Rudraksh (2004) is a famously terrible Bollywood movie. Since I first started watching Hindi films in 2005, I have read multiple blog posts gleefully detailing its shortcomings, and an Indian comedy duo made further mincemeat out of it in an episode of their recent series “Pretentious Movie Reviews”: […]
What happens when a Bollywood film gives the female lead all the privileges and powers that male leads get and she does things that very few women on screen ever get to do, including making herself and others laugh while still being taken seriously? Aiyyaa (2012), a nearly […]
A woman tearfully leaves her newborn in the lap of a giant statue of Shiva during a thunderstorm and keels over dead. Hindu brothers are separated when one one falls into a raging river, presumed dead, but actually rescued and raised by a thief. Boys from good homes […]
Like George Costanza, I’ve often wanted to pretend to be an architect, and an offshoot of this dream is to do some kind of major study of the architecture of evil spaces in Hindi movies. The most distinctive visual marker—physical manifestation, even—of evil in Bollywood is the villain […]
“Looking for film noir in India is to miss the point of Indian cinema altogether.”–Lalitha Gopalan, “Bombay Noir,” A Companion to Film Noir. (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013). There’s a lot about Calcutta—the center of the Bengali film industry, metropolitan capital of the state of West Bengal, […]
I must have been eight or nine when I decided to put up a play for our annual Teachers’ Day. It was the only day each year when kids had the opportunity to go up on stage and present their creative work. My friends and I believed that […]
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