{"id":583,"date":"2005-08-01T15:41:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-01T15:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2005\/08\/583\/"},"modified":"2005-08-01T15:41:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-01T15:41:00","slug":"583","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2005\/08\/583\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Riddle me this – who has made the best movie version of the Godfather so far?<\/p>\n

My answer: your brain. And mine. And anyone else who has read the Godfather novel free of the influence of any of the celluloid attempts. Because the story that Puzo wrote in the Godfather cannot be condensed to two, or three, or six hours of cinema. Feel free to disagree, but hey, are you telling me that the Johnny Fontaine subplot is not relevant to the story? Or that Lucy’s life after Sonny’s death does not figure in the big picture at all? Or that we are not supposed to know about Albert Neri’s past life and how he became Michael’s bodyguard? Like I said, feel free to disagree, and I will feel free to shake my head and do hideous things to you in my mind. So let us not bring up the topic of adapting the Godfather novel to screen, and instead concentrate on the first film that tried<\/i>, the Coppola version, and how Ram Gopal Verma tries really hard, like his predecessors before him, to make a “crime family” movie. <\/p>\n

Coppola’s Godfather gave us – among other things – natural lighting, a hoarse-voiced Man of Honour (Marlon Brando, for the clinically brain-dead), and the Successor Guy Who Does Not Want To Do It But Does It Anyway, forgettable bad guys, and Nino Rota’s score, a musical composition that weakens the knees of fifteen-year old Indian boys and make them want to learn to play wind instruments.<\/p>\n

Ram Gopal Verma’s Sarkar<\/i> gives us, in that order, natural lighting, a hoarse voiced Man of Honour, the Successor Guy etc , forgettable bad guys, and the most cacophonous sonic arrangements ever heard onscreen, courtesy Amar Mohile, last remembered as the man who screwed up Vaastu Shastra<\/i>. An act that required much prowess, if I may say so, because to screw up something that was already screwed-up is a herculean task. <\/p>\n

Verma’s bad guys in Sarkar<\/i> are wannabe cool-dudes, all in their own way. There is the obligatory Middle-eastern Drug Peddler who wears sunglasses and acts so bad he makes Keanu Reeves look animated. Though in his defence, Hemant Birje<\/a> still maintains the top ranking in the WAH! category. ( That’s W<\/b>oody A<\/b>nd H<\/b>am, for the uninitiated. The exclamation point is for effect.) The rest of the crew – which includes a sleazeball politician, a fat South Indian thug with an atrocious accent, a nefarious unHoly Man (played by Jeeva, who did the smashing role of the new Commissioner in Ab Tak Chhappan<\/i>) and an ex-crony – who plot to bring the Man of Honour down are all greasy, distasteful bunch of crooks whose badness hits you with the subtlety of a jackhammer. These are people you cannot sympathize with, whose motivation can be summed up in three words – Do Bad Shit. People who look like they do Bad Shit and nothing but. And talk like they’ve had fifteen cups of black coffee in a row. (except for cool-dudish Middle Eastern Drug Guy) <\/p>\n

Which kind of puts paid to the fact that this is supposed to be a “realistic” crime movie.<\/p>\n

The music. The most atonal mess my mind has ever had to deal with. If you get rid of all the dialogues, all the expressions, everything in the film except for the background score, you would probably still figure out what’s going on. A south Indian guy comes into the scene? A mridangam begins to play. A holy man? A whiny tanpura. Even the “Govinda” leitmotif is taken too far – I mean, I can understand the semi-religious undertones of the Sarkar character, but having twenty people scream the same word at various bpm and decibel levels at EVERY moment of import in the film does make the word “overkill” sound like an understatement. The music is just there<\/i>, every single moment in the film, like an uninvited, opinionated (not to mention loud) relative who plonks himself at your house and decides to stay on for a month without telling you in advance. <\/p>\n

The assumption with which Verma directs the movie is that the moviegoer is familiar with Coppola’s Godfather. Which saves him the trouble of explaining who Sarkar is, how he came to power, what he really does, or why the teeming masses wave at him every morning from beyond the walls of his “fortress”. Which is a bad thing for someone who has *not* seen the original, because everything irrelevant to the succession-story is brushed off on the basis of that assumption. At the same time, for someone who has<\/i> seen Coppola’s version, there is the more-than-occasional jarring note – the storyline deviates. A lot. Again, what’s so bad about it, you might ask. Just that most of the changes are pointless. Why not just have three sons and a daughter and kill the eldest son off etc etc? Why have Katrina Kaif and waste precious minutes that could have been spent on developing the main characters? <\/p>\n

Why am I blabbering so much about this? Because I was honestly expecting something that would blow away Verma’s previous crime ventures, and establish this movie as The<\/i> remake. Because RGV was the only filmmaker in India who understood what subtlety was ( and I assure you, I am talking about subtlety in a commercial context, and not about bare, stripped-down filmmaking) Because I was looking forward to seeing Kay Kay as Sonny Corleone, a character very close to my heart, and was kind of crushed when Sonny and Freddy overlapped.<\/p>\n

But then, the movie did<\/i> make me want to go and re-read Puzo’s novel. Which is never, ever a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Riddle me this – who has made the best movie version of the Godfather so far? My answer: your brain. And mine. And anyone else who has read the Godfather novel free of the influence of any of the celluloid attempts. Because the story that Puzo wrote in the Godfather cannot be condensed to two, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}