Watching Go Goa Gone

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 6/1/2013 2:04:00 PM

'Don’t know why so many reviewers insist that to enjoy Go Goa Gone you have to be familiar with Hollywood horror. Have these guys not seen Do Gaz Zameen ke Neeche made by our own Ramsey Brothers back in 1972? Plus zombies must be the most boring of the horror film staples, so very generic that you understand them the moment you see them. It’s totally beside the point that our heroes keep educating us by saying “What do we know? What have we learnt?”.Anyways, Go Goa Gone is among the (...)'

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I won't let you go

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 5/31/2013 6:27:00 PM

'(Wrote this for a competition on the theme of Strange Love, but after the first draft gave up on this. Wrote another story that I have sent to them - will put it here once they decide if they want to reject it or not.)Just over a month back, she said: I don’t know if you will come or will even like to come, but if you can come then do come, I will feel good if you come. The most politically correct shit to spin on your ex. But I felt that there was a sliver of truth in what she was (...)'

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Watching Bombay Talkies

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 5/19/2013 9:50:00 AM

'Karan Johar, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar, and Anurag Kashyap. The line-up had me excited, and the trailer was promising too. Though I wasn’t sure if the right filmmakers were picked for a tribute film. No doubt that their grasp of film tradition is as good as any other (relatively) young filmmaker – but wouldn’t Farah Khan and Vishal Bharadwaj been better than KJo and Zoya Akhtar? A tribute film depends of intertextuality – Kjo manages only when he is dealing with Shah Rukh Khan a(...)'

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Salt

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 5/17/2013 4:08:00 PM

'She sent to me photographs of her, taken at the beach in San Francisco. This was the first time she had seen the sea – and had fallen in love with it. She was spending all of her little free time sitting next to the waves.  In the photos, she looked happy – content with what she was doing there. Happy to be with herself - away from her family.Photographers are not just about what they capture, but also about what they leave out. The five that she had sent did not look like the kind (...)'

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The Night's Whine

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 5/12/2013 6:36:00 PM

'Tonight, among the usual sounds of the night - songs playing on the radio of the watchman (kya dil ne kaha, right now), the violins of jhingurs, the occasional engine of some stray vehicle, even rarer sound of a horn, the creeping of the gate, a child's cry, some unidentified birds roasting - was a new sound. First, I thought it was a mosquito searching for a mate, but after flapping my ears for a while I was convinced it was something else. I thought it was the whine of a child far(...)'

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Watching Ek thi Daayan

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 5/8/2013 3:16:00 AM

'Real life seems to have but one purpose...“Life. Don't talk to me about life.”Ok, here is the Review of a film I saw well behind the curve:...As we return from a 40 minute flashback – you feel that you are in for a special treat. But the second half seems utterly disjoint from the first. What looks like an intelligently crafted psychological horror suddenly turns into mumbo-jumbo horror that doesn't even try to connect to the detailed flashback that had set up the perfect atmosphere(...)'

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Watching Sound of my Voice

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 4/16/2013 1:09:00 PM

'Netflix Summary: A journalist and his girlfriend get pulled in while they investigate a cult whose leader claims to be from the future....A very beautiful film about trust. The filmmakers keep us bound by what the hero knows - so you feel all the conflict that he feels, but are denied the experience that sure is a turning point in his life. After all, faith is a very personal experience.Now waiting for there next release. (I wanted to say a lot more, but Ebert and Wired have already(...)'

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Watching Django Unchained

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 4/13/2013 7:21:00 AM

'Work, and binge-watching Pokemon has kept me away from the blog. I hope the blog will be back from today. Starting off with QT’s Django Unchained……What makes QT special is his post-modern treatment of genre – he picks up elements from his favorite films, puts them all in a single film, and adds his own signature turning them into mainstream. You would never put QT’s film into the same genre as the films he is referring to. (India connection: Kill Bill picked elements from Abhay.) Th(...)'

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Preparation

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 4/8/2013 3:18:00 AM

'When I die, I don't want to be cremated. I want to be thrown into a Cheel Ghar and exposed to crows and other scavenging birds, in particular, and the elements of the nature in general. I want a photograph of the dead me be taken everyday till the body disappears - and that would take sometime with vultures all gone - and be put up on my blog. I think this is way decaying would be far more fun than being subjected to high temperature burning. The trouble is I am not sure who I shoul(...)'

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Date

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 4/2/2013 3:26:00 AM

'And no hug this time either.Not even a shake of hands.And that was all as expected.And you looked beautiful,but I am no judge of that.'

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Watching Inkaar

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 3/24/2013 5:33:00 PM

'Netflix Summary: At one of India's leading ad agencies, the battle for the top job between Rahul (Arjun Rampal), a venerated advertising CEO, and Maya (Chitrangada Singh) his ambitious protégé takes a dramatic turn when she files a sexual harassment complaint against him.…The trouble with Inkaar is that it never fulfills the promise it makes – the film beautifully sets up its drama with an outside investigator, Deepti Naval in top-form, coming in to conduct a closed door probe into (...)'

