Race and Inside Man

Have watched a couple of movies in the last few days, Race was one, the other was viewed on my laptop, went by the name of Inside Man.

I am not a huge movie buff, for me, after spending more than ten hours a day of my free time on cricket, it is virtually impossible to be a connoisseur of movies. Add to that blogging and reading fiction, movies come a distant fourth.

Still, I enjoy a couple of genres of movies, senseless, mindless comedies for one, the other is the Abbas Mustaan style of thrillers. Basically I like suspense and thrillers, Sixth Sense is an all time favourite, 100 Days excited the living daylights out of me when I had seen it as a kiddo, but Bollywood has not been too well served with this genre. The reason could be simple, such movies can rarely be watched more than once - i.e. rewatched after knowing the suspense - and many of the people who end up watching it once have this uncanny habit and a knack of revealing the end in one way or the other. This ensures that the audiences do not throng the cinema houses as often as they would to watch SRK say 'kuchh kuchh hota hai, you are idiots and will never understand' or something to that effect.

Anyways, that was enough of a prologue for the movies that I saw. The first one was Race. I was hugely disappointed, and this could be plainly attributed to the fact that I am an Abbas Mustan fan, I like their brand of suspense, and the way their plot twists and turns all the way usually. Shockingly, audiences had not taken a liking to their previous flick, Naqaab, which I enjoyed immensely. This one though was different. Probably I expected too much out of the movie, and it failed to live up to it. My personal take on suspense movies or even books for that matter, and its USP is that it brings out the 'whodunnit' factor in the audiences, that causes them to think, review and come out with the solution as early as possible in the story. Unfortunately, this movie had a loads happening, in turn not only confusing the audiences - at least it did that to me - but also causing one to give up on thnking rationally for the suspect. I mean, I actually told Peeya, with whom I had gone for the movie that one never knows the way it is going, it could well be the neighbour's cook who could have been involved.

And mystery for the sake of mystery usually falls flat on its face. For me, it became boring beyond a certain point and I lost interest.

Contrast that to the other one I watched, Inside Man, again a thriller with the plot revolving around a bank robbery. A simple, clean movie, sharp and incisive, and one that can be watched again despite knowing the end. In fact, after having watched Race the week before, I kept looking for unnecessary turns and twists, but found none. And that heightened the experience of watching it.

I did watch another one, Cruel Intentions, but that was in fits and starts and hence I could not really enjoy it too much.