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.

Digression to South

There is a remake of Bommarillu (Genelia plays another Miss Goody Two-Shoes Bimbo) in pipeline, and I’ll quit writing on this blog if the hero doesn’t pick up some pedestrian mannerisms from her in the course of the movie. The original in fact contains this very pedestrian way of drinking tea as depicted in Ghajini.

I am being a little harsh. This transference of pedestrian habits symbolises the hero loosening his tie and all that sort of thing, I know. My problem is, I want somebody to invent a different narrative technique to convey hair being let loose. I am tired of the same old shit being peddled around with upbeat music and sweeping camera movements. Audrey Hepburn blowing her nose into Peck’s handkerchief was funny fifty years back in Roman Holiday, but I am sorry if I don’t enjoy seeing it now after so many rehashes of it in just about every other average chick flick.

I want to see some imagination. Something inventive like Saawariya or Amelie. Content can wait. I want to see something inventive or just pretty.

Now back to Ghajini!

Ghajini is a formula movie in two parts. The formula is simple, but broken into non-linear (in time) pieces to interweave the two parts (which differ greatly in mood) in order to make the transition smooth. In fact, because the transitional difficulties have been dealt with by screenplay, it has allowed the director to exaggerate and contrast the moods of those two parts.

Romance and Revenge.

In the part of Romance, the boy falls in love with a girl who is faking to be his girl friend. It has been done with nice low key humour and perfectly romantic ambience. Something you can take your girl friend to!

And then the girl dies and in the Revenge part he goes on around trying to avenge her murder. The original stylised looks of action sequences have been retained. I have been thinking how they were done, and my guess is that they shot them with the usual jumpiness and jarrings and then smoothed the image progressions.

The Music

While the music is disappointing, the background score is actually good (particularly in emotional/ contemplative scenes). Guzarish had a great potential, but the music director seems to have run out of material and instead of sitting on the simple piano bar (which is what this song really is. it’s a very pretty piano bar stretched to fit some average piece of lyrics.) till it grew to be a decent song, he has attempted to make a song out of it! It reminds of his last movie, “Yuvraaj,” about which I have written elsewhere.

But I don’t blame him for making such a mess out of Tu Hi Meri Dost Hai (of Yuvraaj). Gulzar is solely responsible for that, because I can see that the original music Rehman must have had in his mind was twisted and contorted to fit Gulzar’s crappy pretentious lyrics. That movie is full of some of the worst lyrics ever written.

Moving on, Kaise Mujhe Tum Mil Gayi is a well crafted and well placed song. The high notes of the song might have been unsuitable to the occasion, but Aamir Khan’s portrayal of the emotion is striking and the song and the visuals together capture the mood very well and mark one of the high points of the movie. In fact, without the song and without Aamir Khan, I think the sequence would have been overtaken by its clichéd overdose of mush.

Aamir Khan and Asin

Needless to say, the movie rests on the shoulders of Aamir Khan, and he has some shoulders! I can’t stop gushing about his looks in the movie. For one thing, he has eight packs. But what I like best is the fact that he looks so cute in the songs in spite of all the beef. He looks incredibly cute in the songs, and I can’t help thinking how handsome he is.

And of course he has acted very well. In the romance part, he plays it with a lot of sensitivity which makes it plausible and convincing. But he plays the revenge part with subtle exaggeration which will capture the attention of every action buff. He plays the revenge part with murderous and blind rage. Blind rage overshadows the hatred that is supposed to drive him.

Which is how it should have been, now that I think about it. There is nothing that he can pin his hatred and frustration on. Without memory, there is no focus to his hatred. So it manifests itself as uncontrollable rage as he goes on around avenging the murder of the love his life. And I love the way Aamir Khan does it. It looks spectacular.

Asin turns out to be a decorative piece and bubbles and simpers (yes, she simpers. she tries to giggle but ends up simpering.) on the screen competently but with mediocrity. She doesn’t have a good figure (as yet?!) and is probably a little too fat for Bollywood! She doesn’t have hangups though, and may be she can act.

