Satyam says:
May 21, 2011 at 1:38 am
I LOVED the promo. I've seen it a few times already. GREAT fun! Think the trailer hits the bull's eye!
It was interesting to note the series here… a lot of films mentioned, mostly recent stuff (was surprised to see Jaadugar mentioned) but only one name that isn't a film. Tiger!
This clearly looks to be a film about gesturality. A bit like your character in BnB. I often try to remind people the difference between a masala `body' and a masala 'soul'. The two are not necessarily the same. To this degree the late career of megastars is really an `intertextual' deal. It is about other films in that history. We've seen this with Rajnikant for many years also. The recent stuff isn't like his 80s masala. Because the former breathes on allusion with respect to the latter. This was Shankar's great genius in Robot. He made the film true on both levels. In the South there has been for a while a `late' masala which has incorporated and made explicit the whole ironic stance that was often only implicit in the older stuff. This has also returned to Bombay in some ways. For example the characterization of Salman in Dabanng. And of course here your character in Bbuddah, by way of a Puri Jagannath. And again, rather fascinatingly, the `original' for this entire vein of representation is ultimately your own past career! It is your history that through various refractions (which includes the Southern `twist') now comes back to us this way.
This is the kind of deal that you could have done more often had you 'stuck' to the history of the angry young man. I'm not suggesting that you should have necessarily (because I realize the dead-ends of repetition in this sense.. my own ideal model has always been more narrative-oriented.. Khakee if you will) done this all the time but I am making two points here — had there been better directors in Bombay doing masala when you came back after a gap of 5 years, and had you been willing to do this sort of thing at least half of the time you would have still been I would argue a titanic force at the box office. Now with the gifts that you have it certainly would have been a waste to reduce you to just this, so yet again I hasten to add that I am not arguing for this. Just saying that your box office fortunes have never been (and paradoxically so) entirely measurable by the box office in the entire period of the last decade. The `demand' for your transcendence can be gauged by way of many other registers as well (most recently we saw this with KBC one more time). But certainly it would have been literally so in box office terms as well.
To reiterate something I just said a film like Bbuddah is about pure gesturality. There is a near tongue-in-cheek quality here. I have often argued against this in the past inasmuch as I've considered this an `avoidance' of masala. The body without the soul if you will. In other words one accesses masala in a self-reflexive way, with appropriate doses of irony. There is nothing wrong in this exercise except to the degree that it becomes a deconstructive reading of the tradition when it is the only mode on display. This is what I said with respect to Dabanng and with some other films.
However I like this stance when you yourself attempt masala at this season in your life. Because of course you cannot do it too literally. This is what Shankar realized about Rajnikant too in Robot. The `referencing' keeps the gap between past and present alive which is as it must be. The message with Bbuddah then is: `even if older there is no one like Amitabh Bachchan' (YES! WE AGREE!). And that even if it is not quite the age of the `angry young man' anymore the resonances of that history still carry an extraordinary spark.
I think Bbuddah could do big things at the box office. As you know I would never just try to be kind where your work is concerned because I value it far too much and hence cannot be less than sincere about it. Ever. But I've really liked the promotional campaign so far and the trailer has truly done it for me. Can't wait for the release!
For all recent AB articles, as well as all the latest news on BigB and his upcoming films, check out AmitabhBachchan.net
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