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...

The Thicket review – Peter Dinklage is a bounty hunter in harsh western with unusual chill

Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis star in a horse opera set in a snowbound world of bars, brothels and wide open spaces

Here is a western starring Peter Dinklage, but forget hot sun-baked gullies and leather-skinned cowboys riding sweatily through rattlesnake country. The Thicket takes place in a hard, snowbound wilderness interspersed with equally hard, snowbound little townships consisting mainly of bars and brothels. You can see the breath in the air and the blood on the snow. The plot is staple horse opera: a kidnapped maiden must be rescued by a motley group of good-ish guys with mixed motives, headed up by Dinklage playing a bounty hunter character offering a similar vein of dry, world-weary cynicism as his breakthrough role as Tyrion in Game of Thrones, only much less aristocratic. He is joined by Gbenga Akinnagbe as his right hand man, with whom Dinklage has nice chemistry, and Levon Hawke, as a naive young Christian whose sister has been kidnapped by ruffians.

The ruffians are where the film really does something unusual, via a simple but intriguing gambit. In the book on which The Thicket is based, the main villain, a man, is called Cut Throat Bill. Here, Cut Throat Bill is played by Juliette Lewis. It isn’t exactly a case of trendy, gender-blind casting; while the character is still called Cut Throat Bill, and assumed by those who haven’t met him to be a man, as soon as Lewis encounters anyone, it is very clear that the character is perceived as female. “He’s a she,” and so on. Cut Throat Bill doesn’t correct them, but continues to go by that name. You might read the character as genderfluid or trans, but existing in a world that didn’t have any vocabulary for this, and the film makes no attempt to retrofit modern ideas on to a historical setting. Cut Throat Bill is Cut Throat Bill.

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