Baboon Logic

Disclaimers:
1) Before my boredom takes over, I want to make clear that Ghajini is a decent time pass (I’ll list the USPs at the end of this post).
2) This contains a rough overview of the plot that can spoil the movie for you. There are some specifics of some scenes too.

Putting Ghajini into a genre

Ghajini is not Memento. Ghajini is the boy-meets-girl (and falls in love) story followed by boy-avenges-girl’s death rant. The non-linear unfolding of the narrative is superfluous because there is no surprise in the story and because it doesn’t serve any purpose except for tightening the pace. It’s a different movie altogether, with a different focus and a different niche, and it is entirely unnecessary to keep Memento in mind when thinking of it.

Ghajini is not Bollywood either. It has been reworked to Mumbai, but the screenplay wouldn’t have made much sense without its Southie (I think it’s called Kollywood!) motifs. For example, Asin plays the typical innocent bubbly girl with attractive simplicity (real life bimbo made larger than life on screen!). Obviously this is a character done to death in Bollywood, but they do it with a different kind of sensibility in South which you can see in this movie. The Goody Two-Shoes-ness of Asin might thus be a little jarring to the rest of India, but I am sure they will enjoy the bit where Aamir Khan subconsciously learns to drink tea in a pedestrian manner from her.

Ghajini is Kollywood in Bollywood clothes with the addition of Aamir Khan. It’s almost a scene by scene remake of the original except for a better paced and politically correct (or may be I should say cinematically correct!) ending.

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At the onset of his madness, Philip K Dick remarks on the protagonist of his loosely autobiographical novel VALIS (a novel that is at once brilliant and tedious, capturing the essence of Dick’s madness) that he could be happy only because he was perpetually occluded to what was to come, to his own future and to the consequences of his own actions!

That is how I see myself now. I am at the brink of losing my oldest friend. Even if he survives this, the severe strain our friendship has suffered will resolve itself to some terrible conclusion over time, and I can find happiness for the time being only in my incapacity to see ahead into the bleak future.

We can barely look at each other now in the guilty knowledge of what we have done together, and yet, that fateful evening began in the most promising manner.

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For quite some time now, the movie “Lovers of Six Years” has been sitting on my hard disk, with a view towards a possible screening if I ever booted into windows, because the official (and for that matter, many others that I downloaded) subtitle file (the one by Noir) was lagging. And mplayer didn’t work because apparently there is no Xvideo support for my video card :(.

So I set the video out to X11, and adjusted the subtitle file. In case anyone wants to know about it, +26700ms will fix the official Noir subtitle file.

Oh, and I tried KDE in the meantime, thinking that may be I should give the whole with-more-configurablity-comes-more-power thing a try. To be honest, I dumped KDE after logging into it only once, so this is not some serious criticism of KDE. It was so frigging slow that I knew I was never going to use it, so I made the decision without wasting any more time. And I have a P4 SSE3 processor with 1GB ram, so it’s not exactly a very slow machine.

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Sau Crore (1991) is directed by Dev Anand, and I don’t think any fan of Bollywood will need a longer introduction to the movie. I wouldn’t really have watched the movie, except that Naseeruddin Shah was in the lead, and Sunil Gavaskar was to make a special appearance along with his team.

Obviously I didn’t expect much from the movie, but it managed to surprise me. In spite of being devoid of any artistic merits, it offended my aesthetics. The movie can be seen as a forerunner to a whole generation of comedy bums that Bollywood is producing now.

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For a very long time I had made no effort to understand Shakespeare, owing principally to my belief that he was overrated. Then I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (even though I couldn’t stand Leonardo those days), which used the original text of the play without modifications (except for omissions and rearrangements).

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– spoilers ahead –

Some Philosophy
Murder, in all its glorious mystery, can not be the story (mark the word - story, not subject) of a movie any more. The focus must lie elsewhere, in the lives of the characters, their interactions, their crisis, their interpretation of the world around them, so that when a clue is quietly slipped into a scene, the viewers’ll either miss it, or interpret it differently (reminds me of Ram Gopal Verma’s Kaun), like we all have done in the best of Agatha Christie novels. This is how Bhool Bhulaiyaa fails. It has no story. Its characters have no life (except Akshay Kumar, may be). That is also why in the end, when the mystery is over, one fails to sympathise with the emotional difficulties of the characters.

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There is one scene from Sympathy for Mr Vengeance which summarises why I like Park Chan-wook so much - Ryu sits in his dingy room helplessly while his ailing sister moans in pain and the boys next door masturbate listening to it.

But that’s not how he shows it. What we see is a row of masturbating young men who are trying to keep up their illusion by touching each other selectively and by looking at pornographic images put at the back of the guy in front. They have pressed their ears to the wall, and we can hear in the background what appears to be the moaning of an orgasm. The camera keeps drifting, and we have some time to think about the scene at hand to allow us to detach ourselves with casual deprecation. Then we come to Ryu’s room to find him sitting on a chair with the kind of detachment that can come only from utter despair, and we find his ailing sister moaning in pain on the floor.

Now we have to judge those young men again in light of our previous impression.

Just another scene calculated to shock? Yes, but there is more that Park Chan-wook conveys here. Those masturbating young men, they are not perverts, they are common human beings just like you and me. Their lives are our lives, and that is all there is to life.

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To my absolute horror, I have just realized that about seventy percent of the fiction I pen down are love stories. Or love poems.

I guess that this trait can be traced back to one of my Freudian nightmares in childhood, but that doesn’t help me in coping up with this mess. I mean, what sort of people keep writing one love story after another! Someone might try to point out P G Wodehouse here; but then, he was funny. Anything can be excused if it is funny enough.

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