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Sunday, September 03, 2006

Indian Movies ...

Today being Saturday, I sat and watched a movie in the afternoon - Silent Hill - which is a game inspired movie. And me having played (and loved) the game earlier and having seen brilliant promos of the movie, I was pretty excited to watch this.
However, expectations were not that high - considering how other games related movie turn up (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil)

However, when I started watching the movie, I was shocked and astonished at the level of details which the director had taken care of very painstakingly.
The sets and creatures were right out of the video game and even the shops on the streets of Silent Hill had names from the game.

It felt like playing the game itself.

The two hours that I spent watching the movie, made me feel squirmish, eerie, sad, confused, grossed out and lots of other things which you generally don't go through during your normal life (and thank God for that!)

Anyways, that made me wonder, why no such movies EVER get made here in India.
Mind you, India makes the maximum number of movies in a year (compared to any other country), but if you ponder over the number of gold medals a country of a billion produce at the olympics, the fate of most of the movies is very cliche'd.

Here, most of the directors rarely give any attention to details and if you were to start writing goof ups on movies made here, you could end up writing books on a single movie.
Basically the order of priority of Bollywood movies is:

1. Have good songs
2. Dress all women in such short clothes that they qualify as belts (almost anyways ;))
3. Raise a lot of hype
4. Get the best stars
5.
6.
.
.
.
.
1354. Write a good story
1355. Make sure everything is technically and logically correct.
Very few people here, make movies out of passion - most of the movies are made to just make money and they dont care what crap they put into it as long as the general populous buys it.
The 'chalta hai' attitude of most of the people is highly annoying ...
This fact can be affirmed by a statement which a popular producer of commercial (gaudy) films made.

He said, "If you make movies for Rickshawalas (people who drive Rickshaws), you will travel in cars, but if you make movies for people who drive (and hence can afford) cars, you will have to travel by rickshaws"

The general quality of production and acting of the movies is so pathetic that most of the times, I would not even consider spending that much time watching the movie.
Actually buying tickets and spending money on it is out of the question!

I have never seen any 'out of track' movie ever become hugely successful.
There have been a recent spurt of movies which have swayed a wee bit off track and become hits, but they too have lots of content which is downright impossible.

This entire revolution may still take a million years to come, until more and more of the masses get educated (and stop buying crap) or we get more passionate and talented film makers inside ...

However, till that happens, it is three cheers for Hollywood :)
The biggest plus point of a hollywood flick (a carefully chosen one) is that at the end of it all, you don't regret the time you spent watching it.

*Update - My review of Silent Hill is up and can be read here.

7 comments:

Rishi Agarwal said...

well, i saw 2 movies yesterday, Lage Raho Munnabhai and Krissh... The first one was worth spending time on, but the second.. well, lets not talk about it !

anyways,i dont think there is anything wrong with bollywood. They make movies what people like, what people want to see.And in the end, it is the cash-register / box-office-collection that matters.

Anonymous said...

Well mainly I think there is talent as such here but even a movie like Silent Hill would have taken a pretty massive budget to produce upwards of 30 million dollars (massive by Bollywood standards). Superman cost 225 million dollars approx.
And here even our most expensive movies top out at around 10 million dollars. And another thing is even if a bollywood movie managed to secure more funding they would find it very difficult to make the money back even if it were a superhit. Compare this to a country like USA where a hit movie can easily make 70-80 million in the first weekend alone.

Saurabh said...

Hmmm ...
Shantesh, you make very good points ...

After your comment, I did some research and found that you were right in all the places.

Devdas which was one of the most expensive Bollywood movies made cost about 10 million dollars whereas the Silent Hill production budget was 50 million.

It did make 20 million in the first week and by June 18th, it had made approx 92 million dollars.

Whereas superman with a production budget of 270 million has made 368.71 million to date.

Hmm ... so will have to ponder a little bit more on this issue.
However, saying this, most of the good (out of track) movies can be made with peanut budgets if you have the right story - remember Blair Witch?

Anyways, thanks for the comments :)

Rishi Agarwal said...

i think ur comparisions are wrong... How can you compare the budget gone into a movie and box office collections of US and India...They r totally different. Then u will have to take into account the spending power of people , the quality of multiplexes, plus even the cost of production in each region.

What matters is story, script. For me , what matters is entertainment!

Anonymous said...

rishi what matters is entertainment obviously to everyone. What I'm trying to say is that even if I enjoyed a Lage Raho Munnabhai and a Superman Returns equally. They are still vastly different kinds of entertainment. I could not possibly find a Superman Returns or a King Kong type entertainment in a any Indian movie period. And this is not due to the lack of talent at all. Its just not financially viable for any Indian producer for reasons i mentioned in my previous report. So I will still have to look to Hollywood to satiate all my entertainment needs..

Saurabh said...

Rishi,

I kinda agree again with Shantesh ...
The genre of entertainment that we get out of watching movies like King Kong, Mission Impossible, Matrix, Minority Report, etc etc - can not be produced in Indian movies for quite sometime.

Even ventures like Krish which start of with good intentions pale in comparison to even the mid-size budget movies in the US solely because it costs money to produce those chills and thrills which people dont have in India.

Koi Mil Gaya was a start in this direction and honestly, even after spending so much money (by Indian Standards) and getting a firm from Australia, the aliens looked mediocre at best.

Anyways, the point being that Indians can make great people-tragedy stories and hillarious movies due to the sufficient talent of actors we have here.
But unless we get a brilliant Indian Design house which does good work for less, or till more money comes along, a movie of the Matrix or LOTR magnitude is a distant dream ...

Rishi Agarwal said...

ok.. agreed..

But, speaking of Krishh , which I just saw 2 days back , this is what I noticed - the designs of sets used were pretty gud, they had used a " Minority Report + Paycheck " kind of effects in the movie. Also , the flying scenes by hrithik looked stupid , but they were acceptable.

And just yesterday, I saw that Krishh's budget was around 70 crores ( even when the main lead actor was in-house !! )

But the film was yucky coz of the story , the script, and the usual melodrama seeen in hindi movies from past 2 decades. Very Very Filmi, if u understand that .....So what Saurabh said about Krishh is wrong. Its not the budget , its the whole " trying to appease the junta " thing which every producer wants in his movie...

I think i will write a blog on this now. To explain more !