Monday, December 28, 2009

Three Idiots

All the engineers out there from the gazillion engineering colleges that dot our country know everything that is said and preached in 3 idiots. There may even be 3 million idiots who have gone through the same grind to realise it themselves. I know I am one. (I needed 4 years of engineering and 1 1/2 years of PG to realise what I actually wanted to do) All this said and done, I wondered how many non engineers would like it. I guess they would. There are enough gags, suspense and sentiment to please any average hindi movie goer. Some lines are hilarious, others bring on a smile. Though not a mass pleaser like Munna Bhai, Hirani does bring sparks of brilliance to this movie. All the actors have atleast 2 decades separating them and their college days, yet they manage to somehow convince us, a feat in itself. And Aamir Khan, although I must say is a pain in the wrong place off screen, is a delight on it. Boman Irani as always makes us forget the actor and only see the character. Madhavan proves his mettle as a able support yet again and Sharman Joshi is great too.

The story revolves around ICE, a prestigious engineering college run by a tyrannical Boman Irani nick named predictably as Virus. Aamir Khan is a revolutionary genius who challenges the "by heart" method taught in all our colleges and manages a few inspiring dialogues on the same. There is a suicide, a girl and ofcourse the hero saving the day. But that is only one half of the story. Madhavan is there because his dad has sacrificed everything to make him an engineer, though he wants to be a wildlife photographer and Sharman is a poverty stricken religious boy whose whole family including an unwed sister is waiting for him to get a job and save them. The black & white sequences showing his family plight are a delight! The little jokes sprinkled here and there apart from Omi, the golden boy in college who hates Aamir are like icing on the cake. The story then takes the suspense path and though the ending and the consequent story is a tad predictable, its timepass and in the tradition of great Hindi mass movies takes us through the gamut of human emotions and a few underwear clad butts too. Kareena did not impress except in a few scenes and I was thankful she had very little screen time. All in all a 6/10.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Why Avatar can not be the next star wars...

Every article written about James Cameron's Avatar touts it to be the next best thing, the next Star Wars to be precise. It is not. The attention to detail is the same, but after a truckload of sci fi movies that have been dumped on us throughout the decade and before that, Avatar does not inspire the same awe and excitement that Star Wars initially did.
It is a great movie, it is a great story and it is path breaking but to the average joe on the ground, its just another great animated movie. I personally loved it. I had read about the attention to detail, including the animals anatomy (the breathings holes that provided direct flow to the lungs) the fact that every bolt and nut on the machines had to be explained, the colours inspired from the deep during his work on Titanic etc so I noticed and I admired. But what about people who had not read all this, they just saw a weird alien looking animal and some cool machines like any other sci fi/fantasy movie. The saving grace here was the visual appeal. Cameron managed to make us gasp and hold our breath at the beauty of Pandora. It took him 12 years to complete and in those 12 years the audience had grown jaded. We will love Avatar, but not with the same intensity that we did Star Wars.

There is another important point against Avatar. Though the story is great, the characters did not have many dimensions to them. In Star wars there was passion and politics and family and intrigue and sentiment and comedy and full on entertainment. With Avatar it gets overcome by the visuals. There is a linear story with mostly one dimensional characters. And with the amount of money spent on the animated characters the least they could have done was to  hire a good dialogue writer to make those animated characters sound better and more relatable. Every cliched sentence has been used and abused in the movie.

After all the hype has died down, I wonder where we will place this movie, especially after the same technology spreads and is adapted for better scripts.

PS: I am anyways going to watch it again.