A short wish-list that will help make 2011 a better year for the movie-goer than 2010.
No more Instant Masterpieces, please: Call me conservative, but as a movie-lover with a sense of history, I think it’s prudent to wait a decade or two before proclaiming a film an all-time classic. Yet, this is probably too much to ask in an age characterised by impatience, overreaction and microscopic attention spans. A bemusing recent development is the rush to declare a barely-released (or in some cases, a not-yet-released) movie a masterpiece. This happened most amusingly with Christopher Nolan’s overrated Inception. Such was the hype around this film — and so intense the desire to canonise it — that when the first unfavourable review appeared in a mainstream publication, the online debate all but crashed the Internet.
The best response to the hyperbole came from A D Jameson in a detailed article titled “Seventeen Ways of Criticising Inception” (https://bsmedia.business-standard.comtinyurl.com/2dvv8ra) where he pointed out that there was nothing so pathbreaking about Inception’s celebrated dream-within-a-dream concept. Of course, by year-end, none of this was relevant, for the attention had shifted to the latest “all-time masterpiece” – David Fincher’s The Social Network. The next one should be along in another month or so, though I hope not.
More support for small films: In February I was present for a few days at the location shoot of Anup Kurian’s The Hunt, starring Naseeruddin Shah, and it was an insight into how difficult, arduous and decidedly unglamorous the filmmaking process really is. But it also made me feel a deeper sympathy for people who try to realise their dreams on minuscule budgets. Ten months later, when I met Kurian in Mumbai, his film was still unreleased. He made light of his troubles finding distributors, but it’s a real pity that his movie (and no doubt many others like it) is held up. It makes it easier to understand why a small film like Peepli [Live] needed the backing of a big name like Aamir Khan, even if the resultant promotional overdrive made the filmmakers feel uncomfortable and sidelined. Maintaining the balance between artistic integrity and commercial considerations continues to be a big challenge.
Fewer unexpected deaths: When I met the actor Ravi Baswani in Mumbai for an interview in 2009, I was struck by how fit and agile he was at age 63 — so his death, of a heart attack earlier this year, came as quite a shock. Baswani’s legacy rests on his roles in two non-mainstream movies that have becomes cult classics — Jaane bhi do Yaaro and Chashme Baddoor — but with a bit of luck he could have had a much more prolific career.
Even more shocking, though, was the passing of two very promising — and much-too-young — directors, Pankaj Advani at age 45 and Manish Acharya at 40. In their short careers, both had done some fine work: Advani’s film Sankat City was one of the most inspired satires (not a genre Hindi cinema excels at) of recent years, while Acharya’s Loins of Punjab Presents was a very nicely written, performed and observed ensemble comedy about a disparate group of non-resident Indians competing in a singing contest in New Jersey.
More DVD Extras, lower prices: Indian music stores are full of attractively packaged DVDs, but this is surface glitter — despite the fact that few of these discs have good supplemental material in the form of audio commentary or interviews, they are priced anywhere between Rs 400 and Rs 600. Highway robbery is a polite way of describing this sort of thing, and little wonder that many serious movie buffs — including yours truly — prefer to buy pirated discs from the underground markets. Here’s hoping that companies like Reliance BIG Home Video, NDTV Lumiere and Enlighten get their acts together soon.
[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer]