Romancing the Stoned:In style he perhaps recalls Anurag Kashyap...but i'm going to tell the world to be very very very afraid of Abhishek Chaubey...the terrifying new name of modern India cine-direction...."Udta" stuns in ways inexplicably poignant and unexplored...take Satish Kaushik's piece, his loving haranguing fascist undercurrent.."all in the family" emasculating madness...as a substrate of the entire film... Moderated violence, immodest realism. Not Pahlaj Nihalani nor the entire military can keep audiences away from such mesmerizing work..well done, v.well done...only a fool will blunt the piercing point of "Udta" by calling it a Shahid-Alia film...Kareena's greatest effort...with the ease of "3 Idiots"....Dosanj does Indian acting proud...Alia & Shahid are Ophelia and Hamlet and Juliet and Romeo rolled into one...It's a miracle they are alive at the end of the movie...in, uh huh, on a beach, o mother of God, is that Anjuna? Udta Goa , anyone? Call 9811112220
Reviews
3 Reviews
The Oscars
(2014 TV Special)
Oscaritis 2015 aka Nose-bleed!
26 February 2015
Evidently a suicidal jury would much rather shoot itself in the nose clutching a gun in one hand while reaching out for golden statuesque manhood with the other to an Antonio Sanchez drum roll and/or speculate about the universe out of a wheelchair rather than go out there to find another planet capable of sustaining human life. That's survival instinct for you within ''the line of sight''! Long years ago the jury was criticized for making the mortal error of looking above its navel to award 'Gandhi'. It took some years to correct that mistake by eventually decorating an anal-ytical vision of Indian slummery. This is surely a matter of some gravity, which for the Oscar jury must be a dead weight around its loins rather than a gigantic heartfelt force of liberating attraction which Hollywood apparently sets out to annually celebrate even though the jury it appoints continues to believe this is merely special effects! Or side effects, if you prefer!''What's love got to do with it'', yeah! And then there is the distinct possibility that seized with Noah- like trepidation of forthcoming floods due to global warming, Mexico may be emerging in jury-dick-tional mind as the preferred haven for the Oscark a la "The Day after Tomorrow". But I wouldn't credit the sag-acious old men & women of this jury such foresight given their penchant for being wiser by hind-ahem-sight preferably in white tights butting into theater space & turning it into a retirement home for suicidal manic-depressive Oscarcastaways, while themselves setting sail in the Oscark with lusty lustrous garmented types, preferably more revealing than space suits & capable of more than one measly kiss per 180 minutes. (What? No bathtub, no naked Archimedes @ Eureka! Now, that's not traditional @ the Oscars). Land ahoy, lower the anchor! {p.s. The alt title of this mail is : ''Is Oscar, if not Hollywood, waging fund war with NASA, if not NORAD?''}
Interstellar
(2014)
Mythologizing the Future: INTERSTELLAR's Stunning Vision of the EART-H-EART
15 December 2014
Christopher Nolan updates Stanley Kubrick with a vengeance and i wish Arthur Clarke & he were both alive to see INTERSTELLAR! This is not to belittle the greatness of Clarke & Kubrick, but to lament why Christopher took half a century to do this for us, after "2001:Space Odyssey" kept up our interest on the subject for 3 generations.Perhaps Nolan was too busy exploring the quality of evil in "Dark Knight" and the possibility of interjecting our dreams with it, evil, that is,in "Inception",or perhaps he wasn't even born when a friend of mine and i trooped off on a Sunday morning in Delhi City,both of us about 17,to watch HAL do his/it/IBM thing in the early 1970's!But that is all in the past and Nolan avoids the past like the plague because he believes we are now,in the future,in a blight which is worse than a plague,despite having turned our artificial intelligentsia of TARS,KIPP & CASE into friendly neighborhood explorers!And while the origins of mankind is passé,school-book stuff if you know your Darwin,what mankind really needs is to dust off its ambiguity,its indecisiveness,its procrastination,its revisionist agrarianism (which is the killing cause of dusty death on Earth)to go way boldly further than simply star trekking or hitch-hiking on a much more serious mission to find another planet to survive on!What makes INTERSTELLAR simply the greatest sci-fi movie ever is that Christopher Nolan makes the search and the need for the alternative so urgent,so immediate,so critical,so now or never that you are at the edge of your seat for close to 3-hours and ready to fly out at the end of the movie to go find your space craft,your space shuttle,your space crew, your sartorial space suit, and lift off on your mission to make sure that mankind, born on Earth doesn't end up dying in it! In the process you discover the inward collapsing black hole,the corridor creating cosmos connecting worm hole,the all-of-time at one-time tesseract - what the Hindus call the 'tatra' - the 'that'(tat) - the 'there'(tatra),the book shelf with the prompting books & the ghost behind it prompting you which is you,the watch and not just time as a dimension but the timely dimension & the circularity of it,the feminine principle, and the triumphant return, not as a fetus to end some silly war on Earth but over a century younger,relatively speaking,a deus ex machina ready to take off all over again...you yourself , an alien an extra- terrestrial in INTERSTELLAR who discovers that EARTH is simply an anagram of HEART, spun over and over again,by the gravitational pull that we FEEL attraction! Eart-h-eart-h-eart- h-earth-Heartheartheart!Earth Heart!WHERE OUR HEART IS,IS OUR EARTH!
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