Taare Zameen Par- Shaandaar

Between meals, gifts and other festive things somehow managed to watch Taare Zameen Par.
In terms of art per se it isn’t as good as it is extolled to be but given the context, the subject of the movie, the endemic attitude where in it was made, it is exceptional. The sincerity of the effort is evident in every frame. Acting is superlative and can hold on its own on any level. The music works well with the story but during the first half I thought it was used a bit liberally, esp. the background scores, when silence would have been more powerful. Overall could have done with a bit of polishing but thats just a cringe by someone who has watched too many movies for his age. More importantly the bar has been raised high from the screens of bollywood and high enough to be a flagship of cinema for an international projector .

The movie reached its glorious peak, to me, when aamir and ishaan exchange their paintings and nod at each other, both of them moved from their depths to reach a sense of mutual regard and understanding which I am sure even the greatest of the cinema reviewers cant be able to reflect on paper. And that dear friends is what makes cinema, well at least to me. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most powerful scenes in world cinema I have seen for a while.

And finally, in terms of child or child centred cinema, probably, Taare Zameen Par might not sweep the world into a hanky as Cinema Paradiso did in late 80s but the story is not just of any typical child or childhood, it is a special story of a special boy. And for that effort all credit should go to the man who deserves every molecule of it.

Ladies and gentleman, please take off your hats for Mr Aamir Khan.
May be there are better cinema-men in India , but I have not seen one.


PS :

• I might have troubled a few of you for the Urdu word for splendid-- it is ali-shaan or more popularly shaandaar.
• Sometime back I had put up the post Cinema Child, this would the newer, edited version.
  
  
  Cinema Children
  

Byproduct of a movie conversation….

8 must watch movies on childhood, in this particular order…

~Les quatre cents coups, (400 blows)
François Truffaut, France


~Nuovo cinema Paradiso
Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy

~Pather Panchali (The song of the road)
Satyajit ray, India

~Zamani barayé masti asbha (The time for the Drunken horses)
Bahman Ghobadi, Iran

~Taare Zameen Par (Stars on Earth)
Aamir Khan, India

~Mitt liv som hund (My life as a dog)
Lasse Hallström, Sweden


~Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander)
Ingmar Bergman, Sweden


~Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s childhood)
Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia

The latter two are not exclusively childhood movies, but still make for child centred cinema.