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The changing tides
Highlights
Given the movie buff I am, it is a habit to go through cinema related stuff everyday and obviously the box office collections of all the latest movies. What caught my eyes was this headline which said, “Spectre eats into the collections of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo”.
Indian cinema audience is surely tolerant, much more tolerant...
Given the movie buff I am, it is a habit to go through cinema related stuff everyday and obviously the box office collections of all the latest movies. What caught my eyes was this headline which said, “Spectre eats into the collections of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo”.
Now, who would have thought about this 10 years ago? Today, we actually do not bat an eyelid at the fact that the latest James Cameron offering will eat into a latest Khan or Kumar release. This set me thinking. What has caused this change? The answers are many, but the biggest and most straight ones is that post 1991 and liberalisation of the economy, India stands changed. An all encompassing media, internet and our exposure to strategies of MNCs has changed our perspective about entertainment too.
Many will argue and there is considerable weight in the logic that the influx of multiplexes has actually contributed in a big way with different kinds of cinema getting our viewership. Multiplexes have contributed to this for sure by playing on strategies of impulsive purchase of a movie ticket and the range of choice that today’s a multiplex screens offer.
If you were to ever stand and observe the queue at the box office, you will observe that there is a huge section of people who walk in and look at the choices available and post discussion buy a certain screen’s ticket. In the 80s or 90s you could have put up as many multiplexes as possible, but a Mahi Gill of a ‘Sahib, Biwi aur Gangster’ would have been rated as a “chaaritraheen kulta” forget ever getting box office success.
Yashraj Films would have never dared to make a movie with their highest cost superstar on a female hockey team and most certainly would not have called it ‘Chak De! India’. We the audience of India, to use the biggest hot pair of words, became “tolerant” to new and broader cinema and we have become ruthlessly “intolerant” of cinema that has boring themes and similar stale plots. Of course the asterisk point here is that this logic does not hold if Salman Khan is a star in the movie.
In short, it is the acceptability attitude of our audiences today that made Rajkumar Hirani movies work. It is our hunger to look at different dark entertainment that Anurag Kashyap can create a ruckus at the box office with ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, where the entire star cast is makeup and good looks free.
We were ready to sit, enjoy and applaud an Irrfan Khan and a Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Must I say we are blessed they arrived. It is because we are ready to make ‘Haasil’ a cult movie by YouTube shares that a Tigmanshu Dhulia waited till he got a distributor for ‘Paan Singh Tomar’ and released it on a number of screens.
It is our willingness to break the shackles of images around our stars that a Dharmendra delivered his most earthy, lovable, cherished performance in ‘Life in a Metro’. Amitabh has done a super entertainer ‘Cheeni Kum’, where a 60 plus guy gets into a great romance with a woman half his age. This one worked because we were ready, else we all know what happened to Amitabh’s ‘Silsila’ and Anil Kapoor’s ‘Lamhe’ at the box office just a few decades ago.
A ready, “tolerant” audience and exciting filmmakers with an “intolerant” attitude towards mediocrity and boring are the interesting times for Indian cinema.
By:Rahul Deo Bharadwaj http://thesocietyasiseeit.blogspot.in
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