I must digress here to mention Rani Mukherjee’s character in Chori Chori. It was not a particularly remarkable movie, and I think it didn’t even get a theatrical release because of delays, but it features what I like to call a piece of vintage Rani Mukherjee! She plays an orphan who pretends to be the fiancée of a man in love with another woman and plays her part with incredible nonchalance and helplessness and sweetness. I love her in that movie.

Unique Selling Points

It’s a short movie, well paced and well acted.
Decent depiction of romance and action sequences. Southie style, but still decent.
Aamir Khan.

That makes it three stars out of five!

The Godfather (An obvious digression!)

Before the sun sets on a lonely Aamir Khan on a lonely bench, we see that he sees Asin next to him as he unwraps the gift. This scene has a point. It is expected to magnify and drive home his poignancy and his sense of loss by depicting what life could have been without the bitter unnecessary tragedies. They usually end movies about such dramatic loss with scenes with brief and imaginary happy union, but here it was more useful because it was necessary to show that in spite of his loss of memory, he is acutely aware of what he has lost in life.

It reminded me of the last scene of God Father 3. Every God Father movie ended with a brief scene which somehow managed to capture the essence of what was going on, but it was only after the last scene of God Father 3 was over that I understood and felt the bitterness of Michael’s loss of every woman that he had ever loved. That loss was what had underlined his entire life. Ignoring the thriller plots, the first movie is about his transition, the second about confirmation and the third one about resignation. The point is, the resignation doesn’t come till the very end. He had been working towards that resignation all his life, and it is accentuated in the difference between the way his father died and the way he himself died.

He never got a chance to be happy with the women he had loved (the two wives and the daughter). And the last scene was indeed about what it could have been instead of the last dramatic loss, but they choose to show another man who had not known the pain of losing at his happiest hour.

This is well past midnight and I have started blabbering. I just feel very sad for him when he dies alone in a dusty corner on a dusty chair silently and I realise that he had lost all the women he had ever loved.

Happy birthday to me! :)

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.

I imagine people do some particular thing they get fixated on to find solace when they feel lovesick. I eat pizzas. I had just ordered my pizzas when Rainbow called me up to announce his arrival in town. So I packed up my order and went to his house. His folks were away, and we agreed that a late night movie date would not be out of order.

We caught up with our lives over the pizzas and salads, and he proposed me for marriage. Again! To be turned down. Again! He knows I am seeing someone now, and we talked a bit about that too. The pizzas duly finished, we dusted his museum-piece of a scooter and took it for a ride, yelling songs into the night and the cold breeze. Eventually we set out for a movie armed with junk foods to round the night up with.

We went to see Yuvvraaj. I did ask him if we couldn’t go see something else, but he said he wanted to see Yuvvraaj. I was also interested in the movie because from the promos it looked like Anil Kapoor had turned in an over the top performance and I wanted to watch it, and we went in together.

I don’t remember what happened in the following two hours very clearly. My doctor tells me that it’ll be a while before the trauma subsides and I can start to remember the events after I went into shock, and he clarifies that the complete memories of the night might never come back.

But I do remember a few distorted and blurred images of what had transpired before I lost my consciousness to the criminal attacks made on my senses by the movie. I remember people rushing in to lift me from the floor and I remember the long journey from there to the ambulance. I also remember the bright red bulb on the door of the operation theatre, and I have some recollection of the time in ICU afterwards. I don’t remember anything from the movie though, and my report asserts in no uncertain terms that the merest encounter with anything from that movie in the rest of my life time might drive me a raving lunatic.

But above all I remember that one glance Rainbow and I exchanged before we slumped unconscious into our respective seats. No matter how we are going to pretend to each other, we knew that we had reached the point where we couldn’t turn our back on the tragedy of having watched Yuvvraaj together and pretend as if everything was the same as ever.

I guess all good things come to an end. Rainbow has been my oldest friend through thick and thin, through rain and sun, through dangling genitalia to spotted underwears. As I write this now, he is still common-senseless in the hospital. It has often been observed that he didn’t have a lot of common sense to start with, but the movie Yuvvraaj introduces new depths to the meaning of imbecility. Rainbow’s brain damage might be irreversible.

So dear blog readers, pray for my friend’s soul, if not for his life. And as I have often said, the night is the darkest just before the electricity goes out.

