MR. INDIA
Director: Shekhar Kapur, 1987
This was the ultimate commercial undertaking — something that should have started a revolution in Indian cinema. The well-written, well-performed musical fantasy film. But it didn’t. And maybe we weren’t supposed to learn from its success.
If you consider Independence Day (1996) as the start of big-budget Hollywood VFX extravaganzas, the fact is that we had Mr. India in 1987. An Indian adventure story that relied on very Indian characters. And we did nothing after that. We sat on our own success. Producers and studios should have backed the right commercial stories instead of always saying, ‘Star chahiye’. I think we missed an opportunity, and the industry suffered overall as a result. We didn’t get back to doing large adventure films till the Bahubali series that started in 2015. I personally feel that the heart and soul of every film industry is genre movies and, of course, we have our own genres, but these are wearing thin right now. We need to create new ones — whether it’s horror, comedy, adventure or action — rather than trying to make everything at once, which doesn’t really end up working.
PYAASA
Director: Guru Dutt, 1957
I watched it on a 35mm print at the very first MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) film festival in 1997, in an empty Tata Theatre at the NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts). The festival crowd had emptied out after the previous packed screening of Dr. Strangelove, and those left would ‘tch’ at the start of every song because ‘What the hell is this song-as-narrative-device nonsense’….
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