Ghajini (the movie)
Jan. 27th, 2009 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321Movie review for them as don't watch much Bollywood (the Bollyfew):
See my icon? That man is Aamir Khan. He is a very famous movie star. In India. Or, at least, in Hindi-speaking India. He is very gorgeous. He has a wonderful hairy chest and wonderful rounded arms. You can ogle them .
Note the manly chest hair. Note the smouldering gaze. Note the sticky-outie pixie ears.
Note the fleshy arm. Phwoar.
In Ghajini, we first recognise Aamir Khan by his ears. We see his silhouette, and then we see his head from the rear, but the EARS are immediately recognisable. They are star-quality ears. In this film, he also loses his fleshliness (*sobs*) and gains around eight six-packs, a shaved chest (*sobs*) and a brutal skinhead-type buzzcut.
Brutal Aamir:
Brutal!Aamir has short-term memory loss. Every 15 minutes his memory resets itself to 'blank'. To pass the tormented time, he beats baddies to a mindless pulp. After a while we find out the reason why: REVENGE.
Then we get a flashback!! The sun is shining! There are tall, shiny glass offices! Men in suits drive flashy cars! A cute girl dances and frolics! And oh my, she is very cute and utterly adorable.
The actress is called Asin and has a name in the film narrative as well. She is Tamil and is reprising her role from the original Tamil version of this film. She lights up the screen. Suddenly, all the brutal violence is swept away and we have fun and games. In fact, we have a comedy of errors. Aamir reappears, now with a full head of hair, sporting sunglasses and a tie. He is a business tycoon. He falls in love with cute!Asin but has to pretend to be a nameless non-tycoon. Asin lies to everybody that her boyfriend is the business tycoon. So then Aamir has to method-act his way through being a nameless non-tycoon pretending to be a tycoon while all along really being a tycoon.
Hilarity ensues.
Tycoon!Aamir doesn't work out. Brutal!Aamir works out to maintain his brutality. But strangely, tycoon!Aamir's arms are suspiciously six-packish. It's all that penning of memos!!
Flashforward!! We're back in the brutal present! We find out why Aamir turned from tousled tycoon into hairless hoon! He roars! He fights! He bleeds! Very BAD things happen.
Then there's a lot of running, Danny-Boyle/Slumdog-Millionaire style, in which Aamir is scary and intense but no Asin to relieve the grimness.
The Melancholy End.
See my icon? That man is Aamir Khan. He is a very famous movie star. In India. Or, at least, in Hindi-speaking India. He is very gorgeous. He has a wonderful hairy chest and wonderful rounded arms. You can ogle them .
Note the manly chest hair. Note the smouldering gaze. Note the sticky-outie pixie ears.
Note the fleshy arm. Phwoar.
In Ghajini, we first recognise Aamir Khan by his ears. We see his silhouette, and then we see his head from the rear, but the EARS are immediately recognisable. They are star-quality ears. In this film, he also loses his fleshliness (*sobs*) and gains around eight six-packs, a shaved chest (*sobs*) and a brutal skinhead-type buzzcut.
Brutal Aamir:
Brutal!Aamir has short-term memory loss. Every 15 minutes his memory resets itself to 'blank'. To pass the tormented time, he beats baddies to a mindless pulp. After a while we find out the reason why: REVENGE.
Then we get a flashback!! The sun is shining! There are tall, shiny glass offices! Men in suits drive flashy cars! A cute girl dances and frolics! And oh my, she is very cute and utterly adorable.
The actress is called Asin and has a name in the film narrative as well. She is Tamil and is reprising her role from the original Tamil version of this film. She lights up the screen. Suddenly, all the brutal violence is swept away and we have fun and games. In fact, we have a comedy of errors. Aamir reappears, now with a full head of hair, sporting sunglasses and a tie. He is a business tycoon. He falls in love with cute!Asin but has to pretend to be a nameless non-tycoon. Asin lies to everybody that her boyfriend is the business tycoon. So then Aamir has to method-act his way through being a nameless non-tycoon pretending to be a tycoon while all along really being a tycoon.
Hilarity ensues.
Tycoon!Aamir doesn't work out. Brutal!Aamir works out to maintain his brutality. But strangely, tycoon!Aamir's arms are suspiciously six-packish. It's all that penning of memos!!
Flashforward!! We're back in the brutal present! We find out why Aamir turned from tousled tycoon into hairless hoon! He roars! He fights! He bleeds! Very BAD things happen.
Then there's a lot of running, Danny-Boyle/Slumdog-Millionaire style, in which Aamir is scary and intense but no Asin to relieve the grimness.
The Melancholy End.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Memento?
Date: 2009-01-27 10:15 pm (UTC)Re: Memento?
Date: 2009-01-28 12:37 pm (UTC)This is not called stealing, my dear. This is called creative appropriation. Hollywood does it all the time, after all. If Bollywood films were better known to the movie producers in L.A., they'd be stealing them left, right and centre. As it is, they have to make do with pilfering arty-farty Norwegian or Hong Kong fare.
I recently discovered that Bollywood mining Hollywood is the least of it; it mines Tamil cinema and Kannada cinema and Bengali cinema and all the other cinemas of India to a much larger and merrier degree. After all, Ghajini was Tamil before it was Hindi.
I must one day compare Memento and Ghajini. The points of comparison are surprisingly few, once you get past the short-term memory loss bit.
Re: Memento?
Date: 2009-01-28 12:41 pm (UTC)Re: Memento?
Date: 2009-01-28 07:53 pm (UTC)Whenever I turn the DVD-player on, though, my mind just goes into squee-mode...