Sunday, February 22, 2009

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...

Labels:

4 Comments:

Blogger Rajeev Khanna said...

That's a great post. In fact just like you, even I enjoyed Dev D immensely. I think it was a good adaptation of the novel to recent times. Since you and i have a similar thought process, I'd recommend you another movie - Barah Anna. I had the luck to watch it in the Pune International Film Festival. It was simply superb. The movie is a dark comedy, revolving round the lives of three commonplace characters. The plot encompasses some great surprises and twists and the movie has got some strong performances by Naseeruddin Shah and Vijay Raaz. Just check out the link - http://barah-aana-the-film.blogspot.com/ and you'll know what am talking! hope you like it too...

2/23/2009 3:24 AM  
Blogger zaph said...

Watch out for Gulaal, kashyap's take on the balkanization of india. BTW, I thought "Nayan Tarse" was eaisly the best sung song in the Dev D.

2/27/2009 12:35 PM  
Blogger perfectly said...

meh. all i see is an intense desperation for a 'resurgence'. which is why Kashyap's worst movie is hailed as his best. Dev D was AK's Saanwariya. All blue, no clue. Missing was the absolute joyous irreverence of No Smoking or the taut pacing and kick of Black Friday. AK has done much better re-interpretations, ala Hanuman Returns (THE smartest indian animation flick). Unfortunately, Dev.D falls flat (for me atleast) because it under delivers (by AK's standards) on what he has always been hailed for (even when he merely wrote scripts): dialogues and charecterisation. Its not a bad movie, but i don't connect with the accolades its getting.

Gulaal left me, again, with a sense of being punched around to within an inch of my life, but not served the knock out uppercut. The promos and the music promised a revolution. Only we never see one in the movie. We are served a tantalizing flavor of what might have been (through Dukey Bana's fiery speeches. Faboulous stuff from Kay Kay. His eyes WERE on fire) but we never see the struggle against the Republic. Instead we see a far more personal story, which was certainly brilliantly played out, however i expect AK to tackle bigger themes.

Or maybe I expect too much... :)

AK ofcourse deserves all the attention he is getting but I am trying not to believe that he may have peaked out like Tarantino. Even so, the movie to really watch out for is Paanch, which comes out in April. I don't care how jaded this 10 year old movie looks, its raw Anurag Kashyap, only a faint vestige of whom remains today.

(Dhammo dude, apologize for hijacking your blog with my rant, but i had to get this off my chest. and i couldn't go main stream for the fear of being lynched by the 'Kashyap Sena' mobs... :D)

3/15/2009 10:17 PM  
Blogger D said...

kool tik baby,
you are right. i am desperate for a good flick.
but isn't it telling that you preferred to comment on Dev D and not on LBC? or was that by chance? ;)
and don't worry about hijacking my blog. far too few read it now. with chick magnets like you reading it and commenting, my readership will go up :)
i might add to this after gulaal, which i am yet to see, but i definitely would like to encourage Dev D rather than SlumDog anyday which got more than it deserved from our slobbering media. Atleast I had fun watching Dev D.
Hopefully AK will make enough money from Dev D to be able to make better movies.

3/16/2009 8:03 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home