The movies are dead… long live the movies. The romance of going to the movie died a slow death when we all sat unremorsefully by its bedside peering into our tablets and smartphones. Whenever somebody asks me about the last movie I had watched, I throb in anguish and my heart breaks. For a movie fanatic like me, and I am sure for millions of others, the movie-going experience was dealt a fatal blow with the advent of the multiplex, the Internet and the smartphone. At least in India as it was in some of the other countries in the subcontinent, the single screen movie theatre was an exclusive world in itself.
As a gawky teenager growing up in Delhi in the late-1980s and early-1990s, one’s life veered from the 22-yard green to the 70-mm Cinemascope screen. In short, cricket and the movies drove life. From catching the early morning Radio Australia Test Match commentary to taking in the final title of The End with a heavy heart at the movie hall, those were the days of simple pleasures. A sublime Richie Benaud would lead us past a lazy morning as a fiery Bachchan took over towards late evening as we sat wide-eyed staring as his facial sinews contorted, delivering monologues that had us clapping and cheering in the rear and upper stalls. We lived and breathed those king-sized movie moments. More importantly, we invested so much emotionally in both these life-nourishing art forms.
Going for a movie was an event in itself, carefully planned and most often dexterously orchestrated. If it was an Amitabh Bachchan or Sunny Deol-starrer then we had to book tickets a week in advance. Any idea we had then of a movie came from the humungous hand-crafted multi-coloured hoarding of the impending release housed outside the cinema. One of them near the neighbourhood precinct meant multiple rounds of cycling taking in different scenes splashed across the hoarding and trying to fit it in with one’s own version of the story spinning in one’s head.
We would have a tale to tell of the advance booking experience itself, of how the guy at the ticket counter boasted of knowing what would happen to your hero in the end or the glee on the person’s face walking away brandishing his prized yellow, violet, pink or blue-coloured tickets to everyone else.
Waiting for those several days before the movie, staring at the tickets to see if the date that was stamped in blue had not worn off, needed a lot of patience. We had loads of it back then.
The feeling of accomplishment as one slinked into the hard seats (which were good for one’s back compared to the soft, cushioned ones of today) at the movie hall was awesome. The struggle leading up to that moment when the screen spluttered and crackled with the censor certificate was suddenly worth it, amid yells and hoots and sighs of disappointment or elation depending on the number of life-sustaining reels the movie would have.
At school the early bird who had the luck to catch the latest movie was a mini-institution in his or her own right. They were the stars of the week, till someone else managed to watch it. The story-telling would go on for days with enterprising bits added to intensify an otherwise lame story line, notably to maintain the story-teller’s fan following.
My interest in Hindi movies (not Bollywood, sorry) those days stemmed from the small pictographic advertisements that appeared randomly in weekend newspapers. The priority on a Sunday morning was to collect the loose change and zip across to the footpath newspaper vendor to get the massive weekend issue of a newspaper. My brother and I only needed the inspiration of the graphic adverts to spin off our own home-made productions albeit with our favourite movie stars. We even had albums made out of them that we pored over more often than our schoolbooks.
Today a movie is done to death months before it is released. Its story is no secret thanks to YouTube and endless discussions on news channels. It is born, celebrated, crucified and buried in the blink of an eye. Its obituary is written across the social media landscape in a span of 24 hours or less. A multiplex with so many distractions is also where you can catch a flick nowadays.
As Mani Ratnam said recently, it is both heart-breaking and horrifying to see movies being watched, or shall we say consumed, on tablets and smartphones. I empathise with him.
anandmatthew@gmail.com
