It’s nice to know that the circus is not dead. “Cirque du Soleil” or ‘Circus of the Sun’ retains the traditional aspects of the ageless crowd puller with a juggler, acrobat, dancer, trapeze artists, and tight rope walkers. It bumps up the experience several notches higher with fabulous choreography, music and art direction. The use of projectors and laser lighting brings a mystic and ethereal quality to the performance. It’s pure entertainment for 90 minutes…
Culture
Over the past one year, there are some books that I read and meant to blog about. However, they made so little an impression on me, either good or bad, that I never got around to reviewing them. I thought I would just mention them in a single blog post. Death At the Bar by Ngaio Marsh Marsh was a New Zealand writer, heavily inspired by Agatha Christie. I have read reviews of her works…
Someone at a Distance is a heartbreaking story of an ordinary upper middle class British family is so gripping. I have read no other work by Dorothy Whipple, so am not aware of her style of narrative. I enjoyed this from a literary point of view, but I found the book oddly regressive to feminism. Let me start with the plot, which, as the blurb shows, is ‘deceptively simple’. The Norths are a happy, self-contained family…
There is nothing wrong with the overall plot, and how it can that be, since it’s inspired from Jane Austen’s Emma, but the Bollywood movie “Aisha” falters appallingly in the execution. The story is really simple. Aisha, a super rich, good-for-nothing, rich Delhi girl passes her time setting up people together. The movie begins when she finds her new project, Shefali (Amrita Puri), a middle class girl in need of a groom. Aisha sets her…
I am not the kind of person who typically drools over actors or even fan-girls except for maybe something like Lord Of The Rings and The X-files. I either like certain people’s work or admire specific stories, styles of storytelling or directing. But when I saw the BBC’s contemporary “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch ( yes, his real name!), I have to admit I was utterly Cumberbatched! I have never been so taken in by an…
The Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows movies had a lot to live up to when it came to fan expectations. For the book readers, who had been on the journey much longer than the movie fans, it was the final closing chapter of the Harry Potter series. At that point in 2011, no one knew that Rowling would have an equally hard time letting go of the characters and would end up writing a…
British humor has its own identity; wry, genteel, steeped in sarcasm, slightly tongue-in-cheek. All writers have their own style, but there is something inherently similar in the language and narrative. I always find similarities between Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and PG Wodehouse with their mostly country house settings, caricaturized protagonists and situational humor. I also measure every other British humorist against them, which probably doesn’t help my reading at all, as it happened with Miss Mapp by…
When No Strings Attached was released, Natalie Portman was riding high on the success of Black Swan, and predictably everyone was going gaga over her role in this movie. Catching the movie six months after, it doesn’t look so hot. Let’s talk about the storyline: two people keep bumping into each other and finally hook up for no strings attached sex agreement stating if one of them falls in love agreement ends. Obviously, we all know where…
