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Third Eye 14th Asian Film Festival, 2015, I: Mixed fare, few takers 4a5o4q
Third Eye 14th Asian Film Festival, 2015, I: Mixed fare, few takers It came at the fag end of the year, a week of holidays and unwinding. Prabhat Chitra Mandal, the organising film society, has a large member-base, and has held the festival at bigger and multiple screen venues in the past. Financial constraints, easy availability of films on alternative platforms and the plethora of film festivals that are held these days in Mumbai and elsewhere mean diminishing audiences. So,...
Point Break, Review: Death-defying spectacle and spectacular deaths 4q613h
Point Break, Review: Death-defying spectacle and spectacular deaths Point break: Noun. In surfing, a type of long-lasting wave, found off a coast with a headland or point. Example: A point break is formed when a swell moves around the land, almost at a right angle to the beach, and a break, which begins near the point, gradually progresses along the wave. A young Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) watches helplessly as his extreme sports partner Jeff (Max Thieriot) falls to his death from a mou...
Monster Hunt, Review: Happy hunting 1x5w2x
Monster Hunt, Review: Happy hunting A project that took 10 years to make it to the screen, Monster Hunt rewards you with a good catch of lovable anthromorphic characters and oodles of humour, with numerous subtle messages of inclusion, anti-stereo-typing and tolerance, interwoven into rich tapestry. In medieval China, monsters ruled the land. Then humans fought an all-out war against them, in an attempt to seize the land. They outwitted the monsters and succeeded in driving them into the dar...
Sadhana, Indian star turned recluse, es away at 74 1z3k40
Sadhana, Indian star turned recluse, es away at 74 Sadhana Shivdasani, known by her first name/screen name, succumbed to cancer on Christmas day in Mumbai. Born in Karachi in 1941, British India, Sadhana was named after her father's favorite, actress-dancer Sadhana Bose. Her father was the brother of actor Hari Shivdasani, father of actress Babita. The family fled from Karachi during the post-Partition riots and settled in Mumbai. ...
Star Wars, Episode 7-The Force Awakens, Review: But is still drowsy 2u35j
Twice during the Mumbai première screening, entries were greeted with whistles—once when Harrison Ford (Han Solo) entered his spaceship, right of frame to left, accompanied by Chewbacca, and the second time when R2-D2 was shown in the right corner, with C-3PO leading us to him. The audience included Indian superstar-director-producer Aamir Khan and his director wife, Kiran Rao, though it is impossible to ascertain whether the applauders included this couple. Both the applauded ch...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, XI: PornograIFFI 5d1914
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, XI: PornograIFFI Highly erotic content is not unusual at IFFI, or, for that matter, any international film festival. But pornography? That’s not so common. Many years ago, there was a film based on the life of a porn-star, with several close-ups of her inspecting the sexual organs of the men she was to choose from, based on the appearance of their manhood, who would be paired with her in the scenes to be shot. More recently, we had Lars von Trier’s m...
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, V 4r6p1p
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, V Long festivals and so many films to watch, besides the regular weekly releases to see and review—not unexpectedly, festival diaries go into several parts, and even get interrupted by another festival that follows on the heels of the earlier one. MFF17 was followed by IFFI. But there still so much to day about MFF, so here’s one more instalment of the Diary. Thithi is a two-hour long Kannada film set in rural Karnataka. It has earned rave rev...
Peanuts, Review: Dog and underdog 153ef
Peanuts, Review: Dog and underdog Undeniably, there is a large section of American comic-strip fans who are nuts about peanuts. There is a small section of Indians who feel the same, and have followed the exploits and ‘profound’ philosophy of good ol’ Charlie Brown and his dog Snoopy, for decades. Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip, Peanuts, first appeared in newspapers in 1950. Recently, there have been Bill Melendez-directed animated projects featuring Charlie Brown, c...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, X: NFDC and Incredible India’s Film Bazaar 5w2tf
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, X NFDC and Incredible India’s Film Bazaar This year, the Bazaar saw participation of more than 1,100 delegates, from over 38 countries. Approximately 157 new South Asian films were shown in the viewing room, and 37 participants from 5 different countries were in the producers' lab. 19 projects were selected in the co-production market and 18 scripts in the three screenwriters' labs. Encouraging figures. A newspaper report, on 26 November 2015 rea...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, IX: Advance to the rear 3k6d1g
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, IX: Advance to the rear ...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, VIII: Did the best ones win? 254xm
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, VIII: Did the best ones win? Without any doubt, my favourite for Best Picture was Embrace of the Serpent (Colombia) directed by Ciro Guerra. The Jury, too, found the black and white film about the Amazon, its rape by greedy foreigners and the destruction of the mythical but pristine lives of its native inhabitants “mind-blowing”, which is reason for feeling vindicated. This is the eighth or ninth time, out of eleven IFFIs at Goa, that my pick for the...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, VII 645e1k
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, VII This is being written the day before the closing ceremony, where the winners will be announced. I have missed Filosofi Kopi (Philosophy Coffee, Indonesia), Labyrinth of Lies () and Journey to the Shore (Japan/). Moreover, one competition film has yet to be screened, so my front-runner list may face an upset. But then, the upset can come anyway, if the jury’s opinions differ from mine. So, these are the films I have seen, and my favourites...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary VI k614y
Continuing short reviews of films, seen at the 46th International Film Festival of India. (See Festival Diary I, II, III, IV and V for more coverage) Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara: India: Zoya Akhtar Dude, this was released in 2011! So how come you are writing about it now? Simple. I saw it NOW! Daughter of a writer-poet father, one of India’s best-known, and an actress who was famous as a child star, Zoya is perhaps not as famous as her brother Farhan, who is an actor-director-producer-wr...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary V 483o6e
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary V Continuing short reviews of films, seen at the 46th International Film Festival of India. (See Festival Diary I, II, II and IV for more coverage) Father (Babai): /Kosovo/Republic of Macedonia: Visar Morina Leaving the narrative open and blending real-time and flash-forward cost the otherwise praiseworthy film the wider appreciation it deserved. Just one seamless insertion had many viewers wondering what happened. Was it all a dream? Or was just that s...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, III r465a
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, III Diary pages have got juggled, inadvertently, so, though numbered III, this page should have been IV. Please excuse the oversight and treat this as IV. Although posted earlier, IV is actually III. Austerity is the name of the game, mismanagement is the characteristic and continuing hostility towards media, and, in some cases, delegates too, are factors that dominate IFFI Goa 2015. A circus called the Film Bazaar, organised by the National Film Development Co...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, IV d6g5s
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, IV IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, IV At IFFI, the grand prizes are called the Golden Peacock and Silver Peacock, although India’s national bird is far from either golden or silver in colour, and the décor at the venue this year is derived from various shades of blue, including violet and purple. A total of 15 films have been short-listed in the International Competition Section, two of them India, both from the Eastern state of West Bengal....
