where reviews, columns and essays jostle for attention
When I was eight years old, I thought Prince was The Joker. Allow me to explain this childhood delusion: The year was 1989. Tim Burton’s glorious and groundbreaking Batman movie was yet to hit our VHS libraries, and this was a time before teaser trailers and trailers teasing teaser trailers. All we had to go […]
The first time I saw Saeed Jaffrey I refused to believe he was an actor. Shekhar Kapoor’s Masoom released when I was two years old, and soon became one of the few Hindi film VHS tapes in our house, one often played to placate children because of the Lakdi Ki Kaathi song. In the film […]
Everyone in Bombay thinks they can direct a movie. Amateurs, screenwriters, film school graduates (both those who want to change the way we make movies, and those who want to make a living), television directors, actors who aren’t getting meaty work, theatre artistes… everyone either believes that direction is the ultimate aspirational goal and that […]
“What did you choose? The coffee?” There is such a thing as a very Andheri office. One building away from Mainland China, one alley away from a horrid little advertising agency I worked in for a few weeks when I first moved to Bombay, stands a functionally grey monolith. It houses, among many others, an […]
That fat guy. The first time I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman was in Scent Of A Woman, playing an uppity prep-school bully. I vividly remember that floppy hair falling onto his round face, scrunched up all the time, as if the sun was glaring right into his eyes even in the shade. That fat guy […]
My big Irrfan Khan moment came when I reached the cafe a half-hour late and saw Nimrat Kaur sitting by herself, waiting. I did spy her from a distance, but unlike Khan’s character Saajan Fernandez in The Lunchbox, I strode right up to the actress who, unlike her own character in that film, sat with […]
“Do you think Elvis is dead?” Posed with dreamy yet dolorous vagueness, the question comes out of nowhere on the heels of a rather impassioned conversation about books. But then Sonam Kapoor is about nothing if not the non sequitur. Sonam turned 28 a week ago, and she says it was “hysterical.” “It was me […]
I couldn’t resist taking an umbrella along. I mean, how often do you get to have a drink with a Nargis, anyway? It’s a name we don’t run into much, despite our legendary screen goddess. The girl sitting across from me, one film old, didn’t particularly dig the name as a kid — “I grew […]
2012 was supposed to be a Jenson Button year. No, the ridiculously fast Red Bull cars weren’t suddenly backing off. No, the McLaren hadn’t gotten away with photocopying Ferrari’s notes again. It’s just that this year was all about the tyre, and the whole field looked on the 32-year-old Englishman as being extraordinarily kind to […]
You can tell a lot about a megastar by the way he throws his punch. A Hindi film hero might routinely fell over seven with one blow, but each has their own approach. Aamir Khan, all bloodshot eyes and biceps rippling with the fury of thousands of killed wives to avenge, brings both physical intensity […]
