Continuing my experimenting, Dina and drove home from Phillauri last night and discussed the movie the whole way. Feel free to listen in! (as always with these, we are assuming you have already seen the movie, so if you don’t want to be lost and haven’t seen it yourself, hop over here to read my SPOILER review)
If you are considering whether or not to watch this film and you don’t want SPOILERS, my first review is here. But if you can’t see the movie and want to know what happened, or if you’ve already seen it and want my opinion, read on! (oh, and if you’ve seen it and want to hear a conversation about it, I just posted my podcast on soundcloud)
Well that was a short movie! Strolled out of the theater a few minutes after 10, with a 7:45 start time and a 10 minute intermission. But a nice movie. A nice concise small movie. It felt kind of like a fairy tale, or a fable. A story for children, nice and simple and easy to remember and understand.
I don’t know what was up this winter, but everyone I know got sick! I got sick twice, and like really really sick, not just “a little tickle in the throat” sick. And among my friends I heard everything from bronchitis to walking pneumonia. But it is supposed to be over now! Right? Because it is officially Spring? And to celebrate, lets have one last orgy of Vitamin C!
(This is an updated and reposted post from last year) If you’d asked me 9 years ago when Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na came out, I never would have said that Emraan would be my favorite Imraan/Emraan. But today, oh my goodness! He has beaten his homonym by a mile! And today he is 38 and still going strong! Here are 38 separate reasons I love him (yes, most of them are videos).
(Also, that photo up top makes me crack up)
As you know if you regularly read the blog, moviemavengal who comments here and has her own blog, is my friend “real” life as well as online. We saw Angamaly Diaries together (her review is here), and last night we got together over Skype to talk about it and recorded our conversation.
I put up a post a week ago asking for votes on dates and films, and the winner is April 8/9 and Maine Pyar Kiya! Well, the qualified winner. There were a lot of split votes, Mann kind of tied with Maine Pyar Kiya. But Mann is apparently completely unavailable in Australia, so Maine Pyar Kiya it is!
Nargis Dutt! Finally! After teasing her for the past several weeks. And also, yet another actress after Rekha and Meena. Why is it that actresses have so much more interesting personal lives than actors? Or is it just that I find their lives more interesting? Or is it that the media plays up their lives a little more than with actors? It’s probably the last.
If you want to know why this film is just breathtaking, then you should read my no spoilers review. Because the amazing part of the film isn’t in the story it is telling and what happens, it is in how the story is told. But if you want to read a little more in depth discussion about the film and every aspect of it, not just the breathtaking parts, you can read on.
I finished Guide-the-Book! It was a good book in general, and an easy read, I recommend it. But it was really really really interesting to read it in partnership with the film. There were so many things that had to be changed to make a film version work, and they all revolved around Waheeda’s character.
Hello all! Time to chat about what we have been doing for the past few days. And the next few days too, since you are welcome to come back and keep commenting every time you see something new that you like. Until next Wednesday, when you can come comment on next Wednesday’s post!
That headline isn’t hyperbole. There’s one sequence in this film, way at the end, which should be shown in film classes right along Welles and Scorsese from now on. It’s an amazing technical achievement, but you don’t even notice that, because it is such an amazing artistic achievement at the same time. (Very very long and detailed SPOILER review here)
This was before Indra, right? So the similarities aren’t a coincidence? Or else they are both picking up on an older traditional I don’t know about. There are some Mahabharata touches to it, but the jealous overlooked woman and the vengeance in the second generation, that is oddly specific.
Happy World Poetry Day! India of course has an amazing poetic tradition in every language. And for the past 70 years, a lot of the best poets have ended up working in film lyrics. And also some of the very worst poets. I’m going to do a quick post giving you a run down of worst to best. Even if you can’t understand the language, you should be able to tell just from the sound of it that some of these are very very good. And some are not.
By popular demand, and my own inclination, I am going to do a post on Osho! Otherwise known as “that weird religion that made Vinod Khanna run off to Oregon in the middle of his career.” Just to skip to the end for a second, it’s calmed down in the decades since and is now a kind of normal sort of meditation center. But it was very very odd for a while in the middle!
You know the problem with pioneer films? They are so groundbreaking and wonderful when they come out, but then after they have cut out the new path, the films that come after it are so much more luxurious and elaborate, it makes that poor struggling scratched and damaged first film look like nothing in comparison.
Shashi a couple days ago, Rani today (in India, another 10 hours in America)! Are they related? I’m sure they are, probably through some obscure marriage somewhere. If nothing else they are related through Ranbir and Ayan’s friendship, which is as close as a marriage. Anyway, Happy Birthday Rani! I couldn’t manage a full 79 reasons to love Shashi, but I can come up with a whole 39 reasons to love you!
Happy Monday! Time for questions! About anything at all. Including “Hey, how’s your day going? Mine’s terrible, I hate Mondays!”
You know the concept of “narrowcasting”? Where you target your content to a tiny tiny audience? Welcome to a very narrow cast version of Sunday posts! Just for those of you who are both Indian film megafans, and Golden Girls fans! (also, unrelated, don’t forget to vote for the next tweetalong/watchalong movie on Friday’s post!)
Is that a controversial statement? Not the birthday part (can’t really deny that), but the best SRK-Rani part? I don’t think so, they’ve worked together a lot, but they haven’t actually been the main “jodi” in most of their films. It’s really just this one and Paheli and Kabhi Alveda Na Kehna. So, okay, you can fight with me over whether this is a better movie or Paheli or Kabhi Alveda Na Kehna.
That’s the “cool” website, right? That’s what moviemavengal told me, and she knows lots more about the internet than I do (she will also be a guest on a podcast at some point if we can figure out the whys and wherefores of it). Anyway, search for “dontcallitbollywood” and there I’ll be!
79 years old today! Which in my family is super young (Grandpa’s turning 96 this year), but for the Kapoors is pretty old! A reward for clean living, and general niceness. Shashi is clearly the “best” Kapoor. And so he gets a full dozen reasons I love him.
I’ll be putting up my regular TGIF post later today, Aamir themed of course. But I have to say (and feel free to disagree), Aamir is just not that sexy. Intellectual, sure. Caring, a good father, charming, confident, all those things that are usually sexy. But in what is, for me, just a tiny little non-sexual package. If you have this same issue, I thought I would share with you a little gift from twitter this morning.
(This is a re-posted post from last year, because I am lazy. And also there really isn’t anything to add to Irish-Indian connections in the past year) There really aren’t as many connections between Ireland and India as you would expect. They both start with “I”? They are both former British colonies? Their flags are confusingly similar? The both have disputed territories to the north? But what few connections I could remember, I have pulled up and highlighted, on this, the ridiculous made-up unofficial international Ireland celebration day.
dontcallitbollywood 