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Posts under ‘Reviews’

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 [...]

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 [...]

Avatar is no Star Wars

I read and heard a lot of superlatives about James Cameron’s Avatar in the last two months. Some from well-known critics and mostly from the gen-pop — “awesome”. I knew very little about the story itself and that may have helped ground my expectations closer to Earth than Pandora. I waited for the opportunity, and [...]

Still Life the Game

I rarely play PC games. More than the epic-scale strategy games and frag-anything-that-moves games, I prefer games with few characters and a storyline. Max Payne was the first such game that I played and it remains the favorite. I enjoyed the dramatic shoot-while-jumping moves, loved using the clean weapons, had my heart broken by Mona [...]