A title card at the end of Paresh Mokashi's Harishchandrachi Factory, India's Oscar submission for 2009 and a centerpiece of the Eighth Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, states the nation's claim to an output of more than 900 films a year. IFFLA is a jewel of a festival, one......
Priyas Gupta’s visually impeccable Siddharth: The Prisoner hitches a disquisition on urban angst to that most moth-eaten of noir conceits, the old “switched bag” trick, as an ex-con novelist’s precious comeback manuscript changes places with an identical briefcase full of mob money. Within minutes, the movie, which screens at the......
Every great film festival is like the fabled elephant being pawed by blind men, each of whom describes it differently. This year’s Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, the seventh since 2002, feels especially elephantine, if not literally (25 short and feature programs over six days), then certainly in its......
One of the most persistent legends about the Chinese martial arts is that their world-famous crowning glory, shaolin kwan (Shaolin temple boxing), was actually invented by a visitor from India. Admittedly, it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the story began to get around that in the mid-500s C.E., during......
It feels like the perfect time to be writing about Bollywood. Hardly a week goes by without some brazen new act of synergy being committed, like the news that DreamWorks SKG is getting bankrolled by the Indian company Reliance-ADA. There are some worrying indications for the future of this rapprochement,......
Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (Click to enlarge) Amal Richie Mehta’s gorgeously realized Amal, a Canadian indie filmed in the teeming streets and elite suites of Delhi, makes perfect sense as the opening-night presentation at the sixth annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA). An impeccably crafted urban......
I’ve long thought that the opera crowd could provide fertile soil for raising Bollywood consciousness in the United States, and of all the current A-list Mumbai directors, Sanjay Leela Bhansali has the most fulsome operatic temperament. There were sequences in his 2002 Devdas that played like long-lost snippets of Verdi,......
India’s commercial Bollywood movie industry is the only foreign cinema that still has a flourishing theatrical presence in the U.S. But like all popular screening circuits, this one categorically excludes certain kinds of material. The Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, which kicks off its fifth season on Tuesday, aims......
{mosimage} The first good sign is Amitabh Bachchan’s real beard. As the eponymous royal bodyguard in writer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Eklavya: The Royal Guard, a battered human relic whose ancestors have protected the same family of Rajisthani kings (or Ranas) for nine generations, the most popular movie actor in the......
It’s a safe bet that most of the people who snickered through the screening I attended of Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower had never seen a grand opera performance. Even that frame of reference might not have been enough to make them love the movie: All told, Zhang’s......
