KPAC Lalitha's specialty was evoking on screen people that the audience felt they knew intimately, and evoking them through telling details that tore down the boundary between the audience and the performer, observes Sreehari Nair.
Does the "story" of a Mani Ratnam film come first or does its "spirit" asks 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.
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.
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.
RRR isn't the "spectacle" it is made out to be, argues 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 hits and flops of the week.
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.
Bharat is nothing more than a reflection of the times we are living in: where we expect our heroes to be flawless, virtuous fellas -- it is our current national disease.
'His sin was that he made public a certain lifestyle that was to be kept within the confines of those sweaty dressing rooms,' says Sreehari Nair.
I am yet to encounter an anthology of films (made in this country or elsewhere) in which every feature has adhered to a minimum level of quality, asserts Sreehari Nair.
'Both Main Aur Charles and Titli are essentially stories of two plot-devices that became protagonists. You cannot relate to Titli or Charles, without submitting to the knowledge that neither of them are well-rounded characters; they are more like artifacts -- Charles, a schlock artifact and Titli, an artifact of spirit toughened by years of live brutality.'
The hits and misses of the week.
The hits and misses of the week.
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.
'Surely a person like Happi deserves to be treated with dignity.' 'But does he deserve a two hour movie dedicated to his daftness, and to the failure of the rest of the world to come round to the purity that shines behind that daftness?' asks Sreehari Nair.
There's the excitement of watching minor people commit major crimes and watching how that becomes their second nature, almost. Just when you think the show is extending outwards, it implodes. And with the ethical hinges off totally, you, the viewer, wouldn't know quite how to react, 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.
The hits and misses of the week.
The hits and misses of the week.
The hits and misses of the week.
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.
The hits and misses of the week.
Box Office: Vishwaroop II is a disaster
Sreehari Nair attempts to bring you up-close the pleasures of Javed Akhtar's poetry.
'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.
'Tamhane's densely composed shots achieve what a vacuously whizzing camera seldom does.' 'Like those Renaissance Paintings in which a bewitching lady is shown posing for a portrait, and daily life plays out in a corner unruffled, Tamhane's static frames have a hundred interesting things happening within them,' observes Sreehari Nair.
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