Lights, Cameron, Action!

My wife is upset with James Cameron. She took off her 3D glasses after watching his magnum opus and glared at me. “I know all about the ten avatars of Lord Vishnu,” she said, “but I’ve never heard of this avatar!”

With a title straight out of our mythology, I guess she was expecting a devotional film that would undo the damage done earlier by Kamalhaasan’s Dasavatharam! “But Cameron got it all mixed up,” she ranted. “He’s got people with blue skin — the same skin tone as some of our gods! They even have a tail and leap across trees — like one of our gods! They ride giant birds — like one of our gods! But this is a mess-avatar!” I told her that Cameron is my God, who despite five divorces still creates strong female characters in his films!

While I marveled at Cameron’s visually stunning epic, my mother pointed out that the story was straight out of a Malayalam film! “This is Vietnam Colony,” she said. “Don’t you remember the one where Mohanlal is sent by a builder into a slum colony on a mission to become friends with its inhabitants and manipulate them into evacuating the prime property? Then our hero falls in love, has a change of heart and fights with the colony people against the builder? It’s the same story!” She was convinced Cameron pinched his plot from the decade-old Malayalam hit!

For a brief moment I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a Mallu sci-fi film — lush green Kerala instead of Cameron’s Pandora, lungi-clad aliens and a spaceship disguised as an arrack shop!

My wife or mother is not a critic. But everyone else in the world is! Last night I asked a friend of mine whether he enjoyed Cameron’s labour of love and he said, “I’m putting up my review on Facebook!”  Another buddy replied in two words: “Four stars!” Whatever happened to a simple audience reaction? I don’t want to hear my neighbor’s ratings or expert opinions on screenplay and film editing! But thanks to Facebook, Twitter and countless blogs, the world is full of unofficial movie critics.

As for Bollywood, it’s full of arrogance and wannabe Camerons. Ask a filmmaker about Avatar and the guy snaps, “Give me $250 million and even I can be a Cameron!” The idiot doesn’t realise that it takes a lot more than money to become King of the World!