Monday, October 31, 2011

Ra.One - The raving review that wasn't

Ok, so this one would hold no interest for those who do not watch Bollywood flicks. I say that with so much conviction, like anyone was interested in reading what I have written before but then if a lot of movies being made, irrespective of the their geographical origin, have viewers, my writing would be a relief sent from heaven for such.
Anyhow, coming back to why I am writing this entry, I happened to watch the extravagantly expensive production made by none other than the one called SRK (if you are confused on who that is....well you definitely don't have any idea of Bollywood)called Ra.One. Now, Ra.One could just have been called Raavan (remember that dude with the 10 heads and a mean streak who while being a King resorted to kidnapping other people's wives himself, serious lack of Human Resources planning in that kingdom) except a movie by that name came out not long ago and which starred Abhishek Bachchan, and now need I say about how it fared?
Ra.One it seems was Shahrukh's dream project and he really wanted to make it for his kids as he claimed, yet the first two minutes in, the dialogues were so double meaning that a majority of parents would have cringed in their seats not knowing if they should cover their kid's ears or eyes or just make their way to the exit, the last not being such a feasible option as there would have been a mad rush to exit at that point of time anyways.
Now we could do the whole what went wrong with the flick, that was to re-define the way Bollywood made movies and that super-heroes were not just confined to the self-confessed saviours of the world - the Americans, and could be better off going on to the what went right with it. So here is my list of what I thought was the positives from Ra.One
Getting Akon to sing Chammak Challo, now none of us and I mean none of us saw this
coming and did Akon (and the rest of the Ra.One team) pull it off. The song in
hindsight would be nothing as good as it is.

The whole video game concept, yes it was different although how it was handled here
is a totally different conversation.

The whole pixelated distortion of the faces when punched and otherwise looked
pretty good, to me at least.

Chitti (Rajnikanth)

Did I mention the song Chammak Challo?

That was about all I could find in a movie that ran for 2 hours and 45 minutes, a movie that was publicised in any and all avenues possible and SRK went on a marketing madness to pull the crowd to the cinemas yet he forgot the very basic thing that would have made this a truly re-defining way to make cinema in India - a proper STORY. The team of Ra.One went with the whole Good vs. Evil way in the same as the rest, heck Raavan had a much tighter storyline than this. The movie borrows a lot and when I say a lot I mean a lot of plots from the various super-hero flicks which could be another reason it leaves the audience leaving confused and wanting to see some rational although most of us went looking for none. The dialogues are so clichéd it makes you cringe in your seat and wonder if just some of that money spent on production could have be better utilised in getting a someone who could pen some proper lines. The whole Kareena making up words for abuse was good in the Golmaal series as it was different and new, whereas it was just used and abused in Ra.One. Some of the scenes were stretched longer than the value for money chewing gums and became rather annoying than awe-inspiring.
Overall, Ra.One is the present age Roop Ki Rani Chooron Ka Raja (don't remember that one? Had Anil Kapoor and Sridevi and was one of the most expensive movies made by Boney Kapoor, and had left him out of the business for a long time too) and although it may make its money and not see the same fate as the later the only difference that lies between the two is the larger than life appeal SRK has over his fans.
This one is only for the SRK fans and am sure they would be loving the flick, the rest of us have endured the pain and moved on for now.

Monday, October 17, 2011

A Touch of Life

There was a time when things were simple, life was about living, television was for entertainment and a phone for talking to people. Now however, its all changed, the phone is used as a phone, organiser, radio/MP3 player, alarm clock, web browser and what not; television is to fill in the void when we actually get time to pull ourselves away from that very phone and life a stress filled, heart attack ticking bomb waiting to blow any second that is if some other disease doesn't kill you first.
The human life has been entangled in a web so complex that the more we try to wrangle free of it the more complicated it gets. We have started relying so much on technology and gadgets that we have forgotten how that in-built super machine - the brain works. We can't have a proper debate or discussion without one of us opening up Google to actually verify the answer, sometimes even before anyone has had a chance to speak up. Back in school, we were discouraged to use the calculator while learning maths so we could rely on our ability to think and solve the problem instead of plugging numbers on the calculator and getting the answer, now kids don't even have to bother with a calculator as everything is present "on the internet". The whole concept of imagination seems to be the thing of the past with people now asking to see the animate of concepts before it can be conceived. We now have gadgets where we can just order it to do our work and while it may seem that this would make our lives better we find better ways to complicate it and add more stress. We try to look for answers on life but then there is only so much Google can provide and the answer to one's life somehow just doesn't appear on its radar, it could however find someone else's life for you to read.
Life is short or so they say, however in order to avoid the disappointment, slow down to smell the roses, enjoy the sunshine, feel the wind, dance in the rain - live a bit of your life before the curtain comes down.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Who ate my Planet

It should not come as a shock to many of us, unless you have been a hermit, that mother nature is not really impressed with us lately. The quakes, floods, droughts and just plain wild weather is surely a clear indication that everything is not right. The whole Global Warming debate has become a thing of yesterday yet the effects of the warming are still reeling out in front of us. Sustainability is what is has come to today, we need to ensure we at least maintain what we have today so that we can have a tomorrow.
Sustainability has become the for the present what the Hippie movement was for the 60s....considering they did the whole tree hugging it does seem apt. Any how, after years of pumping out matters from the core of the earth, creating holes in the ozone, manufacturing creative chemicals and spreading that in the atmosphere, we have finally realised that we may have hollowed out the very land we stand on, exposed all sorts of radiations which was filtered by the nature and created toxins which we inhale everyday to ensure we evolve the diseases which in turn requires us to create more chemicals to counter the effects.
Its probably past the point of time to bring back any semblance back to normalcy yet as we go ahead we need to decide whether its time to give a bit of love back to mother earth and detox the nature along with our lives which we fill with baseless, useless toxic junks to fill in the hole we have created by our consumeristic (yes, I did create that word and there is no meaning for it in the dictionary but you get the point)way of life.