RoR

Now all of my geeky readers, please do not get salivating. RoR doesn’t mean Ruby on Rails here. AOE enthusiasts also hold on, this is no Rise of Rome either. This is a term I coined on the lines of FoF (Fund of Funds), an investment fund that uses the strategy of holding over other funds rather than investing directly in shares, bonds or other securities, and stands for Review of Reviews.

The motivation behind writing an RoR comes from three most prolific bloggers on my Google Reader coming up with their versions of reviews of a common object—what else could it be other than the most talked about movie these days—Saawariya. And interestingly enough, they published their reviews of the 9^th Nov-released-flick on the same date, the 15^th of Nov, when the Recent blogposts I read widget on my blog looked too replete with Saawariya and I had to increase the number of items it displays by 50%.

I generally prefer reviews of non-professional critics rather than the likes of Taran Adarsh and Nikhat Kazmi; you can relate to views of people you know than to those of people who are paid to review, even if you know them only by regularly reading their frequent blogposts. The professionals are always biased anyways.

The review I liked the most was Washington based Great Bong’s, a disgruntled movie fanatic on the prowl for mind bending experiences, who, in his usual wit and humor, and sentences as long as half a page, puts Saawariya as the worst of the Sanjay Leela Bhansali lot: “a big plastic bag of hot air where dreamy sets, hued lighting and forgettable music is used to divert attention from the fact that there is absolutely nothing in this venture”. He mocks SLB on his belief about his direction and his interviews and his “merger of raga-based melodies with a Brodway style play”, calls Ranbir a “little tinker-bell of a man”, innocent and poor, and describes Sonal as demure and virginal and giving us more than a few glimpses of her back, “devoid of abundant and luxuriant fur”, unlike her dad Anil Kapoor’s. Salman Khan looks confused—he took off his top, but Ranbir went one step ahead and took off his bottom. Great Bong doesn’t even spare Rani: “Rani Mukherjee’s golden-hearted ‘lady of commerce’ performance completes a hat-trick of prostitute acts (which film historians refer to as her ‘blue period’)”.

A Bangalorean blogger, LongBlackVeil, deeply interested in deeply interesting things, especially nonsense, did not regret watching the movie. She finds the aesthetics stunning, likes the black-blue-green ambience, and loves the music. Although she likes Ranbir’s hairless chest and Neetu Singh smile, she doesn’t like his and Sonam’s characters, and the lack of chemistry between the two. She does like Rani’s role, but expresses afsos over SLB’s weak screenplay, mediocre dialogue and absolutely minimal character development. But she likes the movie as a whole anyways and thinks “it’s just a victim of those horrible old beasts: Great Expectations, and What Could Have Been”.

Cuckoo from Bombay terms the movie as an outright flop. She did not see any trailers, didn’t read about it anywhere, and did not even let anybody talk about it in front of her. She wanted a surprise and she admits the movie “indeed surprised her by nose diving in the theatres”. I can see her state of shock—unlike her other posts, this one was quite laconic, filled with a lot of oversized, black ant-like emoticons.

Anadi, a regular reader and commenter on my blog from Tampa, Florida presents his review on a comment on my RoR. He finds the movie can be watched once despite the criticism, because of its freshness. He believes SLB tried to stretch a half-hour movie to over two hours with filler material that just does not fill up. Like LongBlackVeil, he also senses a lack of chemistry between the debuts, who are otherwise impressive. He says Bhansali's fairytale viewpoint cannot be considered an excuse to a lack of script and pathetic dialogues.

Nova, Bangalore-based crazy, eccentric, conceited, independent, emotionally detached and a near fanatic for things she believes in, is the only blogger I read who is all praises for Saawariya. She feels the movie was two hours of pure bliss, a visual delight and music to ears sore of cacophony people sell in the name of music. She believes the new kid has met all tremendous expectations he had set. Now, Ms Nova, he would definitely have met all expectations and made it a visual delight with his towel sequences. She finds Sonam to be ordinary, just like you would expect a debutante to be. So she also met expectations! All tremendous ones! But alas, the poor thing did not get a chance to have a sequence in a towel, let alone drop one. Anyways, Nova warns her readers not to watch it for mindless jokes and dumb action but to watch it if you want to watch a poetry in motion on celluloid! She goes on to quote a phew! comments from people on indiafm.com before ending.

So, will I go and watch the movie? Don’t know. If I get company I might. Am not too keen; might watch the grandeur on my beloved laptop. I shall, however, continue adding RoRs to this post as other feeds on my reader show up Saawariya. But one way SLB disappointed me was by naming it ‘Saawariya’, which is not a word. The correct word is ‘Saanwariya’ (साँवरिया)— one of Lord Krishna’s names, derived from ‘Saanwla’—and I thought SLB was quite meticulous and sort of perfectionist. Maybe kyunkii he is quite superstitious too and some numerologist advised him otherwise, who could anyways not spare him from the wrath of critics and reviewers, and of course ashes’ also for spelling it incorrectly in Hindi too!