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
Sreehari Nair is *not* impressed by this lot of films at all.
What holds It's Not That Simple together is the cast; performers who frequently rise above their stodgy lines to bring something personal to the table, notes Sreehari Nair.
'Wasn't there a single person below 30 in the whole production team? I wondered aloud at different points in the narrative,' notes Sreehari Nair.
'Tigers fails to understand that the phenomenon of a million babies dying because there is not enough clean drinking water in which to mix a certain packaged baby formula may have its source in a system where deprivation runs so deep that even a small gift works like a tonic,' argues Sreehari Nair.
...But a comedy about Class Wars. Sreehari Nair tells us why.
Gajraj Rao's performance in Badhaai Ho is the finest by an actor in a Hindi film this year, applauds Sreehari Nair.
'What seemed missing in Tumbbad was that screwiness, that kinkiness, which shades so many of our best parables,' observes Sreehari Nair.
'Sriram Raghavan is mainstream Hindi cinema's greatest gift to us,' declares Sreehari Nair after watching the director's latest movie caper.
'This is a movie, which if you allow it to, will wash itself all over you, so that you emerge from it a little drenched but wide awake,' says Sreehari Nair.
If Manto, the film, falls short of being a masterpiece it's because Nandita Das could not quite crack the Manto code: She couldn't quite see the wholeness of her subject with the same eyes that Manto saw his people. This imperfection in the film, in a way, becomes the greatest tribute to Manto, feels Sreehari Nair.
'Love Sonia is a motion picture with the ambitions of a novel.' 'When I walked out of Love Sonia this Monday night, I walked out with a hushed audience that seemed too overcome by the raw power of the film to even pause for applause,' notes Sreehari Nair.
'The overarching fact of modern social behaviour isn't that we are irresponsible women and men, but that we are never quite sure, when and how to act responsibly.' 'This is the real side of every Twitter outrage, where those who tweet about stories of 'unreported domestic abuse' end up feeling superior to those neighbours who are summoned up as clueless witnesses.' 'This view of the supposed spiritual decay of our times, which is at the core of Gali Guleiyan, is thus more fashionable than perceptive,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Not only are the concerns expressed in Stree (patriarchy, consent, prejudice against women) mere excuses to touch our 'sentimental hotspots', the movie itself is a few tricks cobbled together,' says Sreehari Nair.
'Any Muslim who shows even the slightest hint of revolutionary thought is marked as 'infected'.' 'At that point, he is taken to the nearest Detention Centre where a procedure called Reconditioning awaits him.' 'Areas with a high Muslim population have been designated as Scheduled Religion Zones.' 'To be an active participant in this social cleansing ritual, there is only one prerequisite: You have to be an undying patriot whose friend and family is his country.'
Sreehari Nair introduces you to three promising movies coming up.
Anurag Kashyap's lovers have no enemies to shoot, says Sreehari Nair, and so they take aim at each other.
This is a film where random storylines are padded together with obscure Internet facts, observes Sreehari Nair.
'Mulk gets a lot of things right, including its vision of the country as a place where underneath the punctilious, forced-secular surface there are volatilities waiting to go off,' says Sreehari Nair.
Dhadak is a film that turns Nagraj Manjule's vision into naught, only so that a few more zeroes can be added to Karan Johar's bank account, says Sreehari Nair.
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