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Magnolia (1999)
1/10
What was the point of this film? PLEASE? ANYONE?
28 December 2007
Warning: Spoilers
The minute you give an 'art film' 1/10, you have people baying for your ignorant, half-ass-ed, artistically retarded blood. I won't try and justify how I am not an aesthetically challenged retard by listing out all the 'art house cinema' I have liked or mentioning how I gave some unknown 'cult classic' a 10/10. All I ask is that someone explain to me the point, purpose and message of this film.

Here is how I would summarize the film: Opening montage of three unrelated urban legends depicting almost absurd levels of co-incidence. This followed by (in a nutshell, to save you 3 hours of pain) the following - A children's game show host dying of lung cancer tries to patch things up with his coke-addicted daughter, who he may or may not have raped when she was a child, and who is being courted by a bumbling police officer with relationship issues, while the game-show's star contestant decides that he doesn't want to be a failed child prodigy, a fate which has befallen another one of the game show contestants from the 60s, who we see is now a jobless homosexual in love with a bartender with braces and in need of money for 'corrective oral surgery', while the game show's producer, himself dying of lung cancer, asks his male nurse to help him patch up with the son he abandoned years ago, and who has subsequently become a womanizing self help guru, even as Mr. Producer's second wife suffers from guilt pangs over having cheated a dying man; and oh, eventually, it rains frogs (You read correctly). And I am sparing you the unbelievably long and pointless, literally rambling monologues each character seems to come up with on the fly for no rhyme or reason other than, possibly, to make sure the film crosses 3 hours and becomes classified as a 'modern epic'.

You are probably thinking that I could have done a better job of summarizing the movie (and in turn of not confusing you) if I had written the damn thing a little more coherently, maybe in a few sentences instead of just one... Well, now you know how I feel.
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Zinda (2006)
6/10
Stop comparing it to the original! We all know Zinda cannot match up!
16 November 2007
Warning: Spoilers
Even as I am writing this, I can just imagine self proclaimed intellectuals salivating over the thought of ripping this comment to shreds. Well, to all you wonderfully smart people, I hope this comment gives you ample opportunity for this kind of mental masturbation.

To start off, YES, I HAVE SEEN OLDBOY. So I know that for all its disturbing thematic elements (incest, torture, mutilation, to name a few), it is a brilliant, visceral film that leaves you staring at the screen for a good 10 minutes after the credits have rolled. But to compare a Bollywood film like Zinda to a work of art like Oldboy is like comparing a 4 year old kid's essay to Shakespeare. There is no way Sanjay Gupta could have matched up to the original, given not just the fact that he just isn't as good as Chan Wook Park, but also that quite a few of the film's themes cannot be digested by the Indian audience. Context! Context, people! On its own, when not submitted to comparative scrutiny (oh I can see you film buffs getting worked up now!), the film is, from a technical perspective, quite a polished product. Acting is just fine, and quite realistic, though the supporting characters, especially Mahesh Manjrekar and Lara Dutta, make the ride a bit bumpy. Technically, the film is brilliant (again, I'm treating this as a stand alone product), and I personally enjoyed the one shot corridor scene equally in both movies (guilty of comparison here). What really lets the film down is the writing. After building up the audience's curiosity, the film completely blows it when it comes to revealing John Abraham's motives for doing what he does. The flashback is handled in a very ham-handed fashion, the motive, when revealed, just doesn't seem convincing enough, and we seriously need good child actors! The writing fails again when we get to the end, where it seems like the writers just looked at their watches and decided that it was time the movie ended.

In essence, yes, the film is a complete ripoff of Oldboy, and the nothing, not the acting, not the direction, nothing at all, matches up to Oldboy, but if you must have a bad analogy, think of this as something similar to what 'The Departed' did to 'Infernal Affairs' (and if anyone thought Departed was a good film, make sure you never run into me or I will morph into a finger wielding, hateful comment writing SOB sooner than you can say 'plagiaristic, over-hyped crap'!) Coming back to the point, Zinda exposes the common Indian audience to a kind of cinema that they have never seen before. It's like 'art cinema for dummies', and we need it. So all you smug self-proclaimed cinema PhDs out there, stop the madness and get some perspective!
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Black Friday (2004)
10/10
A bold, fantastic and path-breaking film
13 February 2007
Warning: Spoilers
Anurag Kashyap's film 'Black Friday' is quite possibly the most important film of 2007, and as relevant today as it was two years ago when it was banned.

Based on the book by S Hussain Zaidi, the film shows the events that led up to, and followed the serial blasts that shook Mumbai on 12th March 1993 from three very interestingly chosen points of view - The mastermind (Tiger Memon), the unsuspecting, misguided foot soldier (Badshah Khan), and the hapless and under-equipped police (Rakesh Maria).

The film follows an episodic format, and keeps jumping in time and location quite regularly. However, kudos to Anurag Kashyap, for his taut screenplay and brilliant direction, and to Aarti Bajaj for her dexterous editing, that make sure you don't lose track of the goings on. The performances are top notch, be it Pavan Malhotra as the scheming, vengeful and manipulative Tiger Memon, Aaditya Srivastava as the misled, disillusioned jehadi Badshah Khan, or K.K Menon as Commissioner of Police Rakesh Maria, who manages to convey more about the rigors and moral dilemmas of a police officer through his eyes than most talented actors can with the best of dialogues. The dialogue is so fantastic in its realism that you almost feel like you're watching a documentary. Action, set design and sound are among the best yet, (remember they were done more than 2 years ago) and give the film a very troublingly real look.

An all round masterpiece, this film deserves to be seen by one and all, not just because of its cinematic brilliance, but also for its relevance in today's troubled times.

But I do have one grouse. How can the censor board allow words like Madar**** and Bhen**** in a film like Omkara and bleep the same words in Black Friday? It's unnecessary and unfair, not just to the film-makers, but also to the viewer.
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