Thursday, November 17, 2005

Movie Marathon!

The last few days have seen me do the following. Work a little bit on my new internship, apply to a multitude of companies and watch a gazillion movies! Since I find the first two too tedious to write about, I shall write about the movie marathon that I have indulged in over the last few days...
It all started with a waste of time called 'Chot', which had a promising start but was pretty much a disaster from minute number thirty one. The premise seems plausible, marginalisation of UP-ites in Mumbai (I've known this to happen) and their subsequent fightback. Ashutosh Rana and Sharad Kapoor do decent jobs, but the film, after a while, became an excuse for blood and gore. Then came the excrutiating 'Rain' (we got this from the library solely because there was nothing else and a few of us had to see something!). Less said about that, the better. Meghna Naidu's ample bosom was the true protagonist there. An empty house, a blind lady and a suspicious reporter all built up the premise well for this low budget titilator, but again execution is not something that our filmmakers are very good at. The day after we picked up a few DVDs from the school media library. I caught up with Mira Nair's seminal work, the bittersweet 'Salaam Bombay!', which was a pleasure to watch! The street children, the streets of Mumbai, Nana Patekar and Raghubir Yadav and L.Subramanium's music kind of restored my faith in cinema after the suffering of the last day! The DVD also had a special feature tracking the lives of the street children and how their lives had changed for the better thanks to the movie. A well spent couple of hours. After that it was on to Bollywood again, with Hriday Shetty's 'Pyar Mein Twist'. Watching Rishi Kapoor and Dimple again after 'Sagar' was a breeze. The actors were pretty lovable and by the looks of it, must have had a ball making the movie. However, I felt that the relationship between the aging couple could have been developed further rather than spending frame after frame on the lives and bickerings of the loud and insensitive children. The music of the film wasn't too bad either and had a cover of the naughty love long of yesteryear, 'Khullam khulla pyaar karenge'. The marathon neared its conclusion with Peter Weir's 1975 eerie classic, 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', a supposedly true tale about the mysterious disappearance of 3 college girls from a picnic site. The film is brilliantly made, with great footage of the Australian outback and fantastically atmospheric music. Though slow paced and ambiguous in its explanation of the disappearance, the film itself is an education in the art. Convincing performances from the cast also helped. The last film was Mira Nair's 'Vanity Fair'. The film had colour, good performances from its cast and lots of India in it. Becky Sharp has been explored, but not enough, I felt.

Anyways, enough of movie watching...have to send out a few more applications!

Cheers!
Abhishek

5 comments:

Prerona said...

nice post!

i just wandered in. Nic blog. Will be beack for more :)

Abhishek Chatterjee said...

Prerona - welcome! love the fact that ur name has an 'o' in it. loads of people have it as prerna... having the 'o' adds another dimension i feel. keep visiting!
Cheers!

Anonymous said...

Salaam Bombay is fanatastic... don't think Mira Nair has done better work after this classic.

Cogito said...

dude u seriously gotta apply for the Guinness records

Abhishek Chatterjee said...

dude i forgot to write about ankur and bhumika (both benegal features. dont know i missed them out! Tcha!