Amar Akbar Anthony Friday, January 25, 2013

Amar Akbar Anthony was a hit. It needs no introduction (if you were born in India, say around 70s-90s). The title song of the movie goes something like this "Honi ko anhoni kar de anhoni ko honi". Now if you observe closely, the word anhoni is very similar to Anthony. Now I know it was just a song and the similarity of the two words could have been just coincidental, or the it was only used for the making the song more musical, but some how I feel there must be more to it than just for lyrical purposes. May be it was that Amitabh Bachchan's character Anthony, was supposed to be unlucky or his birth was unfortunate in the movie. Was this the reason that the character was named something that souded so much similar to anhoni. Or may be there was a whole different angle that the writer and lyricist wanted to portray. And if you are still reading this I applaud you for your vella-pan, you have reached my level of vella-pan, or even higher. Congrats :P.

Showdown Thursday, December 13, 2012

I think it all started with Slumdog Millionaire, a hollywood movie adapting typical bollywood masala theme. I mean Hollywood is without a doubt superior to bollywood in almost all respects, then why would it make a movie using an age old masala-formula, which even people in bollywood have started to leave. May be it was an attempt to make a parody on bollywood style cinema, or may be the director seriously liked that genre. Whatever may be the reason, but it started with Slumdog Millionaire. And then I think it was Ghajini, a movie made in home production of a bollywood A-lister, and a complete ripoff from a tollywood movie (which itself was parody of an awesome hollywood flick Momento). I mean what was Amir Khan thinking. All the reasons why any one would hate a tollywood movie were carefully included in every part of Ghajini. A stupid love story that can never happen (now I know that bollywood love stories are no When Harry Met Sally, but atleast they don’t have a heroine who literally proves she’s dumb than a dolphin and a hero who falls for that), all action scene fast forwarded so that it seems that hero is actually fast, a unbeatable hero (Amir Khan sure made an credible effort to make that look realistic, but seriously there is something called fight direction that can be used too you know), and the villains so dumb that they could never think of any possible way to kill a person with no arms (guns!). So there it was, Ghajini, a movie certainly of below standard than currently existing quality of cinema in bollywood. Of course it was a hit, it was an Amir Khan movie, how could it not be, and no one dared bad mouth about the movie. Following Ghajini were a series of tollywood movie remakes (Wanted, Ready, Bodyguard, Singham), and a couple of normal scripts tollywoodified (Dabbang, Once Upon A Time In Mumbai). It was a nightmare seeing bollywood turning into ugly twin of tollywood. I mean there were of course good movies which come and hit you now and then (Wednesday, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Gangs Of Wassypur), but these movies often get categorized into non-mainstream cinema. The main stream cinema was surely witnessing a crisis of style and scripts. And then came Talash. The trendsetter of bollywood is here with another trend. He made a movie with a theme that was once used in horror tv show on Door Darshan (remember Aap Beeti?). I mean there were better episodes on Aahat than the movie, for atleast they made people wet themseleves in pants. I don’t know what will happen if the coming movies start to copy who's who of awfull tv shows. Frankly I’m too terified even to imagine. Does it gets worse than this? What’s next? Picking up stories from Mastram's novels (all due respect to that awesome novelist)?