(You don’t have to be melodramatic about one or two spoilers strewn in the article.) In some of the current efforts to reinstate the somewhat disreputable melodrama genre, the discourse appears to have shifted towards the visual brilliance and political subversion in some of its best embodiments. But, paradoxically, this somewhat draws attention away from […]
Read more "Pakeezah, and the Mechanics of Melodrama"(I wrote this article for The Hobbyhorse. Here’s an excerpt from the essay.) (The end of the Western also brings about the end of spoilers.) I never understood why almost all Westerns are shot in desert landscapes! – Anthony Mann Anthony Mann’s string of Westerns in the 1950s represents a seismic shift in the genre. […]
Read more "Mann and his Modes: Man of the West (1958)"(This is the second article in a series which basically consists of my capsules on some films.) Aavesham (Jithu Madhavan, 2024): An unbridgeable chasm always exists between our outsized expectations and the drab reality. For a good portion of the film, Aavesham inhabits this amorphous chasm, with Jithu Madhavan signalling his intentions from his very […]
Read more "Capsule Corner #2"(No spoilers I guess, by which I mean no plot revealers. I would suppose that you wouldn’t care about spoilers that come from a discussion of the themes, would you?) Even after all these years of cinephilia, noir remains a slippery term that keeps evading our grasp. Less a genre than an all-encompassing appellation that […]
Read more "Variations on the theme of Noir: La Nuit Du Carrefour and Le Cercle Rouge"(No spoilers as there’s no story. Ha! I outsmarted all of you spoiler-mongers.) If the current hullabaloo over the Ramjanmabhoomi celebrations made one thing painfully clear (actually and sadly, a lot of things, but give me some license for the flow of words, people!) it’s the tyrannical conforming of Hinduism to the Brahmanical discourse, where […]
Read more "Humanity in Divinity: Anubhuti"(Wrote on Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl quartet for InReview. Here’s a sample of the article.) The superficial recreations of the Wes Anderson AestheticTM have kickstarted a new metric in art evaluation based on their ease of A.I. appropriation. While A.I. struggles to decipher Margaret Atwood’s syntax from bootlegged copies of her books, its “success” in […]
Read more "Exploding Art With Artifice: Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Quartet"(This is the first article in a series which basically consists of my capsules on some films.) Jigarthanda Double X (Karthick Subburaj, 2023): Power might grow out of the barrel of a gun, but it can be both appended and countered by the lens of the camera. This sentimentally tacked-on thesis to the comic-gangster cinephilia […]
Read more "Capsule Corner #1"(I foiled you spoiler-mongers! No spoilers here! Unless you think about it philosophically. Then everything is a spoiler.) “The film will be indecent, completely shameless and rather sad, but very simple”, wrote Truffaut in a letter to Helen Scott on The Soft Skin, and this famous quote now adorns the laudatory essays of many critics. […]
Read more "B-Boy Bourgeoisie: The Soft Skin"(I published this article on Cinema Year Zero, here’s a small sample from it. Just like Rossellini, I am going to start from ground zero and move towards a utopian world where spoilers don’t mean anything. You wouldn’t want to be a stickler for spoilers in this utopia, would you?) The two most famous films […]
Read more "A Return to Innocence Via Modernity: Europe ’51"( I am not going to “terrorize” you with spoiler warnings as I think there are no spoilers, but what do I know about what constitutes a spoiler anyway, as shot analyses are not spoilers but plot points are? Anyway, I published this article on InReview Online, so go ahead and read it there.) Ever […]
Read more "Frictions in Fictions: The Terrorizers"
Candid Opinions 