Black Friday - Notepad » meetu’s notepad

16th April 2007

Black Friday - Notepad

posted in Hindi Movies, Movie Notes, meetu |

This page has additional observations, other than the ones noted in the main review.

Quick Review

Is some good performances and a lot of technical finesse enough to make a good movie? I don’t think it is - for a movie that falls into the ‘reality’ genre. The content needs a lot more depth than this one had. Also, I just didn’t understand the purpose of the movie. Was it to tell people how bombs are made or to tell terrorists not to terrorise? I think such movies receive more attention than they deserve due to the controversy they create.

Rating: Watch if you have nothing better to do (Rating Scale)

See full review

Plot Summary

As the review mentions, the movie is not about one or two people, it is about the 1993 bomb blasts in Bombay. It narrates how Tiger Menon (Pawan Malhotra) supposedly organized the serial blasts. How he trained the actual operators and how he treated them after the job was done. It also tells you how the police got hold of key information.

What worked

The sound effects in combination with silence is used uniquely both in creating tension before the first blast and in adding to the shock value after the blast.
The one chase scene in a Mumbai slum is shot with finesse.

What didn’t

Note: This section simply lists the things that I did not like in this movie. This is not the overall impression about this movie. Please read the full review here

Acting of the few women in the movie - looked like no attention has been paid to them at all.
Dawood Ibrahim - The camera angles and background music given to his character were just plain out of place

Nitty-Gritty

This section lists things that I think are not important to the overall impact of the movie. In most cases, it could be explained away by something like, “we noticed the glitch after the scene was shot and there were schedule/budget issues and thus we could not re-shoot it”. I like giving the makers the benefit of doubt, but I am amused nevertheless. Hopefully, they will tickle you too.

This one just stood out - During the only chase sequence, there is one scene in an underground passage on one of Bombay’s railway stations. It was absolutely empty in broad daylight!

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 3:53 am and is filed under Hindi Movies, Movie Notes, meetu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On April 16th, 2007, Review - Black Friday » without giving the movie away… said:

[...] here to read what I scribbled on my notepad while watching this movie (what worked and what didn’t [...]

posted on April 16th, 2007 at 8:11 am

2 On March 13th, 2008, Pondy said:

About the acting of some women which uyou mentioned, if you are talking about the neighbours of Tiger Memon, then I think their portrayal was spot on. There are characters like that which I have seen. So, I’d rather say a great deal of attention was paid to the characters of these women. Such characters, though they exist in the real world, seldom get portrayed on the screen, because every director yearns his cinema to be full of ‘interesting’ characters. Anurag Kashyap could easily have even maybe let his assistant director handle the characters, and he too would have put ‘more detail’ into it, as you put it. I guess this is also a minimalistic style, and really appreciated it.

posted on March 13th, 2008 at 9:30 am