LUCIDITY IN CONTEMPLATION- AN AGE OLD MALADY

Yeah you can have a chuckle; I did use the synonym tab for the title. But the piece is about two products that had everything going for them but as the title goes; had no clarity in thought. Making movies for the intelligent audience is acceptable but not at the cost of bad screen writing. The intelligent audience are good at peeling layers of the story but; they are also the first to notice a half cooked meal.

Movies deliver a message when told efficiently, and Dilli 6 and Dev D were not managed efficiently. If you fuck up after having scored great music, decent actors, media attention and a good plot , you not even worth any pity. Competing with all the fuckwits that the Indian film industry has, if you have all that going for you and you still can’t deliver is like losing a race where you are the only one competing.

I don’t care what anybody says; but Dilli 6 was a wasted opportunity.

The genre was similar to Swades but the execution was incompetent. Swades used the dam as the pivot to capture the intensity and the agony of the nonsensical involvement of the misunderstood Indian tradition. Dilli 6 lacked that pivot. There wasn’t anything that connects the bits and pieces. Using the Ram Lila as an apologue was interesting but not effective. The love story could have been that pivot. The story should have revolved around the protagonists. The director probably thought that he had to get away from the cliché love angles of Indian movie making but I can’t think of anything else that would have conveyed the same result. Like Raj Kapoor once said; “let them come to see Zeenat Aman’s tits but they will go back remembering the film”. Well; it works.

Dev D was not just a contemporary version of Devdas, it was meant to be alternate take on it. Anurag Kashyap’s Dev was supposed to be the biggest chutiya you will see rather than the eternal lover previously shown. But regrettably it felt like all he did was used the synonym tab to make it look 2009. The end definitely elevates the story to new heights, but it’s just a sudden jump from a story that had almost fallen flat with inappropriately used background score, lifeless acting, and insignificant characters.

Same problem again, lack of execution. The only hope is that unconventional story lines are being backed by financers but the multiplex audience might fade out in a few years as a result of the taken for granted attitude and we would be stuck with Karan Johar.

GOD HELP US

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

One summer night at the door of a carriage on a train, going back home from a gruelling semester at college when the count of women who had dumped me had gone upto 2, I found an ugly stinking man walking up to me and asking for a cigarette.
It wasn’t that necessary for me to entertain him as he did not look like an addict nor was it a chilly night where smokers cant live without the cancer stick, but something about that guy was really intriguing. I still didn’t know the reason for my weird attraction ( it’s not sexual you fuckwits) to that guy, but just then; he opened his mouth and showed me his yellow teeth and started of with a story of him and the riots in Ahmedabad. To my surprise; that bastard was a fantastic storyteller, and him being the ugliest thing since the elephant man; made the whole experience fascinating in a weird way.
For some reason unknown to me i have similar feelings to the one i had that night; talking about the movie. I never heard about Slumdog Millionaire before I saw it. I had absolutely no expectations with the movie and the moment I saw Saurabh “Bhosdike TALK” Shukla and Irfan “My wife is giving me HAIL” Khan on screen, I had a strong feeling that it would be one of those stupid cross-over films about the dilemma of being an Indian in a English Film. But as most of you would be repeating in you head “Sucker, you were wrong”.
If you have read about the movie and are aware about the media hype it’s generating, it’s evident that it definitely is a cinematic masterpiece; people want to read more about it.

But no cinematic masterpiece is devoid of cinematic liberties. Movie history would vouch for the cinematic liberties that numerous good movies have taken in the past. (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button being one of the recent ones, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, most of Steven Spielberg Movies and the list is endless). They are all a work of fiction and the liberties are taken to weave a story which connects A to B; when it doesn’t, (eg: The Day the Earth Stood Still) it hurts and people like me abuse the shit out of it.

Slumdog works for three main reasons; screenplay, editing and background score. The story is very simple at soul, it’s the presentation with the gripping screenplay, sleek editing and fascinating background score that makes the product as good as it is. The casting is mediocre, I thought the child actors did a mind blowing job, as the characters grew older they were passable. The point in the movie where Anil Kapoor tries to trick him was the only reason he would have accepted that film, it gave backbone to his role and made it more real than being just part of furniture. The cop chasing the kids is a winner all the way, it sets the tone of what’s about to come. There is nothing in the movie that is left unfinished. Everything that starts gets a ending, one of the main reasons why you don’t want to miss anything that anybody says in the movie coz you know they are going to use that little bit of information somewhere in the story. Salim’s character (Jamal’s older bro) loses relevance as it gets older and the casting of the oldest one is not right. For some reason he doesn’t convince me as the character. The youngest one was awesome when he is parading all those kid beggars to the streets. The part where the kids are in Agra was not necessary and I believe that is Danny Boyle’s way of adding humour to the script which I think slows the pace down than anything else.

Bottom line is; the product is exceptional and the only thing I gotta say to people who have the time to fuck around with the producers, being worried about the way India is portrayed and have a problem with “SLUMDOG”, get a life you ARSEHOLE”.

