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This story is from March 7, 2008
Give us a fair chance!
As critics seemingly tend to be far more lenient with Hollywood films, than with their Bollywood counterparts.
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A still from Death at a FuneralHelp! I���m seeing double! Maybe it���s just a coincidence.
But of the three big Hollywood releases last week, two seemed to have been inspired by Hindi films that released last year.
Kick me under the table if I���m wrong. But isn���t Frank Oz���s Death At A Funeral the same as Rahul Rawail���s Buddha Mar Gaya, which came last year?
Of course if Oz���s film had come earlier we would all have been busy whipping Rawail for ripping off yet another Hollywood film without a by-your-leave.
It was Urmila Matondkar who pointed out to me that critics tend to take a far more lenient view of failings and far more extravagant note of triumphs in Hollywood films than they do with their Bollywood counterparts. ���Take a look at the review pages. Every other English film gets three or four stars. It���s rare to see Hindi films get more than two,��� Urmila pointed out cannily.
So are we tacitly acknowledging the cultural superiority of the First World? Or is Hollywood definitely superior to Bollywood? It would be, if you insist on calling the Hindi film industry by a mongrelised me-too name.
I think Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Tabu and Ranbir Kapoor are as good, if not better than Sean Connery, Meryl Streep, Keira Knightley and Colin Farell. I think our Rang De Basanti is any day more deftly edited than the political thriller Vantage Point. Shekhar Kapoor who���s blessedly back in Mumbai made Masoom a much more moving experience than the original film. I certainly think Sholay is superior to its derivative source Magnificent 7. And I definitely prefer Gulzar���s Parichay to The Sound Of Music.
Raj Kapoor to me was a better visionary than Cecil De Mille. While de Mille created movies as pretexts for epic expanses, RK���s plots and characters never became subservient to the awesome vistas he built around them. And admit it.
The majestic madness that Johnny Depp brings to his roles is quite conspicuously comparable with what Shah Rukh Khan does on screen. There���s an operatic quality to Depp���s performance in Tim Burton���s Sweeney Todd...
It comes from the mating of stage conventions with cinema. Skillfully adapting a stage play to the screen is an art-form that transcends the relatively narrow precincts of ���pure��� cinema. In India Sanjay Leela Bhansali brought the state of the stage on celluloid. Audiences didn���t much care for the blue-tinted mise en scene of Bhansali���s theatrical love story.
Blue seems to be the presiding shade of Tim Burton���s wonderful play on celluloid about London in the 19th century. Depressed, gloomy and daunting, the scenario of Sweeney Todd... is so bluesy and bleak you wonder where the director derives the recesses of joie de vivre that brighten up the proceedings in spurts of sunshine.
This isn���t the first time that Burton has collaborated with Johnny Depp for a exposition on the bizarre underbelly of human behaviour. In Edwards Scissorshand, the pair was pungently-tuned to the bowels of the bizarre. Sweeney Todd... is far more ambitious.
It recreates the musical in a tone and terms that are distinctly amusical. Depp and his wonderfully-capable partner-in-grime Helena Bonham-Carter (long time no see!) often burst into stifled songs on the quality of love and life. Burton���s narrative is shockingly brutal in portraying the end of love and the beginning of vendetta in a city so ridden with crime you wonder when and where Londoners got the time to assume so much civility in later years!
Very often you feel Brian de Palma has walked into Charles Dickens��� London. The slasher genre gets a slice of lemony broadway-blues. And the principal players take care of the rest.
Depp���s appetite for the ghoulish is by now legendary and Helena Bonham-Carter has played costumed characters consistently. But never one that sings in-sync with the sound of slitting throats. There is a deliberate effort to give the film a look of wide-eyed splendour without taking away the feeling of hell having no fury like a woman scorned, and a man conned.
But you don���t come away from the film with a frown, wondering why moral subversion is so bloody prevalent in movies. Neither do you remember only the periodicity and performances.
What you most take away from Sweeney Todd... is its yummy yoking of stage conventions with cinematic luminosity without tilting the balance against or for either. Foul play has seldom encountered such fair play.
