Wasting Time

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

The Indian movie makers have run out of ideas for quite a while.  They willfully ignore (all most all the time as they have not made a movie that is worth watching in many years) the audience and ticket purchasing innocents, and keep throwing the same stuff (being very kind with my words) at the audience each week.  Granted that some movies are minor exceptions which deviate from the glory of a few men on screen, but even the exceptions really don’t stop from the clichés of the age old story line.

Barring a few exceptions, most movies fall into two categories; dishoom and dishoom, and the new trend of showing western style relationships in an Indianised context.  There is really no nativity to displaying what happens in New York or London or cities outside of India, and people fake speaking in funny accents and show casing life that is not a normal to the Indian way of life.  Granted that many Indians ape on western societies, but life of a movie going Indian really has not changed in generations, irrespective of where they live.

The regional movies have continued to glorify the really short guys, with heavy make-up as super humans, and super smart guys who in every movie do the unthinkable, unimaginable and unbelievable stuff in just about every movie.  Common man watches the movie of uncommon gory and glory.  With each passing movie the production costs and payments to heroes has continued to shoot-up, irrespective of their box-office outcome.  The vast majority of the Indian movies end-up being a flop or disaster, but we keep churning out boat loads of movies every week.

We can perhaps ignore the wafer think storyline, which continues to become thinner with each week.  The heroes and generational attitudes have continued to bank of the same logic, fight, beauty, locations and illogical two and half hours.  Lucky for the audience the so called big heroes in all languages don’t make many movies these days, and the moviegoers are spared the experience mostly to one or twice a year.  If the today's stars release movies as did the the yesteryears heroes, we might have simply stopped going to the theater.  By limiting the number of releases the big stars are really sparing the audience and also the producers the distress of lost money and aspirin.

The love for movies is really escapism.  Fortunately the fantasy, action, thematic, potter, Disney, Star Wars, and many variations of English and foreign language movie take the viewing space (now a days in many of regional languages), and you can just throw in a local language movie in the middle.  But what is still missing is the fell good movies that probably were the staple of life a generation ago.  The experience of watching a movie with 500 or more people in a theater, and enjoying the simple melodrama for almost 3 hours has become a difficult commodity.

But the logic of a moviegoer has never been too good.  We still want to see the movies, and we still want to see the song and dance, and action with a few tears thrown in.

The old saying goes “Time is Money”.  I did not want to emphasize that I was wasting money, just whiling my time away watching movies.  Enjoy the show and for a few months really cold weather in Chicago.