I hope that you enjoy reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where six of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic was chosen by Will Knott, who will however not be writing the week’s LBC post due to other preoccupations. The five other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, gaelikaa, Maxi, Paul, Shackman, and The Old Fossil. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!
Two recent developments that brought the topic of movies to my life, as usual what I call synchronicity are, one, a new blogger friend Alan G who popped up in one of my posts and whose blog Some Final Thoughts is full of film reviews by him. His blog is worth a visit for movie buffs; and two, a film producer friend from Calcutta came to Pune to visit The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) yesterday and wanted me to accompany him there. I was all set to go when his programme changed and I did not go. It would have given me a great deal of joy to visit this institute as I have never been inside so far, despite living in Pune for the past twenty four years.
The title is a difficult statement to write on. Reel life can and often does reflect real life, like the latest movie that I saw. Till the last scene, the story was very realistic but the finale was a bit too dramatic for my taste. Having had personal experience of giving care to some one who suffered from dementia, I could identify with the situations but the ending was too pat for me.
On the other hand, very much like the movies was another movie that I saw recently. This cannot be faulted at all as it is a true story about real life people and their real life experiences.
Where things are not like the movies are those movies where the hero does things that are really super human. In Indian films particularly, reality is totally suspended and fantasy is encouraged and the reel life heroes become real life heroes like our famous Rajnikant.
Such movies however provide the safety valve needed for our masses to escape the harsh realities of real life through a couple of hours or more of reel life. And I find that Paisa Vasool seems to have infected the movie business as almost all movies now run for around or more than two and a half hours with one intermission. If that could be brought down to less than two hours, I would enjoy movies more. I had not been going to or even seeing them at home, for more than a decade and since I got a bit free from about a year and a half ago, I have been regularly seeing movies and can say that I enjoy them irrespective of whether they reflect realities or not.
