As you may have noticed, Aamir is getting a lot of buzz in the press. For example, Taran Adarsh writes

Films like Aamir are more for the discerning audience, for the thinking viewer. It’s a film that attacks your mind, rather than your heart. It’s a film that pricks your conscience.

Not one of the reviewers will tell you about all the pitfalls of this movie - its meaninglessness and the utterly retrograde politics it represents. About the politics first - the whole movie is pure Muslim bashing. It’s entire objective is to get you to see Muslims as dirty, filthy, uneducated, meat-eating paedophiles and druggies. Portraying Aamir as the “educated, moderate” Muslim only makes the contrast that much starker. It is true that Muslims are poor and uneducated. But so are Hindus. But oh, just you try making a film like this about the Hindus. The moral police will be out in force talking about hurt sentiments and what not. Yet, if Muslims protest it will all be oh, look at them, they’re so touchy.

Anyone with even the first glimmer of Marxist ideology will see the situation of the unwashed masses as a deliberate result of the policies of the establishment. It is class warfare and religion is just a tool of oppression. Looking for the reasons for terrorism in shady underworld dons is like looking for the reasons for cholera in a puddle of watery shit. It is purely symptomatic of repression, poverty and exploitation. Had the film carried such a radical message, it would then have been possible for the absurd plot to recede to the background as a purely narrative device to bring the bourgeois protagonist in touch with the proletariat, for the terrorist to then make the point that the real enemy is neither Hindu nor Muslim but lies in the corruption of the State and the greed of the elites. There was a point in the film where it almost went that way. I thought the director had set up a nice dialectic with the whole “aadmi apni kismat khud likhta hai” setup, but oh the waste…now, that would have been a film. As it is, Aaamir has a meaningless plot full of holes and an absurd ending and it has absolutely no sympathy for human beings that are victims of the great political games. It almost seems like someone else (cough…Anurag…cough..cough…Kashyap..) directed the film from about halfway through the first half (enough with the running behind the taxi already!!)

Is Nikhat Kazmi a Muslim? Can even she not see this film for what it is? What’s that paper she writes for again? And boy oh boy did she go out on a limb for RGV with this one…some excerpts for your reading pleasure

But like his father, he has the welfare of Maharashtra at his heart and is hell bent on giving his state the multi-national power project which the NRI business executive (Aishwarya Bachchan) would like to set up in India

His camera follows the angles it excels in, plastering the screen with extreme close-ups of his protagonists. Of course, it does help when the faces in full view are extremely emotive and reflect the myriad emotions of anger, pain, passion and revenge with a mere muscle flick.

It is too boring to review the whole movie. Pathetic depiction of the goons that pass for politicians around here. Can you imagine a film about a power project (we all know which one Ramu) without a single rupee note exchanging hands? The asslicking machine is already at warp5 captain….I cannae hold her no more….

Update: A discerning viewer pointed out the very insiduous assumption at work in the film i.e. that an educated Muslim will immediately seek to distance himself from the terrorists, which is to say that their anger is not justified. Is it not possible that an educated person will look back and say that yes, after decades of marginalisation, of persecution and of being terrorised their anger is indeed justified. That is not a possibility that is admitted. Like in a one-sided argument, the film never delves into the marginalisation and terrorisation of Muslims in India, even if only to reject this as a justification. The film seems to say that only lack of education is the reason behind their squalor and the terrorism in India, and in the same breath says that the onus to educate oneself lies with the individual, as though systems of control and subjugation of whoever, Muslims, dalits, etc. just do not exist, that there will never be the equality of opportunity without some semblance of equality in circumstances.