Firstly, the movie release in India was delayed - something that has become less frequent of late. Then, I did not get the opportunity to watch the movie on Friday night itself. Evidently, by the time I set foot in the movie hall, my expectations were as tall as Deepika Padukone's legs. A tinge of disappointment was hard to avoid even though I found it to be a very fine work, rife with flamboyance, and delivered in rather astute fashion.
However, there was little about it that blew your mind, in my view. Interestingly, if one were to tell me to comment on a expectations vs. delivery chart, I found a lot of similarities in the output of the movie in question, and another much-awaited series bit from 'Sherlock' which came out almost at the same time as well. Both the pieces were carved out to deliver a spectacle, prove that the creators are not just unafraid of deviating from the usual but take great pains to do that, all the while paying little heed to the narrative.
They are part of the ilk of things wherein if you don't like them, it is assumed that you could not understand the profundity of what the creator was trying to convey. It's always like, "Did you see the the incline of the shadow of the third leaf in the fourth tree in the last scene?
Ok, seriously, for those of you who have read the likes of Shakespeare in school/college or, in a context more related to this post, saw the 'intellectually loaded' movies, have you not ever felt that a lot of interpretations of movie visuals, sounds, camera angles, merely a concoction of vastly idle (albeit creative) minds in the audience? Just because these people were great thinkers implies every work of theirs will have layers of meanings that the aam aadmis will then take years to unravel.
Take for instance this review of WoWS, in no less a publication than the New Yorker. Now this guy has this pretty convincing opinion on how Scorsese played a masterstroke in the last scene of the movie by showing the blank faces of the audience, in the process letting the movie audience see a reflection of themselves in awe of the filthy rich, sleazy druggy Mr. Belfort. A rather haunting observation. I have no reasons to say this was not the case. But what if all Mr.Scorsese said was, "Oye chote, camera angle peeche leja. Fufaji ke bacchon ko screen pe dikhna hai."
Well, I am sure Farah Khan showed scenes of the audience watching 'Om Shanti Om' in sequences of the movie 'Om Shanti Om'. I am sure there were people in there going 'Dafuq just happened!'. No one ever said, "See, the audience is being presented a reflection of themselves".
The same with Sherlock, and innumerable other texts, poems, movies in the recent, long back and ancient history. All these writers (and I respect a whole bunch of them for their exquisite words) have at times received undue credit just because someone reading their verses, hundreds of years after they were written, took his creativity a step further, eked out some outlandish derivative of the author's words and exclaimed, "So ahead of his time, bro. So very ahead."
In this category, my favourite is that guy who wrote this beaten to death story titled, "The Lady or the Tiger". That lazy ass thought up this ingenious scheme of free-riding and leaving the conclusion to the reader. More than a century later, poor Indian kids are wondering why the tiger did not gulp up the author himself.
There are times when I believe that a all a lot of people in the world need to is relax. Not make too much of things, because well some things just happen, some people just say stuff or write stuff just because.
Sit back. Enjoy. Get up and, like always, go back to work tomorrow. At times, life and all that there is to it is rather ordinary. And that is perfectly OK!
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