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 […]
When trying to decide what to write about this month, I realized director/producer Ram Gopal Varma has yet to appear on the Cultural Gutter—and that simply will not do. Some people reading this essay will assume I might write about one of his thrillers, since horror is a […]
Of all the things to admire about Darr (1993) (trailer)—its uncompromising tension and insistence on menace, the superstar-confirming work by a young Shah Rukh Khan, its creative sequences of characters’ imaginations, the wonderful use of background score—my favorite is how this film disrupts its maker’s own persona. Respected, […]
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