Living alone and working long hours mean that I rarely get the time to catch a movie in our cinemas, even though I live and work at a film school (Film and Television Institute of India, in case you were curious). I end up watching bits and pieces of movies on satellite television through the Tata Sky connection. Most of the movies I will be writing about below are ones where I have seen at least an hour of the movie. As a film student and filmmaker, I find that this much of a movie does give me a reasonable idea of the what the movie is like.
I started watching Anurag Kashyap's Mukabaaz (the boxer) after fifteen minutes and watched it through to the end. I am not a fan of Anurag Kashyap's movies, though I'd be the first to admit that he enjoys enormous public approval in India. Mukabaaz by most reviews is not one of Anurag's better works but is fairly recent so I guess it deserves our attention as encapsulating what Anurag Kashyap's work is all about. To me the most striking thing about the movie was its complete lack of moments, at the end there isn't a visual, a shot or a cut or a sound or the way music came into a scene that you remember. The script is content to knit together one cliche after another and at the end one is left with a very dissatisfied feeling- here was a subject full of potential, after all mainstream cinema doesn't deal with small town India anymore.But in this film, the subject doesn't stand out at all, maybe it's not foregrounded enough in the manner in which the visuals and the sounds of the film are organised. Am I cribbing too much, expecting each movie to be a classic? In a way yes, that's what we teach young filmmakers that each subject, each sphere of life that they are interested in, everything has the potential to be a great movie subject. Its a matter of how we look and deal with a subject. In Mukabaaz I am left wondering how the filmmaker looked at the subject.
Revisiting 'Cheeni Kum', yes R Balki's famous first film is now twelve years old- Amitabh (Big B) is sixty four in it and he's seventy six now. Like most of my generation we have grown up admiring Amitabh as he evolved into a superstar. Cheeni Kum is one of Amitabh's better performances in recent years, maybe one of the best of all times. As a sixty four year old bachelor who falls for a much younger woman, I love his scene with the girl's father on the roof top. It is the climax of the movie and Amitabh raises his performance by a few gears to make it the climax of a movie. Does it work? You bet it does. Shows you how a storyline needs performers more than anything else. There is no big fight at the climax, this big argument put forth by Amitabh is it. Afterall he is dealing with a formidable enemy- the girl's father is on a hunger strike, martying himself, how do you counter that? Its easy to write such a scene, but dreadfully difficult to deliver on screen- the dangers of cliches and bad performances run nearby. To me this is a classic film from our times, one that will stand the test of time.
There are a few more movies that I want to write about, but can't lump it all together into one post.
I started watching Anurag Kashyap's Mukabaaz (the boxer) after fifteen minutes and watched it through to the end. I am not a fan of Anurag Kashyap's movies, though I'd be the first to admit that he enjoys enormous public approval in India. Mukabaaz by most reviews is not one of Anurag's better works but is fairly recent so I guess it deserves our attention as encapsulating what Anurag Kashyap's work is all about. To me the most striking thing about the movie was its complete lack of moments, at the end there isn't a visual, a shot or a cut or a sound or the way music came into a scene that you remember. The script is content to knit together one cliche after another and at the end one is left with a very dissatisfied feeling- here was a subject full of potential, after all mainstream cinema doesn't deal with small town India anymore.But in this film, the subject doesn't stand out at all, maybe it's not foregrounded enough in the manner in which the visuals and the sounds of the film are organised. Am I cribbing too much, expecting each movie to be a classic? In a way yes, that's what we teach young filmmakers that each subject, each sphere of life that they are interested in, everything has the potential to be a great movie subject. Its a matter of how we look and deal with a subject. In Mukabaaz I am left wondering how the filmmaker looked at the subject.
Revisiting 'Cheeni Kum', yes R Balki's famous first film is now twelve years old- Amitabh (Big B) is sixty four in it and he's seventy six now. Like most of my generation we have grown up admiring Amitabh as he evolved into a superstar. Cheeni Kum is one of Amitabh's better performances in recent years, maybe one of the best of all times. As a sixty four year old bachelor who falls for a much younger woman, I love his scene with the girl's father on the roof top. It is the climax of the movie and Amitabh raises his performance by a few gears to make it the climax of a movie. Does it work? You bet it does. Shows you how a storyline needs performers more than anything else. There is no big fight at the climax, this big argument put forth by Amitabh is it. Afterall he is dealing with a formidable enemy- the girl's father is on a hunger strike, martying himself, how do you counter that? Its easy to write such a scene, but dreadfully difficult to deliver on screen- the dangers of cliches and bad performances run nearby. To me this is a classic film from our times, one that will stand the test of time.
There are a few more movies that I want to write about, but can't lump it all together into one post.
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