khatta meetha

Being not well has its advantages. I could slip back into a more relaxed mode - finished watching once upon a time in mumbai and khatta meetha. Once.. is well-made with wonderful dialogues balancing both dialoguebaazi and poetic form. KM is a pure priyadarshan epic - an ensemble of grey characters, awfully cunning, rendered with unemotional, unforgiving brazenness. The gangster movies bring out lot of depth in the characters, priyadarshan never has time for that. He takes the ordinary, mixes it with as much dirt and filth he can imagine (or has seen?) and just blurts it out on the screen.

Overall its done with such finesse, and fitted within the standard formula. But still, I remain dissatisfied. Its a core-dump, a mega brain-dump of the director/author. It has the formula, the message, plot, justification and everything else you could imagine bundled into one. Perhaps somewhere, it touches you too but it fails to move you - which is dissapointing given the movie contains so much depth and detail. Couldn't we avoid this fast-fwd rendition and focus on the core ? Perhaps what is missing is the elegance of portrayal - maybe the frugalness of presentation? I don't know.

I perhaps noticed this fast-fwd style of rendition in Mani Ratnam's Bombay first - Roja was also done in that hurried way, and later on Yuva too (Guru didn't seem so jarring, though). I earlier shrugged off the fast-fwd genre in priyadarshan movies by attributing the style to his penchant for slap-stick; now, it appears that perhaps he has been meaning more - perhaps he has been trying to put across his message stealthily. I admire his way of putting it across if that's the case - but then do it more beautifully, do it like munnabhai, not like a braindump.