DISPATCHES FROM THE WALL CORNER

Disclaimer: Baradwaj Rangan has no illusions of grandeur that you are going to base your movie-watching on his reviews or even agree with his assessment of movies. He is a film critic simply because he loves cinema – discussing, analysing and getting nostalgic about it– and has no qualms in accepting that, ‘pop culture doesn’t always welcome the deserving and the worthy but sometimes the sideshow carnivals that make modern life such an entertaining merry-go-round.’ Split into six sections – Actors, Hindi Cinema, Directors, Music, Tamil Cinema, and Reviews – Dispatches from the Wall Corner is a collection of Baradwaj Rangan’s best writings, and outstanding in unraveling the magical world of Indian cinema. For instance, like a fawning fan before the Superstar’s altar, he convinces us how Rajinikanth ‘…isn’t a formula that can be bottled and bartered.’ Or despite an obvious reverence for masala Hindi films of the Seventies, including Sholay and Don, he unhesitatingly describes Yash Chopra’s characters as “pretty people in prettier clothes”. Straddling the worlds of Tamil and Hindi movies with great panache, the book is wonderfully honest about how, for instance, ‘Hindi cinema has learned that maximum profits can be made from the handfuls of multiplexes… ,’ while on the other hand, ‘Tamil cinema continues to tell the stories of the villages.