Black Friday

About an year ago while watching the KIDCO-CANDY sponsored,poor video quality version of this awe-inspiring movie on my pc,I never thought I would be able to watch it on the big screen.....EVER! But as Inspector Rakesh Maria(Kay Kay Menon) avers in one of the intense scenes of the movie,"This time Allah was with us,else we wouldn't have caught hold of the maruti van(which actually leads to the prime suspect)...", even I believe that. Allah was with them and was definitley with ANURAG KASHYAP and so this masterpiece could make it to the theatres after so many verdicts were finally passed recently.

In bollywood it is rare that we don't see the age-old disclaimer,"All the characters in this movie are fictional and any resemblance and all the blah blah..",which even Mani Ratnam used in his GURU. Anurag opens the movie with "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind-Mahatma Gandhi" after boldly admitting that the movie is entirely based on the book by S Hussain Zaidi. The movie frankly places the real places and names the real names involved in the tragedy.The chapter-wise presentation takes you through the entire journey as a TRUE journalist(the meaning of which has been long-forgotten by our media giants) would.The performances are highly commendable.The show-stealers are of course Kay Kay Menon as the efficient and tactful cop,Pawan Malhotra as Tiger Memon who ruthlessly plans the entire massacre and Aditya Shrivastava as Badshah Khan,a helpless pawn of the executor(Memon) who is on the run trying to save his ass from the cops. Anything more realistic than the movie would be original clips of those times. Speaking of which,we are treated to some of these,like the destruction, the operations of the bomb squad,the interviews of a Pakistani Official,a Mumbai cop and many more.

The fate of such movies(the delayed release)makes me wonder- Will bollywood and its complacent audience ever accept,let alone appreciate,artistic talent in its purest form? Though lately,there has been a change in the trends of movie-making, I believe film-makers who want to be different and bold and want to narrate great stories in a simple way or vice-versa will always be over-shadowed by phony presenters who just want to make big bucks by t(s)elling the same old love stories or the revenge stories or the extra-marital affair-based stories garnished with the crappy song-sequences which in no way appeal to the classes.Nonetheless,guys like Anurag are never deterred by such set-backs,else we wouldn't have got this gem.

shamie,
10th feb,2007.