Ooh Ah!

Oh yes, I loved my movie. The bummer of seeing something in the theater as opposed to DVD is that the next day when the urge strikes to watch it all over again, I have to wait six months. *Sigh.* I'm on a DVD-buying moratorium until the WIP is done anyway.

Now, I knew I was going to like Saawariya, but I was somewhat surprised that Quin liked it too. I had spent all week dropping little warnings, about how it was all filmed on sets and was going to be highly stylized, like Moulin Rouge only more so, which I was pretty sure wasn't going to be his sort of thing. And it did in fact feel like a play performed on the world's largest set, a 3D set where the audience could follow the actors through all the little nooks and crannies. Saying a movie felt like a play is usually a criticism, implying that the movie was too static and claustrophobic; that's not the sense of being like a play I mean. It was more like every scene was visually composed like a painter would block out an image. The people in the background were standing "just so", if you see what I mean. And the colors really were fantastic. I've had the soundtrack for a while now, so it was cool to see just how they staged all those songs (and was pleased that Rani got to picturize my favorite).

The theater we saw it at was one of the last multiplexes built before they started building the stadium-seating super-multiplexes. It's kind of sad, it was only state of the art for about five minutes and then it lost all of its patronage to the huge new place built down the road. Perhaps I'm overly sentimental of this particular theater; it was the one Quin and I spent our "honeymoon" at. (We couldn't afford to go anywhere, and I was still on a probationary period as a new hire at work and could get no time off beyond the normal weekend, so we spent the day after our wedding watching back to back movies: A Life Less Ordinary, Seven Years in Tibet, and The Devil's Advocate). It's a dollar theater now, playing a bunch of films like Ratatouille that are already out on DVD but apparently someone still wants to pay for the old, scratched film experience.

They also have one screen set aside for Hindi movies, for which they charge full price. I had no idea, I thought this just happened to be a foreign film they were showing for prestige value or something. If the crowd there on Saturday night was any indication, this is probably where they make most of their dough. They even had made over part of the concession stand to sell samosas instead of popcorn (and if we'd known that, we would've saved room; they smelled so good).

We were also the only ones in the crowd who actually needed the subtitles. Which is a cool way to watch a foreign film, in a crowd for whom it's no so foreign. There is an upside to not waiting for the DVD. They'll be playing Aaja Nachle later this month, the new one with Madhuri Dixit in it. I've already been poking my husband. Babysitter again, yes? Since the babysitter in question enjoys building Lego sets and watching old episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender just as much as our boys do, it's really a win-win situation. Two movies in a month, that's positively decadent.