Life in a… Movie Formula
I was up late last night watching the Telly and particularly a Kannada movie channel called Udaya Movies and chanced upon a movie that had me in splits and so much of laughter that once I get rich and famous, am going to hunt the director down and pay him a lot of money to make another movie like this. This was simply stupendous. BTW, before you get me wrong, this was supposed to be a quasi serious dramatic movie with some thriller and horror elements but in reality was the best comedy film I have seen in the past few years. This movie set me thinking on how we have as movie viewers watched some really good formulas over the past few decades and how we have seen it in practically every language in this wonderful country of ours. I want this to be a running list and please do add on formulas I have missed
1. Good Parents, Bad Children
This is one formula that am pretty sure if I get my hands on a time machine and roll grandly into the 25th century will still be running in one form or the other. This is such an amazing amazing formula that it has also taken over TV completely. Well you wonderful readers out there must be thinking hey, I have heard about this formula but really have no idea as to what it mean. Fear not, I am here to help you. :-)
The formula is quite simple. Take a nice roly-poly character actor, a semi dignified character actress; take 2-3 young actors. They can be young or also old. No one really cares. The story line is more important. The old character actors usually wear inordinate amount of make up in the initial stages to look young and then quickly get married and sire children. Well Well…This is when it all comes into play. The man who has gotten married and not at all paid credence to family planning is so good that he has to work on laborious tasks like lifting big gunny sacks, take a large amount of shit from all but still maintain a sense of romance and fun in his life. This is pretty much the first half or can also be done away with in one song. However you like it. Now the kids grow old and ET voila, we have the 2-3 most scheming B@$t@rd$ in town and they are at once tied to the 2-3 most scheming so-so from other families. Now all their intent is to screw the life of their “Good Parents” and make life miserable. The main element in this formula is the bloody predictability. There will either be a servant, friend, student, dog, buffalo, a good son maybe or something that will help these parents when they are thrown away (usually on a rainy night) to fend for themselves. There is usually a sad song here and the temple is shown quite frequently. The man at once gets back to lifting boriyas and working as a coolie. Forget the fact that he could have built some life skills after he had sired 3 children…No…He is a good parent and hence has only spent a lot of time at home having fun and not learning anything in his youth. BTW, these good folks of course do not see the movies as the movies are all about them and they should have guessed this but No…They do not do so and fall again into the trap. Now as he is having this sad life, he will find something and make money or his kids will be taught an example by some moron (read as servant, friend, and boss) who will show them the light & the family comes back together. Classic examples are Avatar, Bhagban, and Amrit ad nauseam. This I believe is the most abused formula to date and one that is so strong, let me cite an example. The great visionary Kannada director Panthulu created a movie called “School Master” about 5 decades back. This was picked up by the world’s most regressive director (Ravi Chopra…Pradeep Sarkar is a close second) & made into Bhagban. Now are the wonders of this formula. A “great” “Superlative” director by name Vijayalakshmi Singh took the same Hindi movie “Bhagban” & made it to “Ee Bandhana”, a Kannada movie released last year. Wow…Kannada filmgoers saw their own movie in a new light. Don was a direct rip-off but this movie traveled in time & hence I like it so much. This formula hence gets my best rating and wonder why THE Subhash Ghai did not take up this instead of “Good Boy, Bad Boy”. Who knows, he might still do it. My other concern on this formula is that Pradeep Sarkar might make a Laga Part 2 where Rani starts to live with Abhishek’s parents and this might be the story for that :-)
Now, let’s head out to the second one
2. Wife /Trainer/Cook/Superb Bahu corrects Husband
This is another formula that has been beaten to death by everyone. I have seen quite a few in Hindi but in the south, this was like the cat’s whiskers for many years. The formula is quite simple. Take down notes, if you get confused
The wife is a warm, young, bubbly, know-it-all Ass. She is so bloody nice; you will get diabetes just by watching her. She is her dad’s chaithe, mom’s laadli and what not. So her Dad’s pompous rich friend, village panchayat leader or whatever finds her to be an ideal bahu and gets his son/daughter (wait, there will be a time in the future where same sex marriage will be commonplace and even then this formula will exist) married promptly to this wonderful girl. She now enters hell. She has no idea of what the new family has in store. See she again has not seen movies & caught on coz if she had she would have been able to compare to her husband’s family who also has a mother (who is decked in a lot of jewelry), a married sister (usually to Tinu Anand) who stays at home and a husband who is such a spineless git, you forget him even in the frame he is there. So into this wonderful maelstrom enters our laadli Bahu and by Jove she makes them all love her by the end of the movie by which time all the audience strongly detest her :-) .
