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Satyam

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Another Sarkar Raj Teaser

May 13th, 2008Related|Filed Under

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  1. Comment by satyam on 13 May 2008:

    Both these recent teasers have lines by Ash. The first of these for those who missed it:

    http://youtube.com/watch?v=I_2Btgr157E

    In fact this one was just Ash.

  2. Comment by Eire on 13 May 2008:

    Nice to see a few Aishwarya teasers. She is looks to have an ace role in the movie.

  3. Comment by Qalandar on 13 May 2008:

    Hmmm, a hint of adultery in this teaser?

    “Paisa waheen lagaaya jaata hai jahaan faaida ho”

    “Faaida wohi hota hai jo sab ka ho”

    ha ha ha ha ha ha

    Shankar Nagre the Commie.

  4. Comment by satyam on 13 May 2008:

    Lots of exchanges like this in the film Qalandar if the trailers are anything to go by. There should be a piece contrasting dialog-baazi in Sarkar versus that in Bachchan’s classic films. RGV offers the abridged edition of those! In those older films you have a number of sentences strung together working up to a climax. RGV offers staccato rhythms and this works well with his other technical choices.

    On the ‘commie’ but one of the pictures frames Abhishek with a huge splash of red in the background!

  5. Comment by Qalandar on 13 May 2008:

    Btw Skeptic, it isn’t my cynicism but my sense of aesthetics that is offended by dialogue this reflexively stilted — and lacking the sort of panache and conviction that santoshi (at his best) brings to the table (as I noted with respect to a couple of scenes in my halla bol review).

    Btw, it is manifestly untrue that only RGV gets me to say this stuff: please note my criticisms of the dialog in dhoom 2, tashan, not to mention the sort of attention deficit disorder at work in many of the NRI love stories…

  6. Comment by Qalandar on 13 May 2008:

    In any event, it can be no defense of the sort of appalling dialog we saw in sarkar 1 to say that other films have bad dialog too.

  7. Comment by satyam on 13 May 2008:

    I wouldn’t go as far as that Qalandar.. I think the dialog in Sarkar is often unexceptional but not necessarily ‘bad’ (even if predictable). I think especially towards the end Abhishek has some good lines. Bachchan has fewer of those for sure. But Sarkar Raj based on the previews seems to be much better in this regard.

  8. Comment by satyam on 13 May 2008:

    TheSkeptic: Q, I’m with you on the stiffness of the dialogues, in particular with the latest teaser, which retrospectively colors all the earlier promos. Until this point one took Varma to be showcasing his “punchlines”, but with this latest one, one suddenly has the sinking feeling that everyone speaking like this all the time is going to be hard to take. I disagree with you on Sarkar’s dialogues, a lot of which I liked, and I know of several others who like them too. Not all of Sarkar’s lines are equally sententious, there are scenes where “natural” exchanges also take place. But, in general, I agree that Varma’s minimalistic scenes tend to isolate dialogues in a portentous way - sometimes, not all the time (the scene where Amitabh banishes Kay Kay from his household has decidedly non-portentous sounding lines). This is just one of the pitfalls of his style, something that he has clung to from his very first film, Shiva. Indeed, this exact criticism is brought up against Mani’s films as well.

  9. Comment by satyam on 13 May 2008:

    I’ll say this. RGV’s core audience likes those stilted, deadpan lines far more than they would appreciate traditional dialog these days.

  10. Comment by satyam on 13 May 2008:

    TheSkeptic: To say that Sarkar’s dialogues are poor, and so are Tashan’s or D2’s, blurs what feels crucial to me - that the style is utterly different across all these films. Sarkar’s dialogues are designed to be minimal, quotable, homiletic (or platitudinous, if you’re feeling uncharitable), and I can actually recall a lot of them, whereas nothing comes back from D2. The “Sarkar ek soch hai” line is a remarkably succinct way of gesturing at a whole body of thought from Hindu scriptures as well as a comment on the sometimes-forgotten “imaginariness” of icons (indeed, Amitabh Bachchan himself is such a “soch”).

  11. Comment by satyam on 13 May 2008:

    ‘Homiletic’ is a good way of putting it skeptic. And I also concur that Sarkar in this sense cannot be compared to D2 and the like where dialog does not even exist (not true for Tashan necessarily).

    I must disagree on the ’soch’ bit though. In the context of Sarkar it refers to ‘ideology’ and I’m unsure if this can be read as either thought in general or ‘celebrity and its vicissitudes’. The idea that a man called ‘Sarkar’ can be killed but a ‘movement’ of the same name cannot carries a very political charge.

  12. Comment by Qalandar on 13 May 2008:

    I was not comparing the dialog of sarkar, dhoom 2, etc.n merely responding to the suggestion that I saved all my criticism for sarkar.

    Satyam: I agree that towards the end of sarkar, there were some super masala dialog moments for abhishek…

  13. Comment by satyam on 15 May 2008:

    TheSkeptic: Stumbled upon a bookmark-worthy website devoted to some of the best directors and cinematographers in the world. Here’s their John Alton (noir cinematographer par excellence) page, with stunningly beautiful frames from his work: http://www.celtoslavica.de/chiaroscuro/dop/alton.html

    TheSkeptic: Looking at many of these smokily lit frames and the stark, angular compositions, I will certainly agree that Varma owes a debt to this style, something that I was resisting a while ago in a debate with him. There are some hat-tips in this direction in Shiva, in Aag in particular, even if I would continue to insist upon a lot in his movies that also does *not* look this stylized and almost otherworldly. Again Shiva is an example of this, where an enormous vocabulary of the camera is unleashed, for the first time in Indian cinema (the steadicam is one of these), and the noir-style is one ingredient among many.

  14. Comment by satyam on 15 May 2008:

    I see what you mean..

  15. Comment by satyam on 15 May 2008:

    I think Naach is very well done in the first half..

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