Movie Review – Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

Come…Fall in Love (with marriage)

It was my first Hindi film in theatre I guess. It was not the time where Hindi movies were on theatres. So I watched it in a B-grade theatre with mosquito bites.

DDLJ when watched looks quite outdated because this looks more of a marriage story than love story. This being said with the ephemeral idea of how love in India means finding a person to get married. The things that we are debating now are why there couldn’t be live in relationships, why couldn’t love be there outside marriage, why should love be restricted to just one person and lot of other #mychoice problems. But let’s rewind to the past. It was a time when we were coming out of teachers telling us during Valentine’s Day on how love doesn’t mean having boyfriends and girlfriends but it could be loving your parents, friends etc.

So this was the time period which was sandwiched between these two when we and our parents both were in a stage that Love Marriage is wrong. Better than now because we don’t understand their point on why love marriage is wrong and they don’t understand why we’re rooting for love marriage. So DDLJ happened in a time where there was just plain rage where both are in sync and one wants to out power each other. Read clearly its Love marriage that we are talking about and not Love. That’s a whole different topic. I’ll get a chance to talk on it when the next GVM movie releases I think.

For this generation – in fact even I don’t belong to DDLJ generation, even though I celebrate it, it would have been better if I had been in my teens at least to completely appreciate it – it’d be better to take YJDH and compare it with DDLJ rather than telling how JYDH had taken so many inspirations from DDLJ.

Raj – a rich spoilt brat, who drives Porsche to college, whose dad celebrates his failure in college and drinks beer with him and Simran – Sanskari ladki, who sings Om Jai Jagadish Hari, I don’t know who still sings that out loudly in their home, meet each other when they are on Euro trip. You can’t get a better setting to start a love story. A road trip and two charming people. What else do you expect? The locales are as exciting to watch like that of Jeans where they showed seven wonders.

I even though like SRK post this movie, I could understand why it was celebrated back then. It was like how we celebrate Bunny now. I found SRK far more convincing in his later movies like KKHH, KKKG. I’ll leave it to you to expand all the abbreviations.

I found the first half to be insipid with romance being cheesy and scenes not really working out. If not for SRK and Kajol it’d have been a very tough watch. When I got to interval it felt as if I watched one whole movie. I was completely exhausted.

But the second half of the movie, something I hardly remember, something I wasn’t expecting anything out of it, is the reason behind the movies success. Only when watching now I could see almost every scene in the second half of the movie was taken in some other movie. And how many loose, tight remakes we have seen of DDLJ, need not mention about the inspirations. But of all the movies, even after so many years, this looked like an organic way of making parents understand children’s love. Rest all still looks like acting. Only that it ranges from best to worst.

 

Movie Review – Arjun Reddy

OMFG

This film is total dope. I’m finding it tough to concentrate to write but it’s like how when you are high and that’s when your senses are completely sharp. I’ve to write a review in present tense for this.

What a day I chose to watch a film. It’s Sunday night and all I could think of is another horrible week at office. Its seven years and it doesn’t subside. In fact it’s getting to the worst, a peak where there is a sense that something is going to happen, again. It’s the third week of January, probably the time when all the New Year Resolutions break and make you feel naked. At least I’m not completely stripped. I’ve that much control. But yes even my resolutions are almost a failure. It’s almost not all. It’ll never be all. I’m not as confident as a layman to not take a resolution at all. To consider New Year and Birthday, just another day. I’ll continue to make list. I’ll fail. I’ll fail miserably. Still I’ll make list, I’ll make new list. I’ll tick it off too. Like how the grandma says she’d have convinced her parents. Probably the best character in the film.

After watching the movie, I was sitting down and staring, not thinking of anything. Now I’m staring at the screen not thinking of anything. Rarely does this feel happen in me. There were a lot of movies, coming of age movies where I get emotional. I watch it repeatedly to become sad like Premam or Tamasha. But Arjun Reddy can’t be watched again. It’s a single act magic. You watch it once and that’s all.

I’m amazed how the director could make a movie so dope and still make it work. I don’t know how so many liked it. Generally for movies like Tamasha when people didn’t like it, I loved it. I felt special that not everyone could connect with the movie but here I’m happy that people liked Arjun Reddy. It’s like accepting people who are different.

The film is organically dope. That’s some kind of writing. There were lot of scenes excellently conceived. Especially when you see the film as a character study it’s a great lesson. I loved the English lines Vijay spoke. Wow how good can it get. Probably only Matthew McConaughey could come close to it, in his True Detective. The dialogues were something you would heed to it only when you are high on dope, but when a general audience had seen it and liked it, it feels so good. It’s like touching that place in cerebral cortex to make it understand. There are so many scenes about objectifying women, about feeling blood in hands by being surgeon, about his girlfriend pulling the bed to make love, the way he says, “Y beedi is nice”, the dialogue to dean post football fight, the rush of adrenaline, eat and laugh after sex, the music behind it. Wow, just wow. I loved the scene where he talks about objectifying women and this comes in a film where there are lot of kissing and drug scenes. It’s like a slap in the face for people who have item numbers, objectifying women and talk morals about not smoking in cinema. I only wish that he had not said that, “we swear but we don’t objectify women”.

Of course Vijay rocks in the movie. He has a bit of Dulquer in him, in his looks but definitely a much better actor. There is a bit of Dev D in the story but it doesn’t romanticize it as much as Dev D. When knowing that Vikram’s son is going to act, this could be the best gift a dad could give to his son. Bala would love to make a first urban story in this concept. Even Dhruv looks a bit like him. Vijay in fact looks like many. He even look like Thegidi hero Ashok Selvan. But how the movie is going to suit Tamil audience and whether Vikram would overdo it by nurturing his kid too much is to be seen. If this had been an original movie, there couldn’t be anything better than making debut in this one.

The films immediate impact is wanting to smoke. Don’t know how right a feeling that is. It’s not a film where you’d root for Arjun. The premise is great. The fact that it happens in Medical College and he’s a doctor is a treat to watch. Of course he’s hot, like his friend says, he can woo any girl if he stands in the middle of the road with just his underwear. He’s rich and he’s talented. That makes this easy in third person’s perspective but that’s what the film is. If he’s poor and not talented the film would have been short film and ended in ten minutes.

His life is clumsy. Even Italy looks clumsy looking through him. Look how Corsica looked through Ranbir’s eyes. But the fact that all this is for love. It’s just again a bloody love story is hard to digest. I generally don’t like intervals. I don’t even like to go pee while watching a movie but the best thing I did while watching the movie is I took a dinner break 15 minutes before the climax, where Arjun comes back from Italy. It was gem till then but post that, he coming back, the kid being his, everyone uniting. It’s so convenient. It’s too great a film to deserve a happy ending like that damn it.

Generally post watching a movie there would be specific scene, specific instance or the overall mood that would linger in mind but with this movie it’s like that phase after you are drunk where you want to get back to normal but you don’t want to. All that runs on my mind is Dulquers face with Vijay’s confused look. It’s like a jigsaw. I hate that confused face of Dulquer. He’s such a limited actor. But I could pity him now. I could pity my mom who has to listen to my dad. I pity my dad whom I put into a pity state with my cynicism. I pity my family who have to see my like this time and again. I pity everyone.