Of abrupt midway halts and the mediocrity emanating therefrom

I write this being the first to acknowledge my incompetence to write on such topics, because everyone around me would be willing to testify that I am not a regular movie-goer, let alone a movie-buff. But things have been different recently. Over the past month and a half, I have seen four movies at various theatres, of which three have been hindi movies and have resulted in me lamenting spending money on them. Out of these three, two have seemed to be movies which their respective movie-making teams tried to make something good out of, and the third seemed to be one no-one could make anything out of. On the banks of this recently acquired experience, I grant myself a licence to write a movie-centric post and I hope it won't be as tough to read through as it was to sit through these movies.

Taking the movies in the order I saw them, I start with New York - a tale attempting to convey to us the alleged hardships inflicted upon certain innocent people by the US government and the mental effect these tortures had on them. Convey the message to us, it did, but effectively? No. So, what happened? Assumedly, everyone decided to make a good and educating movie, stumbled upon a decent script, chose a decent star-cast, hand-picked some good songs, and then decided the work was done. Probably sometime during the shooting of the film, instead of making a film to educate the masses, the director decided to make a film to educate the movie industry on how not to educate the masses. The only message that got effectively conveyed was the ability of bad direction to single-handedly spoil a potentially good movie. I am probably being a bit too harsh on the director, because the performances weren't so good either, but I believe that the performances of the actors are in direct co-relation with how well the director chooses to make them perform. Here is when I am perhaps making my first fallacious argument as a non-seasoned movie critic, but this is the kind of feeling I get when I see an amazingly-misdirected movie like this one, and especially on watching a scene that could offer serious competition to anything that claims to be the epitome of bad direction - the one that showed the attack on the WTC. I remember being more shocked sitting in Gurgaon watching the attack on TV at a tender age of 13 than these people were portrayed to be while in New York at fairly more matured ages. That's why this post is about half-attempts to make a good movie and of how the concerned people just seemingly give up midway and of how this leads to boredom and disappointments among the general public.

Well, moving on, the next movie I saw was Kambakht Ishq and anything I say about that movie would not do justice to how bad the movie was, and how pointless and fruitless the attempt (if at all there was any) to make a half-decent movie seemed. (I think I must confess I did go to see the movie for Kareena Kapoor, another bad choice - enough said.)

That brings me to the idiomatic "andhon mein kaana raja" - Kaminey. I must confess the abrupt halt that occurred in the will to make a good movie came much later in this particular case than in the aforementioned movies, and hence, it was more tolerable than either of those was. The director decided to emulate Tarantino's distinct style of running shots with hand-held cameras, including shaken-up shots to depict chase scenes, of effectively and smoothly integrating music with the shots etc. and did succeed to a certain extent. But again, he probably decided that it was too much of an effort to try to give the public what would have been something refreshingly different and decided to play it safe. Or it may be that he got tired of the amount of brains he had to put into the making of the movie, and of the ridicule he would have been drawing for it from his counterparts, who use as much brains while making a movie as we do while copying an assignment (because that essentially is what they do), and pulled up the reins of his thinking horses and let things drift out of hand and the public drift out of the theatres somewhere around the half hour mark.

Now, if anyone decided to take matters into their own hands and extend these half-attempts into complete attempts, we would have had two excellent movies with good direction, good story lines and good acting. I write this because I seriously believe the movies had enough potential to be turned into the sort of movies we all like, admire and look forward to. Here's hoping people start having faith in themselves and pursuing the half-attempts till the end to give us movies we would love to feast on, rather than lament through sentences reflecting the what-could-have-beens that we usually end up doing, and that I didn't screw up my first attempt (or first few attempts) at reviewing movies.