Seshadri's Musings

I got to see these movies back-to-back this week!! While the former is a whacky movie, Photograph is a slow-moving movie. I saw the trailer of the movie “Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota” during Avengers or some other movie screening.   The concept is that the hero does not feel any pain in his body on being injured!!   He was thrown off a motorcycle when some chain snatchers tried to steal his mother’s necklace when they were coming back from the hospital after his birth, in a Sholay-inspired motorcycle!!   The trailer looked whacky and I was wondering if the wackiness could be carried off in the whole film. The DVD’s were out last week and I happened to see the movie this week.   It is a completely entertaining and a mind-blogging movie!!   It seems like a homage to old movies in a comedical way!!   Imagine fighting being done on the Kishore Kumar’s Nakhrewaali song!!   This scene is absolute gem in the movie!!   There are many references to Brul...

Nowadays, a lot of web series and direct-to-TV movies are being launched by Netflix, Amazon, Zee and others.   I have watched quite a lot of them.   I am writing below on some of them that I found to be of my liking.   Enjoy the blog!! The first film is linked to Sholay 😊 Can’t help it 😊 . The film is called The Sholay Girl! It is about the first stuntwoman, Reshma Pathan, in Indian cinema. She was the one who did the climax tonga stunts instead of Hema Malini, when she is being chased by Gabbar’s men and the tonga loses a wheel!!   She acted as herself in Rohit Shetty’s last Golmaal series movie in a 15-20 second role.   She has done lots of stunt scenes for Hema Malini and other actresses.   The movie is well made and is quite interesting to watch. Good clean cinema. Sacred Games was the first web series that I saw.   This was with my brother who was recovering from an operation in Jakarta, Indonesia!!   I was staying with him at th...

Sholay was released on 15 th August 1975.   From 30 th May to 15 th August, the Film trade magazine had an ad depicting one character from Sholay each week!!   And the final ad depicted the entire cast of the movie!! Sholay was the first movie to be released in 70mm in India.   During the premier, the 70mm print had still not reached the theatre as some bureaucrat sat on the print because has had not been given due importance!! The print was developed in London and was sent from there.   Sippys had to speak to the then Information & Broadcasting minister to get the prints out.   The initial premier was seen on 35mm print and the 70mm print was seen by very few people late at night.   Prakash Mehra was one of the viewers.   After watching the movie, he cursed himself as to why he had let go of this film!! Initially reports came in that unprecedented crowd was witnessed all across Bombay for the movie and they had not seen such a rush sin...

Second-last write-up on Sholay!!   Don’t worry, there is only one more blog left to write on this topic 😊 Feroz Khan’s “Khotey Sikkey” which came before Sholay also was a story where Feroz Khan hires 5 petty criminals to nab the dacoit Ajit!!   Joginder, another actor and director, complained that the story is similar to his “Bindiya aur Bandook”!!   The massacre of Thakur’s family was inspired by a similar scene in “Once upon a time in the West” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ptjc9Vono4 . Actual scene in Sholay can be viewed here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkDFAC2WbEs from 5:55 mark to 10:55mark!! Viru’s tank scene was inspired by a movie called “The Secret of Santa Vittoria” featuring Anthony Quinn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIdjUTa9yU . And the Sholay scene here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbZZecTFlW4 Viru’s tank scene was written by Javed Akhtar while driving to Bangalore airport from the shooting scene.   He then kept on writing the ...

Sholay was written in such a way that every character that you find in the movie leaves you with memories.   These author-backed characters acted as if the part was specially written for them only! A majority of them had a very small part in the movie, but thanks to the dialogues that they had to mouth, the have been heralded in fame!!   I have provided below some interesting tidbits of some of the characters from the movie below.   I hope you too would have the same enjoyment as I had in collating these!!   The sources are the same as my previous blogs. Once Viju Khote was walking on a road with his son.   Some people pointed out to him and began calling him as Kaalia, Kaalia.   The son got angry and told his father that he does not like that.   Viju Khote told him, because of Kaalia only we have refrigerators and TV’s in our home!! Without Kaalia, we would not have been where we are now!!   Viju Khote was immortalized by the dialogue –...

You will be surprised to know that Salim-Javed as well as RD Burman took inspirations from different sources to make this film.   Thanks to Internet now, we can actually find out from where all their inspirations came from!!   Of course, it still doesn’t matter!!   The fact is that Sholay is the greatest movie ever made!!    Some facts mentioned below have been sourced from the book “Written by Salim-Javed – The Story of Hindi Cinema’s Greatest Screenwriters” by Diptakirti Chaudhuri and the rest from Internet. Hariram Naii (Naii in Hindi means barber) was the name of the barber who used to come to Salim Khan’s house when he was a kid.   He used to come regularly and used to cut the hair of all the kids at the house at a discount.   When the character of a barber came in Sholay, he was aptly named Hariram Naii (Keshto Mukherjee) Salim Khan’s father was a police officer. At that time there was a particularly cruel story about a legendary dacoit ...

An Army officer’s family is massacred.  He remembers two junior officers who were court martialled.   They were rascals but also brave.   The retired officer decided to enlist them in his mission for revenge. With these 4 lines of story, somewhere in 1972-73, started the birth of a movie called Sholay, unarguably the best movie of all times, according to me 😊😊.   When it got released in 1975, it was announced as “The Greatest Star Cast Ever Assembled! The Greatest Story Ever Told” Apparently, the movie cost Rs 3 crores to make at that time and made Rs 25 crores for the Sippy family, during its run!!   In the current monetary terms, this turns out to be Rs 450 crores, only in Indian territory!!   And this does not include returns from re-releases for quite a number of times and the satellite rights!!   It was said that whenever the Sippy family required some money, they released Sholay again and again!!   And it ran to full-hous...