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Watching Paradesi (English: Nomad/ Vagabond)

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 3/23/2013 6:44:00 PM

'IMDB Summary: Before independence during the 1940's depicts the lives of poor carefree villagers who are lured to work in Tea plantation farms and how they are forced to live rest of their lives as slaves with no traces of hope and freedom....Back in 2009, I forced Papa to watch a Tamil film – and the film started with a bhajan in Hindi! Papa was surprised, and wanted to confirm if it was actually a Tamil film. That was Bala’s Naan Kadavul – and by the time the film finished, we wer(...)'

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Watching 桃姐 (A Simple Life)

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 3/13/2013 5:41:00 PM

'Netflix Summary: After working for the Leung family for decades, a servant still takes care of filmmaker Roger Leung -- but when she falls sick, the tables are turned as Roger looks after her in this heartwarming tale inspired by a true story.…It is never fun to watch a person decline. But the filmmaker Ann Hui, with loads of help from Andy Lau and Deannie Ip, turns it into something oddly optimistic. Despite the stories capacity for melodrama, the filmmaker keeps away from sentimen(...)'

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Watching 春嬌與志明 (Love in the Buff)

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 3/9/2013 9:00:00 PM

'Love in the Buff sees the wonderful couple from Love in a Puff move up north to Beijing, like very many young people and businesses from Hong Kong since it reverted back to Chinese rule some 15 years back. But, ahem, they are no more a couple – and even find new love. Though the texting starts all over again, and the karaoke night-outs are still as many as in the original. Pang Ho-Cheung, once again, depicts the lives of youngsters with wonderful familiarity. The language, I am told(...)'

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Watching The Attacks of 26/11

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 3/9/2013 6:31:00 PM

'‘The Attacks of 26/11’ starts by reminding us that 9/11 is the most heinous crime to have occurred in the history of mankind, and you wonder how to trust a filmmaker with such selective memory. You would think it is to draw some sort of geopolitical link between the attacks or maybe the director wants to tell you that how both of these are works of pure evil and, therefore, interchangeable. But no, all he is trying to tell you is that RGV wants to make a very “Hollywood” movie.RGV h(...)'

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Watching Holy Motors

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 3/9/2013 5:50:00 PM

'Netflix Summary: This surreal drama from France follows DL, who becomes many different individuals living very different lives over a 24-hour period -- switching effortlessly from man to woman, impoverished to affluent, young to old, and even assassin to family man.…Leos Carax returns with a film that is absolutely impossible to describe. This post-modern classic has a lesser god go around the world acting out roles - and we observe him as we are slightly greater gods. Okay, no clue(...)'

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to forgive is divine, not as rewarding I find, vengeance is mine, mine, mine

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 3/4/2013 5:31:00 PM

'I wake up. It is still bright outside. Must be close to noon. Too early for me. Pull a black cigarette out – Darium Black – that is the brand I like, the perfect mix of cloves and tobacco – if you put the unlit cigarette to your lips it tastes a little sweet, just perfect to balance the dry feel of the tobacco. And the ash can just stay on till you are done smoking, no need to tap your cigarette to drop it off. Anyways, too early for me to wake up, so I thought I would write. But ha(...)'

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Reading दुनिया का सबसे अनमोल रतन (The Most Precious Jewel in the World)

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 2/15/2013 8:14:00 PM

'Read this wonderful story by Premchand, and I couldn’t believe this magical writer decided to become more realistic by the time he reached to his very popular novels! If I had not known who the writer was, I would have never guessed it – thinking it is someone who got inspired from a mix of Arabian folktales and Kafka. The author switches the genders in the frame narrative of 1000 Nights. The very kafka-esque setting where a man is trying to work with a system he fails to understand(...)'

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Nights

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 2/10/2013 12:30:00 PM

'(An excerpt from my upcoming Novel. Do tell me what you think.)The city is different in the nights. Large bats infest the skies, and packs of stray dogs rule the streets. The only people still on the road – not in vehicles that is – are the once who do not smell. The scentless people who the dogs don’t notice, the bats anyways only look menacing – they don’t attack anyone. The bats aren’t the largest living ones you would see – I know that some reach up to 1.7m in wing span – but ar(...)'

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Watching Dredd

Author : Kumar Luv      Blog : Vakrokti      Date : 2/10/2013 8:36:00 AM

'Netflix Summary: In the future, catastrophic wars have transformed Earth into a barren wasteland with the remaining population crowded into megacities, where all-powerful cops -- including the ultraviolent Judge Dredd -- are on the hunt for drug-dealing terrorists.…Dredd is definitely an improvement over the 1995 adaptation, but that is not saying much. So we have a single-tier law enforcement system – and the humongous threat such an unaccountable system poses to the society is nev(...)'

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