Gaddaar is maybe the best Hindi film of 1973, if not the first half of the 1970s, that you probably haven’t seen. Maybe I’m wrong and you already love it as much as I do, but whenever I bring up this movie, I’m mostly met with blank stares […]
The fact that I have to start a discussion of Shalimar (1978) by specifying that this is the English-language version of the film, which is only 60% as long as the Hindi and therefore almost automatically makes less sense than the fuller work, tells you that we are […]
I’m not even sorry about that title. Boom (2003, directed and written by Kaizad Gustad) really is about a group of models behaving badly. But it’s also an artifact of one of the classic paths to stardom in Bollywood: the model-turned-actor. The models in the film have to […]
[somewhat spoiler-y] My current slot to publish at the Gutter falls just a day before the Hindu/Jain/Buddhist festival for snake deities, Naga Panchami, so I take this auspicious coincidence as a sign to bring forward another Indian snake film. If my research is accurate, the first Indian snake […]
Halfway through my rewatch of Jadu Tona (Black Magic, 1977), I said to my cat, who was also most definitely watching it with me since it has a kitty on some of its promotional material and was not just curled up on the sofa for no other reason, […]
Merchant and Ivory’s India-set films tend to rip out my heart and stomp on it—in a good way. Two years ago I wrote about Shakespeare-Wallah for Switcheroo Month, and here I am again, this time with a sort of bildungsroman, complicated by imperial socio-political goings-on. Heat and Dust […]
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The Cultural Gutter 