By wielding merely a pen, one can write off a person's year-long effort with a snort.
An average Bollywood movie takes about 10 months to 1 year to complete, during which a huge amount of money changes hands, the dancers and spot boys wipe a lot of sweat and manage to earn their bread, the heroes make an ugly amount of money, the heroines make a little less, the producer keeps hoping he would get to sleep with the heroine or at least the lead dancer... the sound recordists, the studio guys, the editors, the cinematographers are kept so busy that they either grow their beards for lack of time or go sleepless for weeks. The psychiatrists make hay soon after as fresh people fill in the looney gap. The businesses of the drug peddlers, from the drug companies to our street-side vendor selling brown sugar or at least hash, can stay afloat. Not to mention that midnight pao bhaji bar or frankfurter seller. The film magazines, ad agencies, marketing consultants, web designers can be seen working overtime to meet this huge demand. Someone wants to market a film, someone wants to market a film with a scandal, someone wants just a scandal, someone wants a web site made.
Bollywood is on 24/7 and can beat any outsourcing unit hollow with its constant flow of business and services. Now when a person, let's say someone like Rajat Kapoor, who has always had a dream of making his script into a movie gets a chance to make one eventually, he/she spends an average of 12 months to get everything going. Can be more. Put yourself in that person's shoes: the dream, the script, the arranging funds, the actors, the tantrums, the heartbreaks, the scandals, the paparazzi, and finally the big day of release.
What happens next? You have the critic waiting outside to pounce on you. I don't know what the typical critic looks like, but I would put her as a hormonal, middle-aged spinster or a constipated, sex-starved wannabe of a man. Both of them are veterans. Digging into their pasts you will see that the woman was the assistant to a director but could never make it big and the man was so much of a failure that he could gather only vitriol so far. They are bitter, frowning, and have mastered sarcasm to such an extent that the pen spews acid and the keyboard is rickety with violent abuse.
The critic rips apart the film and if you are stoic about it, you can ignore it and move on. If you are Sajid Nadiadwala, you can laugh at them and keep producing the trashiest stuff. If you are a filmgoer, relying on the critic's appraisal of a movie, you end up reading books instead.
Why Nikhat Kazmi? This person (of whose gender I am unaware...will assume Nikhat, which means pure, is a woman) has made a harsh critic like me sit up and take notice of Hindi movies. She has, with constant practice, mastered the art of willing suspension of disbelief. When she enters a screening, she enters with a free mind, ready to enjoy, ready to be entertained... almost like, "hey, lemme see if you can please me tonight." And she has been generous with some movies, showering praise where it deserved and being critical where she needed to point out a flaw. She never went to a screening with any baggage like huh, this is no Fellini, this is no Ray, so lemme write it off. She is like the perfect kindergarten teacher happily encouraging Indian commercial cinema as it takes its first baby steps toward maturity. We get to see an unconvetional Vinay Pathak steal our hearts in Dasvidanya, Bheja Fry, or Straight.
We also get feel-good romantic movies like Jab We Met from the stable of Imtiaz Ali. We do have Akki too, but then someone has to entertain the braindead as well.She enjoyed Dev-D like any of us and was so kicked, she even gave it a 5-star. I mean, WHY NOT, Nikhat! We love you for being one of the first critics ever to hit the theater with a normal filmgoer's mind. A discerning one too. She knew that New York has a lot of basic flaws in the script and also lacks any locus standi per se, but she gave it a 4-star because she enjoyed it like we all did. New York has unrealistic characters that don't get any time to blossom under the pressure of glam. So we gloss over that bit and try to see if there's any message in the film. Someone asked why this movie had to be set abroad. Why not! Why not abroad? And the message, in fact the messages, can be sieved from the glam and held up to dry ... they will eventually seep in.
- One was that post 9/11 the US govt went into merciless ethnic profiling and held almost 1200 people for just being Muslims. This in turn created a new breed of terrorists.
