The Great Ganesha

[Originally on Blogcritics and Desicritics] I just saw The Departed. A few months late and a few dollars short (thanks to Netflix) but it was on purpose, because I wanted to watch Infernal Affairs first. I’m glad I waited. It?s unfortunate that Martin Scorsese has resorted to making big budget blockbusters in the last few [...]

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Mira Nair’s The Namesake follows the life of Ashoke Ganguli (played superbly by Irrfan Khan) as he goes to the US to get a Ph.D., and returns to look for a wife in Calcutta. He finds Ashima (portrayed excellently by Tabu), they have an arranged marriage, replete with all the colors and exotica of an [...]

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We are all voyeurs. Why else do we watch movies? Sure, there’s the escapism, the pleasure of being moved emotionally and the satisfaction of knowing that sometimes, the good guys do win. But at the bottom of it all, we like to see how others live their lives. We enjoy the act of watching others [...]

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As promised, for people in the Bay Area – The Police will be playing at the McAfee Coliseum in Oakland, CA on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 6.30pm. Tickets went on sale at 10am on Sunday (2/25) on Ticketmaster. Did you get yours yet? If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my [...]

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Its nothing new that the majority of movies coming out of Bollywood are mostly junk. In fact, I may even have said a thing or two about it. But when the indomitable Naseeruddin Shah speaks, people listen. An article a few days ago on the BBC, has him ranting hard about pretty much everything on [...]

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After three years of downright boring ceremonies, Ellen brought the Oscars back to their original glory – with all the glamor, glitz and glitter that Hollywood is associated with. And, of course, by glitz and glitter, I mean Botox and Silicone. Seriously though, this time the Oscars were actually fun to watch, even though they [...]

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?[From my Thirsty article] You may read elsewhere that this movie is categorized as a drama, a thriller, a fantasy film or even science fiction, but one crucial component is left out from all these labels ? political film. Guillermo Del Toro creates the perfect vehicle for political propaganda by creating a child protagonist at [...]

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[From my Thirsty article.] Like The Last King of Scotland, this is a novel-to-screen (from P.D. James? novel of the same name) adaptation, but this is a work of art independent of the book, not unlike Kubrick?s A Clockwork Orange. Alfonso Cuaron has created a masterpiece with this tightly shot film which is, by far, [...]

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[Adapted from my Thirsty article and crossposted on Desicritics.org. What can I say? I'm lazy.] Imagine that you never know the real identity of the people you work for, or even what they look like. Imagine that you are forced to interact with people who are your ideological opposites to the point where you must [...]

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Saw a couple of plays (one on Broadway, one off-Broadway) when I was in New York. Here are some brief reviews. Watched the famous Broadway musical Company. Apart from being an excellent satire on marriage (and single life), I was surprised to see that it had a desi in the cast – Angel Desai. She [...]

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