(Caution: Don't spend your time, money or patience on it. Believe me. I just did. By default, I'm now a free idiot.)
Is the new-generation India so painfully dumb that it can't understand the difference between truth and make-believe, reality and dream, or even fun and pain? Or, it's way too complicated when it's a new-wave Bollywood version of entertainment-awareness-social-change-cocktail served by Coke messiah Amir Khan?
When truth is layered-in with a fake cake in such a cumbersome way that you don't really know which one to choose: cheap fun or grim reality? You want to be a part, if not protagonist, of the desperately-needed social change, but you know that something's dead wrong in the messaging, and yet, you can't quite figure out where the problem is. But you paid handsomely at the box office to get in, and you don't want to come home not laughing or not crying. However hard you need to force yourself to do it, like a bad gas that simply wouldn't pass. (Sorry, but Khan used the element plenty.)
Three hours of non-stop Hindi Blitzkrieg of dialoguing, monologuing, dancing, donkeying, monkeying, stomping, romping, jumping, kissing, pissing, sciencing, philosophizing, teaching, testing, teasing, cheating, beating, stealing, healing, sobbing, crying, tear-jerking, gate-crashing, driving, dying and birthing...you name it...just to drive on one message...like that bad gas...that it's time the Indian supercolonial academia change...and free itself of learning by rote...and enter an era of free thinking!
Wow!
Unfortunately, every bit of masala Amir Khan and his idiots uses to cook up the story is straight from the dingiest Bollywood kitsch kitchen, where the entire purpose of filming is done around the known theme of profit by making the dumb dumber, and the dumber the dumbest. And when so many idiots are employed, free and licensed to teach free thinking to new-generation India, it's no more a dream. It's a nightmare.
It's a nightmare just to sit through the three endless hours of plotting, subplotting, sub-subplotting, flashbacking and backflashing. It's three hours of a very painful trial. Trial of your civility, social skills and patience. When completely disgusted after an hour and a half into the show, you just want to stand up, scream, kick the back of the front seat in the darkness of the theater, and leave. But you can't. After all, you're not really free to do that. Even an idiot wouldn't do it.
My readers, friends, supporters and especially my critics always want to know what my problem is: why can't I simply get some fun and be happy with fun and happy stuff? Why do I always have to be such a naysayer and badmouther at every Bollywood benchmark? After all, what's so cool about always blasting big media and thereby making myself depressed, even more so than ever before? I did that with notable, famed and prospered big-ticket items such as Born Into Brothels and Slumdog Millionaire; I'm now web-spewing the same, predictable criticism of another big blockbuster that's taking Indian families by storm -- both in India and abroad! Why can't I make some peace with reality, and learn to live with it?
Yeah, that's a serious mental case, indeed.
Now, people are so tired of rave reviews, critiques and eulogies that 3 Idiots (I'm sure you've long figured it out) got, it wouldn't be wise to do a shot-by-shot, sequence-by-sequence post-mortem, although one would be tempted to do it, just for the "fun." I'd rather select a handful only for a hindsight.
1. The opening sequence of idiot Farhan's faked illness on a just-took-off Air India plane. (Please don't try it. You'll be quickly arrested, beat up and jailed, maybe, even on terrorism charges). The once-wildlife-photographer
(My critic: "But didn't you get the fun, you wet blanket? Oh, it was so funny! Loved it.")
2. Rancho straps himself with idiot Raju's critically ill, paralyzed father on a scooter, and drives him to hospital for a save, thereby meeting his doctor girlfriend Pia who was also, as it turns out, daughter of the Hitler-ish college director. (Please don't try this method to save a patient. You'll kill them; and law will quickly get back to you. Unless you're an Indian Amir or a member of his now-famous idiot club). In my time I've seen quite a few Bollywood insanities, and this one would definitely make a short list. And it's so inhumane to the point of cruelty, only to match with Raju's poor mother scratching his bed-ridden husband's eczema with a roller pin and then using it to make rotis for her son and his invited friends.
(Critic: "Ha ha, was it funny! Laugh laugh laugh...giggle giggle giggle...")