—

Note: Unedited. Pestered with exams and no time to edit! Written over a seminar on Quantum Cryptography of which I did not understand one bit (I arrived half an hour late and spent the next one scribbling this one :)). But the one on Boolean Functions was interesting, if you really insist on being told!

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.

KDE was not terminally slow though, and I guess those who want the power have to put up with it. For my part, I am happy with Xfce, which is lightning fast compared to KDE. Now I am thinking in the other direction, Fvwm. The question to be settled is, with the amount of usability I am going to sacrifice up front, will there be any significant performance boost?!

Can anyone give me some pointers comparing all these -wm variants (Fvwm, Icewm, etc etc)? I can google too, but I wanted to hear from someone who has actually used them and faced the issues.

And given someone like me who needs to peddle so many large files, the one complain I have about Thunar in Xfce is the recycle bin. Recycle bins have always been shitty in Linux, whereas Windows had it right from the beginning more or less. But Thunar takes the incompetence to another level entirely! While deleting, it copies everything to the home trash folder! I can add a few custom actions to make life easier, but I want trashing to “top directories,” which is what Gnome and KDE and Windows and every other sensible desktop does.

The release note of Thunar 0.8.0 says that they have fixed this issue (I am using 0.9.0), making Thunar the second desktop ever to fully comply with the “Desktop Trash Can Specification,” but it doesn’t seem to be the default behaviour, so I hold them responsible anyway :). And given the poor documentation they have, I suspect it is going to take time to figure out how to change this behaviour!

So custom actions are nice, but they lack the breadth of nautilus scripts back in gnome (obviously because gnome has a larger user base). I would love to be able to right click on an iso file and select a script which will mount the image to a folder inside /media (for the windows users – this is almost the same thing as creating a virtual cd drive and mounting an image file, minus the pirated softwares and superfluous clicks). I’ll take Anshul’s usual advices in such matters and one of these days I’ll stop whining about the missing features and get down to implementing them myself.

(For the gnome users – try g-scripts. It has been a while since I used gnome, but I think the script I talked about above is the mount_loopback one under File System Management (the obvious guess :)). In fact, I don’t even remember if I used this set of scripts back then! And here is another plea for help – does anyone remember the option for nero image files (like iso9660 for iso images)? It think it was something like type2***, and I had to google a lot to find it last time!)

In the meantime, I would like to hear from other Xfce users. And anyone else who has anything to say about it. :)

Going to watch “Lover of Six Years” now. :)

P.S.:
The windows boot freezes while trying to load mup.sys driver, which is the last safely loaded driver! The problem is, it doesn’t say the name of the culprit driver! There are at least two sources suggesting two different drivers responsible for this, and I think I’ll go by Microsoft assuming that the display drivers for my monitor are broken and try to load the default one. :)

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.

The movie is a blatant screen adaptation of O Henry’s One Thousand Dollars (Sau Crore means One Thousand Million), with the requisite plot overheads and song-and-dance routines and the dumbing down for the masses. Stripped off of the sensibility of the original, it couldn’t have provoked me, but the movie goes on and does the exact opposite of what the story did.

While not Kafkaesque itself, One Thousand Dollars is one of the very few stories of O Henry with a Kafkaesque premise. But the story is more human, in that it substitutes the irony typical of Kafka with a dash of irreconcilable tragedy.

Kafka is fond of taking a joke, turning it inside out and then looking at it from the insider’s point of view (the insider who is now an outsider. almost all of Kafka’s stories are described from an outsider’s point of view.). Then it is no more a joke, it is an irony at varying levels of surreality. But it is never tragic, because that perspective inside the joke from which Kafka looks out is not human at all.

That is where One Thousand Dollars is different. It is human. It is a tragedy. May be I am wrong, but I have come to think of tragedy as a very human perspective.

That is why Sau Crore fails. It takes Henry’s rather whimsical interrogation into human beings and tries to look at it from the outside, making a bad joke out of it that it is.

And none of this is conscious. From the movie, it is very clear that Dev Anand doesn’t appreciate enough the pathos of the story to stop from making such a mockery of it.

Considering all the crap that gets thrown at me, I know I am overreacting. But then, why shouldn’t I?

