13B

(2009)**1/2

The premise of this Indian film is great. Manu and his family moved into a new apartment. For some reason they are unable to hang up the religious paintings in the prayer room. His mother watches soap operas constantly. She gets into this one soap opera and says how much better it is than any other. Manu start watching the soap and realizes it is mimicking his own life when the scenes on the soap start playing out for real. He becomes more and more unhinged trying to prevent all the bad things from happening to them. The final straw is when he sees himself on the tv crazed and about to murder his own family.

Yes we are all talking at once, hope you're enjoying those subtitles.

I won't say I dislike this film, I actually think it's quite brilliant in essence. There are three problems with it,  the first is the constantly swaying camera. I actually understand why they did it, it represents the instability of the situation. The more unstable he gets the more the camera sways. Just because I understand why they did it doesn't mean it didn't give me a headache. Now the swing camera and lightning going on outside may not have annoyed me if it weren't for having to read subtitles, which brings me to the second problem. Now I am not one of those people who despises subtitles, as a matter of fact most of the movies I've watched up to this point have been subtitled. The problem is with an Indian film there is so much dialogue, seriously these people never shut up. Three quarters of the film has them running around panicked and constantly blathering. The final issue I had with this film has to do with the couple of times it went Bollywood and they burst into song. It just took the whole film completely out of context.

Telemarketers!

 There is a single moment of pure genius when Manu picks up his phone and is very abrupt and annoyed with what is obviously a telemarketer. After being tortured by outsourced telemarketers for the entire summer I personally found this hilarious.