Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Smoking-Ban in Films and impact on understated actors

Some years back I heard Ajay Devgan had become the pinup-boy for all bad actors.

Seems he started understated acting, in films like Company (and naturally, every film after it), and was hailed as great. You'd know what I'm talking about - 'understated' or 'intense' or 'brooding' acting, in common language means tilting your head and continuously lighting cigarettes and throwing them. I think the current ban on smoking on screen is a big setback for understated actors in this 'light'. I think the industry should form an understated actors union and attack this ban on smoking on film.

When I first heard of the ban, I thought it was a good idea - naturally we smoke because see it in films, perhaps we make love for the same reason. We should ban all scenes of killing, looting, bunking class, crossing roads and perhaps driving too. But now, in the 'light' of what I wrote in the previous para, I think we can reconsider that. How do these guys win awards if you ban smoking?

Will write sometime about understated dancing too - the Abhishek Bacchan innovation on similar lines for bad dancers. And Ramsu, we need to write on the Rap-strategy for bad / understated singers too, and how firang dancers moving around a poker-faced-unbathed-hero-mistaking-the microphone-for-a-lollypop create the illusion of the hero dancing.

And maybe a short discussion sometime on: if the hero-with-dark-glasses gets to lie-down on skimpily-dressed-women licking his face and sticking their hands in his unbuttoned shirt, who should - in a market-economy, pay whom. Should the directors be paying heroes for these scenes or vice-versa?

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