Bihar main ek kahawat hain, mard jab tak chita pe naheen baithta, use buddha naheen kahete.
-Old Is Gold (2007)
Figure 1: The birthday of the future (or so I wish)
The 5-bit counter overflows. I turn 32.
Maturity, responsibility and a sense of balance beckons.
I, however, refuse to listen.
Happy New Year everyone !
Figure 2: The birthdays of the past (or so I remember)
There is so much tequila one can drink and head-ache pills one can take and time one can kill. Which is why I have been unable to see many of the gems that have been released this year, each of them possible candidates for my “awesomely great movies”— the “Reds”, the “Cash”s, the “ShakalakaBoomBoom”s, the “Fool N Finals”, the “Good Boy Bad Boy”s and the “Naqaab”s. Based on the ones I did manage to see however, here is my list of the 5 movies of 2007 that will be remembered in the anals (intentionally misspelt) of Hindi filmdom.
5. Raqeeb–Rivals in Love: The reasons why I loved Raqeeb are:
a) A love quadrilateral. Nothing gets my respect more than when people dare to dream beyond the hoary triangle.
b) Rahul Khanna standing up in a restaurant and saying ” I am not gay” ala Larry Craig.
c) Plump bird Tanusree Dutta and her Jharkhands.
d) The most wicked plot resolution. Ever. After the villains make an elaborate (and I do mean elaborate) plan to murder the hero, they find that the hero has seen through their whole plot. How? Through deduction? No. Through guesswork? No. Then how? Well as the hero reveals: when the villains were making their plots, “sab computer pe record ho gya” and he came to know of it immediately. That’s it. Wickedly simple and yet like all great twists I never saw it coming.
Continue reading ‘Greatbong’s Awesomely Great Movies of 2007′
[This list is based on the movies I have seen through 2007. I have not seen "Dharm" or "Blue Umberella" , which is why they were not considered in the making of this list. ]
6. Guru Is it a public-relations piece that seeks to white-wash the sleazy legacy of a corporate criminal by presenting him as a crusader against a flawed economic system ? Or is it a “warts-and-all” biopic of one of modern India’s most significant figures colored by director Maniratnam’s over-all sympathy for the main character?
What makes “Guru” such a delight, besides the Maniratnam-signature polish and the rock-solid performances (Mithun-da rocks but what’s new?), is that it provokes debate, not just on the director’s motivations or the saintliness of the protagonist but also whether it was “Guru”bhai who corrupted the system or whether it was the corruption inherent in the system that made “Guru”bhai inevitable ? A detailed review here.
[Explanation: The lower down in the list, the worse the movie is. And I should add---this is the worst among those I have seen. For instance I have not seen "Tararumpum".]
7. No Smoking: Going through the blogpost of director Anurag Kashyap and the comments thread below, I understood that if you declare “No Smoking” to be anything except sensational film-making, you are either of two things 1) a philistine who does not understand alternative narrative styles in films 2) a motivated industry-reviewer in the pay of the big studios.
In my defense, I do appreciate (not always though) the David Lynch style of movie-making. I have nothing against movies with non-linearities and more than a dash of the surreal. I admire Anurag Kashyap–I loved “Black Friday” (it was my movie of the year 2005). I did get the Howard Roark-inspired philosophy of arrogant contempt for the hostility of second hand souls that guides both the director of “No Smoking” and its principal protagonist K. I have also not been paid off by the big studio houses nor have I sent lovey dovey SMSs to the director and been rebuffed. And yet I found “No Smoking” to be nothing but a heavy-handed, bloated work of film-making where the relentless obscurantism leads not to a revelatory pay-off (the “aha” moment that Mulholand Drive brings you) but to utter disorientation and ultimately boredom.
The best thing about being me… There are so many “me”s
–Agent Smith, Matrix Reloaded.
[Image courtesy: Yogesh K Sharma]
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