Synopsis:
Movie: Deewaar (The Wall)
Director: Yash Chopra
Notable Characters: Vijay Verma, Son, brother, fantastic criminal
Ravi Verma, Son, brother, police inspector, dainty-pansy-momma’s-boy
Momma Verma, Mommy
Anand Verma, Father
Leena, Cute girlfriend of Ravi, absolutely useless
Anita, Cute girlfriend of Vijay, sweet and kind
DISCLAIMER: Spoiler alert. This review will be riddled with them, not unlike how this movie was riddled with editing problems.
Roy: This movie begins with Anand, a mine worker with a lovely little family. But Anand is a union leader and is determined to get fair wages and working conditions for himself and the hundreds of mineworkers he has led on strike. A corrupt business man steals him family and threatens to kill them unless Anand continues with business as usual. He sells out his fellow workers and gives in. He is ostracized. His family is punished. Instead of… you know, being a man and taking care of them, he leaves them without an explanation. This leaves Momma, Vijay, and Ravi destitute and bullied by the community for the sins of the father. They move to Mumbai where Vijay and Momma work very poor jobs for a very meager living while Ravi excels in school. Soon the boys are all grown up and this sets the stage for the rest of the movie. Ravi is unemployed but Vijay works hard at the Mumbai docks. Soon Vijay rebels over having to pay a percentage to the Mumbai underground and finds himself rolling in cabbage as a criminal. Ravi eventually lands in the police academy and the brothers are on a collision course. Take it away Cody…
Review
Cody: Ok, not that I completely and totally plan to make this entire review about attacking Ravi, or something, but I need to say my two cents on this guy. His mother and brother work manual labor their entire lives to put his pansy-flowered-butt through school. We never see any thanks or even any real appreciation for what they have done. Before his girlfriend’s dad gift wraps him a job on the police force, he spends all his time complaining about not finding a job. Meanwhile, Vijay is down at the docks carrying giant bricks of whatever from one pile to another pile day in and day out. Ravi even gets a job offer from someone, and he turns it down to let some guy who was hours late have it. This is supposed to make him honorable and instill some sort of loyalty in my eyes?? I think not! Vijay would have literally killed to have that opportunity. Anyway, seeing as the title of the movie is “The Wall,” (as in: the wall between Ravi and Vijay) I figured it would be ok to start with a rant about these two brothers. For the rest of the review, I will absolutely not bring up how much of a sniveling brat Ravi is.….probably.
Roy: While Vijay is standing up for the working man and perfecting his amazing spider monkey kung fu style, Ravi is singing songs that A) we can’t understand because apparently subtitles don’t extend to the songs and B) drain every bit of testosterone out of the room. Seriously. I felt the need to do pushups and not shave for a week after watching Ravi sing to his girlfriend… twice. Did Vijay sing once in this movie? Nope. You know why? He’s too busy outsmarting rival gangs, using them to steal gold he promised to his boss, only to double cross them, take all the gold, and five million rupees from the rival gang while he was at it. Prancing around a park with no job and no prospects aren’t on his to-do list. He is too busy, you know, buying his mom a house.
Cody: A mom who openly admits she likes Vijay more than loser face Ravi! Shoot, I wasn’t supposed to go down this road again. Anyway, I have to say that overall, I enjoyed this film. For being a 1975 Bollywood flick, it does pretty well for itself. I think this is an excellent example of why we are partaking in this odyssey. There is absolutely no way we ever would have watched this movie if it weren’t for our book and our journey. I am glad that we saw this; I just wish the real man could have been the protagonist instead of the sugar plum fairy. Now back to nitpicking. Did this whole idea of a “wall” between the brothers (according to the dialogue, the wall is built of Ravi’s morals and stands as an impasse between himself and his criminal brother) feel a bit contrived to you? First of all, we all know the only thing Ravi cares about is skipping rope and singing teletubby songs. Second of all, he became a police officer approximately seven seconds before constructing this so called wall. Do his morals just appear out of thin air?
Roy: It absolutely felt contrived. As Ravi skipped…. literally skipped into his brother’s very sudden, way too expensive house for a family that has lived under a bridge most of their life, to tell them that he got accepted to the police academy he didn’t seem to care at all where it came from, just that it was “really nice!” He graduates, minces to his lady love, and then grows a fierce conscious? It almost felt like they created the title for the movie before writing the script and realized they had to work it in somehow.That being said, Peter Griffin would totally approve. But I agree. I liked this movie overall, I would have liked it much more if it tapped out at a runtime of 105 minutes as opposed to the exhausting 174 it actually was. Plus the editing was terrible. I’m not just talking jump cuts here. The sound effects rarely matched the action they were intended for, and Vijay once kicked the same door open twice in 3 seconds….. so Cody, how was the movie score?
Cody: Thats right ladies and gentleman, it’s time for Cody’s Music Score Moment, brought to you by bottled spray tan. “Bottled spray tan: why look human, when you can look like a basketball?” I actually really enjoyed parts of this score. It really all depends on how well you like foreign films. This score has India written all over it, and that is a flavor of music I can definitely enjoy from time to time. What needs to be mentioned though, is how atrociously awful those Bollywood songs were. Maybe I am spoiled because my first Bollywood experience was Slumdog Millionaire, which brags a fantastic soundtrack from start to finish. If you think it is unfair to judge music from 30 years ago based on a soundtrack from five years ago, then maybe you have been huffing too much spray tan, you degenerate.
Roy: Speaking of degenerates, did you see Ravi shoot some poor kid in the back because he stole some bread and was running from Police Inspector Nancy....uh I mean Ravi!? Literally told him to stop running or he’d shoot. Then… he actually shoots. The kid falls, Ravi walks up to him and slaps him in the back of the head and tells him that he only shot him in the leg (really!? looked like a back shot to me). While overall I enjoyed this movie, some of the stuff was absolutely ridiculous. Like Vijay ascending to the top of his criminal organization after only two jobs. Maybe we missed some things because of the culture difference, but America’s movies in the 70s at least made sense for the most part. Changing the H in Hollywood to a B doesn’t make it near as good.
Cody: Yeah, I know what you’re saying. They clearly didn’t have the budget to make sure this had continuity throughout. At least when Harmony Starbright shot his brother Vijay at the end, it was a clear kill shot. Well, by that I mean he obviously shot him in the back, the bullet wound was clearly shown to be in the arm, and then Vijay bled to death within a minute. See, ignore the middle part of that sentence, and all of it almost makes sense!
Roy: It’s clear we both really like Vijay and hoped that he got to live while the underwhelming Glitter Von-Sparkleton was the one to not make it…. OH MY GOODNESS, we almost ended this review without mentioning the weirdest part of the movie. When the Dad leaves the family he gets on a train and is intermittently shown throughout the next twenty years… on the same train. He eventually dies, twenty years after leaving his family… in the same type of clothes…. on the same train! Did this guy never get off the train!? Did it take a conductor twenty years to notice him!? Is there a fate worse than being banished to a train for all eternity!? This is seventh-level-of-hell stuff, people. *shudders*
Cody: I think we both know what is going on here. The trains started this uprising far before we imagined, Roy. They have been at this since 1975 at the very least! There is a train in India that once you get on, you never get back off. It is the train to nowhere. The train that eats people’s souls!
Roy: Too bad that Anand didn’t take Ravi with him when he got on.
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