“Today, serious cinema is far ahead of serious film criticism.†This remark, taken from an essay written in 1982 by the Indian film critic Chidananda Das Gupta, seems even more true today than it must have been then. Most film reviews in the Indian press offer little more than plot summaries and a few desultory remarks of praise or condemnation. Their original perceptions, if any, are limited to telling the reader which foreign film the movie being discussed has been copied from, and their language is often stilted and ugly. They are published because of the enormous enthusiasm and appetite of Indian viewers for cinema, but they very rarely enhance the experience of a movie for a viewer, which might be thought of as the first prerequisite of good criticism. [On Chidananda Das Gupta's Seeing Is Believing]
If you read most of the reviews we feature here at vc, you will agree with the above conclusions. Most reviews are written in haste with the aim of getting to the press as early as possible. Most of these reviews don’t enhance our understanding of the movie in any way.
One reason is that most people who write reviews are not qualified to write them. They are average movie goers with average thoughts. They are not trained in cinema to write deep opinion pieces. Besides this they are not well read to connect the movie to the society and to compare and contrast. And sometimes the reviews could be confused as promotional articles.
That said, when we get movies like Annan Thampi, Inspector Garud, Bharat Chandran IPS, and Alibhai, why do we need educated reviews?
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July 26, 2008 at 6:22 am
Kozhikkodan was the master of passing on plot summaries as film review, with occasional comments like “gaanangal nannu, camera kollaam” etc. It is unfortunate that a person like him was allowed to review movies for mathrubhumi weekly for many years.
The main problem with other renowned reviewers of Kerala (GP Ramachandran, Geetha, etc.) is that they just review the script, and ignore other aspects of filmmaking. Even there, they focus on the socio-political-sexist aspects of the story.
It is unfortunate that despite all the film festivals and film appreciation camps we have in Kerala our mainstream publications do not have reviewers who are well versed with all aspects of filmmaking. To me, the best reviews of Malayalam movies appear in Orkut.