I had been intending to write about them, but I guess it was Peeyush’s post about watching three movies that gave me the push! I did one more than you, so there!!!

Unlike Peeyush, however, I happened to see three movies I absolutely loved and the fourth, well, less said the better, but the other three more than made up for it. Let’s see. The first and fourth are related to each other as the latter is a cheap rip-off of the former, and is a recent movie which is breaking box office records in Bollywood.  No prizes for guessing, the former is the original, Memento while the latter was Ghajini. First stop was Ghajini.  I was keen on seeing Aamir’s performance and so caught the movie with my flatmates who loved it.  I barely managed to stay awake.  The movie was so pithy that it left me feeling like I had downed stale coffee.  I hated Jia Khan’s portrayal of a medico:  totally hogwash.  Aamir with his bulging biceps and ear-splitting screams was not at all the class act that I was expecting. Ghajini reminded me of another movie in which another super-star actor starred, bulging biceps and all.  The movie was Abhay, starring Kamal Hassan.  Like the older movie, this too had little other than the bicep show but what Ghajini did was to whet my interest to catch the original, Memento.

I loved every bit of Memento, feeling almost in first-hand, what the protagonist was going through.  Guy Pearce did not need to look like a WWE wrestler to impress upon the viewers.  Probably Aamir thought just having such a body would make everything else, including acting uneccessary.  The ending was a total class-act, teasing the brain with further angles and possibilities, giving the mind something to chew on.  Ghajini only gave me a head-ache, in comparison.

The third movie I saw was Slumdog Millionaire.  Excellent movie.  Brilliant acting by rank new comers.  Take a hint,  Aamir, SRK, Akshay Kumar and all the others.  Your days of  being able to sell crap just because it has your signature on it, are coming to an end.  Real soon. The obvious question that came to the mind was why can’t Indian directors come up with a movie like Slumdog which is set in India and is about Indians?  Director Anurag Basu, in an interview to ‘The Hindu’ has stated that Indian directors don’t easily grab such opportunities as they read less or don’t read at all.  Amazing isn’t it?  Why read books when you can load a Hollywood movie into the DVD player and see how it can be ripped-off?  Creativity, anybody??? The movie was very enjoyable, taking the viewer on a rollercoaster ride starting in the slums and ending in riches.  One would be tempted to call it a ‘feel-good’ movie, but it does not attempt to sell a sugar-coated pill.  It makes no attempts at all to mask the sleaze and the slime.  What you see is what you actually get or rather, what you actually get is what you get to see, in the movie. On a side note,  I thought that Rehman’s Golden Globe winning ‘Jai Ho’ song was very ordinary, by his own standards as well as by that of Bollywood.  Does it mean that our music is way ahead of our filmmaking abilities?

The last movie that I caught was DasVidaniya.  Again, an exeptional poignant movie.  Brilliant acting by Vinay Pathak as the geek who gets rudely shaken out of his routine by a terminal illness and decides to make the most out of the rest of his life.  Shades of American Beauty are visible here and there, like the conversation Amar (Vinay Pathak) has with his alter-ego, when he realizes he has been ‘dead’ for years and decides to get his life back, including getting back at his boss, but the shades are just that, a salute of sorts and definitely no ripping off. Movies like DasVidaniya and ‘A Wednesday’ are the only reason why many viewers including yours truly have not completely given up on Bollywood.  About the rest, it’s time they stopped thinking that building biceps like the world is running out of steroids and dressing up like Chinese and cracking corny jokes can be substitutes for acting.