To put it simply, I was swept off my feet. I had seen Shakespeare in Love already (which I thought was a great movie), and I had my personal favourites among his sonnets too, but I had not encountered the scale and scope of his genius in his plays (just like no matter how many great short stories you have read from Oscar Wilde, you can’t just begin to appreciate/worship him till you have read the plays). But I will stop short of making this post a critical analysis of Shakespeare.

Around noon today, waiting for an auto at the traffic cross, it suddenly hit me why I had not been able to appreciate Shakespeare. Take the over-promoted Sonnet 18 for instance. Since my early school days, I have read it in about a hundred different anthologies. And how does it start? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?! To imitate Vineeth mildly – summer’s day my ass! Honestly, who in his right mind would like to compare his darling love, more temperate or not, to a brutal summer’s day in India?

Well, the middle aged husband might do that to his wife, particularly in light of the lines to follow – But thy eternal summer shall not fade. But what does a budding high school romantic like me thinks? Well, I am thanking the lord almighty that … summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

On second thoughts, I wouldn’t characterize myself as a budding high school romantic. Yes, my favourite stories from R N Tagore’s Twenty One Stories were Aparichita (The Stranger), Samapti (The End) and Patro O Patri (The Bride and The Groom), but I was yet to be humbled by the touch of affection and love. The years in High School were the last days of complete self-independence, of the arrogance of youth.

Those were also the days complete confidence, when I didn’t censor my critical opinions according to the group I was with. I remember swearing by Ramakanta Ratha’s Sri Palatak (Mr Fugitive – it was considered a failure as a sequel to Sri Radha, but it had some really awesome poems which is all that mattered.). I also remember holding a bonfire to burn Voltaire‘s Candid, a book that I hated from my guts, a feeling also shared by some of my friends who took part in that ritual.

Ending my digression, I come back to Shakespeare and Vivaldi. If you remember Joseph Fiennes (I am a huge fan, and I plan to travel to London some day to see him in some production of Shakespeare. Hamlet, if you’ll please.), well, he is going to portray Vivaldi in the upcoming movie (but beware, there are two movies in making).

Happy as I am that a movie is going to be made on Vivaldi, particularly because it’ll raise awareness beyond the Four Seasons, I am also apprehensive that it might push the idea of program music too far to make for a visually rich but conceptually misleading portrayal of the way music is made (but then, who didn’t love the scene leading to the death of Mozart in Amadeus?). I despise the oversold fad of program music anyway.

Free recordings of the Four Seasons are available from the wikipedia page devoted to it. The recording is perfectly competent, but I personally prefer a higher tempo.

My favourite Vivaldi composition right now is the concerto for two violins.

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.

I think the time for such movies is over. You can’t just make a “straight whodunit movie” any more. The cinematic language is dead, stale, and little innovation has been seen over the years. One could experiment with the narration, the pace, the atmosphere, but little is going to get any better. No matter how subtle your composition of a shot is, the average audience will know what it means, and they will know how to interpret it. Because, frankly, it is all there, everything that could have been done has been done. The end has come for closed room mysteries.

The Movie
The principal reason why Bhool Bhulaiyaa doesn’t work, after one succeeds in ignoring the production glitches, the emotive incoherency and the many cinematic liberties taken by the Director, is that the cinematic language all cliche, and the story too thin.

I dismissed the movie as soon as all the mysteries of the movie were formally introduced, because by then I had everything figured out. Amisha Patel couldn’t be the culprit, because she was being victimised. The meek brother and the mute sister were obviously dummies, because the director invested no amount of screen time or focus on them.

Now that Amisha is out of the equation, you suddenly remember that terrible Agatha Christie novel you read years back, and something similar comes back. Now why was Amisha under suspicion? Because she pushed the clock on Vidya Balan, right? Because she set Vidya’s saree to fire? But, if she didn’t do them, who did? Who could?

Exactly. The answer is Vidya Balan! And I start to get depressed about the coming two hours of the movie.

And then, presto! Akshay Kumar enters the screen. His character, while it is caught in the story of the movie, isn’t really a part of it, and therein lies its appeal. His histrionics kept the comic refuges coming, and I didn’t want to miss any of his scenes (except for the ones towards the end). I came out with a favourable impression, because the movie was not a tedious self-indulgent exercise of a director wanting to make his mark, it was a commercialised piece of junk without any pretence at integrity, and it doesn’t fail to entertain.

