The Critique

Dir: Rumy Jafry Starring: Amitabh Bachan, Emraan Hashmi, Krystle D’souza, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Annu Kapoor, Rhea Chakraborty. Dur : 2 hrs 19 mins Genre: Drama Rating : 8/10                 The trailer had me hooked. I couldn’t believe that Bollywood was finally experimenting with original storylines! But when I sat down to review the film I realized that it was a copied idea. As if that wasn’t enough, it wasn’t even a new copy at that! This film is actually based off a German Novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt titled A Dangerous Game . A Marathi version had come out way back in 1971; more recently a Kannada and Bengali adaptation were released. Nevertheless, Bollywood felt that it had to jump on the bandwagon and recycle this story.                 The film itself is quite brilliant. The idea is novel. It doesn’t have traditional Bollywood trappings. It dives straight into the story and then begins to explore characters and possibilities. I quite liked the selection of cast. Th

  Directed and Written by: Ricky Gervais Starring: Ricky Gervais, Tom Basden, Tony Way, Diane Morgan, Mandeep Dhillon Dur : About 30 mins each. The whole series is only 6 episodes long. Rating : 5/10 After Life presents itself as a comedy-drama but I didn’t find it either comedic or dramatic. There are elements of comedy and drama but not nearly in enough to term it a comedy-drama. The show came across to me as a reflection on grief. It is dark both in the nature of the theme it explores as well as in its development. Each episode is carried mostly by dialogue and very little background music. Music definitely would have helped to make the episodes more memorable and the times they do kick in (mostly at the start and end) the choice of songs are brilliant and effective. Since it is written by Ricky, the series is highly sarcastic, critical of religion and pretty matter-of-fact in its dealing with sickness, age and death. Ricky’s character goes about in hopelessness after lo

  St. Joseph: A Father after the Father’s Heart , Hyderabad: Don Bosco Publishing House, 2021, Rs. 150, pp. 240. The book is a compilation of articles from various authors writing about qualities of St. Joseph. They have used the litany of St. Joseph as an index and have put together articles on each of the invocations. All the contributors are Salesians from different parts of India but there a couple of contributors from abroad as well. The book lends itself to be a souvenir of the Year of St. Joseph that Pope Francis declared. Let me start out by commenting on the quality of production. The paper is of good quality and so is the design and layout. It is neat and has an attractive cover. Coming to the content, it gets rather repetitive but that is understandable considering that there is so little Biblical foundation for an exposition of St. Joseph. The articles often reference Pope Francis’ letter Patris Corde and extensively utilize Pope St. John Paul II’s apostolic exhortatio