Essay: An Excursion Through The Hindi Movies Of The '00s.

The '00s decade was a mixed one for the Hindi film industry. We saw hits, misses, torrid dramas finding a footing in an unforgiving industry and many, many retirees. And a few comebacks. The hits ranged from good to wowee and the misses ranged from, well, blech! to did I really pay for this. And who can forget Lagaan, the third Indian movie to get an Oscar nod. So, all in all, the decade did do us some good, judging from the caliber some filmmakers laid out in their oeuvres, but still it didn't end on a majestic note. Tsk, tsk. But we'll get to that later.

We started on a high, no doubt about it. Lagaan, Aushutosh Gowariker's absurdly entertaining epic, which revolved around a bunch of enthusiastic young men in a famine-affected village in the heart of rural India challenging a British constituency to a cricket match. If they win, they can evade the tax imposed on them. And if they don't, they'll pay treble the tax. A story that could've made a scream of a gag, you know. But Aamir Khan was at reins so I took it seriously. I had to. And, boy, did it come through! It brought the audiences at the cinema - me included - on their feet cheering, and I can't last remember a Hindi movie doing that. But we lost to Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land, a stunner of a war movie that wasn't about war. Lagaan was whiffed out and I couldn't argue, not after I saw Tanovic's vanquisher. Don't believe me? Check it out at your leisure.

Farhan Akhtar's Dil Chahta Hai glorified the urban India that had evolved covertly sometime in the late '90s, and had people talking and enthusing over it. An acutely observed drama that examined the friendship between three men, it benefited from a magnificently-written quip script by Akhtar, who was a major revelation, maybe the most significant of the decade. Dil Chahta Hai was a landmark film, possibly more important than Lagaan, and was certainly one that opened doors to free speech.

Anurag Kashyap, the rugged brainiac behind the surfacing feisty trend in the industry, proved his mettle as he had promised with his first real movie job - writing the script for Satya. His second feature Black Friday, after his debut Paanch which still remains unreleased - hopefully, not forgotten - was liberated after a long battle. Well-researched, well-detailed, it showed flashes of a promising, uncompromising filmmaker. That tag Kashyap lived up to. Still does.

Vishal Bharadwaj made his directorial debut with Makdee, a feature adapted from a fable, that went unnoticed. But he came back with Maqbool, a perturbing gangland drama that is, in my opinion, the second best crime film after Ram Gopal Varma's Satya. And it introduced one hell of an actor in Irfan Khan. Bharadwaj boasted of his artistry in Omkara and Kaminey too, but Maqbool's expertise cannot be topped. No way, sir, no way.

There's one movie that criminally escaped everyone's attention. That's Khosla Ka Ghosla, directed by a ballsy debutant, Dibakar Banerjee, who proved with his succeeding fleet of films why he's the biggest prevailing hope for Hindi cinema. I'll remember Khosla Ka Ghosla for it's impeccable script by Jaideep Sahni, who hasn't let me down as yet, the witty, loquacious dialogue backed by the swank detailing that defined Banerjee's style of filmmaking. Banerjee is undoubtedly one of the finest filmmakers the industry has nurtured in the past decade.

While some filmmakers addle with movies outside their comfort zone, few of them try making a likable bunch of them without steering clear of the contemporary style of storytelling. Rajkumar Hirani, the mustachioed master of the genre, proved it with Munnabhai M.B.B.S, his debut. Though I did enjoy it, I found its supposed sequel Lage Raho Munnabhai a far better film. Hirani sticks to his exegesis of Hindi cinema. He packs a substantial amount melodrama - sometimes overdoes it, aargh! - with genial characters who are funny without ever trying to be. And, as always, they go home happy so everyone goes home happy. Hirani knows what its like to have an enjoyable experience at the cinema. He may not always pitch cohesively-structured films but he sure as hell shows us a good time. Sometimes that's all you need, ain't it?

