Salaam Cinema

The count down has begun for the Loksabha Polls and the more one watches Sanjay Dutt on the campaign trail for the Samajwadi Party, the more he reminds you of his father, Sunil Dutt. As long as he lived Sunil Dutt was a familiar sight in his trade mark kurta pyjama making rounds of his Bandra constituency. The actor turned politician Sanjay Dutt in his new avatar brings back memories of his father even if he speaks from the opposite camp....

Yesteryear singer Mubarak Begum with a mellifluous voice and trademark style left an indelible mark on her audience, but today she lives in penury in a small by-lane of Mumbai's Western suburbs.

Though widely appreciated in the '50s and the '60s, Mubarak Begum was not a frontrunner in the Hindi mainstream movies because music composers felt that her voice did not suit the trend of formula films of that era...

The story behind the holi festival is as old as our mythologies. When son Prahlad couldn't be destroyed after every attempt of King Hiranyakashapu, Prahlad's aunt and the king's sister Holika blessed to immortality, offered to sit on the pyre with her nephew on her lap. Holika was certain that the flames wouldn't perish her. To everybody's surprise she was reduced to ashes. "I had to take back my blessings," proclaimed the Lord, "Because you misused my powers".

Every time I watch the Oscars I ask myself what is it that they always get it right while we don't. It is not as if our functions back home exhibit any lack of competence. Our basic problem is in the infrastructure. Besides that there are other factors like limited budget but most important, our films cater to a cross-section of language, region and culture. Still we manage to put up an event as glamorous and entertaining as them even though some of us are just a few years old in the business.

Zoya Akhtar's Luck by Chance released last week is an insider's view of showbiz. While other films on the movie world so far have concentrated on the making of a superstar, this one tells you of the heartbreaks of a struggler. In a completely believable screenplay set in Mumbai's filmdom the director unfolds a riveting story of anguish and ambition. It tells you why some people make it and some never do. It is a story about temptation and survival instinct...

Try imagining South superstar Rajnikanth without his famous cigarette stunts...Try imagining old time villains Danny Danzongpa, Shatrughan Sinha and Vinod Khanna without their smoke rings... It's impossible to think of vintage stars like Rehman and Raaj Kumar without their trademark pipes and to think that cigarette smoking was banished from cinema and television....

Aamir Khan's portrayal of a man suffering from anterograde amnesia brought to light the depiction of mental illness in cinema over the years. Khan played the role of a character whose memory span lasted only 15 minutes. While anterograde amnesia victims only forget episodes that have occurred after the cause of the condition (in this case being hit on the head with a lump of metal by the film's villain, Ghajini), Khan's character, Sanjay Singhania, has a total memory loss. He is mercurial - at times violent and on other occasions completely normal....

The idea of forming an association of film writers first originated at the Sunday cultural and literary meetings held at the residence of Shri Anil Biswas, the music director, in the year 1950.

Towards the end of 1950, a meeting of film writers was held in the Shree Sound Studios to form a film writers association, electing D.N. Mandhok as it's President, Mahesh Kaul and Pt. Sudarshan as Vice Presidents, Madhusudan as General Secretary and Shakeel Badayuni as Treasurer...

Hindi cinema has for years projected the catholic community as a stereotype. All the characters irrespective of their status or style speak the same dialect-Bombaiya Hindi. If rich their heir homes have Victorian furniture like Michelle Mcnally in Black and if poor there are large sofas and dinning table and sometimes a secret desire to own a piano like the family in Khamoshi.

Almost always they are portrayed as God fearing and even if they are not on the screen their every second gesture is marked by a sign of cross....