HAPPY JOURNEY: Love Goes for a Spin!

 

Happy Journey is one of those little gems whose scenes one likes to allow our imagination to revisit again and again... A haunting tale whose value slowly permeates the viewer's consciousness for days, weeks or years to come.

Sachin Kundalkar's film in Marathi explores the life of Niranjan (Atul Kulkarni), whose childhood is filled with a constant outpour of innocent and pure love for his newborn little sister Janaki (Priya Bapat). Time goes by and just as he is growing up and discovering the joys of his first teenage romance, Niranjan's sentimentally rich journey is brutally truncated when his parents suddenly send him off to Dubai to earn money for his family. The result is a growing feeling of abandonment that makes Niranjan a hurt and detached young man who gets easily exasperated with his family obligations. It is this angry man who comes back to his hometown when the family is faced with difficult times. Once in India, his charming sister Janaki (Priya Bapat) will take him on a fantastic trip that will ignite an inner discovery.

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Unforgettable RANG DE BASANTI: A Retrospective Review

Forget mainstream Bollywood, forget candy floss, forget boy-chases-girl-chases-boy around trees... As adorable as regular fare from our favorites at Film City may be, 'Rang de Basanti' takes each and every member of the audience on a totally different ride and upon each viewing I say:

YEH CINEMA HAI, baby!

Last week, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's groundbreaking film was screened before its cast and crew in honour of its 5th anniversary (26th January). Several fans of the film across the world also celebrated the occasion by parking the RDB dvd in their drives that week and I am happy to have joined them.. There is a saying that claims "there is no place like home" and that is exactly how I felt as I re-watched one of my all-time favorite films, not only from India, but from around the world. Yes. This is a film I bought several times in order to distribute copies to friends and of course purchased the special edition with a "gem disk" that features Mehra's ultimate commentary. I could never get enough of it!

For those readers who are Hindi cinema newbies and therefore not familiar with what all this justified fuss is about, a brief synopsis follows the trailer below (purple text).

Sue (Alice Patten), a young film maker from London sets to shoot a film about India's freedom fighters based on her grandfather's diary (a British jailor in India during the pre-independence struggle). She hence flies to Delhi and finds whom she believes are the 6 perfect actors for her film. After hesitatingly accepting to participate in it, all 6 youngsters embark on an awakening journey that will shift their view of their country and will make them act upon it together in order to change a corrupt status quo.

ATUL KULKARNI and NATARANG Rule the Roost - Interview & Film Review

Better late than never, the Hindi Cinema Blog has finally managed to watch the unmissable and highly acclaimed 'Natarang', Ravi Jadhav's filmic anthem to a man's passion for art and to standing for what one believes in, based on a novel by Dr. Anand Yadav. A story that has the capability of stirring audiences throughout the world, this is unquestionably one of the best Indian films we have come across this 2010!

'Natarang' is set in the 1970s and is the story of Guna, a village wrestler with a love for Maharashtrian popular theatre (tamasha) who decides to create his own village troupe when he and his friends are suddenly hit by unemployment. Strong and manly, Guna dreams of writing a play in which he will portray a king but things take a different turn as he becomes confronted with the choice of playing a 'nachya' (effeminate character), without which he would have to say goodbye to any possibility of making his artistic dreams come true. The film about his ravaging passion for popular theatre begins as a lighthearted story and progressively evolves towards the dramatic destiny of its main character as the plot thickens. 'Natarang' touches such sensitive subjects as gender roles and expectations in 1970s Maharashtra, the fear ofsurpassing oneself, art politics, family ties and society's prejudices. READ MORE >>