READER CONTRIBUTION

Pseudo-patriots grappling with the producers for the way India was potrayed. Slum-dwellers suing Rahman and Kapoor for acting in a movie that calls slum-dwellers, "dogs". Kid actors underpaid, still dwelling in slums. 10 Academy Award nominations and 4 Golden-Globes bagged. Slumdog Millionaire, based on Q&A, has made it as the first Indian movie to generate as much interest among Indians as and since "Gandhi" (Richard Attenborough, Ben Kingsley). Why? "Editing (reminds you of Trainspotting), Background Score, Script" - Sanket Das. Revisiting "Why?": Imagery, Hope, Kalaeidoscopic POV and a reflection of the insanely cruel Indian attitude.Technically, a marriage of Indian Cinema with Hollywood/British Style, a wedding that will soon be forgotten by the masses and be etched in the memories of movie-makers of mettle forever.- Partha Biswal

SONGS FOR YOUR CAR

O re ,,,,,,,,Saaya ( Slumdog Millionaire)
Dilli 6 ( title track)
Mahi,,,,Rock version ( Raazzzz)
O Jaana,,,techno version ( Raazzzz)
Emosanal Attyachar,,,Rock version ( Dev D)

BIG "FUCKIN" DEAL

If you have followed the mind retarding media hype (yes; I am one of those low life who reads and watches everything the media says about movies) about the three supposedly big BOLLYWOOD movies that came out in the past three months, you would understand what follows.

The 3 movies in discussion are Rab Ne Bana di Jodi (RNBDJ), Ghajini (G) and Chandni Chowk to China (CCTC). All the three movies are clear examples of the biggest problem with Bollywood movies, same fuckin story since the past three decades. All 3 movies had stories which were so common in the 90’s. Thank God, they didn’t have parallel comic streams (the Johnny Lever story streams running parallel to the movies in the 90’s) to the story; that would have made the already painful experience even worse.

Ghajini, is my pet hate these days. It disappoints me more than the hate it generates.
What was the fuckin so called “thinking actor” on? I am sure it was the spiked weed that makes your brain goes moronic. For once can somebody tell me which arsehole was assigned the job of dressing up the actor? I would shoot him/her so this never happens. Saying that the clothes were obnoxious is an understatement. Which business tycoon in the world wears muscle shirt with a tie to work . Agreed; you worked on your body and got all that muscle bulging out of your arms. So fuckin what? Aamir Khan looks disinterested in the part where he has to behave like a normal person. I am sure he was thinking about how he is goin to moan in the part where he has to tear off his shirt and see his tattoos, which for me was the only well thought idea in the whole movie which eventually just added on to the numerous things that the screenplay could not follow through. For a business tycoon; I am sure there would have been million other ways to achieve personal Vendetta. The whole point of the character being rich in the movie was the character of the actress to meet the actor and create a love story which did not eventuate into a good love story anyways. Bollywood being the “love story” factory, I am sure they could find a different and more believable way to connect the two characters. Apart from this I could not find any reason for the character to be stinking rich, which I must say negates the whole path taken by the character to eliminate the Villain.

CCTC was supposed to be a kung fu comedy. It was the first movie in months that I was finding it hard to sit through. To set things straight, the movie is not funny and the kung fu is disappointing, it’s just the visualisation that makes it watch able in parts. The story is absolutely baseless. Akshay Kumar has to stop taking himself this seriously. His comedy was really good in Hera Pheri and above average in some other movies, but the recent lot that he has completed, are just irritating. I don’t think this movie deserves any time to be spent even analysing. All I can say that if this movie makes money, TASHAN should get an OSCAR.

RNBDJ was not at all path breaking. It had a run of the mill story, the actress was not good enough and Shahrukh Khan hammed his way all through out the movie. But, the movie was one of the better ones that came out in the past few months. The movie was able to create moments between several characters which made the movie emotionally gripping. A major credit goes to the background music of the movie which translated the sentiment the story wanted to convey at that moment in a very contemporary way. My favourite parts were the scenes between SK and Vinay Pathak, who proves his calibre as a method actor once again. Although most of the basic concepts in the movie were old school, it connected well with what the story wanted to convey.

READER CONTRIBUTION

Memento rip-off Ghajini has now started giving me the creeps. I feel so lost every evening when I wake up and all I do is look for tattoos all over my body to find none. He he.Great B S (Background Score, morons!), oscillatory cinematography, a hot lady-love and a hotter bimbo, "Aamir's Perfect" look of a psychotic avenger and the South Indian action make it a paisa-wasool product.Especially after CCTC, which made me want to burn effigees of myself in public (for watching the movie, you see - "What the hell was I thinking"?). "Rab Ne..." was another disappoiting SRK-starrer and I wonder if it was made to give Anushka Sharma a jump-start in Bollywood. Could have been "Nishabdh Continued..." IF ONLY, King Khan (Grrr!) had not spent a fortune on getting that hawk-beak of a nose and a potato-peels facial skin that makes him look 50, if not, 63 (makes you want to appreciate AB for playing his age, though he too stuck to being a lover for quite sometime when he should have been playing Daddy). Sorry dude, but I am done watching glycerine-d eyes and sappy romantic faces, and after CCTC (which is a no-genre, on-screen, fiasco), I would rather stick to looking for tattoos every evening on my body. Ha ha ha ... plunk (fell off my chair laughing)!

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