Search
All articles by Sourav Roy
24 August 2011
For the first fifty years the word ‘sentimental’ was used, it was used with a heart and without a smirk. Then, along came 1793 and the world got a tad more cynical. ‘Sentimental’ came to be known as wimpy, maudlin and fragile.
Though the birth of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (born 1894) almost marked the centenary of the downfall of sentimentality, he was one of the best sentimental authors there...
27 May 2011
25. My Big Break (2009)
Love for the silver screen fame is a double-edged sword, this controversial and eminently watchable documentary filmed over ten years, tells us without any sugar coating. Five roommates, four wannabe actors and one aspiring director, try to make it in Hollywood but fail repeatedly. Running out of options, the director resorts to filming his four other roommates. Thanks to...
06 April 2011
13. Ed Wood (1994)
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp portray the true story of Edward J. Wood Jr., widely hailed as the worst film director of all time. His passion for the craft, bordering on delusional, was sorely unmatched by his expertise. But thankfully that didn’t stop him. Otherwise how would we have got such masterpieces as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster and Glen or Glenda...
02 April 2011
Just like being in love with love itself is often diagnosed in lovers, being passionate about films that celebrate the passion for films is a common malaise for cinema buffs. So here it is. 38 films on the love of films. Making them, watching them, and talking about them, killing people over them, being reborn because of them and myriad other uplifting and demeaning shades of cinephilia run...
12 October 2010
Complicite's A Disappearing Number is about the unbearable brightness of romancing the infinite and how it burns everything else in one's life to a crisp. It is also about the unrealish encounter between two great mathematicians of the twentieth century, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a poor Brahmin from South India, and Cambridge University don G.H. Hardy. Most of all, it is about Mathematics as a muse –...
10 August 2010
Some of my grown-up cinephile friends, perfectly reasonable beings otherwise, turn into crybabies when it comes to watching animated movies in theatres. The grouse is old. Animated movies, or 'cartoons' as they are commonly called, are supposedly not quite meaningful cinema. To most, they are good for nudge-nudge-wink-wink fun with kids or quick pick-me-ups on TV or Home Video. But spending a...
06 May 2010
There are two very worst ways to arrive at The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The first is starting the journey by thinking it to be another English Butler story. Coloured by Reginald Jeeves, Nestor, or Cadbury - one would expect stiff-upper-lip-hilarity at every turn of the page. The second is reading it because it has won the Booker and its film has won an Academy Award. One would...
22 February 2010
Holding a prism to the twilight sky
As united as the art critics were in lambasting Bikash Bhattacharjee's work in his early days, in his later years they were as divided in interpreting his work. Because, it's a common ailment of the common art critic not to rest in peace till he has categorized an artist and put him in a pigeonhole, neatly labeled and cross-referenced. And Bikash Bhattacharjee...
15 February 2010
On September 11 1999, when the first reports of the attack on the World Trade Centre started pouring in, it seemed too unreal to be true. After the dust settled, the media started rifling through the bookshelves of contemporary extreme fiction to find parallels. It turned out, none of their nightmarish plotlines could come close to the devastating current affairs. It was not the first time fact...
10 February 2010
Midnight at noon
The most fascinating part of Bikash Bhattacharjee's journey to the light was that he did not rush towards it like a moth, but became the flame instead. In the early sixties, while Abstract Expressionism spread faster than Jackson Pollock's paint splatters across the world, Calcutta was no island. Added with the dismal condition of art market in Calcutta mostly due to the...
01 February 2010
What do you expect of a child who has lost his father at the age of six and left to grow up lonely and neglected? For starters, you can expect growing bitterness and disillusionment. What do you expect of a young boy whose childhood is spent in a decaying neighbourhood, chequered with poverty and stagnation? The last thing you expect of him is to pick up a paintbrush to get himself heard.
When...
22 October 2009
Left write, Right left?
When it comes to a child's education, literacy is and will be defined as the ability to write legibly and meaningfully to express thoughts. Art literacy is considered dispensable and looked upon more as a play than learning. But what if they learn more during playing than during learning, and to make the pitch irresistible, learning to paint actually can help learning to...
01 October 2009
A gallery of alphabets
If writing was primarily painting to begin with, then what do you call paintings that are made up of writing? I would prefer calling them 'history comes full circle', but they are more commonly known as text art. They can be as nerdy as ASCII art (static or animated art created with the characters of a computer keyboard) or as exotic as giant letter installations in your...
28 September 2009
Calliope, the muse of writing and Clio, the muse of painting, were undeniably sisters. Greek mythology bears conclusive evidence of them being daughters of Zeus, the Thunder God and and Mnemosyne, the Goddess of memory. There has been no evidence of them fighting bitterly with each other. These evidences are of course as conclusive as mythological evidences come. But do writing and painting, as...
07 September 2009
It's a fearsome task for authors to make readers feel afraid these days. They all seem to have been there, screamed at all that. Haunted houses are passe. Even murderous cellphones, toothy vaginas, mail order cannibals and happiness sucking insects have to pull out all stops to scare the readers. But what if the author doesn't try so hard to scare us at all? What if instead he tries to make us...
10 July 2009
Before you sit down to watch Garden State, the operative word in your mind is Zach Braff or rather Dr. John 'J. D.' Dorian from the popular TV dramedy Scrubs. You almost expect to see his lovably bumbling, foot-deep-in-the-mouth, incurably romantic small screen avatar reiterate itself on the big screen. After all, it's a film written and directed by him and Scrubs is where he has first proven his...
16 May 2009
You can really wreak havoc if you lock up a writer, a lexicographer and a chemist in a room and make them share a desk. The lexicographer will successfully cripple the writer’s flow of prose by pointing out his split infinitives and ridiculing his mixed metaphors. The writer will definitely mess up the lexicographer’s carefully cross-referenced material by scattering it around. And the chemist...
16 April 2009
Anger gets a lot done, they say. The impotent, helpless kind, especially. When it reaches its threshold, it is supposed to overthrow the status quo, burn the corruption to a crisp and roll out a fiery red carpet for all that is just and sane. But one cannot depend on supposed to’s as much as the olden days. These days, helpless rage is just sound and fury signifying nothing. At its worst, it...
23 March 2009
Empathy, according to the dictionary, is the identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives. It is neither a common occurrence in life nor in films. Definitely much rarer than apathy. The emotion or the lack of it that make us look the other way most of the times. That is why your heart both shrinks in shame and swells up in warmth to see it in such abundance...
09 March 2009
I was little apprehensive about watching 'The Class' at first, despite of its Palme D'Or win and Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Film category. It focuses on the familiar grounds of teacher student relationships on which by now, hundreds of movies and tens of great movies have been made. But here’s my bit of advice – don’t close your eyes to this one, timeworn as its subject may sound. And...
- 1 of 2
- ››