I am a self admitted cinema buff. I watch two movies a day when I am busy. On other days the figure gets inflated by a factor of two!! Yesterday I watched the the first Telugu Movie of my life. It was a movie called Happy Days and about life at an engineering college. The director is himself a engineering grad and so the movie must have been inspired by his experiences. There was little mention of hostel life in the movie probably because either the director himself was a day scholar or his college had no hostels, which was a let down given the fact many like me believe the real spice of engineering days is the life@hostel. I watched with subtitles, and they were a major disappointment. The intensity of laughter of my linguistically less disabled friends (whom i also call 'Gulti(s)')always drowned my infrequent half hearted laughs. As such the less I talk about the screenplay the better it would be. The movie was good entertainment even tough: 1. The songs seemed to start all of sudden (making me feel the director had already paid for the songs and wanted to insert them somewhere), 2. Some of the plot twists looked pretty impossible to happen. 3. The acting left a lot to be desired. 4. The editing could have been tighter. 5. The cinematography and special effects were amateurish many times.
Indian film makers are happy selling escapist movies and the Indian audience is happy gulping the prescribed sweet dose of medicine (fully knowing the dosage won't really help except probably increasing the already high blood sugar levels), one could find enough evidence of the malaise in the film. However I liked the characters who looked real and the sets which (the movie had been shot in a real life college) suited the bill almost perfectly. The movie though dispelled the myth in my mind that all popular south Indian movies have heros thrashing evil looking but helpless villains in different locations, wearing different dresses (though all equally silly looking) and displaying different martial art styles. The movie had a rating of 8.3 on IMDb (and my vote did not make any discernible difference). I will finish my post here as I have to wonder about who would rate a movie on more than 8.
Indian film makers are happy selling escapist movies and the Indian audience is happy gulping the prescribed sweet dose of medicine (fully knowing the dosage won't really help except probably increasing the already high blood sugar levels), one could find enough evidence of the malaise in the film. However I liked the characters who looked real and the sets which (the movie had been shot in a real life college) suited the bill almost perfectly. The movie though dispelled the myth in my mind that all popular south Indian movies have heros thrashing evil looking but helpless villains in different locations, wearing different dresses (though all equally silly looking) and displaying different martial art styles. The movie had a rating of 8.3 on IMDb (and my vote did not make any discernible difference). I will finish my post here as I have to wonder about who would rate a movie on more than 8.