Bob Dylan changed my life at sixteen when I listened to Blowin’ In The Wind for the first time. I hate that sentence above. It’s true, but I hate it, because it has been true for so many other people. That now-iconic refrain “Yes, and how many years can some people exist/Before they’re allowed to…
There really is nothing quite like Game of Thrones, is there? Even in the middle of what is being called the new Golden Age of Television, where path breaking prestige shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Hannibal, Fargo and The Wire have redefined the limits of what can be done through the medium, the…
RATING: 7.5/10. There’s a stirring passage in Donna Tartt’s campus murder saga THE SECRET HISTORY, where the charismatic and eccentric professor of Greek, Julian Morrow, waxes eloquent to his mercurially talented students on the Dionysian ethics of letting loose, of allowing the primal instincts to take over, exhorting that “if we are strong enough in…
When Jon Stewart, undisputed king of American political satire, retired from his 16 year stint as the host of THE DAILY SHOW, with emotional tributes from collaborators, friends and even a good-natured “So long, jackass” from long-time foe, Senator John McCain, he signed off on a typically acerbic note, observing “Bullshit is everywhere. The good…
Rites of passage are important in every culture – whether it be leaving home, the first kiss, the first real fight, the first job, whatever. For Bengali bibliophiles, it is, or at least it used to be, the point at which a child put down his copy of the collected volumes of Feluda stories and…
The first job of a biopic is simplification. A life reduced to a movie must be one of the greatest feats of condensing and simplifying in human history. A movie about one of the greatest physicists of our time always suffers from a further handicap that it does not share with a biopic of Julius…
Rating: – Depends, really. The young adult (YA) romance/high-school bildungsroman has been a fixture of Hollywood, more so in the new millennium owing to the runaway popularity of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises (and countless others in their wake from The Hunger Games to Percy Jackson). But apart from blockbuster showings, some of these…
