Taal movie real analysis movie#
The joy I felt watching this movie is absolutely fixed, and I admit that every time I watch it I can look straight past the movie's shortcomings and just glow happily in my memories of seeing it for the first time. We don't get much of that in mainstream American cinema.Īlso, it had scenes of my former stomping ground, Toronto and other bits of southwestern Ontario. I thought he was cute, but I was also enamored of a male lead who dances. (The other panelist, Gerson da Cunha, said how pleased he was that the film's humor and other emotional moments translated so well and were effective in this foreign context.)Īnd yes, the Akshaye factor had begun (this was the first of his movies I saw). The audience was really into the movie too, and it got big reactions throughout. Either way, I was in love with it from its opening scene, the heroine's modern-dance musical dream.įrom that moment on, I was thrilled with its colors, its love story, its mountaintops and rain, its high drama, its gorgeous music, its giant dance numbers, its overall spectacle - frankly, all the usual stuff that people new to Indian films rave about. Rahman) conked me with a sledgehammer while I was in the theater and I couldn't think clearly after that.
Or, to put it more cynically, this is a fantastically unsubtle movie, and it's quite possible that Ghai (and maybe A. Watching it in that setting - and with my brand-new eyes - was like spending a few hours in the hot summer sun - beautiful, indulgent, and life-giving but likely to make you feel a bit stunned after. There's really nothing that could have made this a better experience, and I was completely overwhelmed by the visual beauty and music of the film. Local boy Roger Ebert included it in his Overlooked Film Festival in 2005 (his review/program notes here), and present for the panel discussion afterward was.Subhash Ghai. Taal was one of the very first Hindi films I saw, and I was lucky enough to see it with a packed audience at a restored historic theater a few minutes' drive from my house.
The fact that I can even raise this point probably says something good about the film: it has enough interesting and thought-provoking elements in it to invite revisiting and to feed a discussion years after I first saw it. Some aspects of how I react to Taal are fixed because they're tied to a very meaningful experience with the film, and others are in flux, changing with ongoing synthesis of what I have learned and thought about since that initial experience. We can't change our contemporary reactions, but we can combine them with subsequent experiences and information to create new understanding. We can't change the past, but we can change how we think about it. (If you want to know more, here are episode information, analysis, and quotes.) This becomes a really nifty idea if we expand it beyond the rare ability to alter a past we know to have happened a certain way to our very real, very personal-level ability to revisit our thoughts and impressions. He admits that this is true but then explains that some history is fixed and some is in flux - and the destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius is, unfortuantely, fixed. She pleads, pointing out that he's saved the world in their previous adventures. This is Donna's first trip through time, and she is distraught when the Doctor tells her they can't save the inhabitants of Pompeii from the disaster they know is about to happen. In the story, the time-traveling alien Doctor and his human companion, Donna, show up at Pompeii the day before the eruption of 79.
If your eyes are glazing over at the mention of Doctor Who - as mine used to do until recently, despite evangelistic* efforts by many friends over the years (somehow I've only grown to love Doctor Who** since falling for Bollywood, but that's another post entirely) - please hang on: this will only take a second, and I promise to outline a relevant idea. In a handy convergence of media consumption, my recent preparing-for-a-trip-to-London-to-see- David-Tennant-as- Hamlet-at-the-RSC viewing of "The Fires of Pompeii" episode of Doctor Who has provided me a new system for sorting out my reactions. Part of me loves it, just absolutely loves it, and part of me has become wary of it after reading analysis by Filmi Geek and Philip's Filums and then considering it on my own in the cold light of.um.having finished rewatching it and therefore not, at this very moment, basking in its glow of relentless beauty and razzle-dazzle. Subhash Ghai's Taal and I have a complicated relationship.
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