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The 2010s is coming to a close and we are in the process of compiling the Best of what cinema had to offer for us from 2010 – 2019. We have already done a few articles on Hindi Films, listing the best films, best performances and the best musical albums of the period. You can find all articles related to the Best of the Decade Here. Today we start the journey for Bengali films, and will recall the Best Bengali Films of the Decade.
Continue reading “Best Bengali Films of the Decade – Ranked”
This is our continuing retrospective series to look at the Best of the Decade, and today we will revisit the Best Hindi Films of the Decade. We have already looked at the Best Performances in Hindi Films by Female Actors and Male Actors respectively, and we also revisited what were the Best Hindi Film Music Albums during this period, all the listings triggering good discussions and healthy debates. As we sit down to list the Best Hindi Films of the decade, the task begins to go tougher.
In our series for looking at the best of the decade, the current focus is on Performances in Hindi Films. We have already looked at The Best Performances by Female Actors for the Period 2010-2019 and it ended up being an extremely rich list of great performances. The task for arriving at the Best Performances by Male Actors was even tougher. As much as there is an increased focus on writing more and more strong female characters, it remains a fact that most of our stories in Indian cinema are still primarily centered around men and their complex worlds. Most of the storytellers are men, the demand of the box office is also skewed, and hence the art and commerce both ensure that the space and scope that the leading men have is enormous. The good news is that the potential and the depth of the craft of our fine actors even surpasses the opportunity size, and hence we have seen some tremendous performances delivered by the leading men over the last decade.
Continue reading “Best Performances of the Decade by Male Actors in Hindi Films”
As the passing decade from 2010 – 2019 evolved in pushing the boundaries for storytelling and the kind of subjects that could be handled, it widened the scope for actors across the board. The roles and the performances got more fearless, their character arcs had the scope to be more grey in nature, and there was a space for stronger and more powerful women to exist in those stories. And we got some wonderful performances from our leading ladies to shine through and through these characters.
Continue reading “Best Performances of the Decade by Female Actors in Hindi Films”
It is that time of the year when we start looking back at the Best of films, performances and music of the year. This year is special as we are also winding up a decade, and hence we will also retrospect across the entire decade over the next couple of months and come up with the Best of films, digital content and more over various languages. We will keep appending the links of all such blogs in this index post, so keep watching this space for more:
Best of the Decade (2010 – 2019)
Best of the Year 2019
The passing decade of 2010 – 2019 has been special in terms of how cinema molded itself to be more experimental, more fearless and breaking more boundaries. The phenomenon was true irrespective of film industries and languages and naturally we see the impact in Hindi films as well. As stories evolved, so did the music; and hence as we look at some of the Best Hindi Film Music Albums of the Decade, we see a very interesting mix of traditional, contemporary and experimental music.
Continue reading “Best Hindi Film Albums Of The Decade – Ranked”
Amitabh Bachchan – The Biggest Superstar ever of Hindi Cinema completely 50 years of ruling the screen today! The range of his body of work is incomparable, and he has been tremendous in everything that he has done from Action to Comedy to Drama to Extrovert to Introvert to you name it, but my favorite ones have been his serious understated types! Making his debut as the voice narrator in Mrinal Sen’s award winning Bhuvan Shome in 1969 and then with an on screen debut with Saat Hindustani in the same year, the Maestro has come a long way! The Dadasaheb Phalke honour, Padma Vibhushan, 4 national awards, 15 filmfare awards, 41 filmfare nominations and a host of innumerable other accolades and counting, his journey continues! May be his performance of the lifetime is yet to come!
Continue reading “Amitabh Bachchan – Most Memorable Characters!”
Mohammed Zahur “Khayyam” Hashmi, fondly known as Khayyam, has always been one of those legends who had always let his music speak instead of himself. And it does speak beautifully, reverberating in melody & pathos, creating its own soothing soulful aura.
A second world war veteran, with growing up years deeply impacted by partition, Khayyam found his calling in music composition as early as 1948 for the film Heer Ranjha, when he made his debut along with partner Rahman Varma as Sharma’ji of the Sharmaji – Varmaji composer duo. However this partnership didn’t last long, as Rahman Varma decided to move to Pakistan, and the event turning a blessing in disguise for Khayyam. He soon found his footing as an independent music composer for Biwi in 1950, and from that point on Khayyam didn’t ever have to look back.
If you are a cinema and music lover, you are bound to be in awe of Kishore Kumar! A Sampurna Kalakar with God gifted voice and talent, he has to be most popular playback singer across generations. In a career spanning 41 years, he sang to many beautiful compositions of the most respected music directors. My personally favorite phase of Kishore Kumar songs are the gems he produced with S.D. Burman, Salil Chowdhury, Hemant Kumar and others in the pre-Aradhana phase, but it was post Aradhana in a period of time in 70s to mid-80s where he almost single-handedly topped the musical charts of hindi films, being the voice of some of the most popular and evergreen songs. Naturally, there are so many of his songs which still dominate our playlists to date and offer a diverse listening pleasure.
However, there are so many beautiful songs of Kishore’da that are still less heard or remembered and can easily be part of best of his playlists. Many of these songs are from the post Aradhana phase of his career, where a host of more popular songs hogged the lion’s share of limelight. So on his 90th birthday, here is an attempt to list down 50 such less appreciated solo songs of Kishore Kumar – they aren’t necessarily all rare, but some of them are also in the list because they somehow don’t get remembered as much today because they weren’t either part of a popular film, or got overshadowed by a more popular song of that album, or just have not received as much love as they deserved.
Continue reading “Kishore Kumar – A Playlist of Underrated Melodies”
There is only one way to describe the immortal music composer Jaidev – The underrated genius! For an artist whose entry into films was as a child artist, he induction as a composer happened as an assistant to stalwarts like Ali Akbar Khan and then Sachin Dev Burman. His first break as a music composer came in the year 1955, and over the next thirty plus years that he was active in, he score music for just over forty hindi films. And yet, he was the first music composer to be recognized with three national awards. That is the musical prowess of the man, who turned everything he touched to gold, and he didn’t need any big banner films to get attention and be heard.
