ChinmayC Blog

Many years back I wrote a piece titled 'Populated Movies' that was later included in my first book ' Laugh and Let Laugh ' in 2017. In that piece I argued that since India is an overpopulated country with high unemployment rates the creative art forms do adjust to that reality by trying to generate maximum employment opportunities in their projects. For example the goons in a mainstream Hindi movie: whereas just one bullet through the head by one villain is enough to kill the hero or the protagonist, the chief antagonist or the main villain sends an army of goons armed with an assortment of weapons for the job. I argued that this is done with a view to generate more employment. But I was mistaken, and so I just want to admit this here.  My argument got almost fatally shot after I watched all the three movies of the 'John Wick Franchise' (2014 onward). I failed to keep count, but hundreds of hapless goons got killed in each of the movies at the hands of the '...

Based on my lifelong experience as a rather discerning and somewhat fastidious movie buff I beg to offer here a few of my rather bovine (no necessarily offending anyone) observations about movie watching. You may or may not agree with these which is quite natural, movie watching being kinda of subjective entertainment. You can also choose the near-absent option of putting your views too here in a way to enrich or annihilate my observations. My observations here dwell on characteristics that adversely affect the viewing pleasure which are more important, because the absence of those acts on the positive side. Ø   In quite a few movies I fervently expect something to happen at some point of the narration, and if that takes too long a time or doesn’t happen at all I get impatient and immediately try confirming again the genre of the film. Most often, I find Suspense as the one. Well, heady kind of suspense that! This phenomenon mostly happens in Hollywood productions where the filmma...

In all my Bollywood , read Hindi movies , viewing experience this should be the first movie with a serious attempt to deal with an air disaster or a possible air disaster, a genre that the commercial Hindi films never really tried to explore barring a few on plane hijack, most prominently the intense drama of Neerja (2016) based on a real-life brave air hostess. The movie Runway 34 , also loosely based on true incidents and released on the occasion of Eid in April-end this year, tells the story of a flight from Dubai to Cochin that entered the vortex of a raging cyclone nearly crash-landing in the Trivandrum airport with 150 passengers on board, and then followed by the grueling investigation into the near-crash. The first half of the film dwells entirely on the flight starting at the wee hours from Dubai and is a gripping saga of what happened on its course from the takeoff onward, told with the required details and intensity that are always missing in most commercial Bollywood m...

The law enforcers, the police and other related agencies, wield immense power to utilize it for the protection and the betterment of the common people if they want to do so. But unfortunately, such powers are more often misused and so, we keep on hearing stories about police corruption from the petty level of taking bribes on any pretext to the highest level of politician-criminal-underworld nexus. This is a global phenomenon, not just limited to more prone countries like India. Such is the impact of police corruption in society that thousands of fictions in terms of thrillers written or movies or television series have been made all over the world since decades. In most commercial films in India, we see police personnel portrayed as horrendously brazen and sadistic characters. In the US and the West through the franchises of James Bond , Mission Impossible and The Bourne Identity among others we invariably confront a traitorous bad cop within the system. I cannot possibly mention v...

Thanks perhaps to the conditional benevolence of the OTT streaming platforms some filmmakers, ostensibly under the pretense of being serious creators, get the rare opportunity to indulge in their experiments or otherwise while always managing to rope in talented actors to create a pre-release hype about their ‘darkly serious dram/thriller’ movies. They always prefer to choose female-centric themes or stories with female protagonists/antagonists, and most of them deliver their favorite ‘emancipation of women’ templates by making the ‘swear-word liberalism’ gender-neutral. They get the much-needed support too from similar or like-minded souls of the mainstream media who praise the movies to the heavens. Fortunately, the Amazon original movie ‘ Jalsa ’ that released on Prime Video on 18 th March, 2022, is totally free of that ‘liberalism’ while still sticking to the female-centric theme with three major roles of women protagonists/antagonists in the movie given to the immensely talente...

For the first time I have had the pleasure of watching a movie that strives to capture the pandemic or lockdown-era hassles and problems. Filmmakers the world over in a film industry that has taken the pandemic hit most painfully, wouldn’t like their heroes or heroines masked-up after trying hard to realize the movie at last. However, in this Hitchcockian a thriller titled Kimi that was released by HBO MAX on 10 th February and now streaming on Amazon Prime Video too, we find the female protagonist masked up in the most crucial scenes outside of her home in Seattle . The movie is directed, edited and photographed by Steven Soderbergh , a renowned filmmaker of Hollywood who, at 26 years of age, became the youngest director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival for his debut film Sex, Lies and Video Tapes (1989) and the film was both a commercial success and critically acclaimed; he earned the Oscar for Best Director for Traffic (2000); and then created the immensely popula...

The Amazon original Hindi movie Gheraiyaan (Depths) that premiered on Prime Video on 11 th February 2022, is set to give tough competition to quite a number of Hollywood movies in terms of the use of swear words, live-in relationships, passionate love scenes, endless rounds of drinks, brats independent of their families and so on; if not for the promotion of luxury yachts and the tourist spot of Alibaug with its beaches and bungalows near Mumbai. The movie features one of the top heroines of Bollywood Deepika Padukone in the lead role of the protagonist (Ayesha), not exactly that perhaps in hindsight, and other accomplished actors like Siddhant Chaturvedi (Zain), Ananya Panday (Tia), Dhairya Karwa (Karan), Naseeruddin Shah and Rajat Kapoor . It is cowritten and directed by Shakun Batra . The movie is produced jointly by Bollywood tycoon Karan Johar ’s Dharma productions , Viacom18 studios and Jouska Films . The shooting schedule and release of the movie had been delayed by th...

It just happened that I watched two movies from Hollywood and Bollywood respectively, back-to-back, and was amazed to find both movies singing paeans in praise of the antiheros, depicting their deeds in an unabashedly graphic way and even justifying it by highlighting a few ‘humanitarian’ qualities in their characters. Both movies are nearly 3-hour long, and yet not having a dull moment; both are marked by their relative reliance on machismo, black comedy and violence. The first movie, ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (2013) directed by renowned new-era Hollywood filmmaker Martin Scorsese, I happened to watch by chance as it was available on Amazon Prime Video and also due to the fact that I greatly enjoyed the director’s two films, ‘The Departed’ (2006) and ‘Shutter Island’ (2010) recently, those two movies being part of Scorsese’s successful collaboration with the ‘Titanic’ (1997) sensation Leonardo DiCaprio which yielded four critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies so far. ...

  The third installment of the much-celebrated ‘The Conjuring series’ and the eighth film of the Conjuring Universe Horror Franchise— The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It —was made ready for release in September 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed it till June 2021 when it was released in the US and on HBO Max simultaneously. Unfortunately, it could not be released in the Indian theatres again thanks to the pandemic. Since the HBO Max show-term was very short the Indian fans of the franchise have been wondering where to watch the movie, the way they were thrilled and intrigued by the haunted-house stories of The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring-2 (2016) with the adored real-life pair of paranormal investigators Ed Warren and Lorraine Warren, played brilliantly by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in all of the flicks of the trilogy and in one of the Conjuring Universe franchise movies. Finally. Amazon Prime Video started streaming this movie from the 15 th of December 20...