Boy-Meets-Girl

It has been quite some time since I did a post. The impact of the culture and saffron brigade controversy was so intense that I couldn't think of other topics.

My friend and I went to Aviator and didn't get tickets. So we decided to go for a B-grade Tamil film. After half hour, we figured it's not B-grade. It must be somewhere between M and N. Then why did we go for it? The leading girl looked quite attractive. Yes, even in the movie she did.

But that apart, I'm appalled at the fall in the quality of our films. As of today, I see no hope for the revival of Tamil film industry. We had two saviors. Kamal, the self-pronounced savior, turned out to be a mere narcissitic copycat. Mani Ratnam, the public-pronounced savior, seems to be simply churning out emotionally charged commercials disguised in slick packages.

The rest generally border between two categories, utter-crap like the one I watched (we left during interval) or a mediocre stuff packaged as a realistic portrayal.

Bollywood, on the contrary, touches on sensitive and essential themes these days. Movies like Swades, Black, Page 3 and Company have simply changed the industry landscape and forced even a dyed in the wool masala man like Subhash Ghai to emulate. With people like Varma, Govarikar and Bansali, Bollywood holds huge promise for the future.

Hollywood, in the middle of run of the mills like Constantine and Anaconda Returns, explores issues such as lost childhood due to paedophilia (Mystic River), truama of a minority wife of a death-row prisoner (Monster's Ball), and amazingly, a superhero's struggle to retain normal-livelihood (Spiderman 2). Spiderman 2 is an unbelievable journey and shows how Hollywood wants to go beyond a typical commercial presentation, even for a superhero summer special edition.

Tamil industry, on the other hand, is fast dwindling down to anarchy. We haven't yet shaken ourselves off the boy-meets-girl formula and we seem to be innovating some numbing possibilities within this boy-meets-girl framework. For instance, the following stories are the recent offerings from Tamil film industry:

1. poor-boy-meets-rich-girl-parents-oppose-lovers-elope (they still make this movie)
2. boy-doesn't-meet-girl-but-loves-her
3. boy-meets-wrong-girl-girl-meets-wrong-boy
4. girl-ditches-boy-boy-kills-girl-and-other-girls-boy-meets-girl-girl-changes-boy
5. communist-boy-meets-capitalist-industrialist-girl
6. girl-ditches-boy-he-goes-to-court-court-"orders"-lovers-to-"unite"
7. boy-meets-boy

You know I lied about the seventh one. I haven't seen any of these movies. But I know all the stories because the people around just can't stop talking about them. Of these very predictable, very boring stuff, the sixth one particularly took my fancy. I still can't figure out how the judge can give such a verdict. I'm itching to watch that film.

Perhaps that's precisely is the hook from the director!