Metro mania

Recently I have started loving writing movie reviews. You may say thats because of my inherent quality(?) of analysing things, or people to the hilt. So here comes the second one.

I saw this movie "Life in a Metro..." about a week back. And frankly speaking, I had mixed emotions watching that movie. I don't know if whatever shown in the movie is really the life we live in a metro. Yes, of course the sequence of action and the placing of the characters some where relates to the volume of bodies we have around us in Mumbai. But we hardly tread a life that is limited to only heavy sentiments and cruel idiosyncrasies of lifeless creatures. Metro is a lot more about fun, about so many small emotions, about small things that grow up to become big, about people living here, about us and our big big dreams in our big big eyes. There is no question that such characters exist here. But the question is, how often do we come across them? And if its not often, its not the life in a metro.

Of course, you may have house wife standing besides you who has a troubled married life. After watching the movie, you would always want to be a Shiney Ahuja standing at Colaba bus station waiting for rain and expect a Shilpa Shetty to stand besides you with a broken umbrella. The last thing you would want is for her to be married. At least I'm not a guy who would want to say "Agar aap Mrs. pe itna jor na de to kya main aapka poora naam jaan sakta hu?" No way.

And ya, there might also be Sharman Joshi, who would do any thing to climb up the success ladder, may it be lending his flat to his seniors wanting to plunge in the ocean of desires... very pleasurable plot by Basu, or to sacrifice every thing that he has achieved, rather garnered from favors of the seniors to save the humiliation in front of his love of life. But this doesn't work here. May be this is a thing that director Anurag Basu found out, and he made up his mind that Metro is about all this stuff. Well, then we will have to call it "rare life in a metro..."

Only characters you would want to identify is one Konkana desperate to find her perfect man and a next door uncle Irfann Khan. What attracts me more to them is the sheer simplicity that the character is shown to have. You cannot imagine any other person to play Monty and Shruti, kudos to Basu and of course to the actors for portraying a larger than life characters. Simply awesome!

Talking about performaces, I loved Pritam and his band more than any one else. Yeah, thats right, Pritam and his band have acted like a narrator. The songs, the lyrics, the melody and the timing is simply superb. I have started believing that after many long years, we have a music composer who understands music so well. I have heard Pritam saying that he cannot create the tunes without knowing the situations. No wonder why he is becoming so popular these days. On the acting front, I think Shilpa Shetty, Irfann Khan and Konkana stand out (not necessarily in the order). I found Shiney very disappointing. We expect some one of his calibre to give a better performance than what he has delivered. KK as always is as wicked and rude as he can get, and our dear Sharman is improving a lot. Kangana is forgettable. And of course there is a pair of Nafisa Ali and Dharmendra, which doesn't deserve a mention AT ALL.

Overall, I think Anurag Basu has made a wonderful movie. We may not enjoy watching that, but we dont fail to appriciate the effort. At least I was happy to get out of the pathetic cult of KANKs, the Honeymoons and the S-E-Is. My take, should watch it once if you want to learn the art of good film making and great music.


Cheers!