Topic started by Amitabh (@ proxy1.bur.adelphia.net) on Sun Jul 22 15:01:34 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

By now I am guessing a huge mass of Indian population has already seen these two movies. There was a lot of hype generated about both movies, both movies are in pre independence era, both got high raves from critics, both have been hugely successful.

While GADAR has been a crazy hit in India and is earning better revenues than LAGAAN, but in overseas LAGAAN has been a mass hit and had already charted in UK Top 10 and USA Top 20.

What do you think about the two movies? Which one do you think is a better movie? Why?

Responses:

• Old responses
  
• From: Munish Sharma (@ transfire.txc.com) on: Sat Sep 22 21:01:03
  
  Lagaan is the most fuddu film I ever saw.
  Sorry, but the film is running only because of Aamir Khan's name. Gadar on the other hand appealed to me the most awesome film ever made in Bollywood... what if Sunny Deol is shown a macho man... Matter of fact, Jatts of Punjab were and are macho in their real lives, Regarding tackling Pakistan's army, its shown in the movie how he daring he is, and how he does it, in all clarity... and he's not able to come back to India himself, but he is successful when Amrish Puri realizes his mistake !
  Overall Gadar is a superb film !! Much close to reality.... Lagaan on the other hand, is Aamir Khan's profit project where he's used his name to show that fuddu cricket match and tried to befooled the public, Matter of fact, many got befooled actually, with due respect to his name.
  
  
• From: Sager (@ 209.208.244.98) on: Wed Sep 26 14:51:00
  
  In a country where cricket sucks public blood like a lingering vampire, it wasn't surprising to see masses going berserk over a fake dhoti-clad Indian team beating British empire in a highly configured/manipulated manner. When was the last time an Indian batsman scored a SIX on last ball to win a cricket match? I can remember Javed Miandad if I extend my memory and I can also precisely remember how greatly Indians were 'excited' when he cracked that last ball sixer.
  For music, it was really amusing to see 18th century starving villagers dancing on 21st century beats/lyrics. Some authenticity might have helped.
  Anyway, in a country where sexually deprived people stick to their TV's for five consecutive days for a Test match looking out for orgasmic experience all along, I for one wasn't surprised to see them going nuts left right and center for a ridiculous cricket match fabricated to suit their needs.
  
  Here's another analysis for Gadar on Hindustan Times.
  http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/050801/detfea03.asp
  
  Gadar: The potboiler’s revenge
  Poonam Saxena
  New Delhi
  
  Balwant Singh has been seeing Gadar — Ek Prem Katha at Lily cinema in Bhopal ever since the film released on June 15. Often, he sees not one or two, but three shows a day. The 80-year-old Sikh, who witnessed Partition, had himself removed bodies from the corpse-laden train that came to Amritsar from Pakistan in 1947.
  
  Balwant Singh is only one among the constantly-swelling tribe of viewers who have contributed to making Gadar one of the most staggeringly successful films in the history of Hindi cinema. In some parts of the country, like Delhi, UP and Punjab, the film has outstripped the performance of the biggest hit to date — Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun (HAHK). And it may even snatch the all-India crown from Barjatya’s diabetic ode to the happy, undivided Hindu family. Gadar too celebrates the family — a husband, wife and child — but not in the Never-Never land of HAHK. In Gadar, the husband is a Jat, the wife is Muslim, and the two are brutally torn apart by the hatred and bloodshed of Partition.
  
  It was a project that should have bombed. Not only was the producer (Zee TV) a new entrant in the big-budget Hindi film market, it also wanted to sign agreements with everyone who worked for the film and pay them by cheque. In an industry where legal documents are regarded with same suspicion as hand grenades, and money transactions are routinely made in black, this was remarkably novel, even audacious. The director was Anil Sharma, remembered not for his successful films like Shraddhanjali and Hukumat, but for his recent undistinguished potboilers like Tehelka and Maharaja. The hero was Sunny Deol, whose market value was zero after flops like Dillagi and Champion. The heroine was a rank newcomer, Amisha Patel, who hadn’t yet signed Kaho Naa Pyar Hai.
  
  Most dangerous of all, the story was not a contemporary designer urban romance/sweet family saga, the preferred flavour of the last 10 years. Gadar was a violent, searing tale of love and separation, set in 1947. But Nittin Keni, the Zee producer who masterminded the whole project, was unwavering in his conviction that this was what he wanted. “It took me three months to finalise just the story,” says Keni, who earlier worked with Zee as its first Executive President, and later as CEO of Zee Cinema. “It’s a real story which finds a one-para mention in Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight. Manto also wrote about it. Then later it was made into a film, Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Buta Singh. For me, the story was just a take-off point. Gadar is completely fictional.”
  