But of the three big Hollywood releases last week, two seemed to have been inspired by Hindi films that released last year.
Kick me under the table if I���m wrong. But isn���t Frank Oz���s Death At A Funeral the same as Rahul Rawail���s Buddha Mar Gaya, which came last year?
Of course if Oz���s film had come earlier we would all have been busy whipping Rawail for ripping off yet another Hollywood film without a by-your-leave.
Now when the tables are turned, dare we say Oz was inspired by Rawail? Of course not! Have you noticed how lenient Indian critics are with Hollywood films?
It was Urmila Matondkar who pointed out to me that critics tend to take a far more lenient view of failings and far more extravagant note of triumphs in Hollywood films than they do with their Bollywood counterparts. ���Take a look at the review pages. Every other English film gets three or four stars. It���s rare to see Hindi films get more than two,��� Urmila pointed out cannily.
So are we tacitly acknowledging the cultural superiority of the First World? Or is Hollywood definitely superior to Bollywood? It would be, if you insist on calling the Hindi film industry by a mongrelised me-too name.
I think Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Tabu and Ranbir Kapoor are as good, if not better than Sean Connery, Meryl Streep, Keira Knightley and Colin Farell. I think our Rang De Basanti is any day more deftly edited than the political thriller Vantage Point. Shekhar Kapoor who���s blessedly back in Mumbai made Masoom a much more moving experience than the original film. I certainly think Sholay is superior to its derivative source Magnificent 7. And I definitely prefer Gulzar���s Parichay to The Sound Of Music.
Raj Kapoor to me was a better visionary than Cecil De Mille. While de Mille created movies as pretexts for epic expanses, RK���s plots and characters never became subservient to the awesome vistas he built around them. And admit it.
The majestic madness that Johnny Depp brings to his roles is quite conspicuously comparable with what Shah Rukh Khan does on screen. There���s an operatic quality to Depp���s performance in Tim Burton���s Sweeney Todd...
It comes from the mating of stage conventions with cinema. Skillfully adapting a stage play to the screen is an art-form that transcends the relatively narrow precincts of ���pure��� cinema. In India Sanjay Leela Bhansali brought the state of the stage on celluloid. Audiences didn���t much care for the blue-tinted mise en scene of Bhansali���s theatrical love story.
Blue seems to be the presiding shade of Tim Burton���s wonderful play on celluloid about London in the 19th century. Depressed, gloomy and daunting, the scenario of Sweeney Todd... is so bluesy and bleak you wonder where the director derives the recesses of joie de vivre that brighten up the proceedings in spurts of sunshine.
This isn���t the first time that Burton has collaborated with Johnny Depp for a exposition on the bizarre underbelly of human behaviour. In Edwards Scissorshand, the pair was pungently-tuned to the bowels of the bizarre. Sweeney Todd... is far more ambitious.
It recreates the musical in a tone and terms that are distinctly amusical. Depp and his wonderfully-capable partner-in-grime Helena Bonham-Carter (long time no see!) often burst into stifled songs on the quality of love and life. Burton���s narrative is shockingly brutal in portraying the end of love and the beginning of vendetta in a city so ridden with crime you wonder when and where Londoners got the time to assume so much civility in later years!
Very often you feel Brian de Palma has walked into Charles Dickens��� London. The slasher genre gets a slice of lemony broadway-blues. And the principal players take care of the rest.
Depp���s appetite for the ghoulish is by now legendary and Helena Bonham-Carter has played costumed characters consistently. But never one that sings in-sync with the sound of slitting throats. There is a deliberate effort to give the film a look of wide-eyed splendour without taking away the feeling of hell having no fury like a woman scorned, and a man conned.
But you don���t come away from the film with a frown, wondering why moral subversion is so bloody prevalent in movies. Neither do you remember only the periodicity and performances.
What you most take away from Sweeney Todd... is its yummy yoking of stage conventions with cinematic luminosity without tilting the balance against or for either. Foul play has seldom encountered such fair play.
End of Article
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