Sreehari Nair wishes to write about that which is in the cultural air but absent from trending lists. You can e-mail the author at sreeharin@rediff-inc.com
I thought Saudi Vellakka a glancing, loving depiction of the judicial system as a pageantry filled with performers trying to do right by everyone, do everything by the book, and failing despite their best attempts, observes Sreehari Nair.
Once you are done paying your respect to God and Grasshoppers, you circle back to the human beings in Gold, and that's when things become progressively more and more muddled, observes Sreehari Nair.
In a year of overwrought spectacles that slavishly sucked up to the audience, I found refuge in a bunch of 'mainstream' Indian films that espoused such old-fashioned values as dedication to craft, close observation and casual bravery, explains Sreehari Nair.
Sikandar Kher's Nishikant Adhikari is a solitary poet by the corner, trying to remind us that the honest plans of honest people don't always come to respectable ends, observes Sreehari Nair.
After a lifetime of showing us what it means to 'act at the top of one's bent and never hit a false note', Mammootty had the good sense, in the third act of his career, to pare down his style, become less mannered, draw directly from life. And getting a performer like that to play characters who seem 'completely dead inside', is, in my view, a betrayal of his legacy, his still-burning ambition, and his still-sharp feelers, observes Sreehari Nair.
Doctor G is outwardly all for women, but evidently has no interest in them, observes Sreehari Nair.
'The common ground between a film-maker and a film critic is a mad masochistic love for the movie.'
Does the "story" of a Mani Ratnam film come first or does its "spirit" asks Sreehari Nair.
Friendships are not merely severed, but built over scuffles. And just about anything can stir things up -- a long-standing feud, a pointless stare, a disrupted moral stance, a fist that ricochets off a face and smacks another face in the near vicinity, observes Sreehari Nair.
'I believe it's not the success of RRR or KGF that we must actually investigate but what makes these two films our marquee events,' argues Sreehari Nair.
I cannot think of another Hindi movie that has, without so much as a hint of cynicism or speechifying, brought out that fundamental fact of Muslims being an integral part of the Indian culture while being at the same time a subculture with its own polite niceties, observes Sreehari Nair.
Dear Friend is for those who idealised Dil Chahta Hai all out of proportion, and then warmed up to the premise that friendship could be a lot more complicated, and transient, observes Sreehari Nair.
Pellissery's women continue to express the beauty in our common humanity. And often, these women go so far into expressing our hopes, desires, absurdities and follies that they end up acting at variance with the ethical prescriptions of our age. And this, I believe, is precisely why they remain "invisible" to a whole bunch of viewers, says Sreehari Nair.
RRR isn't the "spectacle" it is made out to be, argues Sreehari Nair.
If Irrfan could have been our finest professor of empirical philosophy, and Nawaz is our foremost poet of that space halfway between the gutter and the stars, then Jaideep Ahlawat has to be our greatest artist-scientist, asserts Sreehari Nair.
Badhaai Do carries its audience on the wave of those little farces that come with being queer in India, a land where masculinity still has some say, observes Sreehari Nair.
Pinch your nerves, and trust the ghoul -- blood will be spilled; women, children, and grouchy old men will be dismembered! observes Sreehari Nair.
'The response to savagery and mass injustice is never a persistent howl.' 'There will be, among the victims, those who choose to forget the scars, those who go on living, those who challenge the overall environment of sentimentality.' 'And the more effort you put into including these other voices, into assimilating these spoilsports, the more balanced your depiction of the tragedy in question will be,' observes Sreehari Nair.
Despite the Oscars, the box office glory, and the universal acclaim, Francis Ford Coppola, I am sure, remembers The Godfather with as much frustration as pride. Like Michael Corleone, he got into it with the best of intentions, and got out of it on top but lost in the heights. Sreehari Nair revisits the film as it turns 50 this month.
Bloody Brothers is watchable, especially in the scenes of its two lead actors trying to work out something from the puny material given to them. Jaideep Ahlawat, who suggests roiling energy and intelligence even when he is completely motionless, has to be India's finest actor on current form, observes Sreehari Nair.
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