: thanks for the comment, and a request: ...
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Article : From dusk till yawn - why Django Unchained was a bit of a grind-horse
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 12:00:40 AM
Anonymous: thanks for the comment, and a request: for future comments could you pick a moniker and stick to it? (It doesn't have to be your own name, of course, or have a link attached.) It helps in distinguishing between the different anonymous commenters here.
But I don't regard him anymore as this nume...
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Article : Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray
Commented Date: 5/5/2013 12:00:38 AM
But I don't regard him anymore as this numero uno Indian artist who is a few light years ahead of commercial Indian film-makers. Agree. In any case, given his reputation as our preeminent film artist, there is plenty of structural unevenness, even carelessness, in many of his films. And as I've indicated here, I'm constantly surprised by his limited view (as presented in his writings) of what good cinema should be. Lots of silly statements like the one about Jalsaghar be(...)
Anon: thanks for the kind words, but no, I don'...
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Article : Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)
Commented Date: 5/3/2013 2:21:20 AM
Anon: thanks for the kind words, but no, I don't feel like I owe my readers any such thing. In any case, if I were the sort of reviewer who was hung up on my "responsibilities" or "duties", I'd probably spend most of my time concentrating on literary fiction.(Just curious: what if I read the Shiva trilogy and really liked it, and wrote a laudatory post about it? Would you still reckon I had honoured my f***ing dharma then?)
Sudipto: wait, you were in the projection r...
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Article : A cinematic time machine - notes from the centenary film festival
Commented Date: 5/3/2013 2:21:20 AM
Sudipto: wait, you were in the projection room in Audi 4?! Couldn't you have spliced bits of Mondo Trasho into the film?
Shrikanth: as a brief continuation of things menti...
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Article : A cinematic time machine - notes from the centenary film festival
Commented Date: 5/2/2013 2:33:19 PM
Shrikanth: as a brief continuation of things mentioned in this post - I felt like Dilip Kumar's performance in the opening scenes (where he is playing the more reserved Devendra) was almost too understated for the big screen. While Dev Anand in Baazi and even Rajesh Khanna in Anand seemed more effective, precisely because they seemed more aware of the camera and were playing to it once in a while. (Don't want to form any major theories about screen acting based on this limit(...)
Anon: haven't read Amish's writings, so ca...
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Article : Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)
Commented Date: 5/1/2013 1:08:29 PM
Anon: haven't read Amish's writings, so can't say anything about those specifically, but I have no problem with "jazzy mythy stuff" as a category. It can be done with as much imagination and skill as any other type of writing can be.
Anon: thanks, have corrected it.
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Article : Lessons in perspective - how we see a free-spirited young woman in Lessons in Forgetting
Commented Date: 4/27/2013 10:15:25 AM
Anon: thanks, have corrected it.
Deepa: oh, you don't have to watch the whole o...
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Article : A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100
Commented Date: 4/20/2013 2:47:13 AM
Deepa: oh, you don't have to watch the whole of Aman for that (though it is an interesting film in some ways) - the video with Russell's two-minute appearance is there in the post I linked to.
It seems that you did not like his work in Seem...
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Article : A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100
Commented Date: 4/20/2013 12:00:56 AM
It seems that you did not like his work in Seema, or was it the character he played? Anon: and where did you get that impression? I'm always a little surprised by these assumptions - once again, this was not some sort of comprehensive exploration of Sahni's career, just an attempt to say a few things about him using selected films as examples.
Shrikanth: Huston in Dodsworth - that's...
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Article : A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100
Commented Date: 4/19/2013 3:43:22 AM
Shrikanth: Huston in Dodsworth - that's a very intriguing idea. Though I wonder how Sahni might do as old Lucifer in The Devil and Daniel Webster, which was one of Huston's great "flashy" performances.And yes, Indian cinema needs historians and archivists and record-keepers very badly - though theirs is bound to be a depressing job.
...there is one bit that is missing
Slythe...
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Article : A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100
Commented Date: 4/19/2013 3:43:20 AM
...there is one bit that is missingSlytherin: oh, I'm sure there are hundreds of other bits that are missing! This is not by any means a comprehensive post - how could it be?Will look out for Sone ki Chidiya. I have a dim recollection of Mere Humsafar.
Anubha: thanks. And yes, I wrote in my Anuradha...
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Article : A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100
Commented Date: 4/19/2013 3:43:19 AM
Anubha: thanks. And yes, I wrote in my Anuradha post about the way the film creates a conflicting response to Dr Nirmal.
Shwet: thanks! And good to see you here after a lo...
