IFFLA ‘09: QUICK GUN MURUGAN!
Quick Gun Murugan Movie Review
Sometimes mad cinema is the poison to end the eternal plague that has besieged Indian films in their quest to portray extreme reality or extreme fiction. Either 2 hrs of unnecessary communal preaching or 4 hrs of drought ending tearjerkers which have become a friday fare in some madness to quantify films for “aam junta” (normal public). Why, I don’t know. All I know is now I wanted to watch something radical and if madness, absolute and pointed, is what will do the trick, so be it.
Shashank Ghosh, the director, is one mad guy. To add to this, some 20yrs back it looks like, a writer who saw equally mad south indian westerns came to him with an idea to give a guy some gawdy pink/orange/green silk outfits, stick him two stainless steel guns and make him trot around south indian villages in blistering 50 degrees heat, on a horse, make him eat rice at udupi hotels and fight equally mad rowdies. Our mad director converted it into 60sec shorts for Channel V and 16yrs later – out comes the film – Quick Gun Murugan. Mad! Unoriginally Original mad film.
Film opens to an Omar Sheriff’isc cripple playing scare crow to passerby’s. Our hero comes, deals with him in some science negating fashion and establishes – Tamil cowboy to save the world, MIND IT! After that there are no questions asked. Only a 2hr laugh riot in a story that is anything but funny. How can mommy daddy dying, “would-be” dying, innocent aunties dying, hero revenge taking be funny? Cannot be but – MIND IT.
Not to reveal too much before the release in June/July, QGM world-premiered here at IFFLA to a completely disarmed audience who cheered, roared and applauded every bit of the film’s excesses interms of the story, actors and such open source plot line. I personally spent many a nights watching Dr. Rajendra Prasad’s Telugu humor masterpieces that even today stand up against anything in the world of comedy and to watch this brilliant actor play QGM was a real honor. He may be old, but how can such exceptional talent wither? Emotionally overacting yet heldback, believe me when I tell you, there was not a single frame that I remember where Dr. RP laughed, yet we did – insanely.
Naseer, Rambha, Raju Sundaram Vinay Pathak, Ranvir Shorey, the whole set of people whose business is to act – only, dazzle around QC becoming pawns and fall guys to invoke humor from how they dress up to what they say. American Westerns inspired sound track reminds you that the crux of the film is all about an ugly good guy is out to defeat the uglier bad guy to fall in love with an ugly damsel and live eating rice and sambar ever after. You see, this is a western set in South India, we have no Hema Malini’s or Rekha’s dancing around a la bollywood westerns, but hey… wait a min…. Hema, Rek… anyways.
Go watch this movie. If not for anything, just the satisfaction value it offers by being crazy. If in Indian context our justification to make dreamy films is to say people don’t want to use their grey cells while watching films, this challenges every sense of logic you may have. Support this film – a very unoriginal effort – if that is the way you like your cinema.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
We need mad films! We need craazier filmmakers. Shashank Ghosh had to do it, right from him wanting to name his first movie as ‘Manohar Kahaniyan’( obviously!)which culimintaed to ‘Waisa Bhi Hota Hai..’. I hope the madness is here to stay! Thanks for the write up Ravi!
ravi,
u lucky , son of a ‘gun’…. cant wait for this….would love if Shashank Ghosh can come on board and share his thoughts about movies in general….
Dunno how many times I’ve watched Waisa bhi Hota hai. Now waiting for QGM’s DVD release…
BTW, how many such mad movies do we have in Indian cinema?
man, waisa bhi hota hai is one of my all time favorites, i have really high expectations from this one. I did get to a rough cut of some scenes mid last year fortunately, and then it did not seem very funny, maybe because it was choppy and way too out of context.
Met shashank and he loved the review. My day is done.
Thanks ravptor..waiting for this too
This movie is certainly something I’ve been waiting to watch & I’m sure it would get due notice.Good to know Ravi that you had a blast watching it.
when is it coming out?
Looking for a June/July release
What was that hint about Hema & Rekha ?
Both are South Indian actresses (Originally)? And yet they did not act in those “kollywwod/Tollywood” movies with heroes lovingly dressed in Yellow/Orange pants? Just a guess….
Both Hema & Rekha are of south indian origin.
Is this movie out yet? July is done