From Regressive To Progressive – A Matter Of Choice.

Some time back I watched I am Legend, and wrote about it. It was, to me, a brilliant movie idea executed very well. Of course, there are always moments when you go “Oh damn, they could’ve dealt with THIS part slightly differently!”, but by and large that did little to radically change my overall good impression of the script, storyline and execution.

The movie is based on Richard Mathesons book as we had discussed in that post. The book was first made as a film in 1964, and then again in 1971. I am Legend was the third adaptation. Although this is a well known fact, no one sighed or rolled their eyes or dismissed it as a me-too.

Stop and think about it. A third attempt. A much used plot. Yet, why was there not much rolling-the-eyes?

Now consider this.

You’ve watched Pyar Toh Hona Hi Tha?  Well that’s French Kiss. Bad Boys, Reservoir Dogs, Hitch, When Harry Met Sally, What Lies Beneath…..they’ve all been used. And its not as if the cinema viewing public doesn’t know about it. The Blogosphere is full of these references, for example this exchange of comments in the forum of Think Digit. And everyone is noticing these  supposed ‘inspirations’ and eyes roll about in their sockets in a crazy frenzy all the time. With each release of such ‘inspired’ movies, reports suggest that Ophthalmologists yelp out in joy and keep their clinics open for 3 extra hours each day. 

DishumDishum.com,  the blog dedicated – sort of – to Bollywood exploits even made a sort of a cross referring analysis of the general views in the blogosphere on shameless copythis, copythat orientation of Bollywood. They even referred the post of a famous blogger you follow religiously. 

Apparently, and I havent noticed any myself, no credits have been made to the original in any of these ‘copywood’ releases, as DishumDishum.com calls them. And really that lack of grace is probably what sets eyes rolling. Adaptations are not new and need not be objectionable. But trying to pass it off as your own certainly is.

Oh and theres music. Take a look at this.

It is time for some serious change. As people of this country, we have history of producing some of the worlds most awe inspiring creative thoughts. But now we confront creative bankruptcy.

Now read this refreshing piece and you will see what I mean. What incredible magic with just black and white! As Karthik points out, what brilliance in 1959!

It is now 2008.

We seem to have have mastered the art of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. I won’t be surprised if 9 out of every 10 movies is a copy. Nothing surprising, if you consider that 8 out of 9 alphabets in the name of our movie industry is a copy afterall.

The fact that the media, industry and the public allowed the industry to be called Bollywood should say something.

Sigh.

Creative Inspiration – Bollywood SchezwanStyle Plagiarism

If you took my previous post seriously and watched I Am Legend, I am sure you’ll agree it was quite a well made, thought provoking movie. And whats more, it was a big box-office hit.

Which is all the basic criteria Bollywood needs to, shall we say, get creatively inspired to make a shameless copycat version of the same. I was shrivelling and writhing in embarrassment after the Partner movie episode which involved the original makers of the original movie, Hitch call the Desi Hitch-inspired Bollywooders and pull them up and shake them a bit in their shoes.

But do we ever learn? I think not. To learn will be a significant shift from mimic. Bollywood will do it again. They are sure to go ahead and allow I Am Legend to creatively inspire them and use this inspiration to create their own version of the movie. 

Here is the sneak peek of what a remake of I Am Legendwould be when it does tickle the creative fancies of the Bollywood multitude.  

You can also read an IMDb review from the link further down or click the image below. 

I Am LegEnd 9,9.

It is the year 2012. The setting is the ruins of Mumbai city. Rabert, with size 9 on both Leg-Ends, is your friendly clean shaved, red and black checked, full-arm T-shirt(or sweater no one knows), faded jeans and white-shoes-wearing super-hero-next-door who can bash up bad guys 15 at a time. But with increasing peer pressure, Bollywood movies are driven to bold attempts to step away from the beaten-to-death formula of heroes battling dumb villains in a three-hour celebration of the unearthly greatness and glory of one single man – our hero. Our hero is ably supported by a huge cast, and even more by the director and special effects teams (chalks & crayons type entry-level animation rookies). This combined rock solid support enables a single minded 3 hour pursuit of the core objective – Mission-Matrimony – which eventually climaxes to the tying the knot around the heroines neck, and sometimes to a closing shot of a terribly odd bed strewn with flowers.

Indeed, ’tis time for our incredible hero to test his heroic disposition against bigger powers.

