About My Images and Avatar
Image header: Line from “Ankhiyan Milake,” from Ratan (1944)
Sidebar Images:
Flyer for Noor Jehan in Dupatta (1952)
Sandhya in Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje (1957)
Dilip Kumar in Kohinoor (1960)
Mohammed Rafi
My Avatar (the picture you see next to all my comments): The iron mask from Uthama Puthiran (“The Man in the Iron Mask”) (1958)
February 10, 2009 at 11:01 pm
June 8, 2009 at 10:36 am
I am writing to you to ask how to find any reviews you might have done about Raj Kapoor fiilms. I have just discovered him, and am absolutely smitten! Mind you, I haven’t seen Mera Naam Joker yet so I am shocked to read that your picture top right is of him! I don’t think I want to see him like that!
So far I have watched Shree 620, Awara, Chori Chori. I loved the last of those and find the chemistry between RK and Nargis electrifying. I was pleased that I recognised one of the songs, probably from this blog (the one in the garden of tissue-paper flowers, can’t remember its name). I loved Awara too, for similar reasons. Also I liked the way he portrayed the experience of poverty. It’s not so much the charm of the little tramp that moves me, rather it’s the way that the background of his characters impinges on the relatioships with Nargis’s characters, who are middle class. Her naivety, his bitterness … and yet they still fall in love. Irresistable!
I wish you had a search facility on your blog. I hope to see some more RK here soon!
June 8, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Hello, Joss. Here’s a link to my review of Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai:
http://roughinhere.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/jis-desh-mein-ganga-behti-hai/
My love of Raj Kapoor films started with Shree 420. However, before I was smitten with Raj Kapoor films, I was smitten with Padmini. So, it makes sense that my favorite Raj Kapoor film would be the one co-starring Padmini (which I saw sometime after I saw Shree 420). Shree 420 comes close for me (and Nargis is great in his films too), but I found Jis Desh… to be an even more wonderful experience (and even more so the second time around!)…
Strangely, I’ve never seen all of Awara. I’ve seen many scenes from it (especially the songs, of course), and I once watched a little bit of a copy online without subs, but I haven’t yet picked up the DVD to watch the film completely, with subtitles. I guess it seemed less urgent to see that because it has many similarities to Shree 420, and because I’d seen so much of it in bits and pieces. But I do have to watch it in full sometime.
I loved Chori Chori too. What a charming movie that was! And some of the songs and dances are fantastic… This movie has a Kamala Lakshman dance and a Sai-Subbulaxmi dance – both just superb.
I enjoyed Mera Naam Joker a lot too, partly because it’s the other movie that he did with Padmini. But it has a lot of other interesting and moving stuff too. (Though it’s a little controversial – not every classic Bollywood fan likes it as much.)
Well, I could say more another time…
By the way, I DO HAVE A SEARCH FACILITY IN MY BLOG. It’s right under the strange picture of Raj Kapoor from Mera Naam Joker. There’s a little box above a button with the word “Search” on it… (Maybe you can’t see it so well because it’s also black – well, that’s the way they designed it for some reason; I don’t think I can change the design of the template there.) Put your cursor inside the box and type whatever you want to search for, then hit “Enter” or the “Search” button.
OK, have to go now…
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P.S. I wrote a few posts about Shree 420. Don’t have time to link to them all now, so if your’e curious about what I said, now you can try the search funciton. :)
June 11, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Oh, by the way, I changed the picture on the top right subsequent to the comments above. I change that picture often anyway, but perhaps Joss was right that Raj Kapoor as Joker wasn’t the easiest thing to look at, especially with repeated viewings…