PROJEKT iVIEW : Of Movie Trailers and Reviews (Part 2)
iView Author:
Subrat
(Bangalore, India)
EMAIL:
withheld
Groucho: (To Film Reviewer) What kind of a job do you have?
Film Reviewer (FR): I am a reviewer.
Groucho: What kind of rider? Pony express, motorcycle, or what?
FR: Reviewer. R-E-V-I-E-W-E-R.
Groucho: Oh, that’s very refreshing – a reviewer who can spell.
While I owe apologies to Groucho who reserved the above for Ray Bradbury,
the writer, on his TV quiz show, I think he would nod a quiet assent to the
sentiment expressed. Reviewing a work of art is possibly the second oldest
profession in the world and these days it tends to share traits with that of
the oldest, namely, a certain laissez-faire attitude towards morals,
readiness to be on the shelves for sale and, finally, easy availability on
the Web.
But it was always not so. Not for me at the least.
As a seven year old I came back home one evening after possibly the greatest
movie watching experience in my short stint on earth – Disco Dancer. The
truth that had eluded the greatest spiritual leaders and philosophers from
times immemorial had hit me in the solar plexus while watching it. That
Disco is an acronym – ‘D’ se hota hai ‘Dance’, ‘I’ se hota hai ‘Item’, ‘S’
se hota hai ‘Singer’, ‘C’ se hota hai ‘Chorus’, ‘O’ se ‘Orchestra’. Secure
with such knowledge and having found a voice to all that I felt about the
world in the form of Mithun, I slept well that night. And I dreamt of Kaka
exhorting Mithun to pick the guitar up “Gaa, Jimmy, gaa” and Mithun going on
to sing the awesome “Yaad aa raha hai”.
The morning brought ruin. In the school bus as I set the scene for
recounting the tour de force to a dozen others, I came face-to-face with
REVIEW. Yes, in all caps – caps that senior Boy Scouts wore at school who
shredded Disco Dancer to bits not on the merit of the movie but by comparing
it unfavorably to Namak Halal. I lost my audience of dozen and also hit upon
another great truth (yes, two in two days, those were the days!!) – raving
lunatics dictate societal choices.
This model of reviews continued till I hit my teens. The morning trips to
schools mostly had us discussing movies. These were elemental discussions
where your ability to remember the dialogues, recreate the background music
through various vocal acrobatics and outline the basic plot without giving
it all away made you stand out as a reviewer. So a Shahenshah review needed
the following; a raspy, fire-breathing dragon like timbre for that famous
introduction where he establishes paternal connect with his adversary, then
the ability to enact a paan-chewing policeman, do a bit of ‘kaun hai woh,
boloji boloji, kaun hai woh’ with your neck straining forward and then the
ultimate act of making that creaking sound with your mouth of JK straining
at the noose as Bachchan delivers vigilante justice in the courtroom. Now if
you could pull all of the above together, you were guaranteed an audience in
thrall for ten minutes. What earned me spurs as a movie reviewer was my take
on that Ramsay classic ‘Veerana’. Humanity can be divided into two families,
one that has seen Veerana and the other who live an unfulfilled life.
Another take on this is one which has heard my review of Veerana and those
who are waiting to hear it. Reviewing Veerana required summoning all of your
faculties to do justice to a masterpiece. From getting that Vijayendra
Ghatge stifled dialogue delivery right to describing that chudail in the
bath tub scene (Lux – filmi chudailon ka saundrya saabun), Veerana was made
for school reviews. Then the whole bit on Hemant Birje with the average
Ramsay heroine (Sahila or someone) and the mandatory Tantrik played Rajesh
Vivek who in my mind was born to be a filmi tantrik. Getting the tantrik
right was the key and I excelled in this area, rolling eyes, shake of the
head with Bappida’s music in the background. You might that think the
greatest ideological sell-out in last century was when Deng charted his own
course different from Mao’s protracted struggle philosophy. You are wrong.
It happened when Ramsays made Sabse Bada Khiladi in mid-90s and gave their
die-hard fans the sabse bada ideological dhoka.