When I look at the whole picture, I don't see why I can't classify it as a good decade for the industry. And then, I see why I can't. I contradict myself. Sure, we had a few films that stood out and I've mentioned a few of them in this treatise, but how many of them have been gladly received by the general public? That precise impression gave the producers the idea of making, uh, films apparently, that would entice the audiences to walk into the theaters. So began an armada of godawful poppycock movies that sustained themselves on a paper-thin plot. They'd usually feature a protagonist that tries to catch the attention of a shy female while mouthing off the corniest lines one could imagine, snide humor in handfuls and an antagonist that popped out of a '90s cartoon. I can't imagine why anyone would want to put their money in a film that hyped to be that kind of snotty cinema but, well, the films found the darn money.

The last few years of the decade have been cataclysmic for the industry. We saw an uprising on highly commercialized cinema, which we now associate with the Hindi film industry, and the benighted industry now ostracizes movies having feeble audience connectedness and intellectually compelling plots. One example of this was Stanley Ka Dabba, the debacle that was one of the best movies of that year. Though I realize it released in 2011, Amole Gupte's miraculous film was indirectly rebuffed because of the obsession that jostled out many for the same reason.

So, I've given my views about what I think of the movies the Hindi film industry fostered in the '00s. I'd root for the talent that has emerged in the past decade but sadly I just can't say the same about the movies. If you yak about the variation, I'd say I wouldn't know about. I can't see it.

Review: Why Paul Greengrass' "United 93" is the best film of the first decade of the new century.

There have been good films, great films and films which were criminally ignored in the '00s. Though Paul Greengras' United 93 clutched a deserving Oscar nod for Best Director, and being one of my favorite films, I had to endure the scalding insult of answering the disparaging question, "United 93? What's that? Oh, is it, like, a football movie or something?"

Uh-uh. It's something else, you know, something that can't be put into words. Is it enjoyable? Not really. Is it, um, great? Absolutely. But yeah, not many people have heard about it. That's because it doesn't feature any known actors, it wasn't a film of a big, sweaty budget, but it was a film of such prodigious power that it stunned me to my very core. Oh, you'll see, you'll see what I mean when you watch it. That's something a small treatise like this won't do justice to. You can't read about United 93 to get an idea what's it like, you've got to watch it to know it.

So, I had my first encounter with Greengrass' United 93 while I was scanning through the winners of the 79th Academy Awards, which was a big event because, as most film-lovers might recall, Martin Scorsese overpowered his peers to win a long overdue Academy Award for Best Director. And when I saw his name being called out, it was a moment of deep joy for me. But there was Greengrass, the only nominated director that night whose product wasn't in contention for the top prize. I had to watch it because my conscience wouldn't have it otherwise. Little did I know what I was about to see could whiff out any movie vying for any prize on any night.

Concisely, United 93 chronicles the events of United Airlines Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked during the September 11 terrorist attacks, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when the passengers stirred up a surprise rebellion in the aboard flight. And when tackling a film that's based on true events, United 93 gets just about everything right. You've got the hand-held camera style of directing that's almost guerrilla, a way of reminding the audience that it could be passed off as a documentary too, you've got non-actors so that remind us that you don't always need actors to make a film experience endearing and you've got extemporized dialogue that makes the setting look so authentic. And you've got a lot of people playing themselves, most notably FAA operations manager Ben Sliney.

To tell you the truth, for most of its runtime I thought United 93 was spellbinding but not good enough to be ranked as one of the decade's finest, you know. That was until I saw the amount of filmmaking and emotions that Greengrass packed into the last half-hour, the thirty minutes of pure bliss that we are promised and denied so often. And I'm not lying when I'm saying that the last half-hour changed me as a person. Really. A piece of cinema so perfect that it's shattering. I couldn't remember the last time I had watched a film that had moved me so much. And when I finished it, I knew that United 93 wasn't just good, wasn't an experience to be had just once. It was different, a movie that knows what it wants from a director who knows what cinema is.

United 93 is a mammoth achievement, no less, a film that needs to be honored and cherished and watched. I can't tell you just how good it really is, because I don't know myself. My vocabulary shames me. And when a moment like this presents itself, you know the movie's a knockout. If you haven't already seen it, please do so. I can't seem to find a better film to recommend to you. Not in the '00s anyway.