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Showing posts from June, 2010

Raavanan

Director: Mani Ratnam In an interview Mani Ratnam once said, I don’t care about the story. I would be happier if I were to just shoot. What he meant was that, the success of a director lies in manipulating the emotions of the characters and hence the audience with every scene. He meant the director’s scope lies in creating spell-binding scenes. But he failed to bring one more point to the table: without hampering the flow and purpose. A movie can’t be made interesting with just great visuals. How much ever you pan with your camera how much ever emotions you try to extract from the dedicated actors it will remain only two dimensional if there is a dearth of the third angle. The third angle, which not necessarily third in order, is the depth in the screenplay. When you are going to be faithful to the epic (largely) and are going to just make them travel in time and station them in a remote jungle why not give them real challenges to portray what they are capable off. It can be a nice

Raavan

Director: Mani Rathnam Ramayan is a very bold story which along with many knots, put forth that both the good & bad when at fault pay for their sins: a knot worth to be inspired. When you are struck by an idea you start enjoying it in different ways, like how a guy who falls for a girl will go on creating and recreating the scene of submission. As these ideas continuously follow while the creator is envisaging, his analytical mind starts working on ways to connect these random hair rising moments. You know they excited you and you know now you have to connect those points to make it into a plausible screenplay. When you start writing you have all your notes ready and you work on ways to insert them; because these notes – hand outs are the very definition of each character and motive for each & every particular hair rising moment. But the mind has this treacherous power to be excited by the high moments alone that you will want to take great care in crafting them. When you are t

Raajneeti

Most writers when queried confess that they get that knot, that idea, that concept when about to sleep or as dream. Prakash Jha must have slept with the idea of bringing the kingdom politics of Mahabharata to contemporary milieu. How great a concept it will turn out to be, with two families fighting for power at the cost of the people! He would have realized if we are to remove all the ethereal skin and flesh of Mahabharata and its politics, it all comes to that one word “Power”. This cinema fanatic turned politician would have turned back to his Godfather frenzy days when he knew it’s always about power; for the movie is filled with incidents from Godfather and the well inspired Sarkar. From the brother who a ruffian and weak with women by nature and yet genuine in his interest, the silent sibling who wages a war with just the commandeering blink of his eyes, his foreign love who seem to be the victim of his Rajneeti, it all comes to how these are deployed in this vast script. Then th