An Jo reviews PAANIPAT

Ramblings on PAANIPAT

No, I am not talking of Roshan and Dutt’s Paanipath, where the director, Roshan and Dutt’s horribly expanded physical mass and intolerable act massacred Bachchan’s masterful, externalized, antithetical performance of DEEWARand Danny’s class-act to the smithereens. And that Bachchan re-worked his inner angst and seething anger from Chopra’s film to fit into the world of Pacino’sheavily influenced Scar-face’dact and re-worked by a heavily tech-influenced Mukul Anand: I am talking of Gowarikar’s ambitious saga, which, truly, in parts, brings back Gowarikar to his elements; to his caliber.

This is a sprawling epic, and I am glad Ashu has been able to somewhat go back to his roots, just like Ramu discovered something again in SARKAAR 3. I am one of the few people, who found JODHAA AKBAR really terrible: And I will tell you why; the main reason is, the promise of the first half, was so devastatingly slaughtered in the second-half with Ekta Kapoor kind of spiritually taking over Ashu and turning Akbar’s story into a Saas-Bahu story between Ila Arun and Aishwarya Rai, it was truly disappointing.

Blast from past – courtesy munna

Tony Montana reviews Bala

Just came back from watching Bala.

A few random thoughts:

I was recently watching a recent Aaj Tak interview of writer-lyricist Varun Grover. One of my key takeaways from it was his describing how he, having listened to hundreds and thousands of songs, understood from a young age what constitutes a cliche and what does not, and that is his approaching into avoiding the stereotypical while penning his songs. Watching Bala, Ayushmann’s latest content-driven film, reminded me of Varun’s casual statement. That is not to say that Bala is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. In fact it is yet another of his forays into subjects that explore small town earthiness with a “deformity” of the lead character. The storyline is straightforward and one can easily form the basic plotline from the trailer. But the film plays smart: it challenges the general perception of beauty and relies itself on well-written characters, each with a decent backstory, to propel it forward. The climax doesn’t fall prey to the “guy ending up with girl and all’s well” resolution. It’s a story written with the intent of appealing to each and every one of us. We all have our insecurities, and we wish to get rid of them by trying to eliminate their root cause. But why? asks the film. Why not accept ourselves the way we are?

JayShah Box Office Column (rebooted) – HF4 vs War collections

Assumptions

• Using Film Information data
• Assumes trend in reported centres is correlated with unreported centres (fair assumption considering huge # of centres reported)
• The collections of estimated movie (A) are = Screen Ratio * CollectionRatio * reported total of comparative movie’s collections (B)
• Collection Ratio = Total reported collections of estimated movie (A) / Total reported collections of comparative movie on like for like reported centres (B)
• Further comparison will be done when more movies are available i.e. Dabangg 3

	HF4	*War (9 day)
Week 1 Like for like centres	854,743,777	1,387,311,394
	# centres	ratio
	184	62%
Screens	3500	4000
Screen ratio	88%
Film Information
Reported Collections	86	139
Unreported Collections	49	51
Total Collections	134	238
Ratio Reported/Unreported	64%	59%
Jayshah Est	128	Screen Ratio * Collection Ratio * 238
Kadel	115
Jaiswal	115
BOI	136
Komal	134
Bollywood Hungama	129
Addatoday	141
Average excluding jayshah	128

An Jo on Parasite

On Bong Joon-Ho’s PARASITE

Mild spoiler alert

Many films have tried and finely executed the exploration of class difference in cinema, like the superb 1946 film ‘Neecha Nagar’,  or Raj Kapoor’s ‘Jaagte Raho’, and ‘Shree 420’; but Bong Joon-ho’s PARASITE takes it to an altogether another plane! I am not saying this is better than them, but this truly is a marvelous marriage of visual mastery and writing, not to take anything away from some superb acting chops.

An Jo’s brief note on KAITHI

What a movie!! WHAT! A ! MOVIE! Karthi rocks in his avatar as a prisoner out with a motive only to see his daughter who’s in an ashram and to ensure her good life. This is an absolute fantastic twist to the ‘Tamil’ masala template. The movie is so focused, so straight-focused narrated, it’s a joy!

tonymontana’s note on Chhichhore

I must admit the film was surprisingly an overwhelming cinematic experience. Barring the initial twenty minutes, where I expected the film to go downhill, it was very engaging with the right drama, emotional moments and humour at the right time. Every one acted decent (Sushant does need to act better while crying).

I wasn’t too impressed by the trailer as I felt it was the same old rehash of 3 idiots and Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikander with bits of Student of the Year thrown in. In fact a few of the scenes (the ragging scenes and sports contests) do remind of the aforementioned movies, but where it scores highly is the emotional impact. A few scenes are rather improbable (on one occasion, a squint-eyed bowler is asked to aim somewhere else so he could better control his line and length) and the beginning portions become sappy and stretched, but Tiwari is in such firm control of his material that he doesn’t let any of these minor hiccups affect his narrative. Even scenes that could otherwise have been uninteresting and mundane are brought alive by infusing humour in the proceedings. I never thought I would enjoy the scenes involving the sports competitions (Blame Student of the Year’s glamour porn in such scenes). But on most occasions they were a hoot.