  The film is the story of a Jat truck driver, Tara Singh, who is in love with Sakina, an upper class Muslim girl. Sakina’s family decides to leave for Pakistan, but Sakina gets left behind in India. Singh rescues Sakina from a murderous Hindu mob by marrying her. The two settle down to domestic bliss. Sakina thinks her entire family has been killed, but when she discovers that they are alive and well in Pakistan, she journeys to meet them. Once across the border, her family — now India-hating Pakistanis — refuses to let her go back. But they have reckoned without the lion-hearted, one-man army Tara Singh who, along with his son, crosses over to Pakistan and brings Sakina home, after taking on what seems like the entire military might of Pakistan.
  
  The film, which was launched in May ’99, took two years to make — two arduous years of shooting on location at Lucknow, Amritsar, Pathankot, Ferozpur, Simla, Dalhousie and Bikaner. The uncontrollable crowds in Punjab — where Sunny puttar is loved to distraction — were a nightmare. In Lucknow, the unit was not allowed to shoot in the Imambara.
  
  Meanwhile, there was the period look to work on. Says Keni, “We did a lot of research. We looked at the films of the period to get an insight into the lifestyle, hairstyles, costumes, nazakat.” For the opening sequence and the climax, Keni hauled two steam engines all the way from the Rail Museum in Delhi to Amritsar and Bikaner. The beginning of the film shows the arrival of the train which came from Lahore to Amritsar, full of dead bodies, and this sequence — perhaps shown for the first time on 70mm with such disturbing realism — was shot on the same platform of Amritsar station where such a train had come in 1947.
  
  Gadar cost Keni Rs 18.5 crore. But when the time came for him to sell the film to distributors, he found himself with his back to the wall. Distributors were offering him just Rs 1.5 crore per territory (there are variousfilm territories and each has a distributor: like Bombay, Delhi-UP, East Punjab, Bengal, C.P.-Berar, C.I., Rajasthan, Bihar-Nepal, Orissa-Assam and South). If he’d agreed, he would have been heavily in the red. So Keni did something quite unprecedented: he actually showed his film to distributors, convinced that once they saw it, they would like it. And he stuck to his price: Rs 3 crore per territory. The gamble worked. Says Manpreet Chaddha, who picked up Gadar for Delhi-UP, “I found the film very touching, and I had a feeling it would do well.”
  
  It did. Chaddha initially released 63 prints in Delhi-UP. Today, the number has gone up to 84. Ask him about any records the film has broken in his territory and he answers simply, “It has broken all previous records in all the theatres.”
  
  A film becomes a big hit only when audiences go to see it again and again. And for Gadar, such stories abound. For instance, Chaddha (who himself has seen the film at least 20 times), went to Swaran cinema in Delhi where he met a man who had seen the film 38 times! The Punjab distributor, Manohar Lal, says his territory has never seen a hit of this dimension before. “People who haven’t come to theatres to see films for years have been coming to see Gadar,” says Lal, an observation that is echoed by almost the entire trade. “Old men, who witnessed Partition, have been coming, often bringing their sons, to tell them that see, this is what happened,” he says.
  
  For that 1947 generation, seeing Gadar is a kind of catharsis, a re-living of the horror and terror, but from the comparatively safe vantage point of the year 2001. Points out Chandrika Parmar, who is working on an ambitious Partition project (collecting oral narratives from people who were witnesses/ victims/ perpetrators of the carnage) at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, “For 50 years, there has been a silence on Partition. It has taken that long before people have started studying it, talking about it.” According to Parmar, the generation that suffered Partition hasn’t spoken about it because they always felt that only those who had gone through the trauma would be able to understand what happened. “It is information shared only among those who know,” she says. The Partition generation needed the distance of these 50 years before they could re-live their trauma, or share it with their children. “This is their last chance really,” adds Parmar. “That generation will soon be gone. And they know that.”
  
  But the film has obviously appealed to every kind of audience, not just those viewers who lived through Partition. Gadar is that rarity: a universal hit, which is doing equally well in metros and small interior towns, all over India. Analyses Komal Nahta, editor of the weekly trade journal, Film Information, “It is bigger than all the hits of the last few years — Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Dil To Pagal Hai, Raja Hindustani. It has that deadly combination: action plus emotion. Women are going to see the film in droves because they empathise with the deep husband-wife emotions in Gadar, while the men love the tough, fearless character of Tara Singh. And Sunny’s high-powered, patriotic dialogues hit the audiences like bolts of lightning.” As filmmaker JP Dutta, who cast Sunny as a heroic Army officer in his hit war film, Border, says, “Indian audiences love Pakistan-bashing. And Sunny is a very convincing actor. There is a lot of fire and strength in his eyes.” Says Keni simply, “Sunny was my first and last choice. No one else could have carried off a larger-than-life, macho role like that.”
  
