Sreehari Nair wishes to write about that which is in the cultural air but absent from trending lists. You can e-mail the author at sreeharin@rediff-inc.com
ITo steer clear of sanctimonious newspaper stories all your life, and then be saddled with movies like Kadak Singh -- now there's a rotten bit of luck worth moaning about, sighs Sreehari Nair.
They represent a new tribe whose grace and skill-sets lie well beyond my comprehension, notes Sreehari Nair.
'If it weren't for Om Puri, a whole range of our big city experiences wouldn't have found their honest representations on the screen.'
I do have a dream biopic. It has as its subject Renu Saluja, the cosmically gifted editor, with a special focus on the Vidhu Vinod Chopra-Saluja-Sudhir Mishra love story, says Sreehari Nair.
800 gets so lost in celebrating its grand subject that it forgets something pretty elementary: Cricket is a team sport!, notes Sreehari Nair.
We are back to being a country that talks about box office numbers as the measure for what an audience's real feelings about a movie are, laments Sreehari Nair.
Though the lies hardly go beyond extramarital affairs and conception problems, they are laid out by arresting storytellers who raise the stakes while speaking in tongues not wiped clean to make progressive points (No Made in Heaven-type diddling, here), notes Sreehari Nair.
Konkona Sen Sharma's short Mirror in Lust Stories 2 is a rare thing: A feminist film that is also very, very funny, states Sreehari Nair.
'The pride of the devoted Seinfeld fan is that he happens to love a show that doesn't take his love for granted, so that even on repeat viewings he is never really sure what directions an episode might take,' observes Sreehari Nair.
These films, even at their saddest, darkest and grossest, retain their sense of humour, their sense of proportion, which again is something you associate with a Malayali.
Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam is a masterpiece, and like most masterpieces of the cinema, it's a great act of folly, observes Sreehari Nair.
Let us get high on Pathaan and his simple-minded antics, sure, but let us also take a moment to think about Jim who, with that one cunning piece of dialogue, goes on to boldly state that patriotism is a many-hued thing, observes Sreehari Nair.
I thought Saudi Vellakka a glancing, loving depiction of the judicial system as a pageantry filled with performers trying to do right by everyone, do everything by the book, and failing despite their best attempts, observes Sreehari Nair.
Once you are done paying your respect to God and Grasshoppers, you circle back to the human beings in Gold, and that's when things become progressively more and more muddled, observes Sreehari Nair.
In a year of overwrought spectacles that slavishly sucked up to the audience, I found refuge in a bunch of 'mainstream' Indian films that espoused such old-fashioned values as dedication to craft, close observation and casual bravery, explains Sreehari Nair.
Sikandar Kher's Nishikant Adhikari is a solitary poet by the corner, trying to remind us that the honest plans of honest people don't always come to respectable ends, observes Sreehari Nair.
After a lifetime of showing us what it means to 'act at the top of one's bent and never hit a false note', Mammootty had the good sense, in the third act of his career, to pare down his style, become less mannered, draw directly from life. And getting a performer like that to play characters who seem 'completely dead inside', is, in my view, a betrayal of his legacy, his still-burning ambition, and his still-sharp feelers, observes Sreehari Nair.
Doctor G is outwardly all for women, but evidently has no interest in them, observes Sreehari Nair.
'The common ground between a film-maker and a film critic is a mad masochistic love for the movie.'
Does the "story" of a Mani Ratnam film come first or does its "spirit" asks Sreehari Nair.
© 2025 Rediff.com - Investor Information - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances