Tuesday, August 24, 2010

mr blandings builds his dream home . peepli live. ghajini. bheema. a better tomorrow. im a cyborg but thats ok. ten

jim blandings is cary grant, an advertising executive trying to do his best coming up with slogans to sell the american dream, when disgruntled with the daily turmoil of living in the bog city, he decides to buy a home out in connecticut where he and the three women in his life can live the 'blueberry pie' american dream. the house turns out to be a dump that has to be torn down. of building a new home drives his almost completely broke and is full of endless discussions and diatribes against his architect, his contractors and his wife. at the end of i all though all is stable and satisfied in that ideal suburban getaway from it all. he sits in an armchair in the garden surrounded by his loving family and friends inviting us to drop in if we are in the neighbourhood.

if you have seen the trailer of 'peepli live' you've seen the film. nothing in the film surprises you- for a incisive take on the 24 hour news network industry, its insights are pedestrian; and as far as narrative and characters go, they don't rise beyond the one dimensional- innocent villager, corrupt politician, cold hearted media.

now, this is not the aamir khan 'ghajini' but the original one in tamil with surya as the man who loses his memory every fifteen minutes. based on memento, this film does not bother with the logic of the backward storytelling, the piece by piece mental puzzle of that film. instead it goes for revenge drama. asin plays the wife and like most women in these films she is relentlessly happy and jolly. the man broods and stares intensely, he patronizes her eccentricities and when she is killed for stopping an evil marwadi from smuggling 'good tamil girls' to mumbai to be sold- she is killed. but these are all incidental- because the film is about nothing much but the making of a hero. a soft tough man.

like 'bheema'. in the beginning the very hard and tough, perpetually macho guy puts you off; until the back story and bheema's obsession for the small time robin hood in his hometown is introduced. from that point on the love story is of these two men- the young protégé and the older mentor. the women come and go and eventually become one of the reasons for the grand tragedy at the end. this is the real thing about gangster films- the male-male love stories, from 'once upon a time in america' to 'bheema' and john woo's 'a better tomorrow'. in this film a gangster tries to go straight but is pulled into his earlier life because of his love for his brother and his friend. again the girl here is incidental as she tries to make peace between the warring brothers (one is a thief and the other a policeman) and mostly fails.

a young woman believes she is a cyborg and in the beginning sequence tries to recharge herself by plugging her own body into a socket. the rest of the film takes place in a mental hospital filled with other deranged individuals played up for so-called comedy. because she believes she is a machine she refuses to take any food until a co-inmate who is in love with her fits a convertor in her that makes the food into a electrical energy. trying to be profound by using the hospital as some kind of allegory the film merely ends up appearing pretentious and silly. 'oldboy' was so much better.

another film with a conceit was 'ten'- but in this case it did seem tow work. made of ten segments all shot by a stationary camera placed in a car sometimes looking at the woman driver and sometimes at the person sitting besides her. the life of the driver of the car and her relationship with her ex-hsband and her son are explored in long dialogue bits interrupted by trivial discussion regarding directions or the nature of the roads or arguments with other drivers on the roads.

No comments: