Guru

The best time to write a movie review and especially of a Hindi movie is just after you have seen it,so here am writing it for guru after the night show.Finally I managed to see a Hindi movie after a gap of two months,of course during the gap I saw more than 30 non-Hindi movies(non hindi counts English,German,Japanese,and italian),anyways lets talk about guru.

Guru:Guru is a drama quite faithfully inspired from the life of Dhirubhai Ambani and the fact that the movie has reached the mainstream makes it obvious that it is eulogising from the start but then Dhirubhai was a man who deserves it.

Good things first,its great to have a script that smells Indian and is not a foreign lift,not many tweaks, quite faithfully follows Dhirubhai's life right from his days of struggle back in Yemen(ofcourse dancing with Mallika Sherwat hardly shows struggle) to his tussle with Wadias and the media campaign against him led by Ramnath Goenka and his Indian Express.

Abhishek Bachchan is good, his wide grin comes very close to Dhirubhai's,he tries to imitate his dad's accent at times and is wonderfully successful at it,on the whole the elan of Gurukant Desai does give that feel of Dhirubhai Ambani.Mithun Chakraborty also gives a good performance. A.R Rahaman does churn out a few good numbers like the song that introduces Aishwarya Rai and the title number.

The final reference made to Gandhi has an important point that the laws made by the government are not always correct.It is widely known that our economic system had serious flaws pre liberalisation,license Raj was seriously detrimental.The fact that Dhirubhai Ambani was genius at tweaking it and many other numerous legislations doesn't entirely make him a hardcore sinner.Through his promotion of the equity cult he brought wealth to shareholders and that is a glaring truth.

Now the bad things,with a huge chunk of revenue coming from music sales and the fact that songs in films is a trademark of bollywood cinema and a necessity for its million viewers makes sure they can't ever be left out.But there placement,spacing and number can always be taken care of,two songs in less 10 minutes into film is not appealing at least to me.

Cinematography surely lacks,shots aren't that great,something that is a hallmark of great directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa.Goofs and anachronisms can be easily found, like disappearance of Guru's white hair during songs and its consequent reappearance.

But on whole some good performances and a fascinating storyline does favor Guru a watch.

Here some other articles related to Dhirubhai Ambani that find reference with the events depicted in the movie.

1.His famous Battles.
2.Another article by rediff on his life.