Cannes ‘09, Official Selection Revealed

The lineup is studded with some big heavyweights of the likes of Almodovar, Lars Von Trier, Tsai Ming-liang, Resnais, Ken Loach, Ang Lee, and Haneke. French actress Isabelle Huppert heads the feature film jury. The jury also has Nuru Bilge Ceylan, who won the best director award here last year for Three Monkeys. Interestingly the [...]

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French New Wave is 50 now, almost

The French New Wave, 50 years old today, was the greatest criminal enterprise in cinema history. A gang of filmmakers led a raid on the Bank of Tradition. They emptied its funds with the sole purpose of closing a near-bankrupt heritage, so that a new art could begin. Drawing aid from their own fund of [...]

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Anurag Kashyap Interview

Q: Is there a method to the madness then?
AK: No, I do not like to storyboard at all. Mostly, my method of directing a scene is to tell my actors what their basic actions within the scene are. And then, I mostly call the steadicam operator, let the camera roll, and let the actors move [...]

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RIP J.G. Ballard

British novelist J.G. Ballard, famous for works like Crash and The Empire of the Sun, and after whose works the term Ballardian has been coined, died following a long illness.
Here’s Guardian’s obituary.

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Flight of the Red Balloon

Hou Hsiao-hsien’ Flight of the Red Balloon starts with a kid Simon trying to coax a red balloon to come with him. The balloon’s up there on a tree, away from his reach. After failing in his attempt, the kid boards a train back his place. Then curiously enough the balloon starts following him, which [...]

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The Spirit of Beehive

There’s something mystical about The Spirit of Beehive, something fragmentary that never confronts you directly but leaves a desolatory feeling. The film brings out to reel, rather marvelously, the inner subjectivity of a kid whose trying to come in terms with the outside world. It’s a tale of growing up where the facts, fiction and [...]

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Remembrance of Things from Past

Ah, its no Proust post, and you already know it seeing the book cover on the left, anyhhow am just reading Bill Bryson’s A short History of Nearly Everything. It’s been two days and am more than halfway through and its been a pleasure till now. Every second page you turn and some name from [...]

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Not so Funny Games

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (US version) is a self reflective, metacinema intended to shock the audience ,alongside denying them any thrilling experience. The movie is more of a critique on how we see violence in movies, how a user takes an emotional stance towards it whereby in the process distancing itself from it, how viewer [...]

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Fallen Angels | Wong Kar Wai

To be true I didn’t like falling Angels that much. Not from the general standards but from Wong Kar Wai’s. The movie was more on lines of Chungking Express, probable coming from the fact that the storyline of the movie was meant to be a part of Chungking Express. Still it was a fair enough [...]

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