Rabert is an AFMC scientist who is the lone survivor of a biochemical fallout caused by prolonged use of the Mithi River for political ends(Substitute copy with Cooum River if it were Kollywood making this movie. But that being said, Kollywood seldom does such shameless rip-offs) . Years of repeated mud-slinging among politicians turns worse when they switch to slinging mud, sludge, or whatever it is from the Mithi river. The city is, in no time, contaminated with deadly stench and concoction of the flush-out matter of over 20 million apartments in Mumbai and its suburbs. The concoction is so potent as a toxic chemical – what with 90% of the population drinking cola and eating thoughtlessly engineered vegetables washed in green dye to appeal to the unsuspecting ‘housewife’ outside the 26 markets of Mumbai’s suburban railway stations -  that it rapidly begins to affect the population of the city at the DNA level and eventually the entire nation and even the rest of the insignificant world (Refer to earlier JustPathe post to get the drift of this self-promotional reference).

In less than three years it splits the population into just two types. Those with LegEnds of same size, and those with mismatching LegEnds (mostly shoe size 8 on left and 9 on right Leg) . As you might expect, as we have been hardwired over the years by generations of script writers, the ones with mismatching LegEnds are the bad people. To be different however, the guy named Rabert is in fact the good guy.

Rabert has blood thirsty zombies as his neighbors and his trusty dog, Samantakini, Rabert is trying to discover a cure for this disease and to help revive whatever is left of the population including any other people who might have also survived. So he practices his experiments in his secure lab on an infected zombie he has captured. It is worth noting that this zombie is female. 

One day, Rabert meets Pinky, another survivor. During an intense mentally stimulating conversation when he encourages her to accept the idea of Bobko roz Marle, they discover they were childhood friends and that they had, out of sheer innocence that is found only among 10 year old children with long hair and shrieky voices in Hindi movies, wandered into a desolate temple on a rocky mountain and gotten married to each other during a game of mummy-papa. Pinky has a twisted, dirty, stinking totally gnarled rope still around her neck which establishes all evidence to prove her credibility.

Suddenly the young couple is rudely shaken out of their romantic revere – which had incredibly transported them to the Alps. They hardly have time to change their clothes back to what they were wearing before they had drifted off into dream sequences involving 15 to 20 encouraging Apsaras going ‘Ooooo! Oooooooo!’, who had materialized magically on the snow-clad mountains of Switzerland wearing totally Indian outfits.  Result was that Pinky was still wearing a two piece suit that exposed a lot of skin and flab, not to mention a very ugly, wrinkled belly button. How she (and others of her kind often spotted on Chitrahaar etc.) ever escaped Pneumonia is a big mystery that is still being studied by specialised research labs set up at John Hopkins in the United States. Rabert was of course wearing a silly sweater with diamond shapes in yellow and pink and white leather shoes on his size 9,9 LegEnds.

The captured zombie had broken lose and she was what was responsible for thesorry-for-the-breakyathat happened on the Alps. The Zombie shrieks and wails and emits barbaric noises and seems very upset. That’s when the young, terrorised couple recognize good old zombie – Sheetal who was secretly in love with Rabert for over 20 years when their fathers had jokingly discussed marriage between her and Rabert. Rabert was of course mollycoddling innocently with Pinky at that very moment outside the temple….what unfolds is an emotional, tear jerking, heart-wrenching suspense thriller family drama…..a must watch.…..

Adapted from a totally spoofed up future review on IMDb (if image is illegible, then you have to ‘zoom barabar zoom’. Hover mouse over image till you find a ‘zoom’ button at the right bottom corner of image. Oh yes, you need to click it too).

 

It Takes Will To Make A Legend

When you read a book, particularly action or thriller, you tend to create mental images around the people and events in the book. I have felt sometimes that the degree of joy you derive from a book is directly proportional to the degree of vividness you mange to create in these mental images.

 

This is true for the simple reason that the entire experience of reading the book becomes richer. That means if watching the movie creates a more exciting experience than what you had as a mental image from reading, you are likely to appreciate the movie.

 

When I watched Jurassic Park I thought, “Damn, I should’ve read the book first”. The movie was so brilliant in capturing the ecosystem in Site A:Isla Nublar,  its flora and fauna, its crude, bloodthirsty, dominant inhabitants and their demeanor (Homo sapiens included) that I didn’t think the book would evoke imagination anything close to this brilliant movie. Especially given my challenged mental faculties.

 

I was wrong.

 

Michael Crichton is not any ordinary fly that’s likely to get trapped in ember. The book was incredible and my respect for both the movie as well as the book shot up.

 

That was probably the only time in my experience did a movie do justice to a book and vice versa.

 

And that was probably the only time that I saw a movie and decided to read the book.

 

Until last night.

I watched a late night movie at Inox. I wished I had worn a hat to the hall. Well, I might not have taken it off and awarded the movie an elaborate bow, but I would have touched the hat at its rim and tipped it about 10°.

And as apparent, it did affect me enough to consider writing about it in Pathe which has never so far carried a movie review, and considering that a movie review is one of the most commonly written things on blogs, you could say it took team work of a distinguished bunch of people to make me finally do this – A book by Peter Matheson, a movie directed by Francis Lawrence, Screen Play by Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich and incredible portrayal of Robert Neville by Will Smith, the whole cast and crew that got together and indulged in teamwork.

