Way over rated!

its really sad that you divide films in two sections. I think a film is film, there are no arts films or commercial films. It is just the media who created this ...

anyways i totally disagree with on LRMB. I think its worth a 9.0/10! I have showed this film to lots of my foreign friends and they all loved it, so there goes you "only bollywood fanatics loved it"!!

i'm with you my friend. i actually found the movie painful.

Good post, prodigal-rooster. Although, I beg to differ with you that it's not a horrid movie. You made some good points:

<The whole Gandhigiri tagline was part of the publicity campaign and the media just blew it out of proportion.

Requiem for a Dream can change the way you think about addiction. Fight Club can change the way you think about chasing a lifestyle-obsession and how consumerism owns our soul. American Beauty can inspire you to wake up and salvage the pieces of your failure of a life - even after mid-life crisis has reared its ugly head in your face. >

Munnabhai is just voted by a pool of around 1700 people. Whereas, American Beauty has over 150,000 user ratings. So the later is bound to have less average.

Many people have hailed this movie just because they are intimidated by Gandhi. It's just become a fashion. No one praised its prequel as much as they praised it, because there was no Gandhi.

It was a good film but the media blew the term Gandhigiri out of proportion. There's a general feeling if-you-don't-like-Gandhi-you-have-a-low-taste. Gandhigiri seems to have become a style statement or a form of pretence and snobbery amongst the youth. In a way they say, Gandhigiri is for cool dudes and those who don't embrace it have low taste, which is a form of symbolic violence itself and contradicts the mere foundation of Gandhigiri. In retrospect, I like the film and can watch it again and again, but I discourage the snobbery attached to it.

I was shocked to see how they blatantly invoked anti-Godse sentiments and totally lamented him in the film. By the way, Godse's execution was itself a mockery of Gandhi's principles by his followers. He was hanged within a week of his arrest. Gandhi was a non-violent person and totally against capital punishment. So much for a fair trial.

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Most of the criticism I have heard of this film has to do with it's predictability, it's popularity, and it's humour. You have said a few times that somebody enjoying the film doesn't qualify it as being a good film. What does?

I'm beginning to wonder, are only films with unpredictable plot-twists good? It seems to me that most movies that bank on suspense and the unexpected are often unrealistic and forced. Perhaps we are able to predict what happens in this movie because it seems plausible, or perhaps because that's what's likely to happen because it's a movie. Neither of these are really reasonable criticisms of the quality of the film, so much as opinions on what one particular person feels entertained by.

And if a movie is popular, does that necessarily mean it is bad? There seems to be a strong sense that the so called "masses" don't have the discretion to assess what a good movie is, and if THEY enjoy it, it MUST, be stupid/trivial because they CLEARLY don't have the capacity to enjoy the "high art" appreciated by the "classes". This masses/classes division is entirely false, and is a result of some really snobbish notions about "high" and "low" art.

As to humour, that's a very personal thing. It is evident that a lot of people found this film to be hysterical. It's completely understandable, then, that it is called a comedy. On the other hand, it being called a comedy doesn't necessarily mean that everyone must find it funny. Humour is subjective, and one cannot determine its "quality" based on how intelligent, slapstick, rhetorical, or anything else it is. That is an assessment of the kind of humour, not the quality.

It seems to me that we've acquired this vocabulary of arbitrary criticisms that we use whenever we don't find the movie to our taste. Melodrama, for instance, is cinematic device, a convention of Hindi cinema, a stylistic choice, and cannot logically be used to criticise the quality of a film, just the way Charlie Chaplin movies cannot be disregarded for the character's exaggerated expressions/curious walk. We criticise films CONSTANTLY for being melodramatic or masala films. Again, a "masala" film is a KIND of film, not a QUALITY of film.

If a movie gives people pleasure, why is that not enough to make it a good film? Why must we impose these self-created pretensions about what makes a movie "good"? Why can't we stop judging our films based on foreign appeal or comparing them to foreign/art films? They are not the same, and (hopefully) they are not trying to be the same. Why can we not just appreciate well-thought, well-written, well-made Bollywood films for what what they are rather than tearing them apart for being Bollywood? Assessing a film from one tradition (say, Bollywood) using the parameters of another tradition (Art film/Hollywood/French film) is fallacious, because the film you're criticising isn't even aiming to satisfy those parameters.

I wish people would stop thinking of Bollywood or mainstream Hindi cinema as the bastard cousin of Art Cinema or Hollywood or European film. It might be useful to reassess our expectations of what good film is before we start to assess whether or not a particular film qualifies.

Thanks god I enjoyed watching this.
I prefer this than the prequel mbbs.