“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world” – Jean Luc Godard.
So I went to the watch the movie “kis kis kyu pyar karu” and while I was coming out of the hall after seeing the movie I heard 3 boys talk “kash main bi hero jitta lucky hota toh apni bi chandi hoti”. I feel sad for them. I feel sad that the only thing they could take out of the movie was the vulgar thoughts. The movie was a sheer entertainment with no intention to tell pupil to get 3 wives with 1 girlfriend. My say is not to criticize the movie but to tell what our generation has been learning form the movies.
Movies and Indian cinema do play a very vital role in our life. By saying that it’s just entertainment, I think we are portraying a very false image of Indian cinema. It’s more than entertainment. If a person is sad they go see movie, if a person is happy they go see movie, if a person is alone, they go see movie. Be it with family or friend or with better half, when it comes to entertainment we opt for movies.
People do get inspired by Indian cinemas as we know about the Indian cricket team who got inspired by the movie Chak de India and had put their best foot forward. But as there is positive stuff, so is the negative stuff as the news had read a 7 year old girl kills the baby of her neighbor because the child’s mother had scolded her.
Another story reads, after the launch of the movie the twilight saga. A 13year old boy had bitten the girl in his class; after the principal got into the matter he learned that the boy had bitten 10 kids in one month. When contacted, the boy’s father said that it was his son’s love of the ‘twilight’ film that made him bite his fellow students.
India had been the oldest film industry in the world, it even makes largest amount of movies in the world. But there has been a dramatic shift in the style of film making due to globalization of film. This has caused concerned with conservative Indians. The Indian industry which chums out around 800 films per year has come under scrutiny for producing films that were deemed too ‘sexed up’. Bollywood consisted of escapist musicals with common storylines of good vs. evil and boy meets girl. The films were generally family orientated and the plot kept simple so that even the rural villager would find it easy to relate to. There has however, been a gradual shift in film style that has threatened the values and of the Indian society. The current Bollywood formula has some causes for concern because the transplantation of western ideas has led to extreme vulgarity with high sexual innuendo and unnecessary violence in the films. This argument begins with the comments made by the Film Federation of India, a regulatory body that presides over film content. They complain that the films made in Bollywood were too westernized and are degrading and diminishing India’s true cultural identity.
Another is the case for duplication of popular Hollywood films. If you point to any new Bollywood release you can bet that there existed a Hollywood original, somewhere down the line. Koi Mil Gaya is a befuddled remake of ET and other recent films like Bhoot (Ghost) saw the emergence of an Indian Exorcist and Raaz (Secret) was taken from ‘What Lies Beneath ‘. This ‘highlights worrying dependency of the Indian film industry.
Films like ‘Oops’ and ‘Boom’ have caused a lot of controversy in India. Oops deals with the story representing two male strippers, a concept so vague and unfamiliar to the Indian audience that there was rioting in some cinema theatres iN an attempt to ban the film. Boom shows the three main female leads strut through most of the two hour film in little more than bikinis and are frequently the target of crude sexual remarks.
The criticism to the change in film style also comes from the religious groups who feel that Bollywood films are degrading traditional values. But I think the loophole in the Indian cinema is the audience. They are sadly not mature enough to understand that not every movie has a message for them. The movies which have nonsensical, Sexist, Homophobic, illogical, immature themes gets mind bogglingly successful. When and how will it change? Youth channels like The Viral Fever and All India Bakchod are trying to change the mentality and also show the stupidity that persists in Indian cinema/TV. Aren’t we far away from becoming a logic-appreciating audience?
I’ll answer that it’s not anytime soon because those who go and watch movies like Happy New Year and Chennai Express in theatre and those who go and watch Rajinikanth’s movies in theatre (and bathe his statue in milk) when all he does on screen is sheer buffoonery (or because he is an extremely humble, good person in real life)?
If that so, then we have problems, those movies’ equivalents are Transformers and Twilight series, and they also rake in mega bucks in USA and China. Sure, those movies come with swashbuckling action scenes and a sense of sophistication Bollywood can’t dream of, but even with all that, they are a colossal insult to the art of cinema and deserve to be thoroughly trashed, but are not.
It’s very sad that Indians audience does not appreciate the good movies much. There are many embarrassing movies like singhum series, golmaal series, and etc which make in millions while genuinely nuanced, subtle, thought-provoking movies like Lunch Box, Vicky Donor, A Wednesday, Haider earn a mere fraction of their revenues.
Why so? A substantial part of the Indian audience is uneducated, or barely educated, their lives dictated by poverty and tribulations of day to day life. So for entertainment, they see movies with proverbial hero, a ravishing heroine, some villains with the sole reason to get beaten black and blue, few cars getting rolled down the hill side, some gravity defying actions (vintage South Indian movies), the heroine dancing seductively in few songs, and voila, there day long tension and toiling gets rewarded!
Indian audience does know how to appreciate good movies, but they form a minority of the overall population, because they have had the privilege of good education, background, upbringing to be able to appreciate them. These numbers are much higher in U.S.A and other western countries, thus along with bad movies, these movies are also greatly appreciated, both critically and commercially.
As India being one of the largest movie producing country and due to its wide acceptance it can be easily used to portray India’s art and culture. Most of the country’s population watches movies; hence it should generate revenue rather than harming the society.
Let’s make sure when you go see the movie; you only learn the good aspect of the movie and not the bad ones.
BE THE CHANGE TO SEE THE CHANGE
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Please check the article: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls004818169/