Your destination before or after you complete your journey at the movies
Nowadays, the prospect of watching (another) patriotic film made by Bollywood seems like a daunting one. My skepticism for these types of movies churned out very regularly in India (almost all Akshay Kumar vehicles in the past five years) stems not from the fact that I do not share the same respect, and pride that a majority […]
This is an academic paper on the way in which postmodern films like Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007) and Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance (2009) juggle between celebrating and critiquing Bollywood. Major spoilers ahead for both films. Coined in the 1970s when the film industry in India – constituting not only of Hindi language films but […]
This is an academic paper on the way in which Ramesh Sippy’s iconic Indian Western – Sholay – borrows from the historical context of 1970s India, and from the Western genre to create the quintessential Bollywood “masala” film, whose appeal has endured ever since its release in 1975. Major spoilers ahead. The image of men in commercially […]
From “Black Friday” to “Raman Raghav 2.0,” the majority of Anurag Kashyap films never attempt to conceal their fondness of exploring the dark side of the human psyche. They revel in interrogating the morally grey nature of their characters to suggest that even the seemingly most unhinged people may have reasons, valid or invalid, to […]
This is an academic paper on the analysis of Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s career, persona, and films (with a significant focus on her recent feature “You Were Never Really Here”), and how all these factors define her personality as an indie or independent filmmaker. Within the context of American cinema, writer Michael Z. Newman proposes […]
The word lust invokes a particular kind of image of sexual desire – one that is strong and often comes with negative associations attached to it because of this very strength it represents. When compared to the holy representation that Indian mainstream films give to love, especially, this word feels and sounds emptier, and dirtier. […]
From the moment we enter this world to the time when we evaporate into the void, we are always either under some form of authoritarian presence or are the authority itself. This consistent authoritarian presence is not strictly limited to one that is political, which, in the current state of democracy, tends to extract criticisms. […]
