Harris Films Blog

(Warning: Spoilers ahead!) It's April Fool's Day, and it's a coincidence that I just watched  Chungking Express  (Hong Kong, 1994) in which this young and handsome police officer is jilted by his girlfriend on the first of April. Initially, he thought it was an April Fool's prank, but she had left him seriously. He decides to wait for a month, and meanwhile eats canned pineapple slices, because she liked it very much. He makes sure every can he purchases from the supermarket had May-1 as the expiry date, which completes one month of his loneliness, beyond which there would be no pineapples for him. His lost lover's name happens to be 'May'. The first of May is his birthday too. After the monthlong wait, he looks for someone who could go out with him for the evening. But he's late. Another May, who is a worker at the takeaway joint he frequents was a prospect but while he was waiting for his lost lover, she had found another person to spend the evening wi...

Watch on Sony LIV I happened to watch the new Anjali Menon movie ‘Wonder Women’ (2022), and the following are my thoughts. Unfortunately, most of them are negative. I felt it was a badly made movie. Anyway, I didn't have a lot of expectations from her as a director as my interest in her movies had declined since she turned into a commercial filmmaker. However, just less than a couple of minutes into the movie, the face of Nithya Menen cheered me up as she is an individual I like a lot in Malayalam cinema. But then again, barely two or three minutes more and I could smell disaster. That’s when Nandita speaks to Veni and her mother-in-law. The flaws: Nandita (Nadiya Moidu) is this lady running a preparative centre called 'Sumana' for pregnant women. She educates them on the subject and makes them practice yoga and various exercises for a few days during the gestation period to prepare them mentally and physically for easy and safe delivery and healthy motherhood. And what we ...

  I watched  Super Sharnya  (Malayalam, 2022) and thought what a pointless movie it was. There is hardly any substance in it. Then I noticed the name  ThanneerMathan Dinangal  (Malayalam, 2019) mentioned along with it in certain reviews, and learned that both films were made by the same director Girish A D. So I watched  ThanneerMathan Dinangal  too, which is his first movie. I felt it was the other way round though.  TMD  looked as if it was his second movie because it was so much better than the other one and looked like a director's improvement over his first creation. One thing I particularly liked about  TMD  is Ravi Padmanabhan's (acted by Vineeth Sreenivasan) characterisation. Ravi is a fraud but pretends to be a very erudite scholar and a refined man while he works as a teacher in the school. That he is fake is hidden from the viewer until the end. And all through the story, while he behaves predominantly like a cultured and...

  ( Purchase book at Amazon ) ( Watch film on Amazon Prime ) Delta of Venus  is a collection of erotic stories. In the preface of the book, Anais Nin has mentioned that she wrote these stories around 1940 for an ‘anonymous client’ of a book collector she knew. It all started with Henry Miller, her famous friend, who wrote stories for the ‘client’ for money. Gradually, he involved her and their other friends in the project. They all set their wild imaginations free and started writing stories of lust and desire to order. And the stories Anais Nin wrote were what later became ‘Delta of Venus’. It is obvious that these stories are less literature and more porn. Because the anonymous buyer of these stories kept telling her to dump poetry and philosophy and focus more on raw sexual descriptions. It was not an easy task for the writer, though. As a consequence, you can see the unpleasant tension of a fight between poesy and porn throughout the book. The struggle between her poetic i...

This is not so much a film review as a tiny attempt of mine to express my happiness in being fortunate in having such a sweet viewing experience as well as to shout out to all those movie-loving people who, despite being aware of the existence and importance of this movie have been keeping postponing watching it to tomorrow that never came: “Stop delaying anymore.. enough procrastinating!” as well as to spread the word among those who are not aware of the beauty and value of this movie or even its existence but may watch it and thus be saved from missing out on such a delicious treat for the eyes and heart when I tell them just because they relate to me in some way, just because their tastes rhyme with mine. People who are really interested can go  here  for a simple and brief review of the movie which gives a clear idea of the plot too. Even at the beginning of it, I knew I was going to love this movie like crazy, just for its cinematography, if not for anything else. Such ch...

Irrfan, the great artist passed away. And you see all around mentions of his movies, especially 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ𝑏𝑜𝑥 , which went to Cannes, 𝑃𝑎𝑎𝑛 𝑆𝑖𝑛𝑔ℎ 𝑇𝑜𝑚𝑎𝑟 that earned him the national award, and even 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑃𝑖 . However, the films that came to my mind were different, for personal reasons. One is 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑎𝑚 𝐵𝑜𝑚𝑏𝑎𝑦 made in 1988 by Mira Nair which I didn’t see most mentioning. She is the director that discovered this gem of an actor for the Bollywood moviegoers. When he, in his late teens or barely out of them, approached her with his aspirations, she wanted to make him the major protagonist of the movie. However, it was a movie about slum children where the characters where children (who were real slum children) of a much younger age group and he wouldn’t fit in. She was sorry about it; she was desperate to have him in the movie somehow. So she offered him the minor role of a scribe stationed at the passageway in front of the shops who scribb...