Aaranya Kaandam

  Just some quick thoughts based on seeing the film Aaranya Kaandam at last year’s SAIFF.  Am going back tonight for a second viewing now that the film is out today. What has stuck with me since that night seven months ago is this: I recall a gritty, stylish, violent and often funny story of […]

Bitten by the Tamil movie bug

This originally ran in Firstpost on June 1. I’ve been obsessed with Indian film for some 14 years now and since I’ve started writing about those movies and the people who make them, I try to get to Mumbai and Chennai every year, to stay in touch. Yes, Chennai too, because only a few years […]

Gabriel Byrne, Jim Sheridan, Enda Walsh

Just a few pix from yesterday’s post-film Q&As of Gabriel Byrne with director and writer Jim Sheridan (after a screening of their In the Name of the Father) and afterward, with writer Enda Walsh (after a screening of Hunger, for which he wrote the screenplay).  This is all part of the film festival at MoMA […]

Irish film festival opens at MoMA

  Starting tonight and continuing through June 3rd, the Museum of Modern Art here in aamchi NY is launching Revisiting The Quiet Man: Ireland on Film, a festival curated by Ireland’s cultural ambassador and fellow New Yorker Gabriel Byrne, with the intention of examining how Irish identity has been presented on film.  (If you caught […]

Pete Hamill Reading Tabloid City

Pete Hamill ventured out from his beloved downtown Manhattan earlier this week, crossing the Hudson, on to the wilds of New Jersey to read from his latest novel, Tabloid City, at Bookends in Ridgewood.   (On the way there, somewhere around Secaucus I passed a wall that said “Osama/Obama – one down, one to go” which really took me […]

Farewell Outsourced

So the email-writing campaign did not achieve its objective and NBC has cancelled Outsourced, which was sad news to wake up to on a Saturday morning.  I watched every episode of the season and am sorry to see it go.  Ok, the writing may have been a bit uneven at times, but I chalked that […]