Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Retro Show --> Review of Life in a Metro

There was once this senior of mine who told me that the best equation he liked in Physics was

Work Done = Force X Displacement

The equation implies that for work to be done it is not necessary to just apply a force but also to do so in the right direction.

Anurag Basu's latest movie Life in A Metro has the right direction, but lacks the required force. We might be biased, considering we have been pampered on a diet of noir movies that involve an ex-marine whose idea of a date is watching a porn movie, a paranoid mathematician or about movies that talk about the amount of weight lost when a human being dies.

The movie gets the basics right. The cast is great (I mean if Shilpa Shetty can actually emote on screen, that should amount to something). The screenplay is excellent, and so is the soundtrack (Mark Knopfler, operatic solos way to go Mr Basu).

An effort towards creating our own Amores Perros, we appreciate Basu for not going their way and start off by showing how all the parallel stories are interconnected. And not since Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri acted as the witches of MacBeth, have we seen an innovation like having the actual band perform the songs in the movie. The first three tracks are good but the last two we could have done without. Thankfully that takes care of any of our hero/heroines running around trees.



We can forgive Basu for making Kangana Ranaut's hair straight (As Hobbes says "Redheads, I like redheads!!" our philososphy is "Curly Hair, We like curly hair!!, Sandhya Mridul, Sushmita Sen, Bipasha Basu you get the drift we guess"), but sir please the Indian audience is much more appreciative than you would think. Why did you have to have that extra long bit on that "Style and RDB" guy explaining why he is making money for a good reason ? Why oh why did you have to end it with such a sugar-coated-everyone-rejects-money-and-follows-love-at-the-end ? And still we do not have an Indian heroine walking out of an unsuccessful marriage, now that would have been something!! And you had to break the heart of the one guy we liked in the whole movie, Shiney Ahuja ? Don't worry sir you are not the only one even Mani Ratnam made an unapologetic movie till in the end he felt compelled to make Gurubhai the Mahatma!!. We definitely could have done without the horse in the rail station and some more screen time for Ifran Khan and the lady who said no to "The Namesake". (with good reasons we must say after watching the movie)

All in all it is an excellent movie till about the last 15 minutes where it quickly degenerates into yet another Bollywood movie.

And as we were shaking our head in disappointment at the dumb ending and went home we switched on our Idiot Box only to find "Main Hoon Na" and we realized how much better by orders of magnitude your movie was, so what if the ending was not what we wanted, we will surely watch it yet again and maybe add it to our DVD collection just yet.

P.S : The boss working out with the "Brokeback Mountain" poster in the background was quite good eh. And if you have read so far and are wondering why the title is what it is, well we are equally clueless!!

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