Afterthoughts
Wow. Well, as far as an introduction to the Bollywood scene, this was a doozy. I remember as I watched this movie how amazing it was, in many different ways. It was unlike anything I'd seen before, and at the same time it stole so much from other movies I felt like I'd already seen it. I will say this - after viewing this movie I had to see more. Even if they were all as silly as this one, I would love them. I'm a huge fan of cheese movies, and this one is right near the top. I was very very pleased to learn that there are many very good movies to come out of India, and I will be covering some of those as well. I just thought it was important to do this one first, since it was my first Bollywood movie. As you can imagine, it only gets better from this one.
Negatives:
Waaay too much theft of material from other movies.
Utterly unbelievable when it comes to how much punishment a body can take. This is even over the top when compared to Hong Kong action movies, and those dudes are pretty bad-ass.
Huge plot threads left open: What happens to Karan and Vivek? What about all the girlfriends of the people that were killed? Will Prem get out of jail before he is executed? Can they prove it wasn't him that killed Ashok? Can TP help out in any way? None of these answers were even hinted at. The movie is already 2 hours and 45 minutes long. What's another 5 minutes to wrap things up?
The way the whole topic of rape was handled. The perpetrators were (I guess you could call it appropriately) extremely brutal and sadistic. They taunted, teased, and relentlessly pursued their quarry. That's bad, but the way the others reacted seemed utterly unreal to me. To suggest that the one who was being unreasonable in the situation was the victim and not the slimy bastards that actually caused the problem is unfathomable to me.
Positives:
Fun music. I really liked a lot of the songs.
The special effects, while bad, do hint that the team that did them were at least trying to get the details right. Lots of little things like reflections, environmental impact from CG elements, etc. all indicate that they at least thought of those things and tried to include them. I'd be interested to see a movie they worked on in a year or two and see how they're coming.
It was never boring. For all it's oddities and flaws, I was hooked to the screen for the duration. Can't complain that I wasn't entertained. Most importantly, I wanted to see more. That led to a wealth of other good movies.
Manisha. She's good in anything.
I'm told by my friends that I need to come up with some sort of rating scale. I've decided to use two scales of 1 to 5: quality, and entertainment value. For this film I will use "Angry Karan's" as my unit of measurement.
Jaani Dushman --- Ek Anokhi Kahani (2002)
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| Entertainment Value: | |
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(Out of 5) |
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