Every year, in November, this spotted, yellow teddy bear with a patch over one eye makes an appearance in the UK. He goes by the name of Pudsey and is the mascot of the hugely popular fundraising event known as Children In Need. As its slogan goes, every penny raised will go to the needy children of UK.
Members of the public take up the actual fundraising. High Streets might be littered with people with the collecting pails. Teens wearing wacky outfits and standing in the cold with a bucket in …

Mani Ratnam’s winter release GURU, with Abishek Bachchan at the helm, is this year’s most awaited film. The last Mani Ratnam movie to come out was Ayutha Ezhuthu two years back. He made India sit up and take notice of the junior Bachchan as an artist of note. Now he is back with a straight Hindi film, which is widely reported to be based on the life of the late Dhirubhai Ambani.
Mani Ratnam and A R Rahman have always been a winning combo, since their Roja days. Together, they have …

Popstars on an adopting spree, veiled Teaching Assistant and the Macca v Mucca battle – Britain was never such a fun place to be in that the last week. It was like being in the thick of not one but a myriad of newsstorms and we didn’t know which way to turn! Whilst the celebs seemed to be hell-bent on making sure our attention was concentrated on them, the Muslim TA added more drama to our lives by making her views known far and wide. All I had to do …

Gautham Menon is one of the hottest directors in Tamil cinema today. His first movie in Tamil was the Madhavan-Abbas-Reema Sen starrer, Minnale. He became famous when his ‘Kaaka Kaaka’, starring Surya and Jyothika became a super-duper hit. He recently made Vettaiyadu Vilaiyadu, with Kamal Haasan and Jyothika. Shooting for his fourth project, Pachaikili Muthu Charam, with Sarath Kumar and Jyothika is going on at full steam as the movie is set for a Christmas Day release. It is at this time that I got a chance to chat with …

***SPOILER WARNING*** This post contains details of the plot so please be warned ***
Long before the movie was released and the hype and the hoopla started, I was quite keen to watch it. Any movie that had a sublime song like ‘New York Nagaram’ must not be missed, I told myself. Well, you live and learn, don’t ya?
What put me off about ‘Sillunu Oru Kaadal’, let me count the ways.
1. The title – if there ever was a misnomer, this was it. There was nothing ‘sill’ about this movie. It …

Remaking movies – in other words, lifting the success formula from one language and neatly transferring to another – guarantees instant moolah. Or so the belief goes. This, in my opinion, is the reasoning behind remaking a movie. This concept has been employed time and again to varying degrees of success. One of the most successful remake franchises was that of Munnabhai – its Tamil alter ego Vasoolraja and Telugu counterpart Shankar Dada went on to duplicate Sanju’s antics and laughed all the way to the banks.
In the South, Vijay …

Wednesday, 10:30 pm BST: I was just lounging on the sofa, after a ‘welcome back’ new season episode of ‘Wire in the Blood’, when the news anchore of the Late News said the words ‘Top Gear’s Richard Hammond was injured in a car crash earlier today’. To say I was shell-shocked would be an understatement. I simply could not believe my ears!
My first thought was ‘Oh no, the poor bloke must have been driving on the M25′. Later, when fresh details emerged and I learnt that the accident happened during …

I have often wondered about that parody called ‘comedy track’ – this is a concept that is unique to Indian cinema. 90% of our movies have a comedy track running parallel to the main story line; very few of the really good movies have this feature.
Most of the time, these comedy tracks are anything but funny – many of them are so annoying, you feel like slapping the so-called ‘comedy stars’. Goundamani and Senthil, were a comedy duo from the 90′s Tamil cinema and Goundamani used to kick the hell …

Take an ordinary, simple storyline; get some brilliant actors; throw in some decent music; give it all a good mix – what do you get? A movie called Bommarillu (means doll’s house). The story is this: Siddhu (Siddharth) is a college lad, in his senior year, whose only wish is to live his life the way he feels like. This may seem simple enough to you and me but not to Siddhu, whose rich, industrial magnate father (played by Prakash Raj) micro manages every single aspect of his life. Just …

What’s happening to Indian cinema these days? More and more, I am reading about blokes who want to become directors, become some big shot’s assistant and then end up catching the eye of a director and end up being cast as the main lead in their next movie and…. you can guess the rest.
Or…. a normal, middle-class chappie, with no connection to filmdom whatsoever, gets bitten by the movie bug fairly early in life, completes his education (in most cases, at least a master’s degree) and then moves to the …

The movie is due to be released on August 9. Till then, here’s a trailer to tantalise you. Sid dances to ‘We have a Romeo’ and it sounds / looks just like it is a continuation of Girlfriend (Boys). Is it just the Sid – Genelia connection or is it something else?