Phantoms in tunnels, and the quiet creepiness of the first Hannibal Lecter film

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 5/16/2013 1:25:00 PM

'Being increasingly stressed out by road travel, I have had much reason to be grateful for the Delhi Metro in the last few years. But one of the more oddball benefits of the underground line involves a personal fetish, which I will hesitantly reveal here: I like watching the glow of an approaching train.Not the train itself, mind, but the intangible things that herald its approach. This is roughly how it goes. Standing on the platform, staring into the darkness of the tunnel, you fir(...)'

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Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 5/8/2013 12:44:00 PM

'Last month I wrote about a film – Lessons in Forgetting – that centres on a protective father and his free-spirited daughter, the latter’s personality colliding with stereotypical ideas about the “good Indian girl”. Coincidentally, a few days ago, while watching the anthology film Bombay Talkies, it struck me that all four short movies in it touch on the relationship between fathers and their children, as well as on changing perceptions of masculinity and “male roles”. And a buried (...)'

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Legends of Halahala - silent pictures from another world

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 5/7/2013 11:46:00 AM

'[Did this piece for the magazine Democratic World]What people are willing to consider literary, or even literate, is highly variable. Often, one hears the casual remark “This mass-market/popular novel is not literature” – a statement that, apart from being inaccurate at a purely definition-based level, also suggests an elitism that runs against the long, complex history of art and popular culture. However, even the most broad-based definitions of literature are sure to contain the w(...)'

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Author, auteur, rationalist, fabulist: an essay on Satyajit Ray

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 5/5/2013 2:16:00 AM

'[Did this profile of Satyajit Ray for the African magazine Cityscapes. Since the piece was meant for a largely non-Indian readership – including people who would know of Ray only in passing – there is necessarily some formality and simplification, including the setting down of biographical detail that is widely known in India. But I tried to avoid making it a dry, encyclopaedia-like piece and to discuss something I personally find intriguing, the divide between Ray’s “serious” work (...)'

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A cinematic time machine - notes from the centenary film festival

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 5/2/2013 1:54:00 PM

'[Did a version of this for my DNA column]“These films were made during the relatively short period in cinema history when the only way to see a motion picture was to gather in groups in a darkened theatre,” writes George Stevens Jr in the anthology Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The words (and the book itself) are an ode to a time when film-watching was not yet possible in the privacy of one’s home, and I thought about them a few months ago, whil(...)'

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Lessons in perspective - how we see a free-spirited young woman in Lessons in Forgetting

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/22/2013 3:47:00 PM

'Last year’s National Award winner for Best Feature Film in English, Unni Vijayan’s Lessons in Forgetting – an adaptation of Anita Nair’s 2010 novel – is playing in exactly four halls in the Delhi region this week. One of those is the ultra-luxurious PVR Director’s Cut in Vasant Kunj. You might well question the decision to screen a low-profile, relatively low-budget film – with potential word-of-mouth appeal – in a venue where the tickets are priced at Rs 1200 each, but that’s a sub(...)'

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A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/19/2013 2:18:00 AM

'(Did a version of this for my DNA column)With the birth centenary of one of Hindi cinema’s most respected actors just around the corner – May 1 is the date – I came across an amusing little anecdote about Balraj Sahni. In his biography Balraj: My Brother, Bhisham Sahni recalls a Bombay producer saying the young Balraj resembled the Hollywood legend Gary Cooper. “Balraj took this as a compliment, but it was meant to convey that he had grown too lean and thin for the role of a hero in(...)'

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The lady varnishes

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/17/2013 6:28:00 AM

'Lata Mangeshkar has watched every Hitchcock film...and then some. Today's HT City tells me that Lata-ji loves Hitchcock's Gaslight in particular. Now, given that this isn't a Hitch film in the first place (which is okay, she is in her 80s and memory is treacherous for those of us less than half that age), I enjoyed the report's fussy inclusion of the correct year of the movie next to the title - even though the reference is part of a direct quote and it's unlikely that the great lad(...)'

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Pandavas in the sky with diamonds (on Sandipan Deb’s modern Mahabharata)

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/16/2013 9:14:00 AM

'[Did a version of this review for Biblio. And here I had thought this piece was the last thing I would ever write about the great epic. To quote Michael Corleone, or is it Bheeshma, “Just when I thought I was out, they PULL me back again”]-------------------Even if you don’t know beforehand that Sandipan Deb’s bulky underworld thriller The Last War is a modern version of the Mahabharata, the dots will begin connecting within the first couple of pages. In the opening chapter, set in (...)'

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Rendezvous with Drama - quick notes on Nautanki Saala

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/13/2013 10:13:00 AM

'In one of the smoother throwaway moments in Rohan Sippy’s film Nautanki Saala, as emotions run high backstage during a performance of a play titled Raavan Leela, one character yells at another, “Yeh theatre hai, yahaan drama nahin chalega!” The line is a cousin of Dr Strangelove’s “This is the War Room, you can’t fight in here!” and the conceit involved is similar: that it’s possible for a group of professionals to coolly play God in a sterile, controlled environment (whether direct(...)'

