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« ROCK ON … and keep rocking

The Movie: Rock On

Producer: Ritesh Sidhwani, Farhan Akhtar |Writer, director: Abhishek Kapoor |

StarCast: Farhan Akhtar, Arjun Rampal, Purab Kolhi, Luke Kenny, Prachi Desai

Plot Preview:
The movie oscillates between the successful present and the happy past of ‘MAGIK’.
Magik is a band formed by the four protagonists in their early twenties, when they escaped the quarter age crisis by doing the thing they wanted to do.
The band that rocked the crowd and set the stage ablaze moved apart for self centric reasons to give some of its members a successful and ‘well settled life’: the life without a calling.
The story takes you across the split and merger of MAGIK with the magic of meaningful music combined with a coherent sense of direction.

USP of Rock On:

• Emphasis on minute real life details:
  The viewer is an intelligent being. He will be impressed by fantasy if he is looking forward to it. So if a film maker shows a series of impossible acts, the viewer is bound to loathe it unless, the movie is called “The Miracle’ or ‘Mission Impossible”.
  
  With Rock On, we finally have a rare Indian production that shows a guy playing an electric guitar without a piano/keyboard/acoustic guitar playing in the background. It is every actor’s fantasy to be a rock-star and hold a Kramer; but then you can’t do hip hop numbers holding that electric guitar.
  Farhan Akhtar indeed has a sense of detailing, which he exhibited in ‘Dil Chahta Hai’, his directorial debut, by manifesting a no nonsense , no fantasy story of three young men on the crossroads of life. With Luke Kenny on board, Rock On had to strike the perfect chord with the subject technicalities.
• Something to take back home:
  Rock On is about the youth too. It talks about a crossroad of life too. Yet, it was a totally new and refreshing experience. The movie focuses on a popular dilemma that everybody faces in the younger 20’s and 30’s. The one that gives us a choice of doing the thing that we want to do v/s the thing that we are expected to do. Life goes on either ways; success would come to you both ways too. The root of the dilemma is, was, and will always remain about happiness and satiation’. Rock On beautifully captures ‘the quest of the calling with the pursuit of happiness’ and puts it in front of you in a captivating manner.

  

• The Rock says:
  
  Rock on is a Bollywood flick and that too about a Rock Band. It is obvious that it would have several songs and, as per past trends, they would be wannabe rock tracks or rip offs.
  I am not a big music digger to guarantee their originality, but I can surely say the stuff was genuinely rock (formerly ‘the blues’) and in case my intuition counts they were far apart from the Indian rip-offs that we have been exposed to.

  The way this genre of music has been portrayed will do a lot of good to its image. It’ll break the myth that equates Rock n Roll to sex and drugs, and limits its domain to sub-genres like Death Metal, Heavy Metal etc. which are perceived as a portrayal of sheer noise for the uninitiated. The movie will help the junta identify the Indian rock scene and respect the genre as a source of meaningful lyrics and passionate music instead of head-banging and mosh pits.

• Silence is blissful:
  
  The adage has a lot to teach, especially to the Indian film directors. A complete lack of human and other artificial sounds including a background score adds a huge impact on scenes that are heavy on the emotional/senti side.
  The scene that features Joe (Arjun Rampal) sitting alone in his balcony with the guitar on his lap had only the sound of crickets playing at the back.
  This style of direction has been depicted in Dil Chahta Hai too. A few other directors like Nagesh Kuknoor have also deployed this fundamental of film making in their movies and has always been the differentiating factor.

The Verdict:

Two Time watch.
Rating: * * * * 1/2

Producer: Ritesh Sidhwani, Farhan Akhtar |Writer, director: Abhishek Kapoor |

StarCast: Farhan Akhtar, Arjun Rampal, Purab Kolhi, Luke Kenny, Prachi Desai

Image courtesy: wikipedia

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