Saturday, October 1, 2011

Of copycats and.... copycats!

My mom had gone out for a movie with her office friends yesterday and it was some Tamil movie that had released on that day. First day... not quite the first show! My mother had wanted to see this particular movie for quite some time. As a matter of fact, it had two of her favorite artists in it. Since I was battling a butt ugly stye in my eye and dad had some really pressing matters to attend to, she decided to go on her own. And when she got home after the movie, I automatically assumed the movie wasn't that great. Because, if something impresses my mother, she gushes about it to me the moment we meet and well, she was just being normal.

So, when I asked her about the movie, she shrugged... "It's inspired by Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train." She deadpanned.

And that was all that took to have comprehension dawn on me. There it was... another over-hyped movie that's so heavily inspired by some other older one. My sensei the other day had promised that he would treat us to some really awesome Japanese movies by stalwarts like Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira and Naruse Mikio. And when we asked him where he got these movies, he smiled and told us of his source who happened to be a guy from Bangalore who in turn sourced it from Taiwan. Apparently, that man's primary clientele happened to be really famous movie directors of the south. We all laughed though deep down in our hearts, we knew it.
To tell the truth;I feel insulted in a way. Sometimes the fact that it was taken, plot for plot from somewhere else is so blatant that it makes me wonder if the film maker is making fun of our intelligence... as though they're of the thought that unless the original was tempered to suit the Indian palette, it shall not see. Hello! Sure, there are folks who might find watching an English or foreign movie to be quite taxing. There are more people out there than those willing to accept that sometimes, they find even accented English hard to follow. And though I find it disconcerting to have these copies being marketed as something that's really wonderful, I've no problem with directors and writers trying their hands on adapting a foreign movie... see... I said adapting...not copying! And for anything to be adapted for something else, it is only right that the person give credit to the original idea.

And to all those idiots and jerk faces who are still in denial, worshiping their respective artists on a pedestal, GET A LIFE! Your hero or director is famous mostly because he decided to spend two hundred rupees on a CD that he thought would look good when it's improvised. And he's still making money, taking somebody's work, mutilating it in all probability and then regurgitating that mutilation with a heady number of songs and fights (something I just don't get!). While he gets richer and more rotund with all the joys money brings him, it is cinema that suffers.

And don't even get me started about the music industry! The day some d***ead decides to steal some composition by Yuki Kajiura, there'll be blood, I swear!

No comments :

Post a Comment