- A second message, coming from the lips of powerful Irrfan Khan was that only Muslims can work toward repairing the image of the Muslims in the minds of the world.
- The third was, in the last scene, where young kids playing baseball have the son of a terrorist on their shoulders, celebrating their victory... and as Irrfan Khan puts it... it is possible only in the US of A.
Being Nikhat Kazmi is not easy. She caters to normal audiences like us. And we love her for that. She doesn't expect a Bollywood movie to be at par with Crash or The Departed. She does not have any intellectual hangovers. She does not draw unnecessary parallels but treats Bollywood as unique and evolving. Am sure she can choose to be the hormonal spinster and suddenly rip everything apart by comparing Barah Anna with Ray's Protidwondi (late 1960s classic also available as The Adversary) because both are primarily about survival.
But she hasn't lost her marbles yet. When she writes for the readers of The Times of India, she writes for the Indian filmgoer who doesn't mind commercial cinema along with a late night dekko of Into the Wild. For the Indian who can listen to the brass band version of "Emotional Attyachar" and also "Kind of Blue" off vintage vinyl, one after the other, and enjoy both.She has successfully stepped into the shoes of Shobha de and Santosh Desai, who probably first started the trend of calling a spade a spade and not denouncing it for not being a sceptre.
P.S. If Nikhat is a he, replace all the "she"s with "he"s...
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8 comments:
I pray, for the sake of this warm write up, that it is a 'she' and that 'she' reads it. After all, it is Oreen Praising someone.
just googled... she IS in fact a woman... a playwright and a senior editor...
not sure if i like it! why is it hard being nikhat kazmi -- u say that at one point and dont back it up. it looks like a pretty easy job to me, to not be discriminating.
i dont enjoy hindi films on the whole (there are some where I get carried along for whatever reason). and i dont think i'm being snobbish when i say that. considering my taste in phoren films mostly run to romantic comedies. hindi films demand too much of me as a viewer -- too much willing suspension of disbelief even for films that pretend to be realistic, too much pulling at the heartstrings (how almost every filmmaker exploits every so-called touching moment is cringe-inducing), too much song-and-dance literally, and they are simply just too long to sustain attention and interest. and i simply cannot identify with the north indian ethos and attitude and everything else most of them espouse -- and that part is so in your face that if one can't relate to that, it seems impossible to enjoy the films. it's not that i identify with the ethos of american/brit films, it's just that to me it seems you don't need to wholly, in order to enjoy them.
so i feel if critics point out aspects/elements where there's scope for improvement, good for hindi films
--RB
and i agree with RB...
like i told her, for a person who never watched Hindi movies on principle to now be able to tolerate everything that comes of Bollywood can be considered as either a developed sense of tolerance, or a deterioration of taste...
but fact is, i watch Bollywood now and shamelessly enjoy some of it...
I feel RB is right in saying that emancipated Indians can identify more with the American/Brit ethos than with the "in your face" North Indianness of Hindi movies. Hindi movies are mostly made for North Indians and their stereotypes (about Gujjus, Sardars, Bengalis, Madrasis) are so misleading and politically incorrect!
But I also agree that some Hindi movies these days are watchable. I read Nikhat Kazmi as well and I like her way of looking at films. Maybe you can work on this article to make your stand clearer.
PK
You always knew that it was a 'she', didn't you?
Good one Oreen...
I came back from a movie called 'Chillar party' today and had unfortunately read Nikhat Kazmi's review on the film. She has given the film a 2 star.
I agree that tastes differ and the vagaries of human mind are difficult to fathom. But the review on this film was simply un acceptable. So unacceptable and biased that it has forced a non blogger/untrained net user like me to start blogging out of sheer nausea. She does not deserve to be a critic. Good writing skills are not the only essential criteria for beeing a critic, you should understand and empathise with the movie. I doubt if she was ever a normal child. The movie is a class act. Nikhat needs serious psychiatric counselling . STOP WRITING MAM. RETIRE!!
Ranbir
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