In general, our movie watching experience is often driven by a few things especially when we talk about the slice of life genre – How likeable are the characters? Can I emotionally root for one of them? How attached are the characters to each other thereby evoking compassion or sympathy? Is it explicitly making me laugh, feel sad, get angry? Is it aligning with my preconceived notion of how I am supposed to feel for this film? Sometimes when we don’t have clear answers to most or any of these questions, there is a chance we will dismiss the film as uninteresting, bland or confusing. But Shoojit Sircar and Juhi Chaturverdi are not interested to find a happy path to these questions and create a feel good laugh out loud comedy to satisfy everyone. For the fourth time in a row, they present another deeply layered observational film packaged unconventionally yet again, this time as a dramedy, on the futility of attachments and running behind the eventually inconsequential things for a lifetime. Life is often about its nothingness and a goose chase to feed our desires, and the whole pointlessness of the entire journey and its disappointment is what one is left with in the end. Gulabo Sitabo shines because Shoojit Sircar and team intricately weave in this deep philosophy as the melancholic soul of the film, with an effortless ease into the everyday ordinariness of a seemingly brewing cacophonic premise.

Continue reading “GULABO SITABO : Jeevan ka Khela” →

When the human moral compass waivers, and greed chokes the ability to feel anything else, the relationships go down the drain!

What happens when the common ordinary man feels emotionally marooned because they are all trapped in a world of chaos and war? It could be a migrant Indian family desperate to go back home from a war laden Iraq, but their employer has opportunistically tricked them and their government has conveniently forgotten them. It could be a native Iraqi whose life has been shattered in the hands of an autocratic ruler and then by an unwarranted foreign invasion. It could be the trapped American soldier of the frontline whose inherent human instinct is long lost amidst all the violence and bloodshed but is desperately seeking a revival. Or it could simply be a young six year old boy whose innocent ask from life is to get his birthday celebrated, but last two years has robbed him of such simple joys of life. The new Zee5 Original film Chintu ka Birthday is a story of all such broken, marooned people who are desperate to cling on to life and its small gifts, however illusive they might be.

Natkhat – The thirty odd minutes long short film by Shaan Vyas premiered on the We Are One global film festival and is an important film that talks about how misogyny is most often ingrained in young innocent minds in their homes and in the playful environments surrounding them, and how it is critical for parents to protect them from the same even at the expense of exposing their vulnerable selves to this impressionable innocence.

Continue reading “NATKHAT : Soft Gloving Life Brats!” →

Because the basic human dignity of the marginalized has become a monkey business in this country!!

.. Prateek Vats‘s sharp political satire Eeb Allay Ooo that brilliantly inverts its lens for a bold commentary on the power dynamics between ‘Lutyens Monkeys‘ and ‘the common man at their mercy‘ is an essential viewing experience, more so now than ever before!

Continue reading “EEB ALLAY OOO : Calling For Existence” →

In one of the more memorable scenes of Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhan, writer-director Hitesh Kewalya poses a question back to an ordinary Indian couple on screen (read. us the audience) through one of his lead protagonists – Why does no one ever ask Jack whether he wants to go up the hill with Jill or Johnny? May be Jack and Johnny have a plan to live in love and laughter up there. He challenges the couple not to pre-set the mind of their young child that only Jack and Jill going up together will remain happy or should be accepted as the norm. He knows that the change for the child’s broadened perspective has to start happening right from there. He possibly wishes that at least that young boy doesn’t face the daily and most painful struggle of his family not accepting the way he is, and instead feel the imposed weight of their standards of normal to define his agency.