Observations and Reflections
What’s with these boring war films in the past few weeks? Following in the footsteps of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is Meghna Gulzar’s Sam Bahadur. Despite being a film about one of the most prolific military leaders in India’s recent history, the movie fails to feature even a single well-structured battle, let alone the war that defined the future of the entire Indian subcontinent.
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Midway through the tumultuous Battle of Waterloo, my patience for Napoleon’s portrayal grows wearisome. How is it possible to transform the narrative of one of history’s most brilliant minds into a dreary and lackluster cinematic experience? Ask Ridley Scott.
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This profile was written as a part of a graded assignment for a Fashion Journalism course conducted by Ms. Sathya Saran.
“Recall the face of the poorest you have ever seen – and ask yourself if your contemplating will be of any use to them.” For Rahul Mishra, these famous words by Mahatma Gandhi have become his guiding light. Born in a small village in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, Mishra’s name entered the hall of fame alongside the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent when he won the prestigious International Woolmark Prize at the Milan Fashion Week with his collection The Lotus Effect.
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“One of my only memories of my home in Lyallpur (modern-day Pakistan)”, my Nani said while showing me her old Phulkari Dupatta.
The earliest reference to Phulkari in Punjabi literature can be dated back to the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the 18th century, in Waris Shah’s “Heer Ranjha”, which describes Heer’s wedding trousseau, detailing the different clothing items. One of those was Phulkari. Grandmothers and mothers would start making a dupatta for a daughter as soon as she was born, since the birth of a daughter was considered to be auspicious in olden Punjab.
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This interview was written as a part of a graded assignment for a Fashion Journalism course conducted by Ms. Sathya Saran.
Richard Williams is a man of gravitas. That is the thought that first comes to my mind as he sits down opposite me. Over the years, he has developed a slight stoop, but his larger than life persona and lisp has stayed with him.
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One of the most celebrated documentary makers of all time, Bert Haanstra relies heavily on the use of music and montage to elevate his visual storytelling. Through a harmonious marriage of these cinematic techniques, “Zoo” transcends the boundaries of traditional documentary filmmaking, transforming a simple zoo into a stage for a captivating and multifaceted symphony of life.
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A spiritual successor to 2018’s Veere di Wedding, I expected Thank You for Coming to have the same issues – crass humour with an attempt at being audacious about women’s sexuality but being too scared to actually dip its toes in that water. Surprisingly, Thank You for Coming manages to be terrible in a completely different way.
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I wanted to like Barbie, I really did. But to no one’s surprise, a film funded by a corporation that has made most of its money through ‘sexualised capitalism’ can’t really be expected to critique the very structures that allow it to exist.
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Park Chan Wook’s Decision to Leave is a study in restraint. At a first glance, it is unlike most of the directors’ body of work, dwelling more on the peaceful ordinary than the violence and gore many have come to associate with Park’s cinema. But Decision to Leave emerges as his best directorial endeavour to date – flourishing because of the very thing that sets it apart – the mundane.
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is one of the few movies that started the trend of Metamodernism in cinema. Vox even made a video talking about how the movie forced animation to evolve beyond mere hyperrealism – by using animation to create what the camera cannot capture, instead of simply replicating a lens’ vision. Yet even a recent rewatch of that genre-defining film could not prepare me for the sheer audacity of its sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
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