Yes, I am talking about I  Am Legend.

A man-made deadly virus. Un-availability of a vaccine. Virus turning airborne and rapidly infecting people across the globe. And a world that dramatically disintegrates in merely a few hours after millions of years of investment into evolution.

 

Yes, we are dealing with an infection that causes a chilling ‘de-evolution’ of the human race.

 

Nationalities disappear. Countries vanish. Languages disappear. Ideologies melt. Religious differences disintegrate. The world, in just a few hours, becomes a place of only 4 kinds.

• 95% of the world population that have mutated into nocturnal carnivorous beasts that display up to 9 times normal human aggression, leaving New York, and perhaps the rest of the world,  a totally, uninhabited empty, city. Yes, that’s right, an empty New York city.
• 4% elsewhere that are constantly under threat of being infected anytime.
• 1% that is somehow immune to the virus.
• And an immune Will Smith, the one scientist who can find the vaccine, and reverse the ecological disaster – and has and does what it takes to be able to say “I Am Legend”.

Update: Tian points out that 90% of the population is infact dead by 2012. Which is in fact true from various references I managed to find. Of the remaining ten percent, less than one percent is immune to the virus–everyone else is infected.

The movie has a few layered messages that you might spot. But only if you aren’t busy sitting at the edge of your seat, gripping the arm rest, biting your nails and trying hard to appear composed. One is the music that Will Smith plays at various situations. Many are introspective and contextual. WS’s reference to Bob Marley and his message – the layer being Alice Braga has no clue what he was talking about. I thought that was quite deep – the disconnect they share is quite significant and thought provoking. It really does contrast their core drives. Another rather subtle message is the one on the butterfly – the layer being WS’s final take on God. Be alert to that one.

I am stopping myself from giving my most critical comment because it might be a movie spoiler. So let me just say the end could have been different.

The story of man destroying man has been done to death. Pardon the pun. We’ve seen the likes of Outbreak, etc, but this one certainly broke away from the cliché successfully. However my strong point of contention about such movies is the writers think the United States is the world. This was very obvious in the Morgan Freeman movie, Deep Impact. For the record, Europe, Africa and Asia are weaved into dialogues but it’s always in an ‘oh by the way’ tone. I must mention though, that Independence Day did acknowledge the rest of the world.

When you make movies thinking about dollars of profits and overseas rights, and markets in China and India, you can’t shut the rest of the world out in the script. That’s one point I think where I am Legend kinda let me down.

Its definitely worth a watch. And, let me know if it makes you think it might be worth a read too.

What Has The World Come To?

There was a time when men hopped on boats as often as we have Pani Puri today, wearing ridiculous hats and tight white pants that would make our own Bollywood’s Helen look like she was wearing bell-bottoms.

These men sailed in the seas searching for non-sea parts through long pipes with one leg on the boat railing and lived life in pursuit of this strange obsession to a never-ending quest of discovering new land.

What was the drive for explorers like Vasco Da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Jacques Cartier, Roald Amundsen, and good old Christopher Columbus, to name a few? What got them into such a single minded obsession to spot and discover land?

JustPathe commissioned a special research spanning 30 long seconds and concluded it could be a particularly bad argument with the woman in their lives that drove these men to shoot out of their houses and rush right into the High Seas and stay there for months on end. Since they had to return home someday, they cloaked their designs in an alibi of searching for land. 

But parallel research also discovered that these men had certain genes that are till today found in Bombay among a particular group of active humans who have taken to the real estate business. Although this variant of the gene does not compel them into the sea, they have adapted to looking for land on land.

Yesterday, I was reflecting on this deep thought while watching a Hollywood movie, and I realized that these explorers had also happened to contribute heavily to the shape of the world map. Their exploration gave us the first global view of the globe.

But I am just seriously deviating from what I want to say.

What I am trying to say, is that it’s terribly sad that Hollywood has not learned from their efforts or the millions of satellite images that have been beamed back to earth station.

Being a true ‘citizen of the world’, I can’t help but notice how, more often than not, movies from Hollywood tend to portray the ‘world’ as America. This is so ego-centric that it makes a gullible viewer who hasn’t worn the hat of a ‘citizen of the world’ yet, believe that the whole world was limited only to the United States of America. This is particularly true in movies such as Deep Impact, etc. that deal with global, mankind threatening, save-the-race types kick-ass disaster movies.

Here is how Hollywood seems to interpret the effort of all the explorers and all the satellite images.

If Hollywood is salivating increasingly thinking of the growing cinema going audiences in China and India, they better change their concept of the world. In fact, they better erase their concept of the ‘world’ and look at the real picture.

So there.