Smritimedur (Pleasant Remembrances) [2009]

I went to watch Smritimedur with a friend, despite not knowing anything about the movie, for the simple reason that it was being played at one of the screens of Nandan, a movie theatre enormously respected among Calcuttans for being a bastion of good, non-mainstream movies. However, the powers that be perhaps decided to play a prank on us – or was it belated ‘April Fool’ ? – by screening a classic bad movie like Smritimedur. The basic skeleton of the movie might elicit interest – a cynical guy, who has recently fallen out of love, gets drawn into a relationship with a mysterious older lady while on a trip to North Bengal. Unfortunately, every single aspect of the plot’s execution was hopelessly pathetic – the pseudo-philosophical tone, the trashy dialogues, the inane characterizations, the ludicrous comic interludes, the B-grade song-and-dance sequences, the tele-film look, and the third-grade acting (if you can call that acting, that is). The only hope for us lay in leering at the bootylicious Sreelekha Mitra – for those who aren’t aware of this luscious lady, suffice it to say, if I start speaking about her, I might end up seriously offending the cyber police. The final nail on the coffin, regrettably, was that even her buxom presence couldn’t shield us from the atrocities aimed at us by the movie’s horrendous cast and crew.





Director: Sunit Bhattacharya
Genre: Drama/Romance
Language: Bengali
Country: India

Ghajini [2008]

Bollywood, in the last few years, has developed a ready-made formula for quick and easy success – plagiarize a famous/cult foreign flick, suitably modify/delete contents that viewers might find incomprehensible or controversial, ‘Indian-ize’ them by adding songs, dances, romance and comedy, and voila, your movie is ready to go for shoot. Ghajini is the latest in this crappy trend, with the source being the brilliant, mind-bending thriller Memento, but bereft of the bravura filmmaking of the Nolan classic. Ghajini is filled with inane characterizations, a complete lack of an eye for detail or rationale, filled with comic-book like action sequences that are a straight lift of B-grade Tamil movies and containing more bloopers than the makings of sitcoms; consequently we had a few more laughs (make that a lot) than perhaps was the director’s intent. And to make matters worse, the movie stars Amir '8-Pack' Khan, who, with his fame for Method acting, had created an enormous hype prior to release, thus making the show that much more ludicrous. Being afflicted with ‘Short Term Memory Loss’ can be a boon when you are watching a movie like this.





Director: A. R. Murugadoss
Genre: Action/Revenge Movie/Romance/Musical/B-Film
Language: Hindi
Country: India

A Lost Man (Un Homme Perdue) [2007]

A Lost Man is the kind of movie the only way of viewing which is at film festivals, where one often ends up watching movies which are stranger than what one might have bargained for. Ditto for this French movie; this was the first film that I saw at this year's Kolkata Film Festival. The movie, in the form of a loose travelogue, follows two protagonists – a trigger-happy French photographer with a lewd fetish for ‘live’ photography (if you know what I mean), and a mysterious, laconic and world-weary Middle-Eastern wanderlust who is running away from one thing that no one can ever escape – past. The movie is unabashedly artsy in nature, but hopelessly hollow in its intellectual content. The biggest failure of the movie is that it fails to add layers of these two otherwise enigmatic and deeply existential characters; in other words, the director, by stubbornly refusing to delve into their pasts and their thought processes, ends up presenting two characters who remain as two-dimensional and unknown to us during the end credits as they were when the movie began. And what happen in between seem inconsequential in hindsight.





Director: Danielle Arbid
Genre: Drama/Road Movie/Existential Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: French/Lebanese
Country: Lebanon/France