Taare zameen par ...trial review

This is the first review and for that sake anything I am writing.
First the apology.

To make things clear, I am not a movie expert and neither I claim to watch even 1% of the movies produced in the world. But I believe that movies are creative expression of a director's ideas and views and everyone - the viewer, critic has the right to interpret and criticize it in his own way. The criticism from a movie reviewer may be more relevant only for the reason that the perspective he brings from watching more and different types of movies and not from the depth of analysis that he/she brings. The depth of analysis is always viewer dependent and its my option what are the criteria I want to judge the movie upon. And since I am a novice, the criteria may not be clearly defined and may not be defined at all.

What do I think of taare zameen par? The good part first... An original story in the maze of remakes and ripoffs from the hollywood or the near south cousin is a brave effort in itself. And to top it to make the movie on the plight of a dyslexic child and show it in a sensible way is a superlative effort. No praise for Amir Khan is big for even after being a superstar, he choose to act in these small and social message oriented movies. Acting wise, the kid is great but so are all kids . This is certainly an amazing fact that I have always found that the percentage of bad acting as a kid is much smaller than what is found in adult. May be the directors have a way to get the best out of people when they are innocent unaware of the trappings of the real world and the children are just there to have fun. Amir khan as usual is very good though he has a very small part to play.

On the story representation, the movie is good on the representation of so many grey characters right from the father, mother and brother of the troubled child. Its not like the stories of the earlier decades in bollywood when everyone was either a bad guy or a good guy. Lets not get confused by anti-hero which though represented criminal characters on the screen always were the good guys being there due to the exploiting society. Of course there are other examples but lets not get into that. In the story, the family is sympathetic to the child and is pushing the child to go ahead because that is what the best for the child also.

Now the bad apart, if Amir Khan gets a filmfare for best direction for this movie its no great surprise he has boycotted these awards for such a long time. Certainly there are big holes in the direction and story development and to be fair to Amir, it is expected. My first problem with this movie is the number of songs in the movie. I didn't count but it will be more than 25% of the movies. I can understand songs in an out and out entertainer like Om Shanthi Om but in a serious movie like this, the sequence is broken and so is the interest. I had this feeling that the songs were put in there because the director didn't have dialogs for the actors and may be the movie had to be made for at least more than 2 hours to make it suitable for distributors.

Another thing missing was the point in the story where Amir start giving special lessons to the child so that the child can get over his problems of writing and reading. I felt that those scenes could have been made more interesting using comic prop like in the earlier case the child does the multiplication of 3*9 to get 3. This point in the story shall have been the showpiece of the movie to show what is the difference between a good and a bad teacher. But that was not the case. And in the end, the child comes first to prove what was shown earlier in the movie was just bakwaas and the message goes that you have to be at top in any field to be recognizable. This I believe negates the basic motive of the movie.


Now what could have made the movie a classic. If the movie has not been about a dyslexic child but about the teaching profession as a whole in India. How the rote learning is given preference over creativity, how the system is full of bad teachers who are there without any behavioral training at all, how the craze is to do well in vocational courses like maths, commerce etc and forgot about the other unimportant subjects like English, history etc and how excessive competition is destroying the true essence of education which is learning. A story revolving around this would have been more relevant to the present society . Watching this movie, people will feel sympathetic towards that specific disease, but will continue pressurizing their kids to be at the top as their child is not dyslexic.