Cutting Chai. Chapter 3: Jawan; Shot, Reaction Shot, Repeat

2023 has now gifted us with two Shahrukh films with a third on the way. What a time to be alive. Now we have the action romp Jawan from a South Indian director Atlee. This is cutting chai after all, so, much like the film itself, let’s trim the fat and get straight to it….

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Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1

At some point in the last few years, Tom Cruise’s career seems to have largely shifted towards answering the question, “What shall I jump off of or climb next?”. As a fan who places Cruise’s performance in Collateral highly in a capricious ranking of performances, a part of me is very sad at the prospect…

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Cutting Chai. Chapter 2: The Foreign Location Song

A weekly game I’ve been playing with my mother concerns Citadel, the new show produced by the Russo Brothers. The rules of the game aren’t nearly as relevant as the objective, a means to answer the question, ‘How did this cost 300 million dollars?’. The answer certainly doesn’t lie in the mediocre production value and…

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Cutting chai. Chapter 1 : A review redux

It’s been far too long since my last post and so, in an effort to ease myself into the rant essays that are the signature dish of this site, not like Gordon Ramsay’s Wellington, but more like McDonalds’ burger; something that upon consumption makes you ask, wait, what was the point of this? And that…

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Avatar: The Way of Water (or) The James Horner retrospective

It’s insane to believe that we live in a time where the success of the successor (pun intended?) to the biggest film of all time is in doubt, but that’s the time and zeitgeist that Avatar: The Way of Water has chosen to plop itself into. Much like Top Gun Maverick earlier this year, the…

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My Relationship with Film Music

Film score and soundtrack curiously occupy a separate genre of music, and while this distinction isn’t something that makes a lot of sense when you consider the music itself that’s being played isn’t very different from genres like classical, electronic, or pop, the distinguishing features are sufficient to justify a deep dive into what makes…

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Semiotics and colour symbolism: A case study of La La Land

Semiotics : (siːmɪˈɒtɪks) : the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing. ‘A symbol is an image with special power that has value to the audience. Just as matter is highly concentrated energy, a symbol is highly concentrated meaning.’ John Truby,…

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Dune : Part One

I’ve always regretted not being able to watch the Lord of the Rings in the cinema. I have since caught a rerun at the Prince Charles Cinema, but I can’t imagine it captured the excitement of the audience at the time of release nor the zeitgeist that it was a part of and went on…

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