Coming back to the schedule of the ideal Bahu, She gets up in the morning and god forbid if she does not do the “Main Tulasi Tere Aangan ki” and then also a lot of puja but still cooks wonderfully and is a tigress in bed. WOW. Hence Indian men seem always confused in the whole process of marriage as they keep looking for this girl and SHE DOES NOT EXIST but HE is so used to the formula that he keeps looking. Now getting back to the formula, she goes ahead and bears all the pain and suffering doled out to her. Not sure why they dole it out but they surely dole it out. There will of course be some scenes of her either as a thief, philanderer, cheat and what not. In all these scenes, that git of her husband will ignore her and fall for it. Again not a movie watcher. Eventually she also goes through a sad song and is redeemed back. In the end frame of course all the people are nice to her and all is well that ends well. Fantastic. This is so badly abused that there is this actress that I hate called “Lakshmi” in south India. You might all know her as Julie Lakshmi. She did this role for a decade and killed us as an audience and promptly as she grew old, she became one of the Good Parents and again screwed us with that formula. Sheesh. This remains for me a gem and hence 2nd in my rating.
3. Unemployed Youths join the Mafia with a dash of love and violence!!
This is another really superlative formula that seems to have died out in Hindi but is still running strong in the south. This is a very simple dish to make and will not require more than 4 hours to prepare. You will need the following:
- 2-3 youths all from poor backgrounds
- College or just after college atmosphere
- A Big bad don/politician in their area
- Fathers are either nice or really bad. If one parent is nice then the other is definitely not
- One unmarried sister, who can later be used for either as a hostage or raped, this is left to the discretion of the write who works hard for about 4 hours on this plot
- One nice rich girl who loves the hero, He can be the grubbiest looking git on this side of the Suez but she has no issues in loving him. This can be the girl from formula 2 as then the movie will be quite interesting. First part can be formula 3 and second half of the movie can be formula 2
Now add all this ingredients nicely in one bowl of fevicol so that they all stick together. This will make it into a movie. Let me just tell how the story will usually pan out. The boy is a happy go lucky lad who is like the best Son, Sant Baba (plays with the children of the area, helps the old & sick yada yada), Honhaar Student and what not. This guy has a good gang of friends also who play pranks and life is good. They do not have jobs and that is the only struggle they have. Of course with the economy booming like this and in particularly Bangalore where the services industry is so rampant, that trespassers will be recruited, these guys do not find jobs and the criminal underworld is the only answer for them. There is always a Bali ka Bhakra in these friend gangs in such films. He is to die in the film and all know it except the people in the film coz they DO NOT WATCH FILMS. So they have to now take up some activity for a bad man and it fails and they all are now dragged into the underworld. If the Hero is a real Hero like a Superstar, then the police, politicians and all are corrupt and hence he is given a virtual license to kill and he is alive at the end of the movie. If the hero is a non entity and some wishy-washy character, then he is to be killed at the end either in the name of love or as a lost cause. This is the only formula with a fork but believe me you both the formulas in this have been used heavily. The film usually meanders between his love, his life, and family outburst, lots of fights and death or redemption.
So these are in a nutshell my 3 top formulas and I am sure there are many more such wonderful formulas from you all and we as movie lovers should list them all here and see if we can as a group arrive at a new formula that generations to come will scarce believe such a thought could come out of a normal human mind :-)
Cheers,
Deepak
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
hi some of them are:
LOST AND FOUND: where 2 brothers or sisters or father-son, mother-son gets seperated and after series of events meets at the end.
BOY MEET GIRL, BOY LOSE GIRL, BOY GET GIRL: i think this can be the most exploited theme ever. and will remain in the future where the reason for seperation may change to girl’s brother to girl’s father to boys discovery of having AIDS to girl’s dillemma over another girlfriend of her.
CATCH ME IF U CAN: a clash between good and bad and towards end good catches up with bad.
i am still thinking that i can add some more, probably in next msg
enjoy
@ Deepak, could you please tell the name of the movie you were watching on Udaya?
I agree with Paharia. I think the poor/rich boy and rich/poor girl love story is the most abused formula in our film industry.
Close second would be the Love triangle.
Another one is Revenge, where hero would have lost someone near and dear to him (it could be in childhood).
Gurugale adu yaav movie swalpa heli… naavu nodi dhanyaraagthivi :D
LOL!!
“Hence Indian men seem always confused in the whole process of marriage as they keep looking for this girl and SHE DOES NOT EXIST but HE is so used to the formula that he keeps looking. ”