Ticket to Paradise, Review: Destination rom-com that loses track of both the rom and the com When you have actors of the calibre of Julia Roberts and George Clooney on board, you can pretty much get them to do anything. And when you ask them to deliver motor-mouth dialogue, full of love-hate content, it becomes a long spat that is occasionally funny but, at times, unfortunately, predictable. Pretty Woman Julia and Batman (1997) George have a ball, as do the co-actors, for most of the action i...

Love Hostel, Review: Khaps, cops, corpses, more corpses and still more corpses It’s not about a hostel. But it is about love. And the price that has to be paid for falling in love with someone who follows another religion. Killings spread through the film like a pandemic caused by a particularly deadly virus strain, ‘LH Covid 22’. The makers could run a contest with the big question: How many people are killed in the film? The prize could be four tickets for the film, so tha...

Prithvi Festival 2019: Bone of Contention is a motor-mouth hysterical farce, as the crow flies A comedy is what you would automatically expect from a theatre group that calls itself FATS theARTS, and a comedy it is. A farce to be precise. A nod to Molière, the full name of the play seen on 09 November at Prithvi Theatre was Bone of Contention in Cosmopolitan Co-Operative Housing Society. That’s quite a mouthful, and every character in the play had a mouthful to offer, over the 90...

Where else in the world is black beautiful, baffling and brings together East and West? In South Trinidad at the Siparia Roman Catholic Church in that “city of sand”, a black female statue venerated by Catholics as the Virgin Mary and worshipped by Hindus as a black Hindu Goddess does just that! To Catholics who follow her in street processions, the statue is known as “La Divina Pastora”, the Divine Shepherdess - to Hindus who charawe her by touching her arms and feet, sh...

Mirza Juuliet, Review by Siraj Syed: ‘Sex peer’ or Shakespeare Six timeless tales of doomed love continue to enjoy tremendous popularity in India, even in the 21st century: Laila-Majnu, Shirin-Farhad, Sohni-Mahiwal, Heer-Ranjha, Mirza-Sahibaa and Romeo and Juliet. Of these, five are Indian or from the sub-continent and only Shakespeare’s R&J makes it from the foreign category. India had its own Shakespeare, named Agha Hashr Kashmiri, who in the period 1920s-50s, transla...

Bangistan, Review: Citizen Wong Kar-Wai meets Raging Bull at FcDonald’s If references, allusions and name-dropping could make a film watchable, Bangistan would have arrived with a bang. Sadly for debutant director Karan Anshuman, that récipé fails to tickle the taste-buds, and the film turns out be a dish that is half un-cooked and half over-cooked. Why he chose to use crutches like parodying the title of Orson Welles’ all-time masterpiece, Citizen Kane, poking fun a...