Ghajini or how I shouldn’t have begun my new year
Ghajini is the sort of movie that makes you thank Aamir for doing only one movie a year. There are so many obvious lacunae in the plot (even for a straight forward revenge formula) that I wouldn’t even bother pointing them out - except for this one; because had they addressed it, the movie would have ended at least an hour in advance: Ghajini (the villian - played by Pradeep Rawat), after having killed a handful of his rivals with impunity, holds back from killing his archnemesis Sanjay Singhania (the hero - played by Aamir Khan) because he suspects that he’d get into some complications with police! The songs were an annoyance too and affected the flow of the story. And to top it all, the parts of the movie that were not flashbacks, had Aamir and Jia at their irritating best.
Miscellaneous points of interest (or may be not): There was a lot of (possibly unsolicited) Apple product placement - an old iMac (possibly G5) sat on Aamir’s desk. Then there were a couple of white MacBooks and a black MacBook for him when he was on the move. Even Pradeep Rawat had a first generation iPhone! I suspect that this particular product placement could be some deliberate poking-fun at Apple because Aamir is Samsung’s brand ambassador.
Then there was this shot where Aamir is summoned by Asin at one in the night so that she could hand him some money for treatment of his imaginary mother in the village. Aamir is wearing a dark (maroon?) shirt and standing with his back to the camera. If you look carefully, you can see a house-fly sitting on the shirt. And indeed in a second or two, it flies away.
Ah well, the film has been marketed extremely well and I’ll probably now be accused of not enjoying the movie because I was focussing on the minutae. Go ahead, ruin your 3 hours - but consider yourself forewarned! Meanwhile I’ll pretend that today never happened.