College Days

My computer's screen has been staring at me for the past couple of minutes. I too was staring at it. I am supposed to type out something. Type out - not just because it has been about 20 days since I updated my blog, but also because I have come across so many things to share with you. One of them is about doctors, other one is about the Indian summers, the need to have a Friend-Philosopher-Guide also featured in my topic list and movies too found a place, naturally.

Also I have been writing lots of other stuff in the mean time and I was not able to find time to scribble down on these hotspots in my mind.

"Happy Days". (Telugu/2007/Sekhar Kammula) One of my close friends gave me this when my train stopped at the Vijayawada Junction for a few minutes, many weeks back. I took out time for this movie only a couple of days back. To tell you in one line, this movie is a must-watch. The film traces the lives of a bunch of friends from the day they enter the gates of an engineering college to their farewell day. Nothing more; Nothing less; And there lies the speciality of the movie. Generally college-type movies try to solve something - a love problem, a friendship problem, a student-teacher relation problem etc - by killing a character or by loads of lecture by someone or by gallons of tears. Say, the film "Kallori" (College. Tamil/2007/Balaji Sakthivel) tries to cinematically trace back the incidents that happened before the grossly unfortunate incident of burning of a college bus, in Tamil Nadu, many years back. It had followed the popular mode of developing a story from news articles. But HD stands out here. HD just shows what happens in those four years in the campus - No problems, No solutions; Just four years.

No one marries anyone in the end; No one kills anyone in the end; A few take up jobs; A few others leave for the US; A few remain undecided.

This sense of incompleteness makes this a complete movie. This imbalance in the end makes the movie a perfectly balanced one. This sense of void gives.. I hope you got the message by now, right? Songs are wonderful. The lead lady looks great; (incidentally she featured in Kallori also!) the lead man also looks smart like Boys-fame Siddarth's close clone. And above all....this is the first movie I get to watch, after many months, that does not have even a single murder or a gun shot!

I too had a happy day :)

(PS: Just now I found out that Happy Days was released about 2 months before Kallori!)

2 comments:

Cosmic Voices said...

It has been my experience that the best movies are those which do not tell a story but narrate incidents that happen at a period of time.

Pilani Pictures said...

:)

The Queen’s Gambit (Review)

(Glad that my review got published in Readers Write  - Thank you so much Baradwaj Rangan! ) Streaming on Netflix and consisting of seven epi...