When Kamini Kaushal passed away at 98, she missed being a centenarian by just two years. But there is very little else that she missed out on in her long, rich, creatively fulfilling life.
'You need the drishti, the experience. I am beginning to see things differently.'
The Godfather of French New Wave Cinema was 91.
'He provokes you intellectually so hard that you really break out of your shell and come up with something creative.' 'He can extract a creation out of you, such is the power of Godard and his films.'
'I didn't want to do a highlight reel with greatest hits of Yash Raj Films.' 'I wanted to do an actual story.'
RRR isn't the "spectacle" it is made out to be, argues Sreehari Nair.
Notes from the recent Keral film festival: how two great films handle the delicate issue of death.
'How can so many misfortunes fall on one beautiful family?'
'Where Pratidwandi is concerned, there are very few men standing.'
Ismail Merchant was known for his persuasive powers and his ability to mold difficult situations in his favour.
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.
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.
Every film that Sriram Raghavan makes is a compendium of ideas and sensations that tickle him. Trying to remake a Sriram Raghavan film is like getting excited by somebody else's goosebumps, 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.
Aseem Chhabra salutes the late Italian Master and his cinema.
'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.
And it's written with tears, blood and unspoken lines.
Skip Fifty Shades of Grey. Watch these well-made films recommended by Aseem Chhabra.
'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.'
'The best Indian movies today are ones that portray life as "something that doesn't end when the movies do".' 'There's no real arc to traverse or easy lessons to learn. And Irrfan and Nawazuddin -- who can both swerve a movie purely on the strengths of their instincts -- are just the perfect actors for this kind of movie sensibility,' says Sreehari Nair.
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