Music and Background Score
There are very few songs, and they are catchy, short, and mostly take the story forward, contributing towards the pace of the movie. Akshay looks cool in the title track.

The background score is also competent, but sadly misused, to the point of ruining the thrill of the movie.

Consider the scene where Vidya enters the much advertised mysterious locked chamber for the first time with a stolen duplicate. The sequences are good enough, and tension builds up as we start to fear for her physical safety, wondering what is going to happen next. But just before the tension could reach its peak, the ill timed exuberant background score pops up and we instinctively know that nothing is going to happen to Vidya, and all the laboriously built up panic dissolves away. We let the long held breaths out, ease ourselves into our seats, and go back to snoring.

Aesthetics
The most interesting sequence of the movie is towards the end, where Vidya Balan, finally having surrendered to the ghost (of her mind), produces a captivating dance, which was almost the best thing about the movie, along with Akshay Kumar. I wish I could see more of that haunting look, I wouldn’t mind going to the theatre just for that performance.

Apart from that, the movie seems to have a poor sense of Aesthetics. The atmosphere, which is supposed to be spooky, if not scary, is badly constructed. The attempts at interspersing shadows with light doesn’t quite work, and sometimes it sends wrong signals.

Actors
Akshay Kumar, as usual, has an energetic and entertaining appearance/mannerisms, and his performance is competent throughout. Paresh Rawal does deliver his lines, but he is underused. Amisha Patel is okay, and Vidya’s performance is raised from okay to good through some key scenes, some of which have more to do with her appearance rather than her acting. All the veterans (whose names I can’t remember) have turned in competent performances.

The odd one out is Shiney Ahuja, who disappoints. He alternates between wooden stereotypes and screaming fits, and expects us to take him seriously. I would blame the director though, how could he let him get away with those terrible performances? His character could easily have been emotionally consistent and normal if he had only stood there and let the scenes take their course. Instead, he tries to act and we have this high-strung guy who frequently overreacts (by screaming) and whose sense of loyalty towards his father-figure is simply incomprehensible. I like this guy. It’s sad to see him grow complacent like this. He has some serious self-contemplation to do.

Final Verdict
Given the standard of Bollywood movies, I would rate this movie 3 stars out of 5. One for the pace (the movie is not self indulgent, and keeps you mildly preoccupied from boredom), one for not digressing from the theme meaninglessly (like most of the other movies do, no item numbers), and one for Akshay Kumar and Vidya Balan.

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.

It is an undeniable fact that the shock-value is one of the main selling points of his movies, but patterns emerge when one puts everything together in order to understand them. The worlds he creates are an indirect critique on the one we live in, and corruption is the theme it is built on. I like his portrayals so much because they happen to coincide with my own discouraging view of the human kind. His characters are neither heroes nor villains, they are individuals driven by existential despair towards their uncertain and brutal ends. The brutality is both physical and mental. It is best expressed in his own words - In my films, I focus on pain and fear. The fear just before an act of violence and the pain after. This applies to the perpetrators as well as the victims.

His movies can be seen and interpreted literally, but I often find scenes which can be metaphorically interpreted, which, at the same time being graphic and stylistic enough to daze the audience, subtly bring out the existential theme of his world and blend it with the theme of his movie, often vengeance. The depth of his movies does not lie in the theme or the content; It lies in the outlook, the insight they offer.

If one were to evaluate him objectively, Old Boy should be his best work till date (I haven’t seen I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK), the one where he perfected his cinematic style finally, but somehow I find Sympathy for Mr Vengeance a bit closer to my heart.

While Mr Vengeance is far from Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance in terms of the cinematic style and techniques he is famous for, he clearly anticipates himself stylistically in this grim and depressing tale.

Park Chan-wook has sometimes been criticised for the extremism in his movies, but in the end that is what sets him apart. There is an integrity to the way he creates his corrupt worlds. That is the key to understand his movies, to overcome the moral ambiguity of his characters and understand that being corrupt is not being evil.

