Dev D and Luck By Chance

Dev D is fantastic. For once, Anurag Kashyap dazzles while indulging himself. Nice music, especially the Pardesi song (heart rending stuff in the raw literal sense, not touchy feely sense - like I wrote about The Wrestler, you will need a whisky after the song!) and the brass band version of Emosanal Atyachar. Watch the movie. Make Kashyap rich so that he can make more movies like this. The movie is so good that I can only recommend it strongly that you watch it rather than read this post!

If you are still reading this post for Dev D, it is an irreverent take on the much venerated tale of Devdas. Great coming together of a wild script, great music (I hope there is no plagiarism here - have once been disappointed by Pritham before when I liked Life in a Metro only to discover a library of places where music was filched from!) and nice acting (yet again!) by Abhay Deol. Mahie Gill has great eyes and a nice role. I really loved the clothes washing bit when Dev D is wallowing in filth. Further fun is had at the expense of SRK's or if you prefer SLB's Devdas with frequent tongue in cheek nods to it. If you love alternative cinema and the fact that good Indian movies can be made with Indian scripts, this movie is it. Good Luck to the makers to produce more such output in the future.

Now for Luck by Chance - a movie about the industry, from a family which is rooted in it.
Zoya Akhthar manages to pull off a great show.

Dialogues by dad with her bro as main actor, what could go wrong? Actually based on my experience as a compulsive movie watcher, everything!

The strength of the movie is the script. It does not have madhur bhandarkar's moral high ground kind of position with excess mockery rather than self mockery. Am a little tired of that anyways, as is the indian audience (thankfully). Hope he gets back to the chandni bar level.

shah rukh, aamir essay brief roles. srk has perhaps the best lines that the stars have in the movie. aamir has a brief role which seems like disguised mockery of his obsessive self. karan johar also has some lines of wisdom. hrithik has perhaps been the most generous in his time on the movie.

anurag kashyap has a cool cameo as script writer.

My major grouse with the movie is that it takes spoofing the world it belongs in, a little too far while having bouts of serious stuff. For ex., Isha Sharvani's role is great, but then that gets mixed with Dimple Kapadia's self-indulgent and simultaneously parodied character. Farhan Akhtar shows his role in Rock On was not a fluke. He is my other nominee to lead the resurgence of Indian movies.

Overall good watch. In fact it partially inspired me to stretch my neck out and write that other post on resurgence of Indian movies...