Me and Raavan

No, I didn’t meet Raavan and No, this is not a philosophical musing on him either. After more than three years I watched a Hindi movie – Raavan in the theaters. Watching the movie, so many thoughts were racing in my mind, trust me not the good kind of thoughts, that my brain had indigestion. So like a good ranter I decided to write a blog. I just couldn’t fathom the wastage of money in making that movie and most importantly the wastage of precious gray matter of my upper deck. You know that gray matter isn’t exactly cheap and easy to get.

I am a big movie buff and usually watch a lot of English movies. That doesn’t mean I don’t like Hindi movies. I do love them. It’s just for last few years industries’ propensity of producing trashy movies surpasses my enthusiasm to watch them. Devoid of logic, the movie directors and script writers seems to lack any sort of intelligence usually associated with homo-sapiens. The only thing these stupid directors and producers seems to do is to show skimpily clad woman at every instance. They think that they will recoup their money by satiating carnal needs of general populace. Suffice to say that it’s not only insulting to the art of story telling in the form of movie making but also, there’s no way they can ever compete with porn industry.

In 70’s and 80’s we had actress Helen doing such roles. She was the baby doll and graced numerous memorable ‘item number’ songs. She had elegance in her seductiveness and oomph in her dancing. When I look at the current crop of so called actresses who do the so called ‘sexy’ dance sequences I wonder if they are trying to turn me On or trying to scare me away. In any case they are worth the chuckle because I visualize zombies doing those moves. Think of zombies, instead of walking like dead, doing these dance moves on the street. Trust me they will convert a lot more people into zombiesm than their current rate!

It’s not like every Hindi movie is trash. There are decent number of very good films produced in last decade. Rang De Basanti, Omkara and Taare Zameen Par are some of my personal favorite. These movies were great movies because they had great story line and talented actors working of a great script. The story line had a purpose and directors stuck with the message to the end. Black was another of the good movie but I could watch only first half of the movie. Then there were bunch of no-nonsense movies like Ab Tak Chhapan and Ek Haseena Thi. I also liked 'Being Cyrus'. The movie plot was quite dark, highly unusual for feel-good factor genome in Hindi film industry.

And then there was Raavan. The movie was trashy. I can actual end my blog right here, right now but I am angry. I am angry because the expectation was high from acclaimed director Mani Ratnam. And the story wasn’t regular run-of-the mill, songs-around-trees, love story. But movie was bad. Really really bad! Stupid story line, even stupider script. Ending didn’t make sense nor did the middle part. The beginning was confusing. Emphasize on social issues was counter productive because lack of understanding of these issues on directors’ part. Acting was bad. Not that anything of useful was expected from Aishwarya Rai. She is a beautiful doll. And to her credit she looked like a beautiful doll. Her dialogues barely ran for a page. After getting abducted and after she was done screaming her tonsils out, her grandest dialogue was “muze jaane do” Comon, at least for the love of sweet mangoes, you, sweetpie you gotta at least curse! Remind your abductor of his mother and sister. But don’t say “muze jaane do” it’s insult to your abductor. You see my sweetheart if he wanted to let you go then he wouldn’t abduct you at first place. But for some reason she kept repeating that dialogue till end of the movie even when she was let go. Abhishek Bacchan was awful. His act of terror was laughable. He tried to come up with a signature screaming or ranting or some facial disfigurement that involved him screaming, his eyes widening and his teeth bearing. And just to add more effect to this creating ‘terror’ routine camera was rotating around him faster than the roller coaster. I mean what the f^& wrong with these people?

Abhishek’s character talked about tribal injustice wearing high quality designer cotton clothes. Of course to think that this combination doesn’t go hand in hand would assume that viewer will be using god gifted brain. And using your brain was not allowed during any point of the movie. Not a single character was developed properly and I think that’s some feat to accomplish. The songs for most part didn’t fit in the story. Raheman gave his usual best but he isn’t going to tell director how to use his melodious music in the film. And to waste such a great music is all most criminal.

The title Raavan makes us believe that story is inspired from Ramayana and that the story was based on Ramayana. It was up to certain extent i.e. except for the title there was NO similarity. Raavan never meant to kill Seeta and he didn’t let her go either. And in case if he had let go Seeta, I doubt, Shri Ram would have conned Seeta to go back to Ravan so that he could take revenge. I mean I understand there rarely is any faithfulness in Hindi movies towards the original story but still, this film was not only confusing to the viewers but it probably threw actors off the wagon too.

But I am ready to keep aside these ‘minor’ points. If I to look at the movie script independently, I still found so many loop holes and so much idiocy that I felt like thousands of vuvazulas going berserk. My brain refused to function after the movie ended and I was in the state of delirium for quite some time. It became a task of gigantic proportion for fatigued mind of mine to find the rhythm in three dimensional reality. The emotional atyachar was too much to bear. Seriously!

So much for Roja, Mani!