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Posts under ‘Foreign’

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 [...]

Cultures in Conversation – Urban Legends

The May 2010 issue of UTV World Movies Magazine carried an article I wrote comparing Bollywood and Mexican Cinema with urbanization as its underlying motif. I am not very happy with it. I think essays of such kind need a person with greater expertise about the subject matter and with greater skill. My article reads [...]

PIFF 2010: Crazy Pete

Around the same time that Alain Resnais portrayed the innovative use of flashbacks in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Jean-Luc Godard discovered jump cuts with Breathless. I haven’t watched Breathless, but his Crazy Pete serves as a good enough example for understanding jump cuts. Other than that nugget there is not much I can write about the [...]

PIFF 2010: What do you think about Elly?

Asghar Farhadi’s Darbareye Elly opens with a small group of friends starting on a reunion vacation along with their families and a guest Elly. Even those who are not friends are friendly. But the truth is, even the close friends are only friendly acquaintances now just the way most once-close relationships transform from friendships to [...]

Book Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire starts with a confidence, maybe certainty, that the readers of his previous book will hold on no matter what. Lisbeth Salander gets a lot of pages. This is her book. She travels the world; reads Principia Mathematica; tries proving Little Fermat’s theorem; and gets her breasts enlarged, [...]