Cinema: Movies that move

M has asked me to list my top five favourite movies. This is something I have always avoided doing. I have never understood how to rank either movies or books. I get so confused. Do I like Toy Story better than Godfather or is it the other way around? I am sure scholars and critics, people who have some understanding of the art and craft of movies, will be able to say why one is better than the other. I am just a guy who watches a lot of movies. I can only talk about how a movie made me feel and that too at a very intuitive level. And I react to the same movie in different ways at different times. So how a movie makes me feel depends as much as on the frame of mind I watched it in as on the movie itself. However, not answering when someone asks about my favourite movies also feels like a cop out. There are movies that I like very much. Movies that have moved me in different ways. Even movies that have moved me in different ways at different times. So I am going to take a middle ground here. I will think of different genres and for each genre I will mention the movies that for me represent that genre. That is to say the movies that immediately come to mind when I think of that genre. They may or may not be the most "acclaimed" or well-known, or the most award-winning or money spinning movies for those genres but I don't care about all that.

I have decided to create separate lists for Indian and non-Indian movies to avoid the difficulties of slotting a lot of my favourite Indian movies into these genre definitions.

This is the list in no particular order.

Science Fiction

• Gattaca
• Blade Runner

Adventure

• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Lord of the Rings - Fellowship of the Ring

Drama

• Godfather
• Il Postino

Thriller

• Tinker Tailor Sailor Spy
• Notorious

War

• Paths of Glory

Comedy

• Groundhog Day

Noir

• The Maltese Falcon
• Chinatown

Romance

I do not like romance movies unless they are comedies. By romance movies I mean movies where the drama is just around the trials and tribulations of love. A list like this is no place to go into the reasons for this bias - believe me, as irrational as it sounds, there are reasons for it - so I will elaborate on that some other time.

• My Fair Lady
• Notting Hill
• Love Actually - Not all the stories in this movie are equally good.

There will be follow up posts to this as I add to the list of genres and movies. The only two genres guaranteed not to appear here are horror and blood-and-gore. I hate horror movies. Even the lousiest horror movie scares the shit out of me and I don't like being scared. And I despise gore for gore's sake. I don't like violence in general. Movies which have no point other than to show gore - "Saw", "Hostel" series and their like - turn me off. Read More

Cinema: Two movies

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is not a comedy. Sure it has lots of humour. But ultimately it is a tragic tale of a bright boy lead down the path of crime by his environment and his own greed, taken advantage of by everyone around him and then betrayed by all. It is to the film maker's credit that he manages to tell the tale with humour instead of with the usual dose of glycerine.
It might have something to do with the fact that I am from Delhi but the first thing that I noticed about the movie was its atmosphere. This movie has captured Dlehi in all its avataars. From the posh colonies of South Delhi to the run down mohallas, Oye Lucky! does for Delhi what Aamir did for Mumbai. Abhay Deol and Manjot Singh as the teenaged and adult protagonist are terrific. Abhay is quickly becoming one of my favourite actors in Bollywood today. His just being in a movie guarantees that it will be different from the run of the mill stuff. Paresh Rawal is great in all his roles. I did not understand the logic behind him playing three characters though. If there is some hidden meaning behind it I totally missed it. Both Archana Puran Singh and Neetu Chandra do justice to their roles. The pace flags a little in the second half but not so much as to prove distracting. This is probably where the director's first movie Khosla Ka Ghonsla scores over it with its tight pacing through out. I liked it the open endedness of the story and the morally ambiguous ending. Any attempt to tie all ends would have made it either sermonizing or clicheed. Dibakar Bannerjee set out to make a more difficult movie than his first movie which was an out and out comedy and has succeeded admirably. I would have liked to see this movie become a big hit but that will be tough considering that it does not offer push button entertainment like most audience seems to expect.

Dil Kabaddi seems less like a movie than a collection of random scenes taken from a different movie. It starts and ends abruptly and zig zags in between. For a movie which claims to be a comedy, very few situations have anything funny in them. The only saving grace of this movie is Irfan Khan. He practically carries the film on his shoulders. Khan has all the rib ticking scenes in the movie and does full justice to them. The movie becomes entertaining whenever he comes on screen and goes back to boring when he exists. Rahul Bose is totally miscast as a college professor and also has the most irritating story arc. But then he also has the best (and only) kiss. Konkona Sen is competent as usual, Rahul Khanna has nothing much to do and Soha Ali Khan is incompetent, again, as usual.

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I am back...

Its good to be back after such a long time. My last post was two months ago. So many things have happened since then and I have so much to write about. I don't really know where to start. Its probably best to talk about the present first but I have had a completely uneventful week so there is nothing to talk about there. The week before that I bought a 6 DVD pack of Guru Dutt's classics and held a Guru Dutt film festival over the weekend. Needless to say, I was the only attendee. But more about that later.

