This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 6, 2012. Ishaqzaade (“Love Rebels”, rechristened “Born to Hate, Destined to Love” for TIFF2012) tells the story of Zoya (Parineeti Chopra) and Parma (Arjun Kapoor), and is set against the backdrop of the political wrangling that divides their two families. “Here comes…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 7, 2012. “He didn’t understand how it had happened. Undoubtedly he never would. These moments are like shooting stars. They pass before us, leaving only a luminous trail impossible to decipher. Where do they come from? What do they plunge toward?”…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 12, 2012. Early morning. A family chats around the breakfast table. The conversation touches on the typical day-to-day stuff familiar to any family, but as the scene unfolds, we notice one difference: much of the conversation happens in English, with the…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 13, 2012. Documentary filmmaker Ashim Ashluwalia makes his transition to feature films with this story of the two brothers, Sonu (Nawazuddin Sidiqqui) and Vicky (Anil George) who work making lurid and sleezy (and highly illegal, given the censorship and repression of…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on December 6, 2012. In director Nikhil Advani’s latest film, Delhi Safari (his foray into animation), a group of wild animals find themselves under threat from a housing development that begins destroying their jungle habitat. When the leopard Sultan is shot trying to protect…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on February 22, 2013. There must be some irony in the fact that I attended the screening of Abhishek Kapoor’s latest film, Kai Po Che, with two female blogging pals – in fact, we discussed the fact that Indian cinema is overdue for a…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 3, 2013. “My father told me,” says director Pan Nalin, “I should travel to the ultimate pilgrimage of Hindus, Kumbh Mela, and fetch him a bottle of holy water. He told me that the Kumbh Mela is the biggest gathering on…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 20, 2013. “The 5,000 or so dabbawalas in the city have an astounding service record. Every working day they transport more than 130,000 lunch boxes throughout Mumbai, the world’s fourth-most-populous city. That entails conducting upwards of 260,000 transactions in six hours…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on August 25, 2014 There was a moment, sitting in the theatre watching Mardaani, when I knew that I was going to be swimming upstream against opinion in my view of the film. I’ve walked out of precisely one film in my long film-watching…
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