I’m a die-hard fan of genre cinema.! Never once in my life, I entered a theater thinking –
“Okay. Here’s a shlockmeister trash film waiting in the queue to be rolled over & I’m goanna hate this work top to bottom!” pre & post becoming a film critic that is.
I might have had prejudices, which, let’s face it - every human being has but I’ve always dismantled my prejudices in a manner in which it doesn’t transform the shape of trenchant cynicism.
I don’t mind movies, when they turn out to be trash material. As the good ol’ film adage goes “Even the worst of trash movies communicate a passion and zest for film-making in a manner in which the self-indulgent best films couldn’t or Didn’t!”.
I endorse this theorem out-rightly.
In fact I have a flipside-ed theory which I want to lop out here … “Bad movies are bad movies when it starts to behave something besides a bad movie!”. Oh! Hell Yah!
What mostly annoys the hell out of me in such films is the attitude it tries to perpetuate on cinemascope.
If a Chennai Express starts to behave like a “Hangover” or a “Padosan!” or an “Andaaz Apna Apna”. Then you’ve problem. BIG PROBLEM.
Goofy trash movies must accept the fact that it’s goofy and that way it should endorse its goofiness without ever trying to do something silly.
If it does . You’re cheating the audience. Indian audiences, most of them, are intelligent in sniffing out which one’s a flawed movie and which ones aren’t if not the inherent ability to bifurcate the goods from the greats to the masterpieces. Well may be some of them have… But this is the general tendency.
When “Kites” and “Ra. One” tries to achieve something which they weren’t, they ended up falling wee bit short, for once making our audiences doubt the attitude and the execution of these films but not the ambition of men behind the scene(I presume).
I remember last year walking out of “Rohit Shetty’s” “Chennai Express” and saying to my elder brother – “Okay this is a typically over-the-top cum flimsy Shetty product. I didn’t like this film but I didn’t hate it either.!”
It’s got sporadic moments of mild entertainment aroused in the futile imagination of Mr. Shetty only and moreover it’s a blockbuster. I’ll leave it at that – a benefit of doubt for spinning the money web all too easily.
After all - No bad film can turn out to be a blockbuster. And unless I’ve just missed the point - Shetty is yet to make a film which is a commercial failure. There’s something in the guy. You got to give him credit for that.
It’s the films which are obscene, immoral and aesthetically aversive that makes me hate movies, and very few films which I had the bad fortune of watching have turned out to be that way.
Albeit unintentional -_ “Perfume: The Story Of a Murderer” is a film so aesthetically head-spinning that it makes human excrement into a perfume itself.!”
Always believed it’s the visual and the audio symmetry archetypes which decides the ultimate fate of a particular film so as to whether it’s watchable or not and hence I’ll rest my case shrewdly - This isn’t a bad film but a badly visualized film.
When the visuals on the screen turn out horribly unwatchable like this, either because of violent graphic or ham-handed photography, you’ll invariably avert the audience in you from the goings-on in the picture 9 times out of 10.
Making movies like “Perfume” requires tons of patience, bravado and imagination in the scripting front but! What good it does if the imaginary work of art enrolled on 70 mm puts off the very naivety out of you.
This is unethical. Immoral. Cynical film-making at its best.
Script seems like a dumbed down adaptation from some german novel & because of that neither the witless, tasteless, pile driving storytelling excesseses nor the excessively abysmal envisaging of the script - holds and caters your attention as if in a spell in Perfume.
It’s not the film-makers fault to show the gratuitous violence like thin water on the screen like this but the fault lies in the production front.
I felt the producers shouldn’t have converted this novel into a film. There’s no way in the world he would have made a “U” rated film out of this novel and there’s no way I would have enjoyed it either.
It’s appalling to see women get raped like this on screen, time after time, sequence after sequence, in a film which seems so blown out of proportions.
“Perfume” makes a last grade B-grade Hollywood slasher movie eats its heart out in utter despair. I don’t get it when people say they got disturbed by a Tarantinian epic as opposed to this cynical piece of a film.
This movie makes me cringe. No movie since “Hostel” and “Saw Movies” stemmed off such a skewed negative aversion in me.
In the 18th century aristocracy of France, Perfume is the story of John Baptiste played by Ben Whishaw, a notorious criminal who once possessed the gonzo skill of recognizing even the niche scents by scything down into its rudiments.
This is the story of how an abandoned son with a unique skill turned into an evil & notorious criminal.
The material is solid & fascinating, the story definitely had scope but the efficaciously overlong storytelling excesses that entertains style and graphic over content is what puts me off in this movie.
May be because of the way Frank Gribie captures its cynical frames in a manner in which I’d never seen it being captured. Or because of the way Ben Whishaw acted those sequences like a flesh and blood human being. I hated this film. Hated it through out its exaggerated 147 minute running time.!
These are perks of this film no doubt but what can you do if the film doesn’t go down well with the viewer in you.?
The film is done in mostly auto-focus with some outstanding frames and illustrations but those are the bits in this movie that can be watched on fast forward mode.
I won’t say don’t see this movie. But definitely keep this movie away from your kids for its got gratuitous violence. Plenty off them.
Did I like the film.? No . I didn’t. I’m not a depressed gonzo like Tom Tykwer to like such films as this one.
My rating.? A generous 2 out 5 for Perfume. It spits out such odour that you won’t even dare of tracing its source. What a shame.! What a shame.!