Can watching a movie, change one’s really and permanently change one’s outlook towards life, and things that matter. I believe that it is possible, my thoughts have been undeniably altered by the following last lines of Lester (played by Kevin Spacey) of American Beauty (1999) -
I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me…
but it’s hard to stay mad,
when there’s so much beauty in the world.
Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once,
and it’s too much,
my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… …
and then I remember to relax,
and stop trying to hold on to it,
and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…
(amused) You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure.
But don’t worry…
You will someday.
Beautiful, ain’t it.
Many of my friends say that Will Smith‘s – The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) has changed them. What’s your take on this, has any movie changed your views about things, permanently ?
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).
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.
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}.
I watched two movies this weekend, much hyped Ram Gopal Verma’s – Sarkar Raj and a french flick C.R.A.Z.Y.
Mini review: You can’t compare shit with apples/oranges. C.R.A.Z.Y. wins hands down in all the departments, be it story development, background score, performances, cinematography.. just name it! I can not cease to wonder why RGV is touted as being amongst india’s finest directors when he makes such kind of bull.. Ofcourse, we do have good directors and exceptional movies too, but as it turns out, most of the movies nowadays depend more on packaging rather than on content, TASHAN for example. Its about time that Indian cinema comes off age.
