I like to watch good movies. Who doesn’t ! But it breaks my heart to first really admire a movie and then realize that it was plagiarized or “took inspiration” from some other movie be it bollywood or hollywood. Damn! What is wrong with Indian mainstream cinema, why can’t they write up good scripts themselves, more often. Why do they have to copy dialogues (verbatim at times).

Me and my group of friends, are fans of the extremely good performance by KK Menon while delivering this dialogue in the movie “Shaurya” (you can find text of the dialogues here and here on Amit’s blog) -

But what do you know, “Shaurya” took inspiration (read-ruthlessly plagiarised) from the hollywood classic “A Few Good Men” -

Now, this does not, in any way make me doubt the acting prowess of KK Menon, and I’ll still vouch that he infact outdid Jack Nicholsan, however, this does in fact, make me lose all the respect for the director of this movie. Come-on guys! We have done Rang De Basanti, we can do better than just copying a flick almost as it is.

Talking of plagiarism, allow me to rant away to glory. “Sarkar Raj” takes inspiration for dialogues like “Sab niji hai” (verbatim copy) from “Its all personal” (Godfather). I wish we’d do better then that. Promising actor Ranbir Shourie’s upcoming movie “Ugly and Pagli” seems to be a copy of the beautiful romantic Korean movie “My Sassy Girl”. The beautiful songs (so they seemed) of “Life in a Metro” (2007) were inspired, that is the composer Pritam literally copied many foreign hits. Part of the story of “Life in a Metro” was plagiarised from hollywood movie “The Apartment” – the part about call center employee giving away his apartment keys to his boss(s) for their escapades.

I mean COME ON, damnned frigging bozos, atleast accept that you are making a scene by scene copy.

Explore more about

• itwofs.com – chronicles of plagiarism in indian film music
• Review of Shaurya – 1
• A Few Good Men Vs Shaurya

Update: Google Analytics tells me that the keyword “Ranbir Shourie” is referring a lot of people to this page. Some research tells me that I have mis-spelled the name, actually it should be “Ranvir Shorey” or “Ranvir Sheorey” or “Ranveer Shourey”. Well, I don’t know how to correctly spell his name, and neither do a lot of my esoteric set of visitors {smiles}.