Monday, February 13, 2006

Read and Tailor !

The otherday there was a discussion among my friends about how Hindi movies are copycats and so on. Some guys had very strong opinions about bollywood films coz they were mostly poor copies of hollywood fare. A few of us were opposing this view , our point was that there are very few original works , there are lots of clones and inspirations which cannot be classfied as copy and looked down upon. Agreed, there are lots of Bollywood movies which are pure lifts ie frame by frame re-make , which some enlightened reviewer points out to us and we look down upon it as a copied and hence 2nd rate product. But the fact is that vast majority wouldn't have seen the hollywood movie in the first place , so the story and movie would be something novel for them and they would actually thoroughly enjoy it. I can remember scores of films which were hollywood inspired , but had localised the stories and had adapted them to Indian situations so were good, some were even better than the originals(I liked Kaante better than Reservoir Dogs!). There have been lot of hollywood inspired stories , where the central idea would be from a western movie , but most of the situations will Indianesque (Tamil blockbuster Ghajini from Memento).
I dont' see harm in such movies as long as you are entertained you should not be complaining. Ofcourse plagiarising is bad , but in some cases it becomes a homage to the original. If due credits are given then we can see this 'copy'/'inspirated' cinema as a means to convey good cinema/stories to parts of the world which it wouldn't have reached because of language or culture limitations. Same is the case with regional cinema , down south there have been numerous movies which are made in Malayalam and get remade in Tamil , Tamil movies-> Telugu,Kannada and vice versa.
The fact is that all these states have their own industry , with their own stars and way of story telling. So dubbing a movie doesn't work always ,hence they go for remakes tailored aptly for each state. 'Manichitrathazhu' a classic in Malaylam went to karnataka as 'ApthaMithra' and landed up as Rajni film tailor made for Tamil audiences in from of 'Chandramukhi'
Coming back to the main issue , even Hollywood movies are mostly adapted from good novels , these days all best sellers are instantly lapped up for movies. But Indian fiction is still in a nascent stage , so we have to rely on Hollywood or other cinema for stories.
Recently saw this ,
which is really encouraging ,hopefully we will also soon be doing 'Read and Tailor' method for movie scripts !

1 comment:

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