It reminds me of what Damien had to say in The Final Conflict (Omen III) – Most people confuse evil with their own trivial lusts and perversions. Now, true evil is as pure as innocence. Chan-wook’s movies are not about what we in our illusion of grandeur consider evil, it’s about the trivial lusts and perversions that actually underline our lives.

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.

And of all people I! Honestly, I don’t think it is impressive to come across as a male chauvinistic moron insisting on Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I really can’t stand an imbecile idiot of a man out of his senses pledging his undying love to the leading lady to reassure her that he’ll “always” be there. I could gulp it down if he did with a bit of irony in his voice or a slight twinkle in his eyes, letting me in on the joke, the conspiracy. But no, he must go on and scare me out of my wits with his sincerity.

In fact, I have almost stopped watching mindless romantic flicks because of this reason. The one I recently watched was You, Me and Dupree. Movies don’t get any lamer than this, but I had to waste time till I caught a shuttle back to my hostel and I got the special ticket priced at 10 bucks (as opposed to the usual ones priced at 120 bucks). Anyway, the movie went all very fine till the build up to the climax when I woke up from my slumber (Ok, I actually watched the whole movie, but don’t blame me. I was jobless.) to find the romantic leads kissing each other and throwing up the usual crap about love and care and shit.

This was the only scene which made an impact on me in the whole movie. I felt so scared and sick that I thought I was never going to talk to or touch another human being again. I felt like running away and hiding somewhere, where no one, in particular no girls, could ever find me. The thought that one day I might be doing all that willingly was an immensely depressing thought, a thought that subsequently had to be driven away by a full course through roasted chicken and biriyanis (my Firefox spell checker tells me that biriyanis is spelled wrong, and offers the alternate spelling lesbianisms).

All romantic flicks do this to me. They make me want to hide somewhere and avoid any sort of human contact. As it is life is already pathetic. I tried to order my first pizza about two weeks back and miserably failed. In fact, J(iga)r thought I had an ego problem or something because I always asked him to talk to the shopkeepers when we went out together. But he eventually understood (or so I hope); may be when he found out that I couldn’t really talk to the waiters either.

I am improving though. I am sure I’ll improve significantly once I go back to my diet of Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick and Action/ Adventure/ Woody Allen. I think the leading pair of You, Me and Dupree (They never had a single intelligent conversation through out the movie!) fit the random pair Alvy Singer picks up from pavement in Annie Hall -

Alvy: You look like a very happy couple…How do you account for it?
Young Woman: I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Boyfriend: And I’m exactly the same way.

Ironically enough, I never penned down the only love story I could possibly have wanted to write myself. I have written, nevertheless, half a dozen love stories and countless poems on the same note at the request of others – some my friend, some not, but all of them in love (I have half a mind to agree with Oscar Wilde calling love a tragedy; but then, as Umberto Eco put it, Wilde probably suffered from furor sententialis, i.e., pleasurable rhetorical incontinence). A lot of people have the tendency to mistake the obvious for the profound and sometimes, to my regret, the beautiful. So I had prospered with my excuse of a poetry in those days (but I was very good at meter and rhyming).

Whatever. I guess I’ll just get on with my love story.

But as the movie progresses, the hints of a Shakespearean tragedy disappears. With such an original beginning (for an Indian movie), Chopra soon gives way to all sorts of cliches that we in the Bollywood specialize in. However, in one of his better performances yet, Amitabh manages to breath life into the character (and the movie) which seems to have been written with him in mind.

For example, when Amitabh stands in front of the chest in his room, we know instinctively that he is going to pull out that scarf Rani Sahiba had dropped a few scenes back. Then, since he wants to express his anguish over his failure, what better (and more cinematic) way to destroy a piece of cloth than burn it? But at the hands of Amitabh, this tedious and predictable scene (it should be borne in mind that the scene doesn’t make much sense in the first place unless we stretch the point) becomes one of the key scenes for his character.

Looking closely, however, we discover that the character of Eklavya has no real substance, and has to depend on the tried and tested formulas to get the point across. His character is well sketched, but lacks depth. Just like “Black,” the character works only because it is
Amitabh playing it.

In comparison, Boman Irani’s character was much more real, and could have been made frightening in its helpless frustration and resignation. Looking at him one thinks that he is not much unlike Antonio Salieri, and lo! He whips out a plan for his ownAmadeus.

