Category — Must Read

The new issue of Wide Screen is now available. Click here to access it.

More than a year after his entry into India (through the India reprint of TSOI), Zizek arrived in India (in flesh and blood) last week to do a lecture series with Navayana publishers and for field work in the IT lands of Bangalore.

A wonderful collection of images showcased by Google in Oscar anticipation. Click here to view.

India has more-or-less embraced Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire even to the extent of appropriating it in many way, but then again, it has got the country it’s first Golden Globe and is the only real hope for an Oscar, something to die-for. There may be a wild backlash at Amitabh Bachchan’s criticism of the film, but there is something to say about an indignation that one can feel when a film like this comes along. [Read more →]

Danny Boyle’s little film, Slumdog Millionaire has made it big. With four Golden Globe wins including major ones like Best Film and Best Director it has become something of an Oscar favourite. A film like this would have encouraged yawns from the Indian masses and at best would have received critical nods and intellectual appraisal at film festivals. But then Rahman went and won a Golden Globe and we went a tad berserk that an Indian received an international award, and dreams for India’s first actual Oscar (Satyajit Ray’s was an honorary one, and Aamir was always a non-starter) have resurfaced at an embarrassing level. [Read more →]

"Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi" brings cheer to exhibitors after six months.

According to the widely-circulated Indian business newspaper Economic Times, the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (Dir: Aditya Chopra) has bailed out the Indian exhibition sector. The last film to have given the sector cheer was the August release of Singh is Kinng (Dir: Anees Bazmee). It is impossible to obtain accurate and reliable data on the Indian exhibition sector, but if we go by reports in the business and economic newspapers we get the picture that all is not well with the industry. Discussions about Hindi cinema post-90s is filled with the buzz word — corporatisation. Let us call it modernisation, given the history of discourse about its “backward” or “not-yet” nature. The Economic Times reports sums up the problem of modernisation well: [Read more →]

The second in the series. First one here

Guardian reports the launch of Fox Star Studios, a Fox Studios venture into Indian cinema (read here). I had predicted changes in structures of ownership (read here), written about the formal subsumption of capital (read here). Majors such as Sony Pictures had already shown the way to do it in Bollywood (read here). [Read more →]

The headlines in western newspapers put it quite succinctly: “Warner set to tackle Mumbai’s Hari Puttar” (CBC);  “Bollywood sued over ‘Hari Puttar’” (news.com.au). The fuss is over what Warner considers as intellectual property transgression of its lucrative Harry Potter franchise.

Hari Puttar vs Harry Potter

[Read more →]

Image Metrics, a California-based animation company has come up with a modelling technology that allows a face to be recognised in its minutest detail and converted to animation.  The technology, unlike earlier motion, capture works “without markers, make-up, specialised stages, or sets“. The results are stunning. For example, watch Emily: [Read more →]