peanutz454

Troy has had no critical acclaim. A lot of critics hated it (& I believe) for all the wrong reasons. They were looking for Homer's Iliad and Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, and that too in the same movie!! Critics expected to see a movie spanning 10 years of the war of Troy staying true to the story by Homer, even wanting the interference of the plethora of Greek Gods. Now which was the last movie to show a God, Christian or Greek or Zulu? I've seen exactly zero number of movies featuring a God character in a serious role, even prophet movies are few. Who wants to see Apollo and Zeus in a movie or Jupiter and Mars as TV program characters? The maximum TV/Cinema presence that God has got in western media is probably in The Simpsons of all things. God is acceptable only in comic movies like Bruce almighty. No heroic, or for that matter mischievous and deceiving or scheming Gods are acceptable in Cinema. Troy is not a stage production, it is a movie (Greek stage productions regularly had God magically appear save the day).

Great mythological stories do not translate into great movies. Troy is made more like a fictional account of a mythological story and not a historical event (all historical research on Troy is disputed.) I have never read Homer's Iliad and do not intend to. But I have read abridged versions of the story, even in Hindi (my mother tongue.) I knew about Achilles' heels, about the decision of Paris (not in movie), about Helen of Troy, and about the Wooden Horse. I knew almost enough to know most of the movie. The movie changed the story quite a bit and it must have offended those who wanted to see Homer's Iliad, this on the other hand was Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. If you have the ability to differentiate between the two you will love this movie.

Some complained about the way the movies made everything grandiose. About the lack of tension and the emphasis on heroics. About the lack of a feeling of a war, about computer generated soldiers. In many ways Troy was like Lord of the Rings in those respects. Ebert wanted this movie to be more like "The Alamo" a movie that has a rating of 5.9 on IMDb. If critics understand what fictionalised accounts of a mythological story are supposed to be like they would understand that we are not expected to look for reality in such a movie. Characters of such a movie are not supposed to be afraid of war, they are not realists they are romantics. Romanticism allows for married women to fall in love with a stranger, for Greek heroes to act like action figures, for men to go to war over women, for heroes to not kill princes early in the day. If you want to see a true war movie see Das Boot or Platoon, nothing to see here, move on. Troy is supposed to be about misplaced heroics like every mythological story. We love and accept mythological stories in there own universe due in part to their absurdities. This is a screen version of one such great story, minus (thankfully) the Gods.

So does this mean a mega budget movie like Troy can do no wrong. Yes it can, but this movie did not. Especially by not doing what critics wanted from it - exploration of human psychology inside a war zone. This was just an epic re-telling of beautiful story, and it succeeded in that.

They say Aandhi is based on the life of India's first woman Prime Minister, India's Iron Lady - Indira Gandhi. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. If it is, then Indira Gandhi should have been happy about the way she has been presented.

Indira Priyadarshani Gandhi was daughter of India's first Prime Minister, Nehru. She fell in love with Feroze Gandhi (a young politician born as Feroze Sopariwala) and they had two children (the younger of which went on the become the third Prime minister from the family). Their married life was not very successful, was it because of Indira's father's political ambitions (that Feroze a respected and righteous politicians interfered with) or because of some personal reasons is hard to guess, though several speculations do exist (especially from pro RSS historians who use any means to tarnish the name of the politically influential Gandhi family), and Feroze & Indira started living separately. Before he died Feroze had a heart attack, and Indira and he were re-united till his death a short time later.

There are parallels with Indira Gandhi's life in Aandhi. But mostly the story is very different. It is hard to imagine how Gulzar came out with a movie like Aandhi when Indira Gandhi had imposed an emergency in India during that time. If my memory serves me right I even heard it was banned for sometime.

The female protagonist Aarti Devi (Suchitrra Sen) is daughter of a politician and she falls in love with a Hotel Manager (Sanjeev Kumar). She does have a strong personality. There marriage is broken but that is about it (with respect to similarities).

I love the movie because of the strong performances by Sanjeev Kumar and Suchitra Sen and the direction of Gulzar. Gulzar's recent movies have been very politically opinionated but Aandhi even though it is set in a political setting is not much about about politics itself. Primarily it is about re-discovery of love in a broken marriage.

We travel back and forth in time to find about the past and present of the couple, we even find that they still have feeling for each other but it is the dirty political games and the interventionist attitude of the public and the press that forces them to face and brings out the truth about there lives.