The film is Dead- Long Live the Hero

 A frenzy has been created by the media around Shah Rukh Khan and his 'Jawan.' Much before the release of the film in the theatre-- eyes hazy, heart satisfied, choked, and distrustful a new thought was stitched--to podcast the mind to show the nation is comfortable with these ugly films. This new brand of hero worship has slaughtered the cinema as an art. There is nothing new, disjointed, burly, artefact in this that is now being perfumed. These movies are made on incoherence, spicy, declared as relics which are glorified themes in movies.

'Jawan', 'Pathan', 'Chennai Express', 'Dabang', 'Three Idiots', 'PK', 'Raees', 'Ghajini',  etc are sculpted as art-dominating camps inhabiting the false spirit of Robin Hood vigilante pickpocketing the viewers' money.  They are just like weapon manufacturers who kill millions of people and pollute the environment but donate some money to NGOs to build hospitals. Female characters are completely sidelined. No film has been able to shun the testosterone trap. This is a very dark period for actresses in Bollywood just like dark ages of invaders.

Like Atlee's earlier movie 'Bigil' the gauchely dressed hero is surrounded by an army of scantily dressed women, the women deliver the traumatic flavour, and the hero thrashes it into catharsis and suddenly comes to terms with his past. The same hot dish is served cold in 'Jawan.'

Viewers walk out of the theatre with heavy heads and the feeling of seeing many old films stuffed into one. Scenes do not travel so much, as to jump into a different realm, a new sub-plot, another public topic, another bit of trauma alchemized as new feed. The flashback, a regularly copied tool in the films, dispensed toolkit, used one after another, presents the past as a mishmash. 'Pathan' failed to give secular credentials to the mess of Bollywood or a new boost to life.

Now, heroism is roaring in Bollywood with the Khan group. One of the many features is a celebration of their presence and over-acting. The action highlights endless quarks of punches and pulls. The setting dips into hideous, sour and over-drenched shades of insipidness. The joy is artificially created to charm the film hero, resisted and depicted.

However, the elements that pushed that heroism, like the unstable gallows of the storyline between the super-display of their muscle and velour. To travel through 'Jawan' or 'Pathan' is to bang about, the smoothness of the highway, slashed by the occurrence of car-sick speed breakers for a sick man. There is now a name for such films. It has become a type -- 'hero-worship'.

This hero-worship, mass cinema is a tasteless distillation of old 'masala cinema' an important variety of Indian cinema. According to famous film critic Rangan Bharadwaj, "these big highlights that would be built up have now become the highlights of the movie" -- 'the mass movie.'

Unresponsive to tale link, and character chain, the plot jumps the one listed vista to the next as if on a trampoline. The mass movie is exclusive to please the irrational fan's fidelity, devoid of any wise and tasteful pretence of being a thought-provoking film. A  "mass movie" cannot be considered a genre. Genre consists of the proper disposition of a film, its quality, and its tropes while these elements have been developed over time, through sublimity of a performer's inherent merit tricked as the taste of the audience, popcorn and cafeteria in hand, disregarding that is supposed to be very object being looked at.

The semantics do not express anything about the movie but only the collection and audience in mind--the mass, all recall. It is called by critics "post-modern" that is to deliver every postulation unlikely to disembowel the conviction we held about what a "movie is." It takes the proper design of cinemas and strikes it to a position where nobody can understand it.  It is almost impossible to accept 'Jawan' or 'Pathan' or "PK' a film because they have more foolhardy ideas--to demolish the very concept of cinema, raising themselves as a "mass movie" movie those are not movies. They are just assembling incongruous ideas.

This is an archetypal move in denigration. To view something in the theatre, the very idea of "art" -- in these cases, distorting the mass movie --- and to turn that thread into a genre, folds it into cinema because one can criticize a film and not a genre. Particularly if the genre is derivative from psychology of the drama, the aspirations, and desires of the 'common man', the "mass movie."

To cut the criticism of a film, the failure of the viewers to welcome it is now postured as your failure to take pleasure in a very exact genre. The onus is not on the producers but on the viewers. The big question is, can the makers handle the mass film? Nobody dares to say "yes."

Fake and phony titles are given to shallow acting like King, Shanshah, Dabang, Mr. Perfect, Khiladi Kumar, Chote Nawab etc. Most of such labels are bizarre and the viewers simply laugh. In the words of noted critic Hal Fostel, "an awkward term for a common move in criticism, the inflating of a characteristic into a criterion... adjectives becomes nouns and attributes becomes values,"  There is no film anymore, there is only fake stardom.