I have done it a couple of times before, and I did it once again over this weekend. Saw a whole lot of movies at a trot. While earlier on couple of occasions, I have seen 3 movies in a single day, this time around, it was 5 movies spread over 3 days.
On Friday night, we saw ‘Hulchul’.
Then on Saturday night, we went for consecutive shows, at 7:30 pm and then at 10 pm, for ‘Shwaas’ and ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ respectively.
And then on Sunday, we saw ‘Khamosh Pani’ at 11 am, and ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ at 8 pm.
Whew… so that’s now over and done with.
Getting ready for the coming weeks with good movies coming up, in the form on ‘Swades’, ‘Raincoat’ and ‘Kisna’, from Ashutosh Gowariker, Rituparno Ghosh and Subhash Ghai respectively.
Its fun to do such movie marathons once in a while. In the planning and execution of these itself, is a sense of passion and fun. And you are happy if the choices turn out to be good, and you end up seeing a host of good movies.
In the present case, my score was 4/5. Four of the five movies were worth watching, while one of them, I could have given a miss.
To start with, it was Hulchul on Friday night.
A typical situational comedy, with a desired sense of exaggeration, typical from Priyadarshan, the maker of the film. A long list of stars acted in the film. Akshay Khanna, the hero, is good material. Highly underrated overall, in context of Indian cinema. Has a flair for comedy, a cute smile that he inherits from his father, Vinod Khanna, can dance well. He does all of these in the movie. Arshad ‘circuit’ Warsi, at the cost of getting typecast, plays a fun character. Kareena and the host of other stars do their bit, in this film that gives you sufficient laughs to make it worth your while.
The next movie that we saw was ‘Shwaas’. Quite outstanding, the best of this lot of 5, by far. A separate posting on this film gives details of how I felt about this one.
The one after that was the exception, in that I felt it to be a waste of my time. This was Bridget Jones Diary… this is a sequel to an earlier film, and I am surprised that people actually find this to be good stuff. In fact, I had also gone for the movie based on a decent review, in one of the papers. But I was thoroughly disappointed.
Sunday morning we went for an Indo-Pak joint venture film, “Khamosh Pani”. The movie was completely in semi-Punjabi, with sub-titles. This is the second film in recent times where I see this. The earlier one was Veer Zaara, where there is a lot of spoken Punjabi. In case of Khamosh Pani, it was completely so. But it is easy to understand as it is similar to Hindi, and in fact, in many ways, it sounds good on the ears. This is a film which captures the consequence of history, the history of the Partition. It also captures the society that is Pakistan. It does show rural Pakistan, and I am not sure if rural India also has such extreme orthodox thoughts. The difference of course, is in India’s adoption of secularism, so the extent of extremist thought that one saw in this film, is unlikely to prevail even in rural India. A story of this kind is good to see, to understand how society is shaped as a result of certain historical events, and thereby it may help in understanding attitudes as well. Kiron Kher has won awards for her performance in this film, and well deserved too. It was a Sunday morning well utilised as the film was captivating, from start to finish.
To top it off, on the Sunday evening, we had “Ocean’s Twelve”. As contrasting as a film can probably be, to Shwaas and Khamosh Pani, seen earlier in the weekend. Not much to say about Ocean’s Twelve, except that it was fast paced and fun, again with many stars (like Hulchul), and well made. Not an outstanding film but good fun, all the same.
And now looking forward to Swades (have a hunch that this could be _the_ film of the year; promos and story appear to be perfect for this day and time, and Ashutosh Gowariker – Shah RUkh Khan combo should pull this off well).
Random Musings 