Parineeta and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi!!

Two movies. Both set in sixties. Both quite good.

Parineeta: Vidya Balan is good actress, and rather ravishing protagonist! Saif is revelation; the dude from DCH and Hum Tum makes elegant transformation into sauve Bengali. Sanjay Dutt is a misfit in role. Rest of the cast is good enough, the songs are beautifully written and actually are picturized best. I will be a little vague in expressing my views, for I will love to do so only after people have watched it. Watch it you must, for in spite of its flaws, this is one of those movies that we will look at with pride when we get old;). The sixties are captured very well, romance is subtle and very ethnic, and colors and dresses are rich, flourishing, picturesque!

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi: Quite easily the best movie of this decade. Yes sir, I can say that with conviction. This is a story of three college students: a south India female, a son of a rich father, and a son of a freedom fighter idealist. Two guys are in love with the same girl. Ah! Don't worry, it is not simply a love triangle, but a story that progresses with lives of these people: the idealism of student movements, Naxalite movement, Emergency, corruption, and the complex romance of real lifes is captured as beautifully as can be. The movie is so real that I was kicking myself on having missed it so far. As a college student, I had firebrand ideas myself, that had then melted in the summer heat of 2000, when I trudged through slums in Delhi, trying to teach kids alphabet, and "seeing" from close quarter what reality had to offer. The gandhians, the wifes of IAS officers, rich kids bitten by social service bug, and sincerely honest and good people and officers: that movie captures so realistically are all part of complex ritual of Indian social disasters and changes: in my own pursuit I had encountered them too! The rediff review http://in.rediff.com/movies/2005/apr/15hazaaron.htm does a good jib of describing the movie!

The music of both the movies is great. Seeing both these movies convinces me that the Bollywood is still full of creative people. HKA surely is cinema at its expressive best. Watch it to see for yourself the grand drama of social revolution that many of us idealists dream, talk or write about. Both movies are serious cinema, hard hitting and deeper than usual masala stuff Bollywood serves so often (and I love masala and gossip and tea:)! Parineeta is good, not great, but good enough; HKA beats me: its too good; its great!!