Home Products: the filmi connection

Having temporarily rebelled against the required reading for certain pieces  to come, I’ve been devouring Amitava Kumar’s  2007 novel Home Products.      The protagonist is a writer from Bihar (hey, wait a minute…) who comes to Bombay and works as a film journalist, and then gets involved in writing a screenplay.   As if […]

Rajnesh Domalpalli, Friday evening in NYC

  To mark the release of the DVD of his film Vanaja, director Rajnesh Domalpalli will be appearing at an event Friday evening, May 30, at the Borders in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. Domalpalli will discuss four scenes from the film (of his choosing), and audience members will ask about another four […]

Big delays?

  No, friends, not a reference to the hunk in that movie opening on May 30th…. But rather, I’m  wondering what’s the hold-up with the East coast cinemas of the Big chain that Reliance Capital has bought, for the purpose  of  screening Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and other films in areas with large South Asian populations. […]

Vanaja: What’s New on the DVD

  For anyone who doesn’t live in a city where Vanaja was released last year, or who just happened to miss it, the great news is that Emerging Pictures has just released the DVD, with some terrific  additional features. First, there are four short films (each around 10 minutes in length) that the director, Rajnesh […]

Some music for your book, Madame?

Does anyone else do this too?   You’re on the train or bus to work and you’re reading a book, and then you start scrolling through the albums and playlists on your MP3 player, sommelier-like, trying to find the perfect musical accompaniment? For Melanie Abrams’ sometimes very steamy Playing, I chose an amorous  playlist of […]

Before the Rains: opening today

Master cinematographer Santosh Sivan has again put on his director’s hat for Before the Rains, opening today in NY and LA. (Not to be confused with the gorgeous 1994 Macedonian film Before the Rain by Milcho Manchevski.) Here  in Manhattan, we’ve  seen a lot of the director and his cast in the past week or […]