I have been buying a lot of DVDs lately. The sale section at Crossword is to blame for that. They have a "Buy 1 Get 2 Free" offer going and I just could not help myself. I got Blade Runner - The Final Cut, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima for just 600 bucks. I also bought the anniversary edition DVD of Lagaan at half the price. I also bought a whole lot of books. The great thing is that I didn't have to spend any money on them. I had got Crossword gift vouchers as prize for something I did at work and I spent all of them. I will ramble on and on about my purchases later. Right now I have to go for lunch. Bye...

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Cinema: Mere Baap Pehle Aap

MBPA is probably the first film to show a father fantasising about his son dancing with lots of semi-nude women. Unfortunately thats the only interesting thing in the entire movie. MBPA is one of those movies which make you think more about what could have been than what has been. It is full of interesting sub-plots that have not been realised. It seems like Priyadarshan had lots of plots in his mind and could not decide which to make a movie out of till the end. As a result the focus of the movie changes from one scene to the next and justice is done to none. MBAP start of well enough. We see two friends past middle age, Rane and Mathur, who set out in search of a bride for Mathur. They encounter a series of hillarious misadventures with a strict cop, ACP B.B. and we think the movie is about to carry the adventures further. But then enters Rane's son and takes him away. We see a nice little family of two where the traditional roles are reversed and the son is the father's guardian. Now we expect the story to develop along those lines. But then enters an anonymous woman who stalks the son and claims to have been wronged by him in the distant past. But this story is disposed off hastily and the father is made to meet a woman from his past. At this point the film loses its way completely. Suffice to say that at the end of the mandatory three hours both father and son pass their agnipariksha and live happily ever after. Throught this time all I could think of were the half a dozen other movie that could have been made from each of the sub-plots. Take the story of Mathur and ACP B.B.. Everytime Mathur goes in search of a bride he ends up being hauled up by B.B.. Their story would have been interesting. Instead, we are merely told towards the end that Mathur has convinced B.B. to marry him and thats about it. Or the story of the father and the son in reversed roles. That would have been a first for the Hindi film indutry. But we don't get that either. And by the way, the baap here is the one who wants to get married while others don't want him to - exactly opposite to what is conveyed by the title and the promos.

Of the actors Om Puri is the worst. He is extremely irritating. He looks very uncomfortable (as he should) in a meaningless role dancing on beaches with babes in bikinies and leering at any woman who happens to be in front of him. He is only funny when he is with Archana Puran Singh as B.B. This is the first time I have liked this lady in any movie. She is the only one I felt sorry about. The charactor was tailor made for her and she was doing justice to it before being edited out of the movie. Akshaye Khanna and Paresh Rawal were competent as usual but they deserve a flop this time just for signing up for this movie. Genelia does not have much to do. I can't really find fault with the actors when they don't even have a story to back them up. All my venom is reserved for Priyadarshan. He has been going downhill since Hungama. This movie continues his descent. I just can not understand what he was thinking when making MBPA. Somebody should tell him that just having Rawal and Akshaye in a movie does not make it a comedy.

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Cinema: Aamir

Why would a terrorist organization go to all the trouble of forcing an unwilling man to commit a terrorist act by kidnapping his family when it has thousands of volunteers who would do the task willingly? That's the question that bothered me all through the movie. If you can ignore this question though Aamir is a pretty good movie. It is the kind of inexpensive no frills movie that I like. The plot is simple. The protagonist, Aamir lands in Mumbai from London. As soon as he gets out of the airport somebody throws a cell phone at him. He is wondering what to do with it when it starts ringing. Aamir takes the call. The caller tells him that his family has been kidnapped and he will have to follow certain instructions if he wants to free them. The movie follows Aamir all over Mumbai as he deals with the situation. All the action happens in half a day. One situation follows another and the action almost never lets up. It does get a little tedious for a little time in the second half before picking up again for the climax. This is mainly because of the lack of characters and dialoges. The movie concentrates exclusively on Aamir. We see only brief hazy shots of the caller on the phone. Some other minor characters turn up from time to time to help or hinder Aamir. This is not a big problem for most of the movie as Rajiv Khandelwal as Aamir is more than able to carry the film on his shoulders. He is perfect as an ordinary guy who does not understand what is happening to him. He just wants to go home to his family and carry on with his life. It is all like a bad dream for him. I especially liked the part where he finally realizes what all this is about and reacts to it. Aamir is a very well shot movie. It captures Mumbai like few movies have done. In keeping with the no frills look, there are no songs or heavy background tracks.
I have heard Aamir is actually a "remake" of a foreign film. Since I have not seen that movie I cannot comment on that. Even if it is, that does not bother me. A creatively made remake may sometimes surpass the original. Aamir is a serious effort at making a realistic suspense thriller and it has succeeded.

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