Anyway, I made quite a mark as a reviewer and could make or break the fate
of a film in that circle of dozen. For instance, I chose Ghar ka Chiraag
(Chunkey-Neelam-Kaka triangle with that awesome Joginder ditty ‘Tutak
Tutak’) over Maine Pyar Kiya which led to this circle of dozen not watching
MPK for over 2 months before news reached our small town that MPK is the
registered hit of the decade. It didn’t mean a thing to my reputation as a
reviewer and I realized this early lesson – people have short memories and
nothing sticks to a reviewer.
It was during this time I realized that the newspaper that lands at our
doorsteps every day actually had pages other than the last two covering
sports. To my shock, I realized that once a week it also carried half a page
on movies including reviews. That people made money out of this vocation of
mine was a revelation. I remain eternally thankful that my first exposure to
real reviews was that of Iqbal Masud ruminating over films and society in
the Indian Express. May be it is sepia tinted memory but those were not mere
reviews. Else, why should I remember so many of them so distinctly so many
years later? What would you say to start of a review which went (and I am
paraphrasing here while keeping the spirit intact) – “The deadline was fast
approaching and the calls from the Producer’s office became more frequent.
And he had the proverbial writer’s block. He slept fitfully that night and
in one rare stretch of tranquility he saw the dream. It was a perfect love
story and when he woke next in the dead of the night, he decided he should
write down the story lest he should forget it the next morning. When he woke
the next morning, he found just a single line scribbled – and the boy meets
the girl. That’s what the best of love stories are, so I don’t fret much
when Mahesh Bhatt picks up Capra’s It happened one night and makes DHKMN.
For it is the treatment that defines such movies and not the story.” Or
Masud analyzing JJWS and signing off with the view that class conflicts
couldn’t be solved through cycle races.
The Nineties saw a minor boom in the business of reviews. The newspaper
reviews meant puns and wordplay which would have done a 6 year old proud.
Some went like this “so you have a Yashji adding a new ingredient in love
story, Darr. Brrr, Grrr, Sunny, Punjab da Puttar. Shahrukh with KKK Kiran.
Hamster hooey, phooey phooey.” Ok, Ok, I made that up but you get the
picture. The first cousin of the above was the TV movie review. Forty five
seconds of content interspersed with 2 minutes of promo with a few words on
actors and a line or two for the Director. Both these models brought in the
other innovation – the 5 star scale rating system. The movies were anyway
being dictated by the ‘Star’ system, now movie choices were also made on
basis of stars. The difference got starker with the access over Web to some
glorious reviewing traditions of the West. One could now sample the
pleasures of a Stephen Holden or a A.O. Scott review sitting at home in
India and contrast it with the trite often on offer at home. While some
Indian newspapers continued to keep the standards of review high (notably
the New Indian Express and the Telegraph), many were seen to have succumbed
to allegations of “campism” and vested interests.
The last half a decade has brought in the latest entrant to the review
circus – the blog. All you need is time and a keyboard and you have your
review ready for the world. And what’s more, you could then argue over the
review for days on for the Web makes us all commentators. In many ways, I
see the wheel turning full circle. The reviews seem to have gone back to my
school days of plot narratives, creating background music to accompany scene
retelling and singing parts of song. I love them. It is like accidentally
waking up to discover it was all a bad dream and life is the same as before.
The reviews have gone back to where they started off from. From a dozen
serving markets of millions, it has gone back to a million serving markets
of dozens. I say amen to that. Now if only I could get that Haryanvi accent
right to review Chak De India for you.
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
subrat // “raving lunatics dictate societal choices” .. how very true.
” It happened when Ramsays made Sabse Bada Khiladi in mid-90s and gave their die-hard fans the sabse bada ideological dhoka.” what a line!
a fitting sequel to your first post. thanks for sharing.
Subrat,thnx for reminding of Iqbal Masud ..Indeed one of the genuine and best reviewers imo..And thnx for sharing the evolution and pristine glory of reviews..Brilliant!
“Humanity can be divided into two families,
one that has seen Veerana and the other who live an unfulfilled life.”
=))=))=))=))
Hemant birje, vijayendra ghatge, om shiv puri, satyen kappu, kimi katkar, ranjeet, Joginder(!), yunus parwez, even a satish shah made to look all lusty and ham for money…..
its all coming back….
For me, reviews meant Times, I would run to find out those ratings to break it to my friends, and justify that all the time. It only changed very late, may be when Dil Se came, I knew reviews are nice to chew on, but not slept over.