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Article : About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert
Commented Date: 4/19/2013 3:43:19 AM
Shwet: thanks! And good to see you here after a long time.
Shrikanth: have you seen Kabuliwala? Would ...
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Article : A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100
Commented Date: 4/19/2013 12:43:15 AM
Shrikanth: have you seen Kabuliwala? Would like to know what you think of it, since it is not what one would call a "no-frills" performance. Also, I think it's intriguing to compare Sahni with Chhabi Biswas in the original version. Having watched only a few scenes of the Bengali film, I think Biswas plays the external aspects of the character (the "Afghan-ness", so to speak) a little more broadly - which may be just as well, since physically he didn't fit(...)
Dustedoff: thanks - I'm sure you've seen a...
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Article : A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100
Commented Date: 4/19/2013 12:43:15 AM
Dustedoff: thanks - I'm sure you've seen a lot more Sahni films than I have. (Have been wanting to see Mai Baap for a while.) And yes, I partly addressed that point about the lesser-known films at the end of the piece.
Marvin: well, I specified "about the great ep...
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Article : Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)
Commented Date: 4/17/2013 3:31:16 AM
Marvin: well, I specified "about the great epic". But if you pay me obscenely well, I may consider not writing about anything else for a few years at least.
Smita: yes, I suppose I should be glad that show g...
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Article : Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)
Commented Date: 4/16/2013 2:50:11 PM
Smita: yes, I suppose I should be glad that show got cancelled - otherwise it would be 300 episodes old by now and I would be writing about nothing else!Pessimist Fool: liked it well enough when I read it more than a decade ago, but there was a lot of novelty value then since I was reading hardly any contemporary Indian fiction - don't know what I would think of it today.
Sid: yes, I wrote about Tezuka's Buddha series...
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Article : Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)
Commented Date: 4/16/2013 2:50:10 PM
Sid: yes, I wrote about Tezuka's Buddha series here. Only read it that once though - haven't gone back to it yet.
A fan apart: this was not a post I agonised over m...
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Article : Rendezvous with Drama - quick notes on Nautanki Saala
Commented Date: 4/13/2013 7:51:20 AM
A fan apart: this was not a post I agonised over much (more like time-pass + writing practice) but you're right, sight-and-sound gag is better. Btw, that emerging-from-the-bathroom scene reminded me of the great halo scene in the train near the end of A Canterbury Tale - an idea expressed in purely visual terms.
Ramesh: thanks!
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Article : About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert
Commented Date: 4/7/2013 9:08:27 AM
Ramesh: thanks!
Anon: I still haven't seen Well Done Abba
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Article : On Jayant Kripalani's New Market Tales
Commented Date: 4/7/2013 9:08:27 AM
Anon: I still haven't seen Well Done Abba, but now that you mention it I remember hearing that Kripalani had written it.
Thanks, Ramanand. Yes, it's the sort of thing ...
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Article : Our films, our selves: thoughts on the upcoming Bombay Talkies
Commented Date: 4/7/2013 9:08:27 AM
Thanks, Ramanand. Yes, it's the sort of thing that can become tiresome quickly, even in cases where it is reasonably well-executed. And when done merely for its own sake, it really is tedious.
Pessimist Fool: actually, the post that inadverten...
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Article : About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert
Commented Date: 4/5/2013 12:31:31 PM
Pessimist Fool: actually, the post that inadvertently gave this blog its first big wave of publicity was one that involved Ebert and a certain ToI movie critic. (It was from November 2004.) I probably have mentioned him a couple of other times too, though like I said I hadn't read him much in the past 3-4 years.
Rahul: yes, that's a great end to a terrific r...
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Article : About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert
Commented Date: 4/5/2013 12:31:31 PM
Rahul: yes, that's a great end to a terrific review - must go back and reread it sometime. (Is that the one where Ebert confessed the prejudices he had once harboured towards Dylan, and how he had subsequently changed his mind about a lot of things?)
BV: yes that's true, but I meant "tribute...
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Article : Our films, our selves: thoughts on the upcoming Bombay Talkies
Commented Date: 4/5/2013 12:31:30 PM
BV: yes that's true, but I meant "tributes to cinema" in a more specific sense than that. (In one sense, any really high-quality film can be seen as being a tribute to cinema.)
I too was thinking on the same lines that how c...
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Article : About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert
Commented Date: 4/5/2013 8:29:54 AM
I too was thinking on the same lines that how come you have not written anything on EbertPessimist Fool: actually I'm always a bit surprised when one is expected to write about something. I did this post only because of that personal email connection - I doubt I would have written anything otherwise, even though RE's work was once a very important part of my reading life.