no one around here ever throws a Bollywood theme party: Page 3

About halfway through this, I turned to my watching companion, Si, and said, "Is this movie about anything?" This wasn't meant as a complaint; I felt like I was watching some sort of scripted documentary type thing, in which we just follow around a narrative focal point character and see what goes on in her life and see what she sees. Which is cool. But then it seemed to take a bit more of a message-y shape, showing more and more of the ridiculous or unfortunate or foolish in the characters. But then there was one more change, and the movie ended with me unsure whether our protagonist was going to make good on all she had learned. Which, oddly, didn't bother me, because in the circumstances she was in, I can see how it would be incredibly difficult either to take action or to stay still; I can imagine how hard it would be to make a decision and how tempting it might be just to keep on doing what you were doing. (Maybe I'm dense and anyone else would think that Madhvi had a clear path in mind, but I just didn't see it. Which made sense to me.)

I also enjoyed how a city as massive and complicated as Mumbai was so easily reducable to a small town, populated with the same people over and over. I guess that's what people do, we create communities where there are none, even if what we build isn't founded on much and even if the people in our communities are...well, shallow and silly.

There was a moment that had either really thoughtful writing or just tapped into basic human reactions: all of the dialogue surrounding the bomb blast sounded exactly, I mean almost word for word, like what I heard on the current affairs programs on tv after the blasts in Mumbai this summer.

I can't remember anything I've read about Tara Sharma - except, well, you know - but her portrayal of the increasingly hollow aspiring actor made me feel what I saw on Konkona Sensharma's face - confusion, sadness, disappointment in losing (in every sense) your friend. And of course Konkona Sensharma, Boman Irani, and Atul Kulkarni were great.

Sorry, this is an uninspired bit of writing here, as was the post on Yuva. I'm both sleepy and distracted by various things, including getting to watch Lage Raho Munna Bhai in the theater on Sunday. Oh, that's a nice tie-in, actually, because at one point in Page 3 Pearl says "Lage raho India!" which Obi Wan had just told me about. I like convergence.

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