Scraps Stuffs - Random musings from apun ka desh

I just realized how incredibly busy I was over the past couple of months or so. Ad hoc demands at work for fixing stuff at short notice are serious time hogs keeping me from doing my own work and leading to slipped schedules. But we are so focussed two inches from our noses that we fail to see the huge problems looming up ahead...

But I digress. Took a welcome early break from work to watch Omkara yesterday. I liked the movie a lot, but more than the story I liked the setting. The landscape was truly incredible, the river contrasting beautifully with the dry landscape. The language was also very interesting, the colloquialism perfectly understandable. In my opinion, these two give the movie its feel. The performances were also pretty uniformly good. Saif was outstanding and Konkona was good too. Only Bipasha's act was a little weak, but her character was not very well etched. On the whole, a very enjoyable movie. I liked Vishal Bharadwaj's earlier movie, Maqbool, very much and am now eagerly awaiting the last of his trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations. These two movies really make me want to read Shakespeare.

There were a few things that startled me in the movie. Konkona mouthing chootia for example (happens when she's finished making phulkas and is trying to coax Viveik Oberoi to eat. Its perfectly keeping in character but still startled me. And she delivered the line so well and was not at all self-concious about it which was good. The second was the line that Kareena's father delivers to Ajay Devgun about women not being trustworthy. The sting in the line was pretty potent. The effect this has on Ajay Devgun was what makes the entire plot. And more importantly Konkona seems to remember it in the very end and this seems to drive her actions at the climax. The other things that struck me were the contrast between the expensive cars and cell phones that the characters posess and the simple houses they live in. Very realistic.

The scenes on the barrage with Saif and "Rajju" were very nice too and the backdrop was stunning. So was the backdrop to the anointing of Viveik as the next bahubali. The temple at the top of the small hillock by the river was extremely scenic. I would like to go there someday.

The only complaint was that the movie was a bit too long and tended to meander once in a while. The movie wasn't as dark as Maqbool and the violence didn't bother me as it wasn't too much. The dialogues and screenplay were excellent and mercifully the censors didn't chop them, the movie would have lost most of its punch if they had done so. I would classify the dialogues as earthy, pithy and coarse rather than vulgar and they are the highpoint of the film.

Nicely done inded.