I remember watching a bit of this movie last year during a flight.
I couldn’t watch it fully as I’d some work to do but a couple of days back I watched it on Netflix.
And I’m still shaken by its brilliance!
The movie has been adopted from a Pulitzier-prize winning play featuring Viola Davis and she deserves every single acclaim for her performance. The narrative is much like a play – meandering, evolving and sequences are quite long and keep fleshing out the layers from each character.
In one of the sequences, when Troy confesses his relationship with another woman to Rose, she retorts:
Don’t you think I ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me. Don’t you think it ever crossed my mind to want to know other men? That I wanted to lay up somewhere and forget about my responsibilities? That I wanted someone to make me laugh so I could feel good? You not the only one who’s got wants and needs. But I held on to you, Troy. I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams…and I buried them inside you. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn’t take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn’t never gonna bloom.
It truly is a work of art, one of the best movies that I’ve seen in a long time.
While watching this movie, I got reminded of Sadness from Inside Out – to really experience joy, one also needs to go through some emotional troughs.
And boy I was feeling a wave of happiness running through my body, with every passing frame of this movie.
And it was Aristotelian happiness: eudemonia!
The movie is based on a book of same title – it’s a tale of two teenagers, both battling through cancer and how courageously they decide to put themselves out there – vulnerable to love, and become wiser and more stronger with their love.
It’s a charming and humrous narrative, with big jolts of reality.
Andi t makes you cry. I don’t remember if I’ve ever cried so much in any movie.
The characters are earnest and the soundtrack amplifies all emotions very eloquently.
It’s sort of like a joy ride that can take you anywhere! That’s also perhaps the reason why Movie watching is perhaps one of the most widespread hobbies of people all over the world.
And like most of Indians, I just love the movie-watching experience!
But there’s something that has always fascinated me from my college-days (that time when you suddenly have a 1 Tb of movie collection and IMDB Top 250 list bookmarked in our browser):-
What makes a movie hit or flop?
There was an article by The Washington Post that my Uncle shared with me and Taruna recently where some R programmers had gone through millions of data reviews on thousands of movies and come up with a list of movie with the most perfect review from 1894 to 2013.
And that really intrigued me!
So with a group of friends (who are more if not equally zealous about movies!), we came up with a plan to identify the factors that people consider really important for rating a movie: cast, director, script, song sequences, big production house etc. And our plan was to make a predictive model basis these factors and then give a rating to a new movie, scientifically and backed by data!
We were super excited! And we deliberated and debated..we could foresee an engine which could come up with movie rating and reviews (basis genres and sub genres)..But then we hit a wall!!
The fundamental question is very simple and insanely tricky: How do you define/judge the quality of a movie?
And this was in spite of a weak critical review of the movie.
Going by the sheer quantum of numbers it is safe to assume that there was some positive buzz around the movie that sustained the momentum till week3.
So there is a significant chunk of populace who liked the movie (in fact quite a lot!) whereas the common perception was that its not ‘good’ movie.
Yes, putting our MBA caps on we can say that there is a segment of movie watching audience who adores Salman and will “even pay to watch him fart for two hours” (someone’s FB status) while there is another segment who wants to watch intelligent, meaningful cinema.
But can we say that one group is right and other is not?
I actually experienced difference in quality perception sometime back, while watching a documentary: Supermen Of Malegaon.
For the uninitiated, it’s a documentary about making of an extremely low budget movie Malegaon ka Superman. Indeed, a wonderful and uplifting storyline.
But the point it drives home is what people seek from a movie experience.
This is something similar to shopping mission that we have in retail: why and how much exactly are shoppers planning to purchase in a store/online. That determines their basket size, cross category purchase and frequency of visits. You can ascertain good shopping experience for a particular shopper basis need fulfillment of that shopping mission.
Movie watching is also similar, from an emotive point of view.
So someone from Malegaon, who sweats for an entire week to watch a Salman khan larger than life movie on weekend, the movie will be jhakaas and the same should be respected!
Closing thought: Watch this wonderful interview of three stalwarts of Hindi Cinema with Anupama Chopra. There is no absolutely no benchmark for quality and formula for success!
Perfectly Imperfect 