The Ram Gopal Varma flick, 'PHOONK' comes from a banner called, ‘ OneMorethought Productions’ and I guess something seriously went wrong with the spellings; as it had to be ‘NoMoreThought Productions’.'Phoonk' is doing very well in the theaters, and the Telugu Version of it doing well too. RGV has all reasons to smile, and he has already made his plans for the sequels of this latest master piece.
RGV's 'Company' was pretty good and highly watchable though the plot was stolen from the movie 'Wannabe' and the score from the movie 'Payback', but 'Phoonk' turned out to be a real horror and the safe release and the successful running of it in our theaters raise serious questions.
Few of them are,
- What's our sensor board doing?
- Why do we find a movie like 'Phoonk' interesting?
- Where are we heading to?
RGV and his crew are happy in introducing the black magic to the world of Cinema. His Celebrations sound more like the bram stoker's rejoice of the 1890's when Dracula was released to the readers of the dreaded dark Victorian Era terrorising them to their spines. Hundreds of years passed and technology has grown cent fold and we are still ready to accept a movie like 'Phoonk'? (Question: if you can take 'Exorcist' and 'Omen' , cant you take 'Phoonk'? Answer : We Indian Cine goers, unlike our western counterparts, has got a nasty habit of getting confused with the reel and real life. One can easily see instances where our reel-heroes becoming the ministers of the state milking their reel image. )
It’s a horrible experience watching , a dreadfully dangerous piece of dirt like ''Phoonk' gets released easily in India and even getting re-made in to another languages. That too first into Telugu? is it because the Telugu intellectuality questionable in the south?
What's this movie all about?
Story line is very funny. Must be written by a school boy with the help of his great grand mother in her death bed.
A happy and successful Construction engineer is the Main Male character in the movie who happened to be a hard core Atheist. Plot unveils showing, how this character who denies even the very existence of God, fails miserably to the unexplainable power of black magic and evil forces and realizes that there is something in the world to which, rationality cannot be applied and ends up in accepting the divine power of Almighty and his religion. His metamorphosis is because of the evil worship and black magic of his enemies targeting his loving cute daughter. He tries his level best with modern science and psychiatry and fails in curing her as she was not infected by a virus but what she had was a 'Boot Sanchar' . Life of his daughter was important, so he goes for the counter magic against the black magic and finally saves his daughter killing the devil worshippers. Beautiful, indeed. And can he go free ,after killing two people for doing devil worship? He can , as this is India and we still live in the mindset of 17th century.
'Phoonk' has got a clean set of good men, good women and another set of evil brigade using black magic against the good. And a Divine intervention of an insane looking tantric saves the good men from the unholy setup. And the real villain is ,the central male character of the movie who dismisses the false belief, forcing everyone to think radically. When this guy ends up in counter magic against the black magic to save his daughter and eventually admit the power of god and his miraculous actions, the curtain falls.
So who lose? The radical thinking, Atheism, Science and Technology. All these loose to a half cut lemon and a bunch of green chillies and some weird sounding chantings.
'phoonk' has got all the ingredients of a typical 'desi bakthi' movie. An atheist protagonist, group of white sari clad theist women, evil men, evil women, holy men, holy women and as an Addition here, 'black magic' joins the party.There's one point in the movie where the kid who plays the younger sibling of the Kid who plays the lead role, asking his sister,
"why did the people scare when they saw lemon in the house ? whats in a lemon?"
and the innocent girl replies,
"what else 'Lime Juice! '"
and movie eventually proves that, there is something more than lime juice in a lemon.
Imagine how many growing brains will be polluted by this movie and contribute towards creating a idiotic new generation who believe in black magic, unusual powers of lemon and green chili?
Now; behind any crime, there have to be a motive and conspiracy.Here the motive is clear, RGV wanted some easy money with his pathetically gifted crew (Other than Sudip and couple of people who did the side roles, there were hardly any actor in the movie who could emote or behave easily. Expressions of the Female Villain played by Ashwini Kalsekar were not terrifying, as they were more like the behavior of a person in emergency, with no toilets in sight) and a school kid who scripts for him. I strongly doubt a conspiracy behind this too. who wants to promote black magic here in India other than the Saffron brigade and its holy warriors of Hindutva? Remember their hue and Cry about elevating Astrology to a post graduate Syllabus. Who ever it is, this is the curse of being an Indian. lets live this pain, and walk back as fast as possible until the true ‘Rama Rajya’ Comes.
