Cinema, Karam, Kapi

We all know the Ramayana. Ravana captured Sita, Rama killed Ravana and rescued her. Simple. Straightforward.  So why did Sage Valmiki write one lakh shlokas to convey a one-liner?  Because devatas and asuras live within each one of us.  Valmiki needed thousands of words, hundreds of anecdotes and small stories to show that the path of Dharma leads not just to victory but to the divine feet of the Almighty. Ramayana is not mythology. A myth is an untrue event that people believe. Ramayanam is an Ithihasa, an event that truly happened, written by one who watched it unfold. Namit Malhotra's Ramayana is a grand attempt to bring that Ithihasa to the screen. The visuals are grand, the storyline grander, and it travels across languages and countries. Rama (Ranbir Kapoor) carries the burden of restraint, the hardest thing to show on screen. Sita (Sai Pallavi) brings quiet strength and grace.  Ravan (Yash) is cast as a scholar-king, not a caricature. Hanuman (Sunny Deol) ...

Thomas Vincent seems to have watched one average Indian heist movie, nodded wisely and said, "Let me try this in Paris." The target is the Mona Lisa, from the Louvre. Come on, is this even a heist? History says it can be done, once. Vincenzo Peruggia, a former Louvre handyman, walked out with her on 21 August 1911 and kept her at home until she was traced to Florence in 1913.  Back then, the museum had about 200 guards for 400 rooms.  Today, a recent audit reportedly found cameras in only 25% of the rooms in one wing. So the real question is not how to steal the Mona Lisa. It is why this took 110 minutes. Enter Roger Cavendish (Stanley Tucci), a legendary thief who recruits two local crooks, one a cyber criminal and the other a small-bomb specialist who can open walls like tin cans.  They break into a house to rob it, and he is already sitting inside, calmly waiting.  Like every Tamil hero in a climax scene, he announces that he is their biological father, and he e...