don’t you hate when a promo comes with something like – “free for a month, and unless you remember to cancel, we’ll start charging you”. Ugly, sneaky and cheap.
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Where Omkara and Gangaajal paved the way, Raajneeti takes it forward. These are the films that take you in Back to the film. Firstly, it’s an ensemble cast film. Prakash Jha (director) has done a great job of putting the perfect actor in the perfect place (even the hip looking Arjun Rampal seems to oddly right in place with the character). A subdued and underplayed Nana Patekar was fantastic, to begin with. Ajay Devgan, big shot he is, playing a non-central character only added to the underscoring what his character was about – which was of a reluctant second fiddle. Manoj Vajpai did well to get back from his excursion into lead-role dreams, and Katrina Kaif is a worthy wallflower, until you see Kubrick-esq transformation – the audience is perfectly setup for that bait-and-switch. Secondly, with about 8-10 strong characters, it’s near-impossible to develop characters at the same time as building a story (look up the film Salaam-E-Ishq). For instance, Arjun Rampal abuses a female party worker in one his early scenes, who, later in the film, becomes a pawn in the opposition hands. Flows flawlessly into the story, without an awkward jump in narration. This would’ve been written as a simple drunken-assault scene in any other film – but here, the abuse is linked to party nomination process run by Arjun Rampal, shedding a ton of light into the ethics of his character. Simply put, story moves forward from shot-one, and characters build along the way. Though somewhat of a longish film at about 3 hours (with some very good-sounding songs cut nicely short), this movies is brisk due to some very compact scenes. Fantastic pace and editing to keep you in the story and in your seats. I found myself stepping back into the film a few times to catch the nuances of the story. Definitely not a lean-back film., and not definitely for those that can’t appreciate the earthy hindi language (use of the word ‘yone soshan‘ for promiscuity). It’s nice to see sophisticated well-films for the rest of the country, by the masters of the craft. Watch the film – but not in a multi-plex. That would be somewhat of a incongruous – like eating pani puri in Oberoy. Watch it in a “Cinema Ghar“, as the trailer puts it.
sub note: the grocery stores used to charge a rental for the videos. then, it turned to giving the rental for free if you bought $20 worth of groceries. now they are giving away the damn DVDs – no need to even bother returning them. checking out the grand google experiment with indian entertainment – IPL telecast live on YouTube.com. my guess was right, the live streaming of entertainment events wont work in india, at present. the ‘last mile’ bandwidth is too lacking to support live streaming of any kind of minimum quality. here’s how the stream looks like in full screen – pixel-by-pixel (another interesting insight – people are going into full-screen mode to watch this event, while they may watch other videos in standard browser mode). i have a 1Mbps connection. it probably is a lot worse in regular broadband plans, land even worse in shared icafe connections.
desis are quite demanding lot. they want it to be free, convenient, but even with all that, it still needs to be decent quality. just look at the comments on the twitter stream.
such a great opportunity missed. some (actually most) reviews of the movie were glowing, forcing me to make an unusual trip to the theater mid-week for a 7pm show. some said it was a tear-jerker, so people i guess were willing, ready and looking forward to shed a few tears at the theater. some reviews even said that the film would tug at the heart strings. what a disappointment. the movie is good in the first hour or so, mainly because of the tried-and-true bollywood formula played out between shah-rukh khan, kajol and karan johar – the master of the craft. and just when mr.johar tries his hand at non-formula piece in the later half of the film, the script falls apart, the editing horrible, and the movie hurtles towards nonsense like plane about to crash to the ground. how else can you explain made-up scenes in stupid looking town in georgia. people shuttling back and forth between georgia, san francisco and los angeles within a span of literally one picture frame? kajol going all stone cold on shah-rukh khan all of a sudden? how else can shah-rukh khan be captured, be on television, and then go away incognito? what a mess. karan johar’s craft is no longer relevant. not when we have kaminey, devD, isqiya and such coming out of bollywood, the nautanki-style thumka movies are pretty much done. karan johar now tries to modernize his film making and it’s a big disaster. of all things i feel really sad about de-valuing the debate of indian muslim identity, the mind of an autistic child and the american way of life by way of incorporating them into this directionless excuse for a film. bollywood took a step backwards. |
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