An Jo’s note on Toilet : Ek Prem Katha

In one of the scenes in TEKP, Akshay repeats the same line he used in KHAKEE; that he’s a human and not a ‘machine’ to keep repeating the sex-act at the will of his heart or something below his navel depending on his wife’s bedroom-demands. It was a nostalgic moment endorsing a fantastic masala movie. Thank you, director, for that.

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Satyam on Shahrukh Khan and his contemporaries

the comment was originally in the box office thread, some discussion followed

On SRK while those who don’t like him can get a bit too dismissive those who like him are also often as divorced from reality. I’ll recap things a bit:

There’s a difference between a declining top star and a much smaller one. A declining top star can still count on his history with the audiences. Moreso in certain genres. Beyond this a declining star can, especially in this day and age of the Hollywood-like production, put together subjects in different genres that excite a large part of his audience or at least an important cross-section of it. A top star even in decline can also start poaching on other dominant genres of the day and get some traction that way. All of this is possible because the star has built up enough cultural capital over time. Even rapidly declining top stars don’t suddenly fade. Or this really happened only once on Bollywood. This was Rajesh Khanna’s dramatic decline (to match his meteoric, really seminal rise) but here he lost out to an even greater force called Amitabh Bachchan. Then there were other historical factors in play as well. But this is hardly the norm. Usually top stars can hang around for a while. Hey, even less than top stars can extend their life quite a bit!

An Jo on Jab Harry Met Sejal

[Mild spoilers ahead]

There’s a scene in Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal [JHMS] where for a split-second the camera glances at the passport of SRK’s Harinder Singh Nehra a.k.a. Harry, and it reveals his year-of-birth; it’s 1980, a mere 8 years older than the lead-actress, Anushka’s Sejal, and more so, 3 years older than the other actress he worked with in Jab Tak Hain Jaan [JTHJ], Katrina Kaif. [He was born in 1965.]

Scroll on Censor Chief Pahlaj Nihalani

Central Board of Film Certification chairperson Pahlaj Nihalani has issued his latest and by no means his final directive: actors can henceforth not drink or smoke on the screen. This is only the latest in a long line of diktats conjured up by the producer and distributor to purify Indian cinema for the sake of national interest.

He became the board’s chairperson on January 19, 2015, reportedly as a reward for having directed the Har Har Modi video ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Soon after taking over the censor board from Leela Samson, Nihalani made his political leanings clear when he told NDTV that he is proud to be a “BJP person” and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is his “action hero.”

Read the complete piece HERE

A casual note on Dunkirk

The following is part of a private exchange with someone. I am just reproducing my contribution. I’ve expanded a bit at points for the purposes of this post. However I haven’t done too much in this regard even though I was tempted to at points. Doing more would have required a longer, much more formal piece and I didn’t quite have the motivation to do this. This remains a very spontaneous, impressionistic response to the film.

On [Dunkirk] lacking a certain emotional resonance I think some of this is borne out of Nolan’s explicit intentions. I appreciate the degree to which Nolan is trying to present this sort of subject in a certain thriller/adventure format, or the extent to which he localizes the action completely and therefore represents more authentically the actual experience of war (obviously people in those situations are hardly thinking Churchill and Hitler! they are just totally in the moment, trying to survive). But this achievement (and it’s a formidable one) comes at a cost. If you remove the ‘transcendence’ element of war narratives you might have a gripping film but not one that has deeper echoes.

Rangan Reviews VIKRAM VEDHA (TAMIL; 2017)

EXCERPT: “An ordinary masala movie would pit a god against this demon – and indeed, the first half of the title (R Madhavan) does come across like the scourge of evil, a saviour. He’s an encounter cop, but he’s able to sleep guiltlessly because he’s convinced the men he’s pumping bullets into are bad men who deserve to die. But slowly, the paint starts peeling away. Rather, the colour of his tees undergo a change. During the first meeting of Vikram and Vedha, the former is in white, the latter in black. By their last meeting, Vikram is in grey. He knows now that it isn’t a clear-cut line between good and evil.

The notion that cops and gangsters are but two sides of the same coin isn’t new: Michael Mann’s Heat is a brilliant exploration of how a cop who thinks he is doing good may be more messed up than the gangster. But Pushkar-Gayatri have decided to tell their story through the prism of the Vikram/Vetaal folklore – hence the title. The film opens with an animated stretch with the king Vikram high up in his castle, and soon, in pursuit of the vampire Vetaal, he plunges deep into a lake, a metaphorical hell. The creature latches onto his back and begins to narrate stories that are the old-world answer to a grey T-shirt: there’s a moral conundrum at the end.”

Complete article HERE.

Game of Thrones, Season 7