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, II 1v41h
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, II To be held from November 20th to 30 2015 in Panaji, Goa, Goa, the 46th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) will showcase movies across several sections, including World Cinema, Indian Panorama, Country Focus, International Competition, Retrospectives, Tributes, First Cut, Workshops, Master Classes, and more. IFFI is organised by the Directorate of Film Festivals, Information and Broadcasting Ministry, Government of India, in association with the...
IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, I r4k64
It began, like Ameen Sayani’s legendary film music popularity countdown show, Binaca Geetmala, in 1952, a few months after I was born. The first International Film Festival of India (IFFI) was held in 1952, in Bombay, which was at that time, a state in itself. It was a non-competitive festival and ran for a fortnight. Twenty three countries, including host India, participated, along with the United Nations Organisation. 52 feature films and 115 documentaries, scientific films, cartoons, ...
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, IV 4lc
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, IV At film festivals, the experience of watching films is like no other. You have many choices, depending on the venue, and the option of walking out of one ‘bad’ film into another unknown entity, just next door, trying pot-luck. Advance booking, the norm at MFF, means that you might never ever succeed in getting a ticket, given that the number of delegates and media-persons always far outweighs the number of seats available, often by 3:1 or 4:...
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, III 5p5a2a
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, III For me, MFF 17 began on 31st October, with Star India’s Movie Mela (Fair), India's first movie carnival, where, over the whole day, a reported two thousand movie fans and celebrities tuned-up. The event was open to all delegates and was held at Mehboob Studios, in Bandra, founded by one India’s greatest ever film-makers, Mehboob Khan. It was kicked off with a session by director Rajkumar Hirani (Munnabhai, 3 Idiots, PK) and his writer,...
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, II b4qg
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, part I MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, II Kiran Rao and Anupama Chandra Come 28 October, and we learnt that the inauguration of Jio MAMI 17th Mumbai Film Festival would be held on 29th October in open-air at Mumbai’s most famous landmark, the Gateway of India. It was also learnt that the inaugural fi...
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, I r5f3l
MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, I (Coming up: Part II) It began in 1997, as the International Film Festival of Mumbai (IFFM). Som...
Main Aur Charles, Review: Misanthropic biopic 2sn6y
Main Aur Charles, Review: Misanthropic biopic In the biography, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, by Richard Neville and Julie Clark, the serial killer’s mother summed him up. “He has the face of an angel, but somewhere, I think the devil crept into his soul,” she said. Main Aur Charles is the heavily edited, partly fictionalised but deeply rooted biopic about one of the most enigmatic criminal masterminds in 20th century history, wanted in India, Thailand, , Gre...
Goosebumps, Review: BlackJack Stine and the ‘loose’ characters 206t2l
Goosebumps, Review: BlackJack Stine and the ‘loose’ characters It’s enough to give you goosebumps: over 400 million Goosebumps books have been sold worldwide, in 32 languages, with author R.L. Stine recognised as one of the highest rated, bestselling, children’s authors in history. Goosebumps had its TV adaptation running from 1995 to 1998. Now, here comes the movie, with so much material that the makers were spoilt for choice. A clever technique is used to get past th...
Hotel Transylvania 2, Review: Vampa ire 436069
Hotel Transylvania 2, Review: Vampa ire When you want to turn horror into comedy, what better ploy than to make them animated/CGI characters? Add 3D to that, and the spell is cast. Only problem is, the funnier it gets, the less scary it remains, and vice versa. Like the ers-by in Hotel Transylvania 2, who are far from scared at the past-their-prime monster brigade’s pathetic attempts at instilling fear in them, the audience might find the proceedings short of being very scary or too...
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About Siraj Syed 2623p
 Syed Siraj
(Siraj Associates)
Siraj Syed is a film-critic since 1970 and a Former President of the Freelance Film Journalists' Combine of India. i601g
He is the India Correspondent of FilmFestivals.com and a member of FIPRESCI, the international Federation of Film Critics, Munich, x224u
Siraj Syed has contributed over 1,015 articles on cinema, international film festivals, conventions, exhibitions, etc., most recently, at IFFI (Goa), MIFF (Mumbai), MFF/MAMI (Mumbai) and CommunicAsia (Singapore). He often edits film festival daily bulletins. 6u5xn
He is also an actor and a dubbing artiste. Further, he has been teaching media, acting and dubbing at over 30 institutes in India and Singapore, since 1984. c205a
Bandra West, Mumbai
Send me a message
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