In the Mood for Love

It is a restless moment.
She has kept her head lowered,
to give him a chance to come closer.
But he could not, for lack of courage.
She turns and walks away.
That era has passed.
Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.
He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane,
the past is something he could see, [...]

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Weekend Movies

The Return is a moving drama about two brothers whose father returns back after twelve long years. The brothers Ivan and Andrey, aged around twelve and fifteen respectively, live with their mother and grandmother. While Andrey, has an amiable, going with the wind attitude, younger Ivan is much more stubborn and deeply emotional. As they [...]

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Cannes 2009, Awards

Palme d’Or : THE WHITE RIBBON directed by Michael HANEKE
Grand Prix : A PROPHET directed by Jacques AUDIARD
Award for Best Director : Brillante MENDOZA for KINATAY
Award for Best Screenplay : LOU Ye for Spring Fever
Award for Best Actress : Charlotte GAINSBOURG in ANTICHRIST directed by Lars VON TRIER
Award for Best Actor :Christoph WALTZ in [...]

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The Last Life in the Universe

Kenji is a librarian, living in clean house stacked with books. He has been attempting suicide for some time but something or the other always saves him or rather something always happens just before he is about to commit. Then one day as he’s about to attempt another suicide, he witnesses an accident of a [...]

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Godard’s Socialisme

The first trailer of Godard’s Latest movie, and probably the last, is out. There are no official subtitles yet, though here’s some translation.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I read the book some two years back, liked every bit of it but somehow it felt hurried then, or maybe I read it so. And because of this I had been a bit apprehensive about watching this movie since then, but guess I was proved wrong. The movie’s quite stunning. The actors perform so [...]

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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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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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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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Bergman on Persona

A sort of truth-crisis that made me feel suddenly that I had to take a stand. What is truth and when does one tells the truth? It became so difficult that I thought the only form of truth is silence. And in the end, going a step further, I discovered that it, too, was a [...]

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Hiroshima My Love

Whenever one talks about Alain Resnais, his exploration of subjective memory of past events takes the centre stage. I haven’t seen any of his movies except for Hiroshima My love. It’s not only subjective memory of the past but also subjectivity as a whole which concerns him, coupled with fragile nature of time n [...]

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I am missing it.

 

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I am Cuba

I am Cuba, or Soy Cuba, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, a Soviet and Cuban co-production was long forgotten before being revived by the likes of Scorcese and Coppola, hailing it a masterpiece. The reason of it’s getting forgotten was the poor response that it received by the Cuban and the Soviet people. Though made to [...]

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Werner Herzog in conversation with Errol Morris

Link
WERNER HERZOG: Walking out of one of your films, I always had the feeling-the sense that I’ve seen a movie, that I’ve seen something equivalent to a feature film. That’s very much the feeling of the feature film Vernon, Florida or even the film with McNamara-The Fog of War. Even there I have the feeling [...]

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Into The Wild

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
– Lord Byron
Into the Wild is based upon a work by Jon Krakauer about the real life adventures of Christopher [...]

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The others experienced nothing like it, even though they heard the same tales.
- Novalis

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Persona

The hopeless dream of being – not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a [...]

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No Smoking

Watched No Smoking few days back at Habitat Center, Anurak Kashyap was a guest there and did a session of Q&A after the movie. Though he advised before the movie began that the movie be seen as the fight of a man against the system, but the obvious reference provided in the movie by naming [...]

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Crash

Crash (by David Cronenberg) no doubt is by far the best movie that I have watched this year. I did watch a few movie this year where director has a theme that he explores it very well and you are satisfied by the movie, but Crash just bamboozles you what what it presents and how [...]

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Where is the Friend’s Home

“Where is the Friend’s Home“ by Abbas Kiarostami begins with a class room scene. The teacher while doing his usual chores starts checking the home work. After checking few works he finds one being done on a sheet of paper. Upon inquiring the student tells that he mistakenly left the copy at his cousin’s place. [...]

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Burdens few Men carry

From “Time Within time“, the diaries of Tarkovsky from 1970-86.
“…the 20th century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that 20 million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of our hockey team winning a match. The [...]

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The Taste of Cheery

Taste of Cherry – Abbas Kiarostami
The movie begins with Mr. Badii moving around in his car, observing people here and there and then randomly or may be not so randomly trying to start conservation with them and in the end offering them some money for a small job. Initially he picks up guy who, [...]

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Apocalypse Now | Opeining sequence

After reading about Coppola’s new movie “Youth after Youth” felt a carving to watch “Apocalypse Now” again. Here’s the opening sequence for the time being.

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Solaris

Solaris revolves around a scientist/psychologist, Kelvin, sent to a space station around a planet Solaris. Solaris was believed to be made of some conscious material and working like a giant brain. Many hypothesis had been earlier laid down but nothing substantial could be proved. And whether the mission was to be shelved or not was [...]

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Pan’s Labyrinth

Watching Pan’s Labyrinth the thing that catches your fancy the most is how a children fantasy and a horrific war are intermingled as a matter of fact thing without ever burdening one thing with the other and also never losing anyone’s relevance. Guillermo del Toro here takes his craft another level up from where he [...]

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Caché

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.
– Michael Haneke
Watched [...]

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Another week

It was quite a rainy weekend, which just made me stay indoor most of the time. Though i couldn’t resist going out on Sunday evening. It did trickled a bit but then who can resist the last shivers of a receding winter.
Watched few movies :
American History X: Starts promisingly but then just flatters as [...]

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The Devil’s Backbone

Ghost stories are never scary. They do have few moments of fright and horror but nothing more and rest all is violence, gore and loud screams. And most of it is the fear of the characters which some how movie makers feel that the viewer’s will feel too. yeah no doubt we humans have the [...]

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January and me

Blogging can be really boring when you don’t take time out of it.
Isn’t that same for every other thing we just don’t care about or can’t find time to care about. Anyhow, its not that i don’t like blogging or anthing but just that somehow i couldn’t blog this whole of Jan. Even the soliatry [...]

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The Cranes are flying

The Cranes are flying is a story about shattered love, told against the backdrop of World War II. The story centers around Veronica, a chubby, vivacious and lively girl, who is living happily, rejoicing as she’s about to get married to Boris, her lover. She is far away from worry and trouble when everything is [...]

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The Departed

Truth and Honesty are not synonymous with each other.

This is what the Irish Gangster Costello says to Colin Sullivan and this is what Scorsese unfortunately lives up to. Scorsese gives us a decent played potboiler which may claim to pocket the truth of the Film maker’s caliber but sadly leaves honesty behind.
What we have here is [...]

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United 93 n more

Yesterday i watched United 93. It was a good movie. Some good realistic description of what could have gone out in the 4th hijacked 9/11 flights. It showed how chaos ensued on the plane, how nervously ppl contacted their family members via phones and cells, how tense and uncertain those hijackers were, how in the [...]

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