13B
This horror film is a few hundred times better written and made than Bhoot. The writer-director Vikram K. Kumar has done a competent job. He has revealed his potential, but needs to handle cinematic elements a little more maturely to become an ‘A’ class global filmmaker. He has to go beyond smart and impressive shot compositions, lighting design, and location selection to bring in that unique cinematic touch to distinguish himself as a great filmmaker.
He is almost there; he can handle the technical aspects well, and knows how to tell a story in a neat and logical manner. He has to work a little more with his actors to extract seamless and natural performances. Indian actors have to be directed very carefully. They bring in all kinds of inhibiting baggage with them. Very few of them can live their characters. They tend to ‘act’ all the time. A film director has to be watchful in this area.
Vikram also has to work on his screenplay and dialogue-writing skills. He states the obvious, needlessly, to underline the salient points of his narrative structure. These false and phony notes affect the smooth flow of the narrative. There are ways to handle it. Western writers and directors are very good at managing this. They slip in the necessary information without making it look like an obvious attempt. They may not have exciting stories to tell these days, but their mastery over the craft is worth emulation. One hopes and prays that Vikram has the capacity to appreciate the shortcomings in his work and is willing to grow and improve further. Nevertheless, it is as remarkable a debut as Rock On.
Gulaal
What is this about? Is it an existential, a kind of a bad dream film? Or is it a historical? It also has political overtones, and refers to the Swatantra Party and the Jansangh and how some erstwhile kings joined these political parties post-independence.
On the
other hand, it looks like a film meant to test the cinematic efficacy
of high-impact Hindi swear words like chutia, bhonsdi ke, haraami, and
gaand, which are used obsessively by the dialogue writer of the film.
The film, as they call it, pushes the envelope further. Get ready for still more ‘dhansoo’ swear words in days to come. The reigning lingua franca of the Bollywood sets will soon be legitimized in the mainstream civil parlance. Bollywood was waiting just for that, the scatological revolution. It is going to push the envelope further and further and further up the Censor Board’s ass now. Ms. Sharmila Tagore must be very pleased with these developments. She is the real harbinger of this revolution.
Gulal is a film about campus politics, dadagiri, and some ex-rajwada’s kin’s ambition to revive the lost glory of Rajputana, with gulaal as an important motif signifying a bloody revolution. What kind of campus is this? Where does a campus like this exist? Who are these characters? Who are these bad mouth revolutionaries? Where do they all come from?
Some film reviewers have called the film a masterpiece. Yes. A masterpiece of ‘bullshit art’. What am I talking about? You have not heard this before! It is an art form, practised by bullshit artistes. I have been using it in the past as well. I googled the term, and discovered that it does exist in the world lexicon and a whole lot of stuff has been written about it. Gulaal fits the description and definitions so well. The following are the fundamentals of this spurious art form: -
Bullshit art and artistes
Quote 1 - A bullshitter who is successful in avoiding detection may be referred to as a bull shit artiste. Bullshit artistes are quite dangerous and may say things with a high degree of confidence, having inadequate support for what they are saying, or making their statements about.
Example:
A man at a modern art museum looks at a painting consisting of randomly placed lines.
Man: This is crap
Artist: No, you just don't get my art
Man: Oh, I see it now.
In this example, the artist is not only a bullshit artiste but an artist as well!
Quote 2 (by Harry G. Frankfurt) – ‘What defines bullshit is its stubborn lack of craft. Bullshit gushes forth in an indiscriminate stream of truths, half-truths, falsehoods and nonsense.’ Frankfurt returns to bullshit’s linguistic nub to explain: 'Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought…more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, colour, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist”.' (Check out the original article at http://www.litandart.com/2009/01/24/art-ist-bullshit-part-ii)
Gulaal is bullshit art at its worst in its pretentiousness and those who consider it a significant film are brainless chutias unaware of being fibbed by a media-savvy bullshit artiste who himself is convinced that his idiotic work is a product of genius. It happens, to those whose minds have been corroded by hyper use of drugs. They take their gibberish to be the gems of philosophical wisdom and revel in their lunatic grandiloquence. So sad, but so true in this case.
RKS
