Spinning Yarns Glorifying Silver Screen Mannequins

A few years back Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan said in an interview that a filmstar’s shelf life in the industry was till a given Friday. He was referring to the fate of actors being decided by the audience with the release of a new movie every Friday. How I wish that was true. If that was the case --- of the audience, and the audience alone, getting to decide the fate of silver screen mannequins ostentatiously called superstars --- we would not have blockbuster hits but good cinema, we would not have superstars but actors, and the tribe of conniving pretentious conmen called ‘film critics’ would have been extinct by now.

Film critics can be compared to a glorified version of the effusively earnest broker, who for a cut in the deal would sell a dead duck as a daffodil. Follow the many reviews appearing every Thursday on newspapers/blogs/TV channels and one is left with the impression ‘this was the movie I have been waiting to watch all this while’. It gives the impression that suddenly our filmmakers have got it right and have reached a state where they cannot go wrong. A dearth of good scripts and actors have made sure that the same old plot is told, retold and told yet again – the difference being the location, number of item songs and, how can one forget, the ‘controversy’ and ‘news’ about the film. News about such developments and film critics are largely to be blamed for this sorry state of affairs. Words like ‘superhit’, ‘blockbuster’ and recently ‘terra hit’ have been abused beyond recognition. It is a different matter that with pre-budgeting a movie more or less recovers the money spent on it before its release. Given this one should work real hard to deliver a flop.
This being said there are a few critics who can be taken for their word or rather for what they do not say. This group speaks at length when the movie is good and if it is bad, they either choose not to comment or talk about the ‘positives you can take from the movie’. It is a survival tactic in an industry where criticism is largely not welcomed while ‘hero-worship’ and sycophancy is hogged upon. Thanks to inflated egos and an equally inflated purse such criticism is seldom heard, if not silenced. This group of hopefuls are a minuscule that does not match against the behemoth ‘film critic’.

Imaging: merilanand@gmail.com

The media is also to blame for cultivating this trend and breeding the ‘film critic’. With various media organisations coming in competition grew and so did news coverage. While that was the positive, the flipside was the birth of an oxymoronic entity called ‘entertainment journalism’. The race for ‘exclusive’ interviews, juicy gossip and inane details about people associated with the film industry ensured that ‘stars’ were never rubbed the wrong way. Add to this the curse of paid-news and we have an overkill of ‘entertainment news’.
Coming back to Shahrukh Khan: No doubt he is a superstar and has been entertaining the nation for more than two decades. But then again Lalu Prasad ruled Bihar for more than a decade and it would suffice to say that the state is better without him (not to forget that he has been entertaining us for years now).
(The appeared as a Middle on The New Indian Express edit page on March 6)

Dasavaatharam – how Kamal and the media took us for a ride

What do you do when you are old (read 50+) and probably running out of steam? What would you do if you've delivered amazing characters early in your life and not matching them of late? You are a script-dialogue-screenplay, find a fat producer, cast yourself in all possible avathars (how I dread that word now) and call it Dasavaatharam.
For a person who has always rated Kamal Hasaan as a superior actor, especially when compared to his contemporary Rajinikanth, for various critical reasons, this latest offering by the 'Universal Hero' is nothing but a desperate show of glorified nothingness. Only if we had it, I would have dialled 911 to save me from the ordeal, torture and trauma that came in the form of 180-odd minute diarrhoea on celluloid. Not only is the actor a shadow of what he used to be but it seems that he has lost the ground beneath his feet. Often quoted by the mavericks of the industry as an all-season actor, his recent movies only glare one message – this is an actor who is in search of a genre which can befit his ventures, an actor who is trying to make a point, an actor who is desperately trying to make the audience gasp, tears roll down their cheeks, give that edge-of-the-seat feeling.
If his movies in the recent past were premonitions and signs of what were in the waiting, D-10 is the proof of the decline in the standard of cinema he chooses and is associated with.
This new movie, D-10, thanks to the new-age-marketing-gurus will be a hit. The regular talks in the media, the promos have over-satiated the audience that anyone and everyone would want to see the ‘magic’ in the ten-roles-rolled-into-one movie. It will be a hit, a hit to the scale that it would recover the invested money. Would this hold any relevance as a blip on the radar of Tamil cinema or in the actor’s personal profile? – I am sure not. For the best it can be cherished as a magnum opus that should not have happened. It is a blip on the radar – a sign of danger or an itch that is in the larger frame a sign of the times we are in. a time when marketing cacophony is good cinema and not performances.
For the industry this is just another movie which is in tune with the trend at the box office. Hyperbole media attention before the release, aggressive marketing and shrewd publicity is the underlying factor of any present day blockbuster-movie. Most of the movies are but the hero-action-songs-item numbers and D-10 has all of this. The technology is refreshing but not awe creating. There are a few scenes which can be counted as different but the difference ends there.
Kamal Hassan might be a happy man to have donned ten hats or perhaps nine different G-R-O-T-E-S-Q-U-E make-ups but sure not in the top few movies of his good movies. It seems that the actor came up with ten different characters – representing different countries, race, languages, and gender – and wove a movie around it. Or to a thread of a story got this brilliant idea of 10-roles-one-movie-first-time-in –history and made the movie. Except for two – being generous – three roles the others are but a glorified fancy dress competition. Probably Kamal got hooked to the Avaishanmughi routine of extreme-long-sessions-of-make-up and wanted to test it to the maximum in this ten-in-one.For an actor, a thespian of emotions, who has graced the silver screen for more than three decades, this is not just an amateur and uncalled movie but an uncalled and to-be-kind-to-the-movie – uncouth one.