Vimarsh

The dichotomy of good and evil is one of the most important dichotomies in the textual investigations. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra is one of the directors who have tried to explore it in his films. The film ‘Aks’ was released in 2001 and was a directorial debut of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. The film has a very powerful cast of wonderful actors like Amitabh Bachchan, Manoj Bajpai, Raveena Tandon, Nandita Das, K.K. Raina and Amol Palekar. Film did not run well on the box-office but was acclaimed by the critics. Amitabh Bachchan wins Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor. The film begins as a political thriller, and in the very beginning the Foreign Minister of India is assassinated in Budapest and there is a threat to the Prime Minister as well. The very first dialogue of the movie says, “ jo honaa hai, so to hotaa hi hai ” which echoes Bhagwad Geeta’s statement “ jab-jab jo- jo honaa hai, tab-tab so- so hotaa hai” meaning whatever is going to happen is bound to happen. But, jus...

How does war affect a country? What could be the impact of the war on your friendship and personal life? Is it necessary to have a personal involvement to be affected by the war? Many of such unanswered questions have been satirically addressed by Emir Kusturica in his 1995 magnum-opus Underground. One of the harshest satires on the war conditions, ‘Underground’ is a Serbian film which bears the subtitle “Once upon a time there was a country.” The film is a portrayal of Yugoslav history from the beginning of World War II until the beginning of Yugoslav Wars. It actually was a five hour mini-series shown on Serbian RTS Television. The theatrical version is 163 minutes long. The film wins the Palme d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. The film is divided into three parts and tells a story of two friends, Marko Dren and Petar “Blacky” Popara. Marko Dren is a Communist Party worker and swiftly moving upwards on Party ladder. The film begins as both f...

Culture, they call it; it distingusheth them from the goat-herds.                                                                                                 -Nietzsche 2003: 07 Language is the aspect of human species that makes the human beings markedly different from any other species on the earth. Because of language only, we are able to develop a wonderful and varied human culture. Lambert (1967: 05) writes, “(l)anguage is a form or type or aspect of human behavior. Language is something which human bein...

Joint Security Area is an area of heavily fortified border that separates North and South Korea. Park Chan-wook takes up this controversial subject as his third film as a director. The film is based on the novel by Park Sang-yeon and entitled ‘DMZ’. The 2000 film ‘Joint Security Area’ becomes a critical and commercial success. It becomes the highest grossing film in Korean film history at the time of release. The film also wins prestigious awards like Blue Dragon Film Awards and Grand Bell Awards. Swiss Army Major Sophie E. Jean arrives at DMZ on behalf of Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission to investigate a shootout there, in which two North Korean soldiers have died and one North Korean soldier and one South Korean soldier are injured. Both the countries are putting allegations on each other, and eager to break the war on this issue. Officer Jean interviews both the surviving soldiers. She finds the inconsistency in the reports. Sergeant Lee Soo-hyeok, a South Korean...

The fourth film by Rajkumar Hirani is PK. Released in 2014; PK is a satiric comedy with some blend of science fiction. The film is written by Rajkumar Hirani and Abhijat Joshi. Hirani, this time, tackles the institution of religion. Though it has instigated lot of controversy, the film emerged as one of the highest grossing Indian films of all time. Part of the controversy is a Muslim actor questioning the religious dogmas and superstitions of Majority community of the country. The movie PK is about a humanoid alien who comes to earth to do research here. As soon as he lends, his spaceship remote gets stolen in Rajasthan. Eventually, he learns that clothes and money are requisites on earth. He starts getting clothes from ‘dancing cars’, that is, he begins stealing clothes and money from couples having sex in cars with open windows. In Burgess, Jaggu falls in love with Sarfaraz. Jaggu’s father is against this relationship as Sarfaraz is a Pakistani Muslim and Jaggu is an I...

The debate of Civilized and Savage, Urban and Rural, advanced and out-dated is very old and has been tackled in a number of ways in different forms of arts including cinema. The 2005 film King Kong by Peter Jackson is yet another installment and argument in the debate, though metaphorical. The film is a remake of 1933 film King Kong by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.​ The film is approximately 200 minutes long and pushes the limits of technology and imagination at the same time. Film wins three academy awards for Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects. The film's narrative is presented in terms of the dichotomy of Civilized, the director - Carl Denham against the savage - the Kong. We can read the film from both these poles. The uncivilized Kong who is the King of his province falls for one of his prey, Ann Darrow and in the act of her protection, he eventually gets killed. He succumbs to modern chemicals...

'3 Idiots' is a satiric comedy released in 2009. This is third film of Rajkumar Hirani. The film is based on a novel by Chetan Bhagat, entitled 'Five Point Someone' and its screenplay is written by Abhijat Joshi, Rajkumar Hirani and Vidhu Vinod Chopda. The film was an instant hit at the box-office. The film featured some of the real inventions done by the common people of India. Like the earlier two films of Hirani, this film, too, follows the same design and fights against an institution, namely education system.  The film is about Ranchhod Das Chanchad, "Rancho", who is crazy about learning but doesn't believe in institutionalized approach to learning in which we talk about higher grades and better paying jobs. He wants to learn for the sake of knowledge. His two room-mates at Imperial College of Engineering Farhan Qureshi, who wants to be a photographer but doing engineering because of parental pressure, and Raju Rastogi, who hails from poor fa...