Rohini and I have been on a movie marathon recently. We caught up on quite a few movies after a long lull. I am going to quickly summarize my thoughts here.
The first one in the series is “Jobs”. We were quite bored one Friday night about 2 weeks back and decided to catch a movie. After a lot of thought on what we’d want to see, we decided to catch up on Jobs movie. While I don’t have a great memory of the movie, I really would give it to the make-up team. Kutcher looks uncannily like Jobs in a lot of the shots and so do the lead cast. That was fantastic. Some of the points seem to have departed from whatever little I have read of Jobs’ life. So I didn’t quite like the distortion. Verdict: its ok if you haven’t seen this one. Perhaps, “pirate of the silicon valley” is a little more interesting!
Then that saturday we decided to catch Rajnikanth in his animated form in Kochadaiyaan. The story was nice, although you could still call it masala. I think it really adds good strength to the movie. Graphics was a little shabby but I think it is way better than Dasavatharam. While there were places where the graphics is really exceptional and looks like an actual shot, most of it lacked some kind of finish. My comment on the whole thing is: the team didn’t seem to want perfection. There could be myriad reasons why they didn’t! Maybe they ran out of funds, maybe they ran out of time? Maybe they just couldn’t set up the kind of infrastructure to perfect this? If the reasons were any of this, I am really happy. Not because I got it correct, but because that means a promise – a promise of good things to come! It is sort of unfair to compare it to Hollywood. Hollywood movies are rarely 3hrs long and they don’t try bharatanatyam or shiva thandavam or even kambu sandai for that matter. And if you say Avatar was 3hrs and excellent graphics- think again. Avatar used only the same sequences that jungle book already did and did not dance or fight like indian movies need to.
Also, since the software is written for the hollywood storyboards, they wouldn’t have thought of the requirements for any of this. Anyway, that can be called an excuse as well. I just think if the team decided to strive for perfection, one that shows up here and there along the movie, they’d have made history. They still did, but not something that they can rest over.
After a long break, I saw a telugu movie. There was a time when all I watched was only telugu movies. That was also sort of a golden era there when movies like bommarillu were being made. Then there was a period of absolute formula based films. After a gap, there was a brilliant movie. And this time from the ANR family. Honestly, I don’t think I have ever seen a Nagarjuna movie that did not have a sultry duet 🙂 This was the first time! “Manam” is a brilliant movie. I’d really welcome everyone to watch this one. There are no songs around the trees, no foreign locales, no item songs and very little masala elements. The movie just flows. The finer details are fantastic and relish-able. The uberness and opulence is fantastic – you just want to live a life like that – not the cars but the sheer opulence in every aspect – the beautiful decor of the house, the posh suits and sarees, et al. The movie has very little element of poverty in it. A sign of things to come? Must watch. After “Anand”, I’d call this “manchi coffee lanti cinema”. The story is reasonably strong or at least it is easy to overlook the gaps. I am not sure I remember the songs, but it comes so well jell’d with the story, you don’t feel the songs happening – ala – “rama chakkani seetaki” in “Godavari”. Just see the movie, I say!
The last one for the day is “Godzilla”. I wanted my sister to experience IMAX 3D. I guess IMAX 3D should just use sequences from Gravity to explain why IMAX 3D 🙂 Anyway, Godzilla is just another run of the mill destruction story. I just can never understand Hollywood’s obsession with large scale destruction. I mean, even Gravity is sort of like that, but Gravity is still a great experience – one that almost puts you in space! Anyway, like my sister summarized, Godzilla is the story of a lizard and two cockroaches. Lizard destroys the roaches. The best part of the movie is the scale. It is almost unthinkable. But there are all the masala heroics as well. Not a bad watch, but nothing so great either.
Let me know your disagreements in the comments 🙂