Amitabh Bachchan
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Bollywood Flashback 2# – The cut-price aesthetics of Hum / We (Dir. Mukul Anand, 1991, India)
Hum is outrageous, outlandish but also borderline brilliant in the hyper-stylised aesthetics of Mukul Anand who really knew how to frame a shot. Set on the docks of a crime infested Bombay ruled over by Danny’s ‘Bhaktawar’, the industrial-slum-proletariat milieu with overexposed lighting, audacious dolly shots and quasi-documentary inserts makes for a bravura genre spectacle. Continue reading
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Bollywood Flashback 1# – The cut-price vigilantism of SHAHENSHAH / King of Kings (Dir. Tinnu Anand, 1988, India)
Shahenshah thrives in the darkness, a nocturnal vigilante who stalks the crime infested city streets with a vicious outrage that is manifested through acts of cathartic violence. He is a cultural composite, an uncanny bricolage that absorbs and radiates a surfeit of cultural markers including DC’s The Punisher, Michael Jackson, RoboCop, and of course self Continue reading
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PIKU (Dir. Shoojit Sircar, 2015, India)
What would Satyajit Ray have made of Piku? There was a sundry of questions running through my head as I left the cinema. There is no doubt he would have agreed that the central female protagonist of Piku (Deepika Padukone) educes the classical Ray woman: progressive, perceptive and selfless. Some critics have commented that Piku’s Continue reading
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ALAAP (Dir. Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1977, India)
Alaap was released in 1977 when Amitabh Bachchan’s stardom was at its peak. It has often been said that the films he made with Hrishikesh Mukherjee saw a more restrained side to Amitabh. In the film Alok (Amitabh Bachchan) wants to become a classically trained singer but Prasad (Om Prakash) his orthodox father regards the Continue reading
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ZANJEER / THE CHAIN (Dir. Prakash Mehra, 1973, India) – Angry Young Men
The angry young man phenomenon that emerged out of the tentative screenplays of writers Salim-Javed (Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar) in the 1970s was in part shaped by the Indian Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi that lasted between 75 and 77 yet predominately the origins of Amitabh Bachchan’s often Continue reading
Movie Mahal 