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Do Bigha Zamin (1953)
Over-hyped melodrama
This film is supposed to be one of the best movies ever produced by Bollywood. The plot borrows a lot from Bicycle thief. A father son duo roams on the streets struggling for money and survival. Bimal Roy tries hard to copy De Sica, but he proves himself to be a bad director and a worse copycat. The plot becomes very predictable halfway through the film. All bad things seem to happen to the poor farmer Shambhu. Nothing can ever go right for him. There are good, helpful people in the movie too, but their role is frequently undermined and unexplained. The screenplay is overly dramatized and the actors are amateurish. The farmer's little kid over-acts and talks like an adult. The only savior is the cinematography and somewhat believable portrayal of the life the protagonist, played by the great Balraj Sahini, leads.
If one wants to watch Bollywood there are many other much better, albeit unappreciated movies. A big Thumbs Down! 3/10
Happy Days (2007)
Good entertainment
I am a self admitted cinema buff. I watch two movies a day when I am busy. On other days the figure gets inflated by a factor of two!! Yesterday I watched the the first Telugu Movie of my life. It was a movie called Happy Days and about life at an engineering college. The director is himself a engineering grad and so the movie must have been inspired by his experiences. There was little mention of hostel life in the movie probably because either the director himself was a day scholar or his college had no hostels, which was a let down given the fact many like me believe the real spice of engineering days is the life@hostel. I watched with subtitles, and they were a major disappointment. The intensity of laughter of my linguistically less disabled friends (whom i also call 'Gulti(s)')always drowned my infrequent half hearted laughs. As such the less I talk about the screenplay the better it would be. The movie was good entertainment even tough: 1. The songs seemed to start all of sudden (making me feel the director had already paid for the songs and wanted to insert them somewhere), 2. Some of the plot twists looked pretty impossible to happen. 3. The acting left a lot to be desired. 4. The editing could have been tighter. 5. The cinematography and special effects were amateurish many times.
Indian film makers are happy selling escapist movies and the Indian audience is happy gulping the prescribed sweet dose of medicine (fully knowing the dosage won't really help except probably increasing the already high blood sugar levels), one could find enough evidence of the malaise in the film. However I liked the characters who looked real and the sets which (the movie had been shot in a real life college) suited the bill almost perfectly. The movie though dispelled the myth in my mind that all popular south Indian movies have heros thrashing evil looking but helpless villains in different locations, wearing different dresses (though all equally silly looking) and displaying different martial art styles. The movie had a rating of 8.3 on IMDb (and my vote did not make any discernible difference). I will finish my post here as I have to wonder about who would rate a movie on more than 8.
The Blue Umbrella (2005)
Beautiful Tale
Cinema is a very powerful medium.Like any other powerful media it needs to be harnessed well or the results can be go awry. For all the power it has, it is not after all so easy to captivate the audience, strike a cord and forever etch it in the viewers memory. Vishal Bharadwaj's Blue Umbrella does just that and in my opinion does a bit more!
It takes a simple village tale woven by Ruskin Bond and makes it to an amazing movie. Cinematography is amazing and the first scene is proof enough. Pankaj Kapoor gives another performance worth remembering. Bhardwaj knows close-ups with such powerful actors work well and we see lot of closeups in the movie. It goes without saying Kapoor's expressions during close-ups are just brilliant and something to look out for. The filmmaker also gets the best of the child actors and the screenplay, the gait all seem add to the rhythm of the cinema. And more than all these it is a movie about humans, their desires, their failings and emotions.
All in all wonderful cinema!!! Please do watch it!!
Flop Show (1989)
Pinnacle of Hindi TV
I remember watching this series when i was hardly a 6 year old and boy it was a favorite at my home. I had a chance to watch it again a few days back and was really impressed by the the serial. Though it is a comedy I dare bet more thinking went into it then today's serious soaps. The serial took up everyday matters showing the moral degradation of the society and presented the things with simplicity without being too simplistic. This serial uses traditional humor to keep viewers interested which is quite a far cry from the coarse humor is frequently employed on TV these days. Jaspal Bhatti as an Actor and Director does more than justice to his twin roles but to me, he really stands out a director, the way the characters are developed in such short episodes deserve recognition- I cannot remember any character that I found hard to identify with in any of the episodes. The technical execution of camera, editing and sound is par-excellence (given the low budget and other constraints). Also the serial tells a lot about life in urban India some 20 years back which stands in sharp contrast to the congested roads, pollution and high rises that are so common in India cities today.
A series which everyone of the family can sit and watch. Must watch for you and your family!!