With hardly a month and a half left in 2011, I am finding it difficult to make a list of my top ten favorite Hindi movies. If we look at the market it has been a landmark year for Hindi Film Industry with 4 new entries (BodyGuard,Ready,RaONe and Singham) in elite 100 crore club taking overall count to 8 and at least one more(Don 2) shall join the club. Bodyguard completed this feat in one week itself. Trade gurus like Taran Adarsh are often observed celebrating the fact that movies after movies which are slammed by critics are doing well at box-office. It is the box-office success that matters. They argue that people love these so called entertaining movies with all the latkas and jhattas …. Anything crude, mindless, unoriginal, derivative and mediocre is sold by terming it as Commercial Entertaining Movie. And anything little cerebral is termed Parallel or art cinema. Contradiction between art cinema and commercial films shouldn’t exist.
If Italians invented realism in cinema, the Germans expressionism, the French new wave, what have we invented? Bollywood? With hundreds of its movies being direct imitation of Hollywood movies .Innumerable websites give graphic details of this plagiaristic orgy, listing film after films which have borrowed from foreign films without acknowledgement. …. True that the industry has to keep commercial consideration in mind, but so does film industry around the world. The industry which makes maximum movies in the world is viewed as a plethora of songs and dances, where people are running around trees singing and dancing in colorful clothes expressing their love for each other in a dreamy location. Why have the standard of one of the oldest and most prolific film industry fallen to this extent? Why don’t our producers, directors and writers feel free to imagine and write original meaningful stories? Why do they follow such short cuts i.e. making formula films or borrow from successful Hollywood movies? Why do they devalue their creative skill so much?
Yes there are few exceptions to this … But most of it falls under the label of parallel cinema … Very few mainstream movies attempt to tell meaning full stories …. If we look at past 3 years there is a handful of genuinely good mainstream bollywood movies …The rising costs involved in film production and the commercialization of the films (i.e. spending huge money in marketing and promotion of movies.... creating huge hype around the movie by occupying lots of media space … occupying most of the screens and thus making it inevitable for people to watch anything apart from their movies ….) is having a negative impact on the art films. Underworld financing and piracy is also proving to be fatal threat to offbeat movies. I have no objection with the crappy mainstream bollywood movies. But what I want is that there should be a space for directors, actors and movie makers who want to make meaning full cinema , for whom cinema is much more than a mere medium of entertainment to Co-Exist …..
6 comments:
Well...very well written...and its very true. But the quality of Inidian cinema is improving year after year, with films like ZNMD, Yeh saali zindagi, LSD etc in recent times. Though the growth of bollywood in this dimension is really really slow, I wud still hope one day films like ZNMD reaches 100 crore mark...
Thanx DJ for appreciation ...if you look at past 3 years only 2 good mainstream commercial movies have been made in Bollywood i.e. 3 idiots and ZNMD ... Rest all gud movies have been off-beat movies ... if you take Udaan as example it only collected 3 crores at box-office in india ... Yeh Saali Zindagi made out of budget of 8 crores and made only 11 crores ... If you see all the other gud off beat movies like udaan,stanley ka dhabba,i am kalaam etc u'll find that even when these movies have been made in budget under 5 crores they have hardly abreak-even .... so m only asking to give filmmakers of these movies space to co-exist .... becoz with so less financial returns even wen film is highly critically acclaimed it becomes very difficult 2 find financier for ur film ....
those films which have touched century crore mark....r still nt those one which can be listed on top 10.
Recently there was a open discussion in which prominent n intelligent film makers were there namely Anurag Kashyap, Prakash Jha, Prasoon Joshi....they too have the same concern which u feel....dey were even disappointing with the fact that they don't get the permission to shoot in those places where the real incident happened....they don't have the enough powers to show wat they feel.....n if they do dare to show wat ultimately happens is either the film is not released or to edit the movie....a few days back....before the release of Rockstar ....some people objected that y some people in crowd waved off their flag (i think they were of Sikkim).....now wat the hell is that...wat was the logic in that.....they were not disrespecting the flag den how can can they raise the objection....same is with the case with Fanaa...it was banned in Gujrat...the problem is this country, its politics.....
the man who killed people on footpath..killed nearly extinct Black buck dear....is now regarded as "Bhai"....people accept him as Bodyguard.....
@Manish well i guess u didn't vote in the poll .. but frm ur argument i think you'll go with last option none of these .... well i completely agree wid u dat politicalization of cinema is also one of the reasons why film makers are afraid of touching sensitive issues and even if they do they try to play safe ... in doing which creativity gets killed ... In recent times due to growth of media, people in order to gain publicity and to serve their political purpose raise objections to anything which appears controversial ...
nothing is controversial ...people made it look like controversy.....
see there was a tym wen tv's were allowed to show adult things only after prime time...after 10 or 12 i guess.....bt nowadays it's not the same case.....no one is objecting dirty picture...der is one dialogue in the movie.."mujhe wahi cheez acchi lagti jiska maja....."....if censor board is ready to pass this movie without doing much of cutting scenes....den it means people are ready to accept such bold moves.....no controversy in that....so its all the politics.....
nice write up...
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