  One week after the film’s release, Gadar ran into controversy. Certain sections of Muslims felt it was insulting to them; even liberal Muslim voices like Shabana Azmi called the film provocative. The controversy blazed for a few days and then died down. Did it assist the film in its successful march forward? “Maybe five per cent,” says Nahta dismissively. “The fact is, the film was a success from the first day, first show. It didn’t need the controversy to make it a hit.” As for the liberal opinion that the film is anti-Muslim, they might be surprised to discover that Gadar is doing roaring business in Muslim-dominated centers like Moradabad, Aligarh and Lucknow. Says Syed Mohammed, who runs Satyam cinema in Moradabad, “I have played many hit films in my theatre, but never have I played as big a hit as Gadar. The Muslim audience loves the film, they are coming to see it again and again. Gadar is anti-Pakistan, not anti-Muslim.”
  
  The earthy flavour of the film is being seen as another major plus point. Says director Anil Sharma, “I myself am a small-town man from Mathura in UP. I made my film for everyone. Unfortunately, these days, people are making films for an overseas audience, or for the big cities in India. They are happy if their film runs from Churchgate to Borivili. But unless your film doesn’t work in the small towns of India, it can never become a big hit. Any Hindustani who sees my film can identify with it. It has that rooted-in-the-soil flavour.” Sharma’s son, Uttkarsh, played Tara Singh and Sakina’s son, Jeete, in the film. And the director can never forget the experience of directing his own son. “We would have to wake him up at 2 a.m. in the biting winter cold for a shot,” he recalls. “It would break my heart. For the climax, Sunny runs with him on top of a moving train. At one moment, Sunny slipped, but then regained his balance. In those 30 seconds, I felt as if my life had slipped out of me. I will never forget the sacrifices my family made for this film.” Sharma is a man steeped in mainstream cinema. Sophisticated critics have found Gadar melodramatic and crude. But the film is true to its genre — it is hardcore commercial cinema at its best. Says Keni, “I wanted to make a commercial classic and I think I have succeeded at least 50 per cent.” Keni calls Gadar a “producer’s vision”. According to him, “It is not a ‘treatment’ film. It is a film powered by its content.”
  
  In business terms, the success of Gadar has brought renewed optimism to the film trade, which was reeling under a spate of flops. “Industry mein nayi jaan aa gayi hai, (A new life has come into the industry),” says filmmaker Guddu Dhanoa who is currently working on an actioner, Jaal — The Trap, with Sunny. As Keni points out, “The crores that will be generated with the success of Gadar will go back into making more films. It is a snowball effect.”
  
  But the triumph of Gadar, along with the relatively more modest success of Aamir Khan’s Lagaan, which premiered on the same day, doesn’t bode well for all the soppy love stories that are in the Bollywood dream factory pipeline. Just as a certain kind of film — identified with the brooding, justice-seeking hero, played by Amitabh Bachchan — dominated the late Seventies and Eighties; similarly the Nineties have been the era of unabashedly escapist romance. The big hits of the last ten years have been bubblegum love stories, featuring affluent, well-fed and beautiful young people, dancing in Switzerland and Austria, whose worlds are untouched by anything as distasteful as poverty or street violence.
  
  But by giving the thumbs-up to a raw, disturbing film like Gadar, audiences seem to be sending a signal to the film studios of Mumbai: They are tired of flimsy, enervating, rich-boy-loves-rich-girl love stories. It is time to bring real drama, passion, blood-and-guts, uncomfortable themes back to the big screen. Says Nahta, “The message that audiences are sending is simple: Formula films don’t work. Filmmakers must always have the courage to do something new. We all want to see a good story.”
  
  And perhaps it is also time to make the cross-over from the traditional, disorganized way of making films to a more professional system. Says Keni, “I was producing the film for a public limited company which has to answer its shareholders. That’s why there was transparency. I didn’t realize I could be setting a trend. But if filmmakers want to avail of institutional finance, they have to work like this. There’s no other option.” Keni shies away from stating that Gadar is a landmark film. “That sounds too pompous,” he says wryly. But the fact remains that such big box office hits are never by chance or coincidence. They invariably reflect a subterranean churning, a shift in audience tastes. Smart filmmakers will see the writing on the wall. As for the rest, their future lies on Flop Street.
  
  
  
• From: ram (@ h00e09875741e.ne.mediaone.net) on: Tue Feb 19 03:17:02
  
  how many crores lagaan collected totally
  
  
• From: ram (@ h00e09875741e.ne.mediaone.net) on: Tue Feb 19 03:17:13
  
  how many crores lagaan collected totally
  
  
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