Akshay Varshney

feelings are (often) facts

[Big Tee @societyhatestee]

i feel like there is a sleep in me that needs to be slept but each time i sleep i don't sleep that sleep.

[Seth Vargas @ohsethy]

Eating a second cookie because I ate the first one absentmindedly and I didn’t appreciate it enough

[Elle 🦇 @gothamcityelle]

he’s so real

[🤠 @heavensbvnny]

one of my favorite things about cats is that when they don’t understand what something is, they hit it.

[Neil Renic @NC_Renic]

By using AI for writing, you’re robbing yourself of the authentic writer’s experience of not writing

[graham @middlemanchette]

Straub: “Cinema will only begin when the film industry is dead.”

[Mordecai @MenschOhneMusil]

Night Fair at Saint-Pol-de-Léon, Ferdinand du Puigaudeau.

[Akshay Varshney @AkshayVarshney4]

*streaming - living in oblivion

[Ryan Swen/孫天行/Sun Tien-hsing @swen_ryan]

The Pope meeting:
Wang Bing
Bertrand Bonello
Albert Serra
Gaspar Noé (handing him a Blu-ray I couldn't identify)

[Alissa Wilkinson @alissamarie]

Pope Leo on cinema, today at the Vatican, could not be more right (and, dare I say, holy):

https://t.co/ae4o67MrwJ

[Kanu Behl @KanuBehl]

Update on ‘Agra’, the film: We’re being denied shows because of the so called ‘big blockbusters’ and because small films ‘don’t fit into’ multiplex chain programming. It’s up to you the audience now! Speak up and tag the chains. Say that you want to see the film!

[Aditya Devulapally @sparky_pan]

#Agra review – A fever dream about sex, small towns, and the rot inside our polite Indian homes.

Caught a private screening of the original uncut version of  #Agra by @KanuBehl at the infamous Shiva Preview Theatre (fyi, that sound system is phenomenal).

Everyone online keeps jacking off to the sex scenes and missing the point (The film got leaked because of an actor’s glorious scenes, hate the word - bold). We talk about sex like embarrassed virgins pretending to be experts. 

But #Agra isn’t about sex, it’s about how sex haunts lonely people who don’t know what to do with their desires.

#KanuBehl isn’t making a “bold” film, he’s performing an autopsy. Every character here has been mangled by the weight of wanting. Their need for touch, power, ownership, it all becomes the same desperate clawing.

Sex isn’t just pleasure here, although the film does play to sensory pleasures in a flow, It’s something closer to breathing through a dirty, sweat drenched pillow. And through that, Behl has somehow made one of the most Indian films in recent memory.

Small-town India, where everyone’s horny, broke, and the family is just another cage you fuck up inside. People chase money and orgasms with equal desperation.

Everyone’s house is half-constructed, both physically and emotionally. We’ve all seen such homes where, 
the father juggling mistresses,
the mother muttering her practical martyrdom,
the once-beautiful “other woman” rotting in her own compromise,
the son growing up to be both a victim and monster.

And Behl, thankfully, doesn’t wrap it in allegorical crap like half the festival films do. He shoots the grotesque straight. You want to look away but can’t.

Guru is repressed, pathetic, dangerous. But you understand him anyway, which is worse. He’s the guy you’d never trust, yet can’t stop understanding. You look at him and realise India is full of such men…horny, humiliated, marinated in repression.

#Agra isn’t disturbing because it’s “shocking.” It’s disturbing because it’s accurate. And what’s refreshing is that Behl doesn’t judge.

He just opens the wound and watches. No speeches, no morals. Most filmmakers can’t shut up. Behl knows when to step aside.

He doesn’t explain India, he lets India reveal itself in sweat, gossip, and cathartic moans.

It’s a wild, flawed, honest piece of work and probably the most truthful Indian film about repression since #MonsoonWedding for me.

#Agra will mess you up. Not because it’s shocking. Because it’s recognisable.

Because somewhere in the dark, as you watch these characters claw at desire, you’ll realise that most people live in some version of that house.

[Jacob Wren @EverySongIveEve]

"When I’m not doing something that comes deeply from me, I get bored. When I get bored I get distracted and when I get distracted, I become depressed. It’s a natural resistance, and it insures your integrity."
- Maria Irene Fornes

[alex lei @alexL_E_I]

smoke like Ghetto Pat
drink like Sensei Sergio
never give up like Col. Steven J. Lockjaw

[Akshay Varshney @AkshayVarshney4]

!!!!!!!??????:O:O:O:O

[Vashi Nedomansky, ACE @vashikoo]

Steven Soderbergh shares the filmmaking stats compiled during the making of THE KNICK

[Akshay Varshney @AkshayVarshney4]

https://t.co/eq6s86nzs7

[Richard Brody @tnyfrontrow]

Everyone focusses on what someone says is missing from a movie but few pay attention to the cited reason: a narrow, assumed, unchallenging sense of form. With an aptly free form, one can put everything into a movie.

[Himal Southasian @HimalSouthasian]

In an India where a rape is reported once every 16 minutes or so and marital rape is yet to be criminalised, Behl is evidently invested in studying masculinist aggression.

@annavetticad writes:
https://t.co/svplwJJ64P

[UtdArena @UtdArena]

Casemiro looking at Varane after he commits a foul and gets away with it:

[Akshay Varshney @AkshayVarshney4]

@amalezishi Harry Scholes dream?