Chennai Express – And National Integration!
My dear followers and fellow bloggers, in case you were wondering where I had disappeared to, I am back after a long mix of business travel and vacation.
Ideally I would not start blogging again with a Shah Rukh Khan movie, but Chennai Express was the last movie I saw with family before coming back to Pune.
I am not a SRK fan, but my brother-in-laws wife and I had an understanding. That she will watch The Conjuring with me and I will watch Chennai Express with her and so began our girls’ movie day out.
For those of you, who do not know who Shah Rukh Khan is, let me introduce you to this famous Bollywood actor. SRK has had a very successful career in the Indian film industry and is one of the famous actors in league with Amir Khan, Salman Khan, Ajay Devgan, Akshay Kumar and others.
Coming on to Chennai Express, it is an over hyped SRK movie like most of his others movies and has a huge promotional budget. His last movie RA-ONE spent millions in promotion to create hype, but was a crappy movie in the end. This time Chennai Express spent millions on promotion, but radio stations and other media critics did an equally good job with negative publicity. I heard a FM station in one of its shows give alphabetical A-Z reasons as to why you should not watch this movie. Most channels aired public and critic reviews pointing out that watching Chennai Express would be a waste of money. They heavily ridiculed Deepika Padukone's phoney accent, unnecessary action sequences in the film and ludicrous euphemism of South Indian Culture.
So with zero expectation, I went to watch this movie. And, it was then that I realized that, be it positive or negative, it was all part of the big promotion game to attract attention for this movie. The accent was fine. I could relate it to a similar South Indian accent by Chatur in the movie 3 Idiots. Although Deepika could have learned some sense of genders in Hindi language by the end of the movie, but again its only a movie and I have a friend from South who still gets confused with genders even after staying with me for a couple of years now. Coming on to action, well both Bollywood and South Indian cinema have witnessed movies with equally ridiculous action sequences, so nothing new there.
In the end Chennai Express is just another average one time watch Bollywood movie. It has a simple love story, average humor quotient, average songs, average acting and a simple message of national integration. This message is in fact the reason that prompted me to write this post.
Currently India is facing a lot of internal problems. Especially after the recent declaration of Telangana as a separate state, many other regions have started vigorous protests to be declared as separate states. In this setup, Chennai Express talks about all Indians, from Leh to Kanyakumari being one and bound by love. There is even a song on this theme, that despite our difference we can still love each other.
I think this message is worth a post of my time and those of the readers. I will not give a rating for this movie because with all the hype that has been generated; you will find yourself watching this movie one way or the other.
To read about the movie plot and synopsis chick here.
To read an actual review of this movie chick here. (by Taran Adarsh)
How was your Chennai Express experience? Share your experiences, reviews and ratings with me. Leave a comment or write to me at deeptiamitsrivastava@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed are those of the author only and not of any organization with which the author is affiliated.
Images from:
Related articles
No comments:
Post a Comment