Motherhood became the common theme of the movies I watched in the 9th Pune International Film Festival. Among the 15 movies were my first Australian, first Ecuadorian, first Danish and first Russian (talkie) movies. The absence of subtitles for the English movies was refreshing. Overall the movies were better than the previous year’s, both in [...]
Posts under ‘Reviews’
The Unreadable American
Interval. The director being a big Sergio Leone fan chose to include a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, the shocking scene where Frank draws his pistol and slowly takes aim at a child. (The scene that may have inspired a similar scene in Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay.) As fun as the homage [...]
In the Wild Strawberry Patch
Few movies ever get made with old people as protagonists, for old age is an unpleasant and boring subject that we do not like to dwell on. “Happily ever after” is a delusion that obscures the loneliness following the death of a loved one in the arms of the other. “Old age is not a [...]
Shutter Island Inception
The last two movies of Leonardo DiCaprio center around two classic philosophical views of reality. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on Dennis Lehane’s eponymous novel) uses Kantian a posteriori, that what we know about the world is subject to our perceptions and thus not entirely objective. Christopher Nolan’s Inception builds on Cartesian dream argument, about [...]
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 [...]