An Introduction

"Why a dedicated blog on movie reviews", you might ask? "Who do you think you are, Raja Sen"?

For starters, unknown to many, I am a complete movie buff. I enjoy watching movies - any kind, any language, any genre. I watch them in greater detail than is possible for most human beings - down to remembering exact dialogue sequences in an entire scene, or what a certain character was attired in and how relevant it is to the scene at hand. Movie music imbibes itself in my brain, so much that years later a small portion of the main piece can make me recall what movie (and what scene) this music was from. This causes endless snubbing in the hands of my wife, as I reportedly don't enjoy even a fraction of my celluloid recall capabilities in real life!

I have long maintained that good cinema is not about a singular aspect. It is not about acting, direction, technique, cinematography or editing. There may be exceptions to this rule, like The Dirty Picture, where Vidya Balan's brilliant acting rescues an obvious plot and ordinary direction. But essentially good cinema is a combination of all things.

Sometimes, all these tangible elements come together to create something intangible, something that can be called just - magic. That's when good cinema becomes great cinema. Difficult to define magic, but easy to give examples. Take the scene in Casablanca, where Ingrid Bergman comes to Humphrey Bogart to plead for her husband's life. She has betrayed him in love earlier, and it’s not easy to seek sympathy from a scorned lover. She cries, pleads for her husband's life, while the usually reserved Humphrey Bogart blazes on all guns and demands to know why she betrayed him. As the camera pans on to her beautiful face, tears on her cheek, bathed in moonlight streaming through the window, it creates a sort of cinematic magic the attentive viewer immerses himself in.

Or take the scene in Slumdog Millionaire - a much criticized film - where the slum children play cricket on the airfield and the guards shoo them off. They run through the dirty bylanes of Dharavi, being chased by the guards. All the time the camera shoots from the top. The clothes hung out to dry in the open, along with the polythene sheets that form the roofing of many shanties, create a cheerful ambience that brings a sense of colour and joyousness to the dreary slums.

The third "must mention" is the scene in Kurosawa's Kagemusha, where the beggar - who has been asked to play the king - discovers himself in the King's bedroom. The viewer enjoys the confusion on his face as he gets intimidated by the scale and grandeur of things, notably the bed. After loitering around for some time, he tries his best to make himself invisible. He huddles up into a corner of the room and goes to sleep on the floor. Again, superb acting, direction and photography blend into a magical scene which you want to rewind and watch again and again.

What should you expect from this blog? For one, I'm not a professional movie critic, no one invites me to premieres. Many great movies have lived their theater life and receded into video discs available over the counter at a discount store, before I've had the time or inclination to see them. So don't come looking for reviews of the latest and greatest.

What I do plan to write, is in-depth reviews of movies that have TOUCHED me, compelled me to watch them again and again, and then pick up the pen (ok ok, the keyboard) and write why they touched me. So the only reason I want you to be here, is to find unbiased, critical, objective analyses of movies. Trust me, anything that gets above 7 stars in my 10 point scale is worth a watch!

And now that you know I'm not a very humble man, lets share another personal opinion. Raja Sen, I think, is a biased and not so smart movie critic :-).