Chaitanya Tamhane's National Award-winning film seems more relevant today than when it released, says Sreehari Nair.
'The directors of these movies to me are less like artists and more like red-pen remarkists, whose idea of a script is basically checking off the broadest of issues in the broadest possible ways: Sexism, Check. Misogyny, Check. Loving yourself, Check,' says Sreehari Nair.
'This slender yet joyous film introduces so many fresh insanities and has such an endless stream of wisecracking that it takes on shades of a running ballad,' notes Sreehari Nair.
Sreehari Nair wasn't impressed with Rangoon at all. But find out which film tops his list!
'The bumblebees in Par Ek Din may not be flying yet, but even as they dangle in mid-air, their stings hurt.' 'Effortlessly graceful, this is a work of passion that conveys what being passionate about something truly feels like,' says Sreehari Nair.
Sreehari Nair explains why Haraamkhor may just be the most liberating Hindi movie made since Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi.
While filled with startling insights and questions, and buoyed by terrific performances throughout, Newton suffers from a lack of end-to-end clarity. It is a near-great film but one that for some reason doesn't express itself fully, feels Sreehari Nair.
When you walk out of Thithi, you walk out with a feeling of having been completely inside its characters' heads, says Sreehari Nair.
There are no real people in Tamasha -- there are only character-types written in little pink balloon-letters, all floating in cloudland, feels Sreehari Nair.
And it's written with tears, blood and unspoken lines.
'Of all the Superstar Khans, I still believe that Shah Rukh Khan is the one most capable of surprising me,' says Sreehari Nair. 'I always have this feeling that that great Shah Rukh Khan turn that would somehow hold all his vaporously brilliant elements together is just around the corner.'
'Pink a movie that's assembled especially for that section of prejudice-free Indians who are all on this side of the screen.' 'Look...there's virtuosity staring at you, 24 Frames per Second.' 'Soak it in; more power to the revolution, more wax to the candlelight vigils,' says Sreehari Nair.
'The non-cinephiles may hold up Sholay as their personal favourite and the cinephile lot may quote something like 8 1/2 as the movie to load with them on the ark.' 'But for a good percentage of these people from both categories, if there is one film to simply laze around with, a film that can extract them from their dull funk, it's definitely DCH.'
'Mistaking carnality for sensuality, X: Past Is Present rings as too literal-minded and too talky, with a technique that just about drains any real density or genuine playfulness that may exist beneath all the talk,' says Sreehari Nair.
'In Vishal Bhardwaj's now fully set world of manufactured poetry, characters wear their emotions at their most prescribed anatomical positions -- courage on their chins, pride over their chests, and innocence in their faces,' observes Sreehari Nair.
'Why is it that we are so forgiving of the glaring problems in grand multi-starrers like Dil Dhadakne Do,' asks Sreehari Nair, 'but when a small film with a truly personal vision seeks our approval, we analyse it through a prism of formal perfection?' 'With its Seinfeldian humour, episodic structure and performers who play off each other's energies, Meeruthiya Gangsters goes farther than most Hindi movies.'
'Movie plots clearly don't excite director Dileesh Pothan as much as true stories where life had come dizzyingly close to becoming like a movie and then, had fused back with life.' 'This means that a conversation he overhears at a tea shop is more likely to give Pothan a setting for his next picture than a brainstorming session inside a conference room,' says Sreehari Nair.
'It took a 75-year-old director to teach the reformist set of Facebook users that Evil is not an aberration, but something that resides in the most regular seeming of human beings,' says Sreehari Nair.
Malayalam film audiences, who had spent close to two decades waiting for something truly interesting to watch at the movies, seem to be finally getting their due.
'In Angamaly Diaries, dreams, kinks, small corruptions, cheap lives, and hopes are all given their due and that attitude frees us up to believe that perhaps there is more good than bad in the sum total of us.' 'This is a coming-of-age tale taken straight out of a diary written in blood,' says Sreehari Nair.
'The real problem that has affected Tarantino's films is not their amorality. On the contrary, it's their misplaced morality.' 'The basic pitches for his movies, off late, tackle such pre-resolved issues, that they don't quite allow his pop-culture sensibilities to hit a crescendo and instead reduces them to trinkets in service of broad movie prototypes.' 'Which means that neither history nor cinema triumphs.'
'Badlapur,' says Sreehari Nair, 'proves that sometimes there are more personal truths to be discovered in our trash cans than in our neatly arranged book-shelves.'
How do you even define a movie that primarily exists as an invitation to its audience -- an invitation to come and merely laze around with a set of interesting characters, asks Sreehari Nair.
'Mahesh Bhavana is a young man who is beaten up in the town's marketplace and who consequently pledges that he won't wear his slippers again, till he avenges the beating.' 'But Mahesh can't get his revenge that easily -- his punisher is off to a distant land. So what does Mahesh do? He waits. And the town waits with him. And we wait with him.' 'Maheshinte Prathikaram is one of those movies where I didn't know what hit me. I don't remember another movie -- at least in recent times -- that I surrendered to with such happiness,' says Sreehari Nair.
'2016 was the age of convenience for Hindi movies; of down pat effrontery and planned feeling triumphing over attempts to discern something complexly beautiful,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Peddlers isn't a movie of grand cinematic achievements, but one of small yet startlingly original victories.'
In an online chat with readers, chef Sanjeev Kapoor shares interesting anecdotes from his culinary journey.
'While Television generally tends to Clarity,' says Sreehari Nair, 'Arnab Goswami's The Newshour Debate portrays our confusions. Each episode offers both the potency of an intensely-fought boxing match and the giddy pleasures of an orgy.'
No-Punchline humour reminds us how in our daily lives, we all are by turns 'The Corrupt Politician we criticise,' 'The Chauvinist Male we frown upon,' 'The Rule Breaker we deride through our Facebook posts,' 'The Communal Virus we so easily lampoon' and 'The Bad Artist we spoof.' In a land where the aforesaid prototypes are our major sources of 'funny,' is there an audience for the NPL kind of humour, asks Sreehari Nair.
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