The Film Far(c)e Awards

Planet of the Apes

On February 27th 2010, all the stars of “Bollywood” descend from the sky at their pretentious best, shamelessly aping Hollywood right from concept to the red carpet, from the nude statues to the fake emotional speeches, from the late after-night parties to the press conferences next morning, from the way they give interviews to the way they profess their love to “mommies, daddies and everyone else in their extended families”, and all of this captured by the shamelessly greedy media masturbating loads of fake enthusiasm trying to ape the paparazzi of America! (Ta da! I think I just wrote the longest sentence ever!) With all the aping and all the taping, it is one big planet-of-the-apes award ceremony. Yes, we are talking about the filmfare awards.

Its in the Name

A lot of people are of the opinion that the name Bollywood should not be used because it is ripped off from Hollywood (like that is the only thing they ever ripped off from Hollywood!). They want it to be referred to as the “Hindi Film Industry”. To be honest, I'm offended. We all know that Bollywood is not an industry; just look at it. It is a small bunch of families living off the dollar exchange rate by making movies for the million odd NRIs while neglecting a billion odd Indians. That is not how industries run; Bollywood is at best a mom and pop store!

Film Farce Awards

I don’t entirely hate Bollywood, only 97% of it! The sole reason being the “gibberish with English titles” that they market as movies. And the reason I have no respect for awards (apart from the reasons aforementioned) is because they just reward the stars. How else would you justify the huge number of nominations for Paa and 3 idiots? They are successful and entertaining movies but if you are judging them as a form of art, how do they fare? Does the screenplay of 3 idiots compare with that of DevD? Is Amitabh Bachchan’s acting masked by 3 inches of makeup in Paa better than Ranbir Kapoor’s almost no makeup act in Wakeup Sid? And Gulaal is not even nominated for best film!

The thing is, star studded movies like 3 idiots and Paa will sweep all the awards while the really deserving ones like DevD should be content with the critics’ choice award and that is my reason why filmfare awards should be renamed to filmfarce awards.

Note: the author is neither a fan of Ranbir Kapoor nor Wake up Sid. The references have been used just for convenience.

Film Far(c)e Bingo

As a reader of my blog, I assume you are fairly intelligent and hence not watch the filmfare awards. However if you do, I suggest you play gtoosphere’s very own filmfar(c)e bingo for some extra fun.

Image courtesy: http://allbollywood.wordpress.com

Its a bad ad world

My tolerance for Ads is pretty high, you give me a pretty girl to look at and I won’t be very critical. However if there is no pretty girl, it better be intelligent! I have stopped watching TV (except for sports) ever since I reached the age of reason (circa 2004 CE according to the urban legends).

I kind of made my own set of rules when it comes to advertisements. As a rule of the thumb any ad featuring Irfan Khan is boring, any ad featuring Akshay Kumar is dumb. Mobile company ads are usually interesting but the Docomo music is so over done that it now feels like inspector Dreyfus scratching a blackboard with an iron glove! The nerve on those people to run the ad so many times! Who do they think they are? Airtel?

Bad commercials are tricky; they stay in our minds for a long time. They are kind of quasi-successful in that sense. How can anyone forget Aman Verma cleaning toilets in the Harpic Ad? I remember the first time I saw it; I kind of forced my mom to boycott Harpic because that is the only way to punish them for inflicting the misery on citizens of India (g2 gets patriotic sometimes).

Speaking of cola ads, Mountain dew is the worst. What are they all excited about? Jumping from the planes, suspended from the air, breaking through glass to spike volleyballs at girls wearing scanty bikinis while riding sports bikes and all that enthusiasm just to drink something that looks like stolen urine sample from a diabetes clinic (now you know why the bottle is green :p).

But there were good ads too. I am sure a lot of us remember coca cola’s “pandav kitne the” ad which urged people to pay only 5 rupees for coke (most shopkeepers used to charge one rupee extra). It was around the time this ad was popular, a shopkeeper asked 6 rupees for a coke. So one of my friends making a reference to the ad asked the shopkeeper, “Pandav kitne the?” And the shopkeeper promptly responded, “Draupadi kosam oka rupayi egestra andi“, which translates in Hindi to “draupadi ke liye ek rupee extra saab”