Hearts and Minds

¨We weren’t on the wrong side. We were the wrong side. ¨
-Daniel Ellsberg

Hearts and Minds is a documentary film released in 1974 on American war in Vietnam(Vietnam War). It won the Oscar for best documentary of the year.
This movie shows you the dirty reality of war, trauma and suffering associated with it. There are no [...]

The Open Frame Reader: Two Essays

Reading more of The Open Frame Reader, I went through two more essays on digital movie making- Digital Video: A Byte For All? by Rahul Ranadive and The New ´D´ In Documentary by Trisha Das. Both of them talk on a very similar lines. How digital video has made amateur and documentary film making a [...]

Ice Age: The Meltdown

First thing that can happen to a sequel is comparison with the original. I did not watch Ice Age, so I simply cannot do that. Good think about it is- I can be impartial and unprejudiced.
Ice Age is a comedy animation film, with an embedded love story which goes side by side to the main [...]

Thought of the day

¨You’ve achieved success in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play.¨
- Warren Beatty

Cradle 2 the Grave

¨Cradle 2 the Grave¨ at max can be called a mediocre action film with very typical Hollywood touch. Such movies can entertain you, if you are too much into action films or you have a fetish for cliched Hollywood adventures.
The typical Hollywood masala- robbery, diamond, hi-fi gazettes, national security threat, super hi-tech thieves, good cars, [...]

The Open Frame Reader

The Open Frame Reader is a book published by PSBT (Public Service Broadcasting Trust(India) ). It is basically a collection of essays by people related to the documetary film making in India. It touches various aspects of documentary film making (technical and non-technical).
_______________________________________________________________
First essay I read was by Subha Das Mollic titled The third [...]

Reading: Gunahon Ka Devta

It is a story of middle class family, but it is much much more than that. It is highly successful masterpiece of Hindi literature. It´s success lies in the ability to recreate human emotions and to deal with them beautifully. Dharmvir bharti seems to be the master of the art.
It makes some great philosophical remarks [...]

Family

Family is a masala movie. As far as it´s contribution to any field related to cinema is concerned. It would be nothing more than zero. It is a violent, revenge story. When I saw it´s trailer few months ago, first thing that came to my mind- it was definitely not a ¨family¨ movie.
Few good things [...]

The Corporation

¨150 years ago, the business corporation was a relatively insignificant institution. Today, it is all-pervasive. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution.¨
- Narrator

I watched this first documentary on such an issue and it was a wonderful experience. If we even leave out [...]

V for Vendetta

¨A revolution without dancing…is a revolution not worth having!¨
- V

Yet another grand project by Wachowski bros.
One aspect of watching it is you can´t help yourself comparing it with matrix trilogy and which of course is very subjective discussion. Let´s skip that part and come down to issues related to this movie independently. However, It is [...]