Jackie Shroff and Jimmi Shergil are more than adequate in their short roles. Raima Sen felt like a surprise discovery in this movie. She had some real acting talents after all!

Sanjay Dutt’s character of a dalit DSP is a stitch up job to hold the script together. He is completely miscast in the character, though he does a decent job. He has acted so seriously that it is hard not to like him.

Vidya Balan looks as lovely as ever, and the fleeting moments of her romance with Saif Ali Khan remind us very strongly of “Parineeta.” One wonders why she made such an elaborate preparation (reading books on Rajasthan and other local researches! she mentioned them in an
interview) for such a short role that hardly required Rajasthani sensibilities (of which she showed none). She has been wasted in yet another movie.

(Note: I didn’t mean to imply that Vidya did badly in the movie by discussing how lovely she looks. It’s just that I am so smitten! She was her usual best in the movie, and one couldn’t have asked more.)

Saif just about holds his character. The problem is that the audience is asked to relate to the emotions of characters like the young Rana (Saif Ali Khan) with the briefest of introductions and the corniest of dialogues. Since the script did not allow for much character development, Chopra should have gone for the actions and mannerisms rather than the words. May be a bit longer movie would have been a good idea.

The brilliant cinematography and camera-work fail to hide the lack of a story as the movie fast progresses towards its predictable end. The director manages to keep the atmosphere intact till the very end, almost making the movie worth watching. But what the hell, one would be entirely justified for sitting through the movie just for the first ten fifteen minutes.

Chopra stops short of being gimmicky and tries to concentrate on the story once in a while, but the attempt (pressure?) to fit a commercial conclusion to the movie leaves an unsympathetic impression. The script could have been tighter without many of the sentimental false notes.
The commendable restraint in explaining plot details, however, was one bright point, except for the chemistry between Sanjay Dutt and Amitabh.

The background score and the sound tracks are competent, and they complement the movie well, sometimes touching a tender nerve, and sometimes depicting the acute agony of the characters.

In spite of the appearance, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s “Eklavya” is not a murder mystery. It is not a love story, either. The way it ends does remind me of the Indian soap operas, but that would be an unkind comparison and the movie is good enough not to be dismissed that blandly.

All in all, Vidhu Vinod Chopra disappoints somewhat, though not probably as a director. The sheer originality behind the form of the movie stands out and puts it above the rest of the pack. With passage of time, I am sure this movie will be seen as an important commentary on Indian Cinema as a reflection of our growing consciousness about the technical aspects of movie-making in the frontier of our industry.

One of my problems with the movie was that I failed to relate to it. None of the issues or sentiments portrayed in the movie have any relevance to me, so I was pretty much detached from it all the while. However, some of the scenes were just terrific.

But the movie had a great start, and could be watched solely for the brilliant performance by Amitabh Bachan, not to mention the excellent cinematography. I give this movie a 2.5/5.

But as the movie progresses, the hints of a Shakespearean tragedy disappears. With such an original beginning (for an Indian movie), Chopra soon gives way to all sorts of cliches that we in the Bollywood specialize in. However, in one of his better performances yet, Amitabh manages to breath life into the character (and the movie) which seems to have been written with him in mind.

For example, when Amitabh stands in front of the chest in his room, we know instinctively that he is going to pull out that scarf Rani Sahiba had dropped a few scenes back. Then, since he wants to express his anguish over his failure, what better (and more cinematic) way to destroy a piece of cloth than burn it? But at the hands of Amitabh, this tedious and predictable scene (it should be borne in mind that the scene doesn’t make much sense in the first place unless we stretch the point) becomes one of the key scenes for his character.

Looking closely, however, we discover that the character of Eklavya has no real substance, and has to depend on the tried and tested formulas to get the point across. His character is well sketched, but lacks depth. Just like “Black,” the character works only because it is
Amitabh playing it.

In comparison, Boman Irani’s character was much more real, and could have been made frightening in its helpless frustration and resignation. Looking at him one thinks that he is not much unlike Antonio Salieri, and lo! He whips out a plan for his ownAmadeus.

Jackie Shroff and Jimmi Shergil are more than adequate in their short roles. Raima Sen felt like a surprise discovery in this movie. She had some real acting talents after all!

