Baboon Logic

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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– 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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Suddenly last week, very much against my wishes, I had to go to one of the places I have least wanted to visit in all my life. I was packed off with my bags in the name of holidays, and I knew I was damned if I was going to enjoy a minute of it. This is the draft I had planned to put up before I was thrown out of my room with my Nokia 6300 and a ticket to an epidemic ridden rainy patch of land that was supposed to be beautiful.

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I saw my first episode of Indian Idol today. I was actually watching Sachin and Dravid bat on the second day of the second test at Trent Bridge, but they were too wary and cautious to be putting up an interesting performance.

It was an open secret that Anu Malik is an idiot. After today’s episode, it is not a secret anymore. He wrongly commented on the personal life of one of the contestants (to Deepali, your crush is crushing your voice. How cheeky is that?!). When cornered by the righteous Alisha Chinai, he employed three different devices of rhetorics (stalling techniques, more accurately) to evade the issue and justify himself. It could have been four, but one of his techniques constituted of making completely irrelevant statements and my knowledge of rhetorics is too poor to place it.

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Eklavya has a great beginning. The first scene of the movie is probably the most powerful one. As Boman Irani recites a sonnet from Shakespeare to his dying wife, remembering the better moments of their courtship, one is mistaken for a moment about the present reality, and when the meaning of it crashes in with all its irony and cruelty, one doesn’t know whether to feel sad for Rani Ma (Sharmila Tagore) or for the Rana (Boman Irani, who is reminiscent of the kings in Shakespearean tragedies). However, this bitter irony of life soon takes a malicious turn and the movie takes off. The darker and gloomier foreground of the deathbed against the lighted backdrop sets the mood of the movie.

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Yesterday I watched Guru. I’ll grant Mani Ratnam credit for an idea, but the movie was bad, corny and full of cliches and interesting subplots (which evolved into pointless indulgences due to lack of crafting and direction). I decided to accept these subplots as a sketch of Guru’s life and make my peace with it, mainly because I am in love with Vidya Balan. I found the character of Guru to be well crafted and well conceived, I liked it. However, they had to adapt the character to fit it into the hollywoodish unsatisfying conclusion of the movie. If I watch the movie again, I think I’ll be able to distinguish between the character fleshed out on the screen writer’s desk and the one adapted in Mani Ratnam’s chamber.

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