total timepass...

(Spoiler alert) I hadn't watched the original Tanu Weds Manu and so had no context of what to expect. And I think that was a good idea, I went in the theatre with no first impressions, and came out completely shaken. What a movie! I do have some issues with it, but to be honest they are my own. The movie by itself was amazing and a must watch. TWMR (couldn't they think of a more creative name?) starts 4 years after the marriage of the boring UK doctor, Sharmaji with the fiery Tanu from Kanpur. Their marriage has soured so much that Tanu gets Manu put into a mental asylum and returns back to Kanpur. At this point you would assume that their marriage is over, and that is where you are wrong! When they both come back to India, the movie is a riot. Manu goes completely overboard with trying to get over Manu - acts crazy, flirts with her ex-boyfriends, paints the town red with their renter and god knows what all. She is just so crazy, you are never sure what she is capable o...

Piku is a tough one. To be honest, the movie is well crafted - the dialogues are individually funny, the acting is top class (Irfan and Amitabh as expected, and Deepika upping her game) and the story flows well too. But something doesn't add up! Piku is the story of a Bengali girl, Piku and her father, Bhashkor da. Her father has constipation problems and hence behaves like a difficult person - loud, irritating, eccentric, quarrelsome and so on. So in one word - highly irritating. Piku loves him and takes good care of him, but it also means balancing her own life is tough for her. Finding a boyfriend, getting married, being on a date, work et al. And so she acts as tough and difficult as her father. Then of course, is her colleague Syed; the local taxi owner (and the only normal person in the movie), Irfan - whose taxi drivers refuse to drive Piku anywhere! and Pike's aunt, Moushmi Chatterjee who provides entertainment with her very multiple marriages. All these character...

Its been a year of very different and interesting movies I must say. Byomkesh Bakshy, Piku and now Tanu wed Manu returns. Some may disagree with the last one, but I found it to be a class apart from the regular Bollywood fare. Anyways let me start with Byomkesh Bakshy - the movie blew my mind away. I went in with a clean slate, I had managed to not see any trailer and no idea at all about the look and feel of the movie. And for me, that turned out to be the deal clincher. Of course everything other than the look and the feel was perfect too, the characters, acting, story, music, dialogues. It all came together so perfectly. The story is about a new age detective in Calcutta, Byomkesh Bakshy. With his sweetheart getting married to someone else, he focuses his attention on finding out who killed Ajit Babu's father. This search takes him to Dr. Guha's guest house, the local politicians Sikdar & Sukumar, a Japanese temple, the local cantonment, a chemicals factories, Chin...

We recently saw a play called 'Dara' at the National Theatre in London. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. Dara portrays the struggle that had taken place between Shah Jahan's eldest son, Dara and his youngest son, Aurangzeb for the Mughal crown. We all know who had won, but most of us don't know how he had won it. This play is a story of what had happened between the two... Dara had been his father's favourite forever, his chosen heir. While Aurangzeb had always been one of the other sons, younger and ignored. This childish rivalry had taken the shape of adult hatred, to the point that Aurangzeb killed Dara and enslaved his father for years to get to the crown. The play details scenes from their childhood to adulthood; interactions between the brothers, with their sisters and father; of Aurangzeb's love for a Hindu woman; his getting together with his brother Murad to beat Dara; Dara's running away but getting caught due to his naivete; and then Aurangzeb ...

The play "Dear Father" stars Paresh Rawal and was playing recently in London. I wasn’t able to find any reviews of the play and went for it purely because of the star power of Paresh Rawal. He is a great actor and so this would be a great play. Dear Father is a comedy-thriller-suspense-social-message play all rolled into one. It is based on the lives of a son, his wife and his father, which is turned upside down when the father (Paresh Rawal) ends up in hospital after falling from their terrace. A cop (also played by Paresh Rawal) lands up at their place, and what follows is a dissection of the last few days of the household leading up to the father’s accident, and also an unraveling of the issues between the three that had cropped up over those days. This play actually felt at times like a saas-bahu serial except that there was no saas but a sasur:). The issues were the same, the father had a lot of time at hand and found mistakes with the wife. The wife did not like t...

I don't like watching Hollywood movies much. And the reason is that they make me think (and sometimes make me feel sad). Much longer than having watched the movie. And Imitation Game is one such movie. For one, it was about something I had not heard about till now. About Turin, about his contribution to the World War, about his machine, about how even though they broke the German's code, they decided not to go all out with their breakthrough, but balance out the short term gains with the long term aim; decide with their brains and not their hearts. It was very very interesting, and I think the director and the actors did a brilliant job of it all. Benedict Cumberbatch was perfect for the role and he did it justice. It was all perfect. But what I was left thinking about after the movie, was just the last 10(?) mins of the movie - what happened to Turin afterwards. The movie was about the Turin machine, and what happened after was just mentioned in passing. But that was a...

Its a bit late to review a movie seen two months back, but I think Interstellar requires one. It was a Christopher Nolan movie. I would not hold the same standards for a lot of movies, but I think his movies need to be more.. and Interstellar wasn't! To be fair - it was amazing at a lot of levels! The visuals, the creativity in the vision - linking space travel, a grim future, black holes, singularities, gravity between time and so on requires a lot of courage and vision. But it failed. And for me, it failed because it tried to do too much! By the end of it, I was confused about what the movie was trying to say and do. Was it trying to give reasons for ghosts and superstitions? Was it an emotional movie on relationships? Cooper and his daughter? Amelia and her father? Amelia and her boyfriend? Was it a science fiction? Did it want to talk about the great human spirit? Or just show an awesome visual movie? Did it have a message on the fraility of human character? Or the import...