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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– 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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Note 1: This is the official sequel to The Mail that Launched a Thousand Spams.

Note 2: To those who received the drafts - The reference to Robert Kolker was incorrect, which I discovered after going painstalkingly through his mammoth book again in an effort to quote him exactly (it contains the whole of GRE word list many times over). That would explain the delay. He said some nice insightful things though.

Note 3: This story, and its prequel, are officially declared to be ficticious accounts incorporating no characters inspired by anyone living or dead.

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Here is a passage directly from the 7th installment, except that I have changed “wand” to “wang!”

Hermione speaks …

“The Deathstick, the Wang of Destiny, they crop up under different names through the centuries, usually in the possession of some Dark wizard who’s boasting about them. Professor Binns mentioned some of them, but — oh it’s all nonsense. Wangs are only as powerful as the wizards who use them. Some wizards just like to boast that theirs are bigger and better than other people’s.”

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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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Yes, apart from mushy love stories, I also hate the triumph of human spirit over all adversities and obstacles. I don’t mind people dying gruesome deaths left right and all over the place, and I don’t mind being blamed a bum for watching them, but I can’t just stand those biopics hailing the greatness of the human spirit, nor can I sit there in front of the Television being inspired by courageous teachers who teach their students to be different and celebrate their individuality.

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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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