Category Archives: Movies

Movies, Opinion

How the film Vertigo set a dizzying bar exactly 60 years ago

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By Sushmita Bose

I’ve often wondered why Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo — that completes its 60th anniversary in a few days (May 9, 1958, was when the film released) was never remade. I’ve always put it down to being too much of a tough act to follow. It’s perhaps Hitchcock’s most complex, nuanced film — yes, even more, much more than Psycho — and definitely his most “sensory” one, and that’s not just because of the vertigo factor. Continue reading How the film Vertigo set a dizzying bar exactly 60 years ago →

Movies

Why we need to break out of a comfort zone called Disney

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By Maán Jalal

Many of us grew up watching Disney animated films. Those classic tales, many of which are based on Grimm’s Fairy Tales or other European folk stories, first established the standard of what to except from a “good” animated film. Disney also became synonymous with innovation, advancing the medium from hand-drawn animation to the computer-generated films we see today. These days, it’s almost unheard of to see an animated movie that is completely hand drawn. No matter how beloved the Disney animated films of the ’90s and even early 2000s were, they are now seen as old-fashioned.

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Books, Movies

How to write an unauthorised biography of a film star

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By Anamika Chatterjee

It is anything but easy to tell the ‘untold story’ of a Bollywood star. Yasser Usman should know. A senior film journalist, he has recently penned an unauthorised biography of Sanjay Dutt, titled The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood’s Bad Boy (published by Juggernaut) after penning the life sketches of veteran actors Rajesh Khanna and Rekha. The actor, however, seems less than impressed. Recently, he issued a statement saying, among other things, that the book was “partly based on my old interviews but rest all seemed to be based on hearsay, 1990s tabloids and gossip magazines”. In a conversation with Khaleej Times, Usman stands by the “extensive research” that informs his book and, of course, why Sanjay Dutt makes for a fascinating subject!

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