20th anniversary EXCLUSIVE: Madhur Bhandarkar says corporate booking, in a healthy manner, began with Corporate: "Half-day was declared in some offices; employees were encouraged to watch the film"; reveals, "Many people STOPPED consuming soft drinks after watching it!"

Corporate (2006) completed 20 years on July 7 and it’s a film that Madhur Bhandarkar considers his favourite. Starring Bipasha Basu, Kay Kay Menon, Raj Babbar and Rajat Kapoor, the film was loved for its subject, shocking climax, performances, music, etc. Despite dealing with the complex worlds of corporate business and the stock market, the narrative was easy to understand, an aspect that was widely praised by audiences and critics alike. On Corporate’s 20th anniversary, Madhur Bhandarkar went down memory lane and shared fascinating trivia. You had made Page 3 (2005) and it was a sleeper-hit. What made you make a film on the corporate world at that stage? Corporate was a film which was ahead of its time. It was a very different world for me. I didn’t have a story. The title fascinated me and I decided to make Corporate, obviously based on the corporate world. I collaborated with writer Manoj Tyagi, who had written Satta (2003) and Page 3 with me. He was an MBA guy and had a lot of kn...

American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

George Lucas’s 60s-set tale of California teens offers some freewheeling fun but also a lingering sadness

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’ dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

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