Aamir (2008)
Most movies crave for hype. Aamir was released without an
y hype or real promotion, but it picked up purely on word-of-mouth publicity, which is probably the truest test of how good a movie is. But by the time I watched it, the movie had been so trumped up, it didn’t seem to be that good.
<digression> I’ve often heard people say mouth-to-mouth publicity instead of word-of-mouth, and I have without fail imagined lifeguards in red bikinis coming to rescue folks. Every time. </digression>
The actor is a revelation – one of those few actors to go from TeeVee to MooVee quite effortlessly – although I must confess I’ve never quite seen any of TV series. The characters are played quite brilliantly by all actors (mostly Marathi actors, which is a sad reflection on the current state of Marathi cinema. Again I must confess, I don’t watch it much 
). The story is quite standard but the plot is very nicely written (my English Lit. prof. must be so happy I finally understood the difference). Calling this movie a copy of Phonebooth is like saying The Thin Red line is a ripoff of Saving Private Ryan. The qawwaali in the movie is quite nice too.
And yet, the movie leaves you unsatisfied. Why? I explain with the help of my source of daily rozi-roti i.e. MS Excel.
| Fraction of Movie completed | Stage in the movie | Nice? (Normalised w.r.t. Initial Hype) |
| -0.2 | Initial Hype – Awesome! | 1 |
| 0 | Start (Missed first 10 minutes) |
0 |
| 0.2 | The first twist (Taxi scene) | 0.5 |
| 0.4 | The Dongri scene (filled with crap) | 0.7 |
| 0.6 | The tale of the two sisters | 0.8 |
| 0.8 | Retrieves bag (Refer Video) | 1.1 |
| 0.9 | Final twist in the bus | 1.3 |
| 0.95 | The slo-mo in the end | -0.1 |
| 1 | Fini | 0.7 |
In true analyst, here’s an overdose of the same information – but this time as a graph. 
Clearly, Average (0.667) < Hype (1). Hence proved.
I still give it 3 stars. And I do think that people should stop inserting redemption for kaum (community) in every movie with Muslim characters (e.g. Shaurya).
Ed: I’m not alone in the disappointment/ sense of being let down. PFC and J Ramanand concur too, apparently.
hmm.. nice analysis..
although i think that since you missed out on the start, the data point should have been out of the calculation and not be taken as a zero.. that might increase the average..
anirudh patil
June 25, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I thought so too- the movie doesnt seem to have too much of a point. The suitcase retrieval was the high point for me.
Net-net I am still glad I saw the movie though.
Amrita
June 28, 2008 at 11:31 am
Thanks for your link!
(perhaps you should add some cool timeline-style visualisations)
Use of quantitative measures (that too normalised) to describe reactions: nice!
Aamir – wish it’d been better. Next time.
As for ‘mouth to mouth’ publicity, I’m told it worked well for the movie ‘French Kiss’!
Ramanand
July 9, 2008 at 7:21 pm