PS : All views are unapologetically mine, and I dont expect you to subscribe to them just dont lynch me!
3 Idiots could be termed as the best masala movie of the year, many people would dub it as one of the best entertainer in recent years and multitude of people would give their right arm and leg in defence of the statement. 99% of people who have seen the movie, have become hard core fans of the movie as well as restored their faith in the Godliness of Aamir. Yet I have always been of a strange breed when it comes to movie, my perception, likes and dislikes are generally different from other people, thats why The Godfather, remains just another movie for me, while Shawshank Redemption , will always remain a rather ordinary one for me (i kept comparing it to a Leo Tolstoy story, and nobody can compare with him). Similarly with 3 Idiots, though I would agree that it was a masala movie, which had almost all the ingredients of a good movie and yet I didnt like the movie.
The movie definitely isnt without its high points, the spirit of doing what you love is a lesson, many people can relate to. Kareena in the role of a simple girl definitely rocks with those glasses. She looks good in the movie without even trying to look glamorous, and ofcourse when she gets glamorous in the song Zoobi Doobi , she just blows you away for brief duration of the song.Balatkari scene, must be one of the best comic sequence in recent years and the acting of the guy Chatur Ramlingam, is one of the nice things of the movie. The parts of Sharman and Madhavan are good, although they also tend to go on a tangent, specially the interview given by Sharman Joshi towards the end of the movie is one of the most random thing I have seen. They just basically made a mockery of the whole placement process in engineering colleges. Students study only once in 4 years of their B.Tech, and yet they were made aware of the fact the things you need to secure a job in a company are, poor academic performance, revolutionary views and the guts to speak whatever comes to your mind in front of a panel of 4 people, while the reality couldnt be any further than this. Had such a movie been made about any other profession or stream, I might have liked it, being ignorant of the ongoings in the field. But, when you talk about Engineering, I would like things not to be made into a fairy tale.
Ranchor Das Chanchad, could easily be one of the most irritating characters, Aamir Khan has played (acc to me). The guy in 3 Idiots is a mixture of the school teacher in Taare Zameen Par, the way he inspires his friends. He is the Big Daddy of Einsten, with a ridiculously obnoxious no of patents (400) to his name. Had they portrayed this movie as a story in a Galaxy far far away, I could have digested such facts. But since you are talking about this planet and this country, I would have liked if we didnt over indulge ourselves in Hero Worship and stuck to our guns portraying him as may be even a Great Student but making him a magician isnt what I liked in the movie. Had they even stopped at showing him as the Teacher of that school in Laddakh, I might not have cried myself hoarse, but they had to make him The Lord, the Master of everything which freaks me out.
3 Idiots was intended to be a good movie, and generally in such movies, you expect not to be flummoxed by the ongoings in the movie. But, the scene when the new born baby who wasnt even breating, starts kicking as soon as he hears the words All Izz Well , is one of the most cringeworthy scenes in recent memory. A scene which reminds me of Govinda’s movies in 90s (arguably one of the bad decades of Bollywood) rather than an Aamir Khan movie released towards the end of the naughties.
One of the crassest point in the movie would be the description of Sharman’s family conditions, specially the scene where his father is shown travelling in Kareena’s vehicle, is a rather tasteless description of a poor man’s apathy. Making it look ridiculous and instead of feeling sorry for his dad, you start feeling a bit sad for the director and his vision of the movie and the suffering of a sick old guy.
The part about Phunsukh Wangdu seems more like the BC plays which we perform in the inter house competition in our freshers’ party. I have no idea, what forced him to go ahead and make such unncessary changes. FPS is,I guess the only decent book by Mr. Chetan Bhagat, he already introduces too much masala into his books that they can be turned into motion pictures without adding things like Phunsukh Wangdu and All izz well sequence while delivering the baby. The only problem (again according to me) would be casting Aamir Khan in the lead role instead of someone lesser (which the character demanded) and secondly all the attempts at making this a mass masala movie when the story needed a different treatment, than the usual run of mill movies. All this movie has done is portray almost all Engineers as weird in some sense or the other, while Engineers are almost like Average people, just with a serious dearth of female interaction owing to their field.
And yet the biggest problem I will have about this movie would be, instead of telling the story of 3 Idiots, it just goes on to glorify 1 Idiot in all ways.
One of my friend, who really loved the movie, (sometime in the middle of the movie) said, “Aamir Khan is definitely not an Idiot :D”and thats what my problem with the movie is.
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