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On Jayant Kripalani's New Market Tales

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/6/2013 12:11:00 PM

'[Did a version of this for the Hindu Literary Review]“This story you can tell. People need happy stories,” says a man named Amol at the end of the tale bearing his name in Jayant Kripalani’s New Market Tales. The lines, along with the context in which they are spoken, are pointers to the good-natured directness – but also the subtly bittersweet tone – of the better pieces in this collection. The narrator has recently encountered Amol, an old Calcutta acquaintance, in a Manhattan sta(...)'

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About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/5/2013 6:16:00 AM

'Sad to hear of the passing of Roger Ebert. I hadn't read much by him in the past few years (no particular reason - my online reading in general has thinned out), but his reviews were staples in my early years of net-surfing, circa 1998-2000 (when the Chicago Sun-Times site was one of the first pages I opened each time I got online) and I particularly enjoyed his Great Films essays. In a somewhat surreal turn of events, I found myself in correspondence with him around six years ago, (...)'

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Our films, our selves: thoughts on the upcoming Bombay Talkies

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 4/5/2013 3:15:00 AM

'[From my new cinema column for DNA newspaper. The e-paper version is here]The enthusiastic if somewhat diffused celebrations around the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema found a new focal point last month, with the unveiling of the trailer for Bombay Talkies. This is an anthology film made up of short movies – each around 25 minutes in length – by four of our best-known directors; Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee were each given choice of subject and tr(...)'

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The nation and the mofussil – on Ian Jack’s new collection

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 3/30/2013 5:18:00 PM

'Ian Jack’s thoughtful, wide-ranging collection of essays and reportage, Mofussil Junction: Indian Encounters 1977-2012, has been one of my favourite reads of the year so far. Here is a review I did for The Sunday Guardian.'

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From dusk till yawn - why Django Unchained was a bit of a grind-horse

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 3/28/2013 2:16:00 PM

'What happens to your relationship with a Quentin Tarantino film when you start to find it... boring? If you aren’t seduced by the kinetic energy of a Tarantino movie, by a nonstop flow of razor-sharp dialogues and terrifically paced action sequences, is there anything worth sticking around for? (This is a serious question. Weigh in, QT fans.) I ask because I went into Django Unchained without the reservations that so many people have about Tarantino’s work – that it is shallow or de(...)'

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Lost men in Rajorshi Chakraborti’s new story collection

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 3/26/2013 4:31:00 PM

'[Did a version of this short review for Time Out magazine. Also see these earlier posts on the work of Chakraborti, who is one of my favourite contemporary writers: an interview; Or the Day Seizes You; Derangements; Balloonists]--------“When did I go to sleep and where had I awoken?” wonders the narrator of one of the stories in Rajorshi Chakraborti’s new collection, “In an askew world where everything was familiar but nothing unfolded as I foresaw it?” It’s a question that might co(...)'

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Exit, pursued by a bear (a grizzly TV set and other horrors in Aatma)

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 3/24/2013 12:38:00 AM

'The new film Aatma knows something the cinema of horror has known for decades now – that there is nothing quite as terrifying as a sweet little girl, especially a sweet little girl who looks into your eyes and chirrups “I love you, mama.” Aatma, subtitled “Feel it Around You” (displayed on the neon ticker outside the hall as “Feel Around You”), begins with a sequence where we see just such a girl, Nia, watching a home video on a fancy plasma TV screen that appears to be.... nestled (...)'

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On the streets and in the workshops - Salaam Bombay!, 25 years later

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 3/20/2013 1:45:00 PM

'[Salaam Bombay! is being rereleased by PVR Director’s Rare on the 22nd, in a fine restored print. I strongly recommend watching it on the big screen. Did this piece for Tehelka]“I believe I may have been put on this earth to tell stories of living between worlds,” writes Mira Nair in her introduction to the soon-to-be-published book The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film. It’s a theme that runs through her wide-ranging movie career, and it takes on a very large scale in her(...)'

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When Sambha danced - on the strange fame of Mac the naif

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 3/12/2013 1:16:00 PM

'In his most famous movie role, he sat atop a big rock with a gun in his hand and replied to his master’s calls of “Arre O Sambha”. It was a small part, but it became so iconic that his profile could be used as the sole image on a “minimal Bollywood poster”, and anyone would know instantly that the film was Sholay. Yet what did the actor MacMohan himself feel about being defined and shadowed by that tiny role for the rest of his career?I ask because a few weeks ago I caught a glimpse(...)'

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Mira Nair and others at Spring Fever

Author : Jabberwock      Blog : Jabberwock      Date : 3/9/2013 3:30:00 AM

'The schedule for Penguin India’s Spring Fever (March 15-24 at the India Habitat Centre's Amphitheatre) is out. On March 17 I’ll be speaking with director Mira Nair about her career, specifically the 25th anniversary of Salaam Bombay! (and the reprinting of Nair’s book about the genesis and making of that film), the upcoming release of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and the process of adapting Mohsin Hamid’s enigmatic novel into a movie. There are also sessions featuring Vikram Seth, (...)'

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