When I read this week that Sidney Lumet died, I was saddened because it never occurred to me that he would have to stop making movies on one dull day. The first Lumet’s movie that I watched was 12 Angry Men (1957). Instant fanhood. I watched it several times. The least I enjoyed it was when [...]
Posts under ‘Craft’
A Letter to The New York Times Editor
To the Editor: There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has [...]
Bergman’s Kaleidoscopes
I watched Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy during three consecutive nights three weeks ago. I’ve wanted to write about it because I’ve felt that I understood something, yet my understanding is vague enough to elude words. Now I am grappling with words to express a vagueness that I know about. The trilogy has been called different names [...]
LSD – A Mathematically Progressive Movie
The only thing I knew about Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha is that it originally had a five-minute sex scene which the CBFC cut to half. The last Hindi movie that I watched in a theater was Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. I was mostly disappointed by it, mainly because I fail to understand the [...]
And the award for the best actor goes to
The day after the big night. The day after a decade of Oscars. This is a better time than most other to air my mixed feelings about awards in the acting categories (hereafter called acting awards) given my interest in fiction. While the deservingness of awards are eternally debatable, awards play a role in reminding [...]