Quality be damned

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To locate a common denominator at the movies would be any dream merchant’s most-cherished dream come true. Imagine a film which appeals in equal proportions to the mandarins as well as the masses!

Now that was possible in the 1950s, clearly the glorious years of Hindi language cinema, when black-and-white entertainers had stories to tell with a semblance of sense and substance. To be sure, Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, V. Shantaram and Bimal Roy couldn’t have possibly predicted the dramatically altered scenario of today when the sillier a film gets, the more mega-bucks it makes.
Back in the halycon days, Rowdy Rathore or a Ready, to name to off-hand examples, would have been booed off the screens, when audiences were treated with respect, and not contemptuously. “Let them gobble leftovers, if we can’t give them bread,” is the presiding mantra.
Over to 2012, then, which has been a disconcertingly disturbing and yet redeemingly inventive year for Bollyentertainment. The yin of the vaultingly expensive-budgeted — to the point of wasting untold crores — presides, but not without the yang of independently financed films barking away at their heels. Of course, at the top end of the film tower, there are the weekend blockbusters hits featuring the Khans — Salman Khan (Ek Tha Tiger), Aamir Khan (Talaash) and Shah Rukh Khan (Jab Tak Hai Jaan). Dabangg 2 is saved up for the end of the year. If a pain-relief balm was extolled in the first edition’s item number ‘Munni badnaam hui’, the sequel gets Kareena Kapoor swinging to lyrics about a popular brand of adhesives. What next? Toothpowder?
Curiously, nine out of ten viewers who’ve seen the Big Ticket films, will not exactly rave about them. Influenced by intensive marketing campaigns — often coming close to the production budgets — the moviegoer is bamboozled into watching star-fuelled projects, to the exclusion of practically every other element. The practice of stars to travel all over the country and the countryside, to brag about their new release, has become mandatory. Once, celebration parties and trophies would be distributed after the completion of an uninterrupted run of 25 or 50 weeks. Today, the trophies are redundant. Celebrations are on after the first-weekend, and the press, generally held in disdain, is invited en masse. Extra publicity, after all, can be encashed by jacking up the price of a film on the home entertainment and satellite channel circuits. It’s all about business-business-business baby, quality be damned.
The blockbuster domain is governed by a fistful of male actors, and directors who make it a point to be in the news, with the exceptions of Aditya Chopra who behaves like a male Greta Garbo, and Rajkumar Hirani who
hasn’t rushed forth with a 4 Idiots even at a time when sequels means securing instant gazillions from the market.
David Dhawan, yesterday’s khatiya master, may be going slow nowadays but Rohit Shetty isn’t, juggling projects with Shah Rukh Khan and Ajay Devgn, and making it a point to say that though the two actors may not be best friends, Devgn has not expressed any objections. Big deal! Reams of newsprint are expended on such trivial blather. Meanwhile, most reviewers have hitched standards down drastically, raining four and five stars even on the most abysmal of films. The fat line between criticism and trade predictions has blurred, if not erased completely.
Today if there’s any trend to be detected, the trend is that there isn’t any. Love stories, action-packed thrillers and farcical comedies are all over the place. No one genre commands a majority following.
And despite the studio honchos in Los Angeles getting tough about copyright issues, there's still a preponderance of the Hollywood hangover. So Sanjay Gupta will accuse Zoya Akhtar of plagiarising Fandango for Zindagi Milegi Dobara. In retaliation, Gupta will be accused of never having made an original film in his life apart from DVD-clones.
Perhaps the ‘inspiration’ factor has become subtler today, but when Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger, Yash Chopra’s Jab Tak Hai Jaan and Reema Kagti’s Talaash resound with echoes of Hollywood products, it’s cause for serious worry.
On the yang-front, there’s a slow but steady trickle of infinitely better cinema. A section of these are occasionally funded by filmmaking corporates. Not that these corporates are perfectly clued into a film’s strength. For instance, a couple of years ago, A Wednesday had to wait for an inordinately long time to get to the theatres, since it did not feature any glamorous stars. Today, depending on the filmmaker’s equation with the corporate honchos and current market equity, some decidedly different films have found commercial acceptance. Examples: Anurag Kashyap’s two-parter Gangs of Wasseypur, Tigmanshu Dhulia's Paan Singh Tomaar and Sujoy Ghosh's Kahani.
On another fringe, albeit a vital one, filmmakers from various parts of India are raising finance from various sources to make digital feature films and documentaries touching upon human interest subjects.
These are, alas, mostly restricted to the film festival circuits, but do end up earning international laurels, and alternate outlets for ‘recoverables’. A leading multiplex chain has initiated special, limited releases of the feature films at their auditoria but the terms are far too draconian for an indie filmmaker to venture to that area, even out of desperation. During the year, Ajay Bahl’s self-funded B A Pass, Ajita Suchitra Veera’s Ballad of Rustam, Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus, Prashant Bhargava’s Patang and Mussa Syeed’s Valley of the Saints did set off ripples among the cognoscenti.
Fingers and toes crossed, a New Wave cometh shortly.