3. A climax-subclimax drama of idiot Rancho and his idiot Indian engineering gang delivering Pia's sister Mona's baby at the college, taking online-video instructions from Pia. (Please don't try it, period). Other than the totally ludicrous and nonsense drama of the pingpong-tabletop-childbir
(Critic: "You just don't get it. It was a metaphor, a symbol, a dream scenario. Like, this is how it should be. It's an Amir utopia. He's making the young generation think. Love it.")
I have another metaphor in my mind. In ten years the movie spans, no one idiot grows up. Telling, the globalized Indian generation considered. We might say, not ten, it's twenty.
I have a feeling had one looked carefully, they could even find those idiots wearing the same stars-and-stripes underpants they wore ten years ago. The ones they flashed globally. That was "balatkar" indeed.
Ah..."All Izz Well."
###
Born Into Brothels Kids Sue Filmmakers!!??
(But it doesn't matter: once a lie is always a lie)
News source at http://www.anandabazar.com/archive/1080807/7cal4.htm
(in Bengali; gist below)
On August 7, 2008, Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP), a major daily newspaper in Calcutta, India (the location of the documentary) broke news that some children portrayed in the film brought a breach of promise lawsuit against the filmmakers. They did it on the ground that those including the much-publicized children who were promised that they'd share in some of the huge profit the film made did not receive any money after all.
I have a feeling the lawsuit may also have included the fact that the children's names were publicized across the globe, while the filmmakers had promised that their identities would be safeguarded. One of the featured kids also alleged that he didn't even know he was being filmed and interviewed for the purpose of making a documentary. In fact, that was an allegation frequently made by the sex workers themselves, and corroborated by the sex workers' union Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) -- I've personally met with some of the leaders of the organization.
In my original letter to Hollywood AMPAS, I'd questioned whether the sex worker mothers' permissions had ever been obtained by the filmmakers when they'd intruded deeply into their personal lives. I subsequently found out by talking to these women that indeed, no such permission had ever been secured; as I mentioned above, DMSC told me that they were never informed that the filmmakers were filming them for this purpose.
(Additionally, Born Into Brothels directors copiously used Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy music, when the copyright holders for Ray films had specifically asked them not to do it. It's plain plagiarism.)
I translated about one hundred tapes full of such gross violation of privacy and intrusion into sex workers' personal lives and professions; and I did not get to translate many more. I know what was on the tapes I'd translated -- the large majority of which was never used in the documentary; I also know what came out as the final, edited product. In my opinion, it's scandalous, full of egregious lies, and purposefully biased against Calcutta (now called Kolkata), India and some of its less-fortunate people.
(Zana Briski told me a number of times that she hated Kolkata and would never want to go back: great gesture considering what she got out of exploiting its people and how the poor sex workers had protected her from any harms!)
I must tell you that even though as a media and human rights activist, I'm totally aware of big media's lies and craving for sensationalism (I frequently write about it -- read my blogs), in this case, the ABP journalist who broke this important story did a great job. I spoke with her on this too.
The fact is, the filmmakers' attempt to show off in the U.S. one of the featured kids named Avijit as the poster boy of their "successful mission" is outrageous. This now-pompous teenager also phoned me in New York and forced a long, rough argument with me. (How he got my phone number is anybody's guess.)
The fact that a happy and jovial girl like Puja (who was greatly exploited by the filmmakers) is now a disclosed-identity sex worker at this very young age, and the other children featured on the film are hopeless and lost (not to mention the sex worker mothers who now feel cheated and violated) is enough reason for bringing any breach of promise lawsuit against the filmmakers.
Nobody has approached me on this lawsuit and I don't know what the real motive is behind it, but if anyone asks me to testify to narrate my insight and experience, I'd be more than happy to do it.
I have no sympathy for self-aggrandizement and Hollywood-blessed lies, and that too, at the expense of poor peoples' privacy and misery. I believe that AMPAS revisit the issue, and revoke the Oscars it awarded to Born Into Brothels, on plagiarism and violation of ethics charges.
Thanks for your attention and action.
-Partha
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