Rang de Basanti Rang de Basanti is a story that intertwines the story of revolutionaries of the Indian freedom movement to the impact it has on the youth that are at the receiving end of a corrupt governance. But whatever others say, to me it is a journey through pristine Rahman music, alongside some fantastic cinematography. The rest of the story comes unstuck.

The movie starts with an english journo, that comes to India, armed with her grandfather's diary to recapture the life of some of the revolutionaries. The grandfather's diary, more than admiring, is a sympathetic account of these revolutionaries, though the dude jailed and hanged them himself. Even though the journo is introduced as a very serious character, fast forward two scenes and she meets the lead role characters in a party doing the worst possible nautanki and decides these eye candies must play the role of these revolutionaries. That's the end of the journo and she turns into a eye candy herself. Her acting skills, if there be any, pale in comparison to any other in the cast. Kiran Kher does a wondeful job and Madhavan carries himself well in the supporting role.

Clearly Amir Khan doth not a student make. But get this! He is still one of the best actors in the movie. The movie relies on the working hypothesis that youthful indiscretion is a college behaviour and it is the only phase where people can be disillutioned. Why so? Can't working man of 40 be disillutioned and angry? they should watch fight club.

The flash backs to pre-independence story-track was done in an interesting way. The camera shots were undistracting in motion, the story rivets to the past era, but comes in a smooth transtition to the present each time. They show Atul Kulkarni and Kunal Kapoor in an escape scene from the british at the end of which they come to present meeting eye to eye and we see them grow closer as friends. The whole shot was neatly done.

The humour track is maintained right through the movie. Much annoying that it laces itself through even those rare moments of serious scripting that ties the movie to the apparent "message" of corruption in MiG-21 fighter plane deals.

The most wasteful piece of cinematic moment was when all end up protesting the death of the pilot Ajay (Madhavan). The "government" sends in some goonda police to clear the riot. The protest group was clearly much more than the collective 5 leads in the movie. The camera zooms in on the blows that fall on the 5, like they are holding the center stage. The whole moment of mob behaviour was lost. The camera should have stood back and absorbed the viewer into the scene.

The movie fails to integrate the hard issues into the movie as "Yuva" did. It does not hold the tight and focused narrative as "Dil Chahta hai" did. And both were equally entertaining. Pouring out more jokes does not make the movie any more entertaining. I think the director and script writer could have done better than this.

I didn't care much for the ending. The dialogues at the end of RdB were stereotypical. They could have just ended with them smiling and had a rolling script at the end as to what happened after. Nobody is going to care about it.

The movie's message is accidental. The primary seriousness and attention the script pays to issue of corruption is nothing more than mere homilies that were spouted in all movies through the 70's and 80's. So watch it for the music, cinematography and the beautiful shots, and Humour of course (it scores many points there) :)

PS: right before the movie starts, when they have "UTN presents" they have someone draw 3 lines of red blue and green with 3 of their fingers. The fingers were pretty darn long.  ¶ 12:11 AM