The greatest of life’s many tragedies is that it’s so damn unfair. Evil often triumphs over Good. There’s often no penalty for cruelty, gluttony, debauchery, savagery and a raft of other venal acts. And, oh yes, good movies sometimes meet a sorry fate at the box office and the hands of critics. We just returned […]
I can assure you that in a 100 years our work will still be rejected. Columbus, you know, had no idea what country he’d discovered. Like him, I’m in the dark. All I know is that I’ve set foot on the shore and the country exists. – Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud describing the then nascent […]
It’s been a while since we boosted your vocabulary. We stumbled on the word Onnagata last night while leafing through the latest issue of New Yorker magazine (April 2, 2012, P.7). There’s a short piece on an upcoming Kabuki (Japanese dance-drama) program in New York City that contains the word Onnagata. Onnagata means a man […]
Agent Vinod, which had a fairly wide release in the U.S. (for a Bollywood film), hasn’t done well at the box office. And that’s a shame because the movie is a decent Hindi action, spy thriller. Here’s how Agent Vinod fared at the U.S. box office compared to a few prominent Bollywood films: Related […]
Like the warning found on all cigarette packets, it’s time to insert a statutory declaration at the beginning of all Bollywood movies: This Indian movie may have been stolen in full or part from Hollywood and/or other foreign sources with impunity and reckless disregard for the intellectual property of others. Indian media reports suggest that […]
It took the bozos over four decades but with Agent Vinod Bollywood has finally turned in the first Indian action thriller that desi Bond and Bourne aficionados can watch without cringing. Written and directed by Sriram Raghavan, Agent Vinod (Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Prem Chopra) is a well crafted Hindi action film that has […]