Your destination before or after you complete your journey at the movies
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 […]
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. […]
“Bhavesh Joshi Superhero” begins with brief images of the titular character fighting some goons before he is (quite easily) summoned by them. The film then proceeds to show its title, BHAVESH JOSHI, in a big bold red font. Peculiarly, the “Superhero” is missing. So, even before a line of dialogue is spoken, Vikramaditya Motwane’s film […]
One of the very few engaging scenes in Shashanka Ghosh’s “Veere Di Wedding” takes place during the beginning of the film’s second half in which the four friends (the titular veeres) confront each other about the vanity of their problems. This sequence is the only time in this otherwise extremely fake film that the friends […]