Sanjay Dutt’s character of a dalit DSP is a stitch up job to hold the script together. He is completely miscast in the character, though he does a decent job. He has acted so seriously that it is hard not to like him.

Vidya Balan looks as lovely as ever, and the fleeting moments of her romance with Saif Ali Khan remind us very strongly of “Parineeta.” One wonders why she made such an elaborate preparation (reading books on Rajasthan and other local researches! she mentioned them in an
interview) for such a short role that hardly required Rajasthani sensibilities (of which she showed none). She has been wasted in yet another movie.

(Note: I didn’t mean to imply that Vidya did badly in the movie by discussing how lovely she looks. It’s just that I am so smitten! She was her usual best in the movie, and one couldn’t have asked more.)

Saif just about holds his character. The problem is that the audience is asked to relate to the emotions of characters like the young Rana (Saif Ali Khan) with the briefest of introductions and the corniest of dialogues. Since the script did not allow for much character development, Chopra should have gone for the actions and mannerisms rather than the words. May be a bit longer movie would have been a good idea.

The brilliant cinematography and camera-work fail to hide the lack of a story as the movie fast progresses towards its predictable end. The director manages to keep the atmosphere intact till the very end, almost making the movie worth watching. But what the hell, one would be entirely justified for sitting through the movie just for the first ten fifteen minutes.

Chopra stops short of being gimmicky and tries to concentrate on the story once in a while, but the attempt (pressure?) to fit a commercial conclusion to the movie leaves an unsympathetic impression. The script could have been tighter without many of the sentimental false notes.
The commendable restraint in explaining plot details, however, was one bright point, except for the chemistry between Sanjay Dutt and Amitabh.

The background score and the sound tracks are competent, and they complement the movie well, sometimes touching a tender nerve, and sometimes depicting the acute agony of the characters.

In spite of the appearance, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s “Eklavya” is not a murder mystery. It is not a love story, either. The way it ends does remind me of the Indian soap operas, but that would be an unkind comparison and the movie is good enough not to be dismissed that blandly.

All in all, Vidhu Vinod Chopra disappoints somewhat, though not probably as a director. The sheer originality behind the form of the movie stands out and puts it above the rest of the pack. With passage of time, I am sure this movie will be seen as an important commentary on Indian Cinema as a reflection of our growing consciousness about the technical aspects of movie-making in the frontier of our industry.

One of my problems with the movie was that I failed to relate to it. None of the issues or sentiments portrayed in the movie have any relevance to me, so I was pretty much detached from it all the while. However, some of the scenes were just terrific.

But the movie had a great start, and could be watched solely for the brilliant performance by Amitabh Bachan, not to mention the excellent cinematography. I give this movie a 2.5/5.

“When I heard that, I knew the film would not work, as youngsters were not able to relate to its basic premise. But mark my words, Kisna will prove to be a classic.”
(Subhash Ghai, as told to Mini Anthikad-Chhibber, METROPLUS (The Hindu), Chennai Edition, 7th September, 2006. link)
To appreciate this comment, one has to watch the movie “KISNA, the warrior poet”, but I don’t recommend it because I don’t want to loose my blog readers. The classic catch-22 situation.
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“Salman Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Amir Khan”
(Sanjay Leela Bhansali, in Coffee with Karan, when asked to order the three khans in the order of preference (in the rapid question round or whatever it is called))
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I think that the film Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.
(Alicia Silverstone, Actress, on the movie Clueless.)
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“My favourite horror movies are the ones made by Karan Johar.”
(Ram Gopal Verma. This started a whole thread of controversy. Incidentally, RGV also said that he thinks Karan Johar is a better director than James Cameron and K3G is a better movie than Titanic.)
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“…I clearly told Abbas-Mustan that it would be very difficult for me to play a dumb character. But they convinced me that my character only plays “dumb”…”
(Sameera Reddy, to Ali Bin Abdulla. The New Sunday Express, Chennai edition, Feb 11, 2007)
I’ll repost this article again when the movie (Race) comes out. When asked what does she do besides acting, she said, “… Given a chance, I’d love to spend all 24 hours of the day at the gym.” The only other thing she does is spend time with her parents whenever she can.

What a life!