It's a ghazab beyond my understanding why a houseful audience at Regal cinema, a small sample of the larger audience around the country and probably the globe, would pay money to have themselves derided for 2 and surplus hours and come out saying, 'saaru timepass hatu.' I went with friends, all of whom are well-educated and represent the upper middle class of the socio-economic strata of our economy. They whole-heartedly endorsed the majority opinion. I was, am and will continue to be disturbed by the willful apathy of people towards themselves.
Do we enjoy being made chutyas of? Evidently we do! Why? Apparently because the 'common man' is so riddled with problems and tensions of real life that the only respite he gets from it is a mindless, repugnantly uncrafted and less-inventive-than-bad-plagiarism motion picture. FUCKALL argument. It has always been a fuckall argument and for all of time to come shall remain only as such. It is an argument which cannot be defended by any sizeable majority that entertainment MUST be mind-numbing, cannot include any commonsense or logic and must be a thundering slap in the face to any self-effacing and reasonably intelligent person. Am I being a snob? I don't care if I am, if snobbery is the price to pay for demanding better of people who are paid in the crores to create content which I pay my money to consume. People who can't tell their asses from their mouths with a fuckin' map in their hands.
I made this argument earlier with Om Shanti Om. With the benefit of hindsight, that picture seems like a classic now. Is that the defining standard of our mainstream cinematic entertainment? We are getting progressively worse. So films that are crap today become classics tomorrow. Shouldn't the curve be going upwards? Or is the downward spiral of content a reflection of what the 'consumer wants?' If it is, then we're in trouble.
In a holistic purview, one cannot delineate the correlation between the apathy evident here versus that which percolates through every part of our lives today. We don't care that our politicians squander our hard-earned money and fill up their coffers with it. We don't care that we don't get answers to questions we can rightfully ask. We don't care to 'set right' a failed democratic system that is still ghazab-aly hailed as the greatest in the world. We don't care that Naxals are taking over the administration in a bloody coup and the administration does nothing except dashing out stern words in the media. We don't care that the media is a ridicule stooped to such low levels that it is nearly impossible to tell a lie from a joke. We don't care... that's it!
So among all these important issues, why should we care if some of the highest earning members of our economy squander our money and insult our intelligence inside a dark cinema hall for a couple of hours!?! WHY MUST WE CARE? Very simply because, if we don't, we will die. Look at it holistically. The arts (yes, cinema is an art form and mainstream cinema cannot shrug that responsibility under the pretext of good business) are the catalogue of time. Is this what we want it to tell future generations? Oh we were a bunch of bumbling idiots where grown ups behaved worse than the mentally retarded (and this deserves an apology to the mentally retarded) and we had no stories of significance or reasonable intellectual value to tell of our times?
I'm not rubbishing mainstream cinema to say that all films must be dark, tragic and serious as bloody hell. Jab We Met was mainstream; it did great business while telling an all-out candy floss romantic story but it did not do it at the cost of insulting the intelligence of the man who invested his hard earned two hundred in the film. Johnny Gaddar was a semi-mainstream film which entertained while telling an interesting story. We can go back in time and go wide in picking up examples from other nations to uphold the argument that mainstream cinema does not automatically spell "DUMBFUCK".
Cinema has many facets to it. It has aspects of craft and art. If you're not artistically exploring more stories, wider subject matter, I at least expect you to push your craft of story-telling, of screenplay / dialogue writing in making better cinema. Does not Hollywood make hard core mainstream cinema? Like bleeding hell, they do! But they do not accept numbnut scripts which lack any sort of coherence or logic in doing so. Their writers push the envelope in terms of the written material; let's find a new way to do this scene, let's find news ways of saying these same dialogues because everyone in the world has heard this a million times before. Why is it then that the audience sitting in Regal with me that night still found sitting on a cake the funniest thing in Ajab Prem...? Why do we obstinately not raise our standards?
The onus to improve lies on both sides; the makers and the consumers for either side will immediately point the finger on the other saying, this is all they're giving us / this is what they want. This rut cycle shall never end, not until it guts out the very last flicker of hope. Going purely by numbers, since the supply side is smaller, I suppose it is logical that the change must start there.
Must we wait for Armageddon before we start afresh? History has never been a bloodless process...
