Mumbai Meri Jaan & A Wednesday

This was an interesting weekend and thoughts about terrorists and bomb blasts stayed with me throughout. We watched Mumbai Meri Jaan on Friday night followed by news of Delhi blasts as soon as we woke up on Saturday and ended up watching A Wednesday on Sunday night. To add to this I just finished Chetan Bhagat's 'Three Mistakes of My Life' which is set to the backdrop of Gujarat communal riots. Both the movies are excellent and fall into the same genre as Aamir and they have excellent actors doing complete justice to the roles.


Mumbai Meri Jaan:





A very thought provoking story of -

• A journalist who realizes the shallowness of Indian media reporting when her loved one is affected by the blast. Soha is passable and yet again loses her fiancee.
  
• A regular person who refuses to run away from India to escape reality and goes through a gamut of emotions during the blast and is scared to even step onto a train because of the trauma. Madhavan has acted really well in this role.
• A poor man shamed by the treatment of a mall worker in front of his family who finds an easy way of hassling the rich. He is also hit by guilt and remorse when his prank causes an old man to colapse. Irrfan Khan needless to say excels at this.
• A suspicious man who fears and doubts the Muslims around him but comes to terms finally with the fact that they are no different from Hindus. Kay Kay Menon, is simply awesome.
  

There is a whole brood of fine actors in the industry currently and coming out with fantastic roles - Kay Kay, Irrfan Khan, Ranvir Shorey (although not sure what he was doing in SIK), Vinay Pathak, Konkona Sen to name a few. I would compare their talent to the likes of Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Farooq Sheikh, Anuradha Patel, Rekha, Shabana Azmi who used to come out with movies like these in the previous era. The whole change in the industry of makingmovies with real stories is wonderful for hungry movie goers like me.


A Wednesday:



A very well made (from a regular movie watcher's perspective) movie with veteran actors like Anupam Kher and Naseeruddin Shah where thankfully they are not wasted at all. All the characters are well chosen especially Jimmy Shergill and his collegue Jai (dunno his name). I really liked Jimmy Shergill in this movie after a long time. I simple hated him in some recent roles with those ridiculous highlights but this one was a fresh surprise.
I am simply in awe of Naseeruddin Shah and the talent he packs into each of his roles. I have heard a lot about this movie called 'Ijazzat' and his acting in that and thankfully my sister sent me a DVD. That is definitely going to be the next on my watching list. God bless him and may be live many many years to work in more movies. His son is really cute too and I liked his movie Dil Dosti, etc but haven't seen him in anything after that;)