Adventures of a Writer

If there is one movie that is perhaps the Godfather of all dirty-cops-and-gangsters movies, it's gotta be The Departed by Martin Scorsese. Interestingly, it was an adaptation of the hit Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs . While the latter was itself a very popular film, it may not be wrong to say that The Departed has surpassed it by acquiring near cult status.   So, it was with this in mind I wanted to watch Vikram Vedha which is a remake of the Tamil film of the same name. The original film starring Madhavan and Vijay Sethupathi was a huge blockbuster and it was no wonder that the filmmakers were keen to remake it in Hindi with Saif Khan and Hrithik Roshan in the roles of Vikram and Vedha. However, the Hindi remake failed to recreate the magic of the original. Even though the film is supposedly an exact copy, made by the very same filmmakers who directed the original.  While there has been a bunch of theories about why the Hindi version failed, the consensus has been that "...

By Jaideep Sen For a while I wasn’t being able to identify what to base my next piece of SALAAM SALIM SAAB on till the Legend himself cleared my dilemma.   During a recent conversation he mentioned that when they had narrated the biggest game changer film in contemporary Indian Cinema, Zanjeer , to a renowned film director of that era, he had told Salim Saab that they had wasted two and a half hours of his precious time.  Now that was a statement that grabbed my immediate attention for two reasons. One, the audience has proved time and again that it is far sharper and smarter than filmmakers while it is difficult for good content to get made into films due to the lack of understanding of filmmakers. Two, don’t get affected and shaken by   ‘rejection’.  When I brought this up with Salim Saab, the humble cinematic giant took the onus on himself for the initial rejections by saying that it was the nature of the story and not the lack of understanding ...