Mumbai is the city of dreams and dreamers. Please pardon my sweeping generalisation when i categorise all the dreamers in two categories i.e. those who follow cricket faithfully and those for whom movies are a religion.
Since last century Indian cinema's hub Mumbai has seen and witnessed quite a few milestones but this year has been quite a memorable one with creative juices flowing from the studios and production houses to outdo one another. The race here isn't necessarily with Hollywood but surely inspirations come from those quarters quite frequently.
2007 has seen many movies paying tribute to their inspirations and the inspired directors have come up aces with some memorable cinematic moments which are clearly their own creative self expression.. they have blended flavours, moods, sounds and more from their sources. For the lack of space and time I will just take you through just a few of such works.
The year started on a high note with arguably one of the best products from Mani Ratnam - Guru. The movie had hottest stars and was based upon life of most incredibly famous industrialist. If you think he was inspired by Abhi Ash chemistry or values that Dhirubhai Ambani followed, i would ask you to strain harder and think again. Guru was Mani Ratnam's reply to all his critics in his true hall mark way. He assembled many elements from his own movies and came up with this super product. He took the biopic structure of Nayakan, where in the lead protagonist just doesn't have a rags to riches story but great integrity, hardships and heroics to stand heads and shoulders above others. He took the Roja's angst ridden love-hate chemistry in early marriage parts of Abhishek and Aishwarya and turned it around to deep bond between the couple as in Bombay. Vidya Balan's chirpy wheelchair handicap was his favourite Anjali mixture of innocence and pain. The look of tere bina and the location reminded of Bombay's kehna hi kya & Mallika Sherawat's Maiyya Maiyya was a tribute to humma humma completely with red outfit et al. We can get into screenplay structure which he has devised by taking the reigns in his hands this time but i do not want to risk sounding like an over enthusiastic movie school graduate.
Coming soon are our other contenders- Anurag Basu, the director of Life in a Metro - an unusual tale of many intertwined lives in this cosmopolis, Sriram Raghavan, the director of Johny Gaddaar, a slick casino heist movie & last but not the least the director duo Abbas mastaan with their largely underrated brilliance in Naqaab- a film about reality cinema... I hope this posting inspired you to think a bit more about Indian cinema :)
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