Remakes and plagiarism the world over

Its my privelige to have a guest column on my blog. The author of this blog...
a very dear friend of mine since I started bunking my classes and someone who has hated my choice of movies (or SRK movies all this while).
Le me introduce you to my buddy


Sunny Panpalia


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Before I go on writing abt what's on my mind, I would like to let yall know that I am an avid movie fan. I love watching movies, especially those in other languages - Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Thai, Chinese, etc - and obviously in addition to those American and Hindi Movies. What I have observed is that all of these do have their inspirations/adaptations from which they base their movie. the Hollywood movies have their books , as a matter of fact almost all good Hollywood movies are adaptations from books - try me think of some English movies u really liked -



Godfather

Shawshank Redemption,
Silence of the lambs,
Exorcist, the latest 21

and the list goes on and on. Also a lot of Hollywood movies especially the horror are inspired from Asian movies. The Japanese adapt some of their movies from Manga which basically are Japanese cartoons with adult themes. The Hindi movies take their inspiration from Hollywood movies. basically I hate it when people tell me that Hindi movies are all copied from Hollywood blockbusters, all I have to tell them is look at ur movies, they are copied (if I could use that work) from bestsellers. so what is difference ?


The difference my friend is in Royalty, the amount of money you have to pay to the authors is you have to use their book and adapt them into a movie. But they can afford it , with budgets of over hundreds of millions of dollars, they can afford to come forth and say look I have adapted from a movie and since I have such a lot of money at my disposal I can make a great movie with great locations, spend on publicity, etc and have my movie win the Oscars. that brings us to the Hindi cinema. we adapt movies from the west,but we do not have the budget to pay royalties. hence what we do is to twist the movie just slightly and call them an inspiration. that brings us to "Shaurya" ...the movie made from "Few Good Men" in which by the way Jack Nicholson rocked ... and many such other movies who the Hindi movie critics would say have been shamelessly copied from Hollywood flicks. to come extent I do agree , they have been copied from Hollywood ... but I have a different outlook to this


Firstly, why do Hindi movie directors put in their own sidetrack and spoil the movie. plain and simple if you adapt a movie from Hollywood stick to the plot and story line, that would at least make the movie interesting. take the example of Zinda, sanjay copied reel to reel from the Korean movie "old boy" the same story line , same characters, almost the same sets , same dumplings :) , the only thing he had to change was the ending and a little bit of the plot and that was because the Indian audiences are not ready for the plot that was actually "Old Boy".


And secondly, I don't see anything wrong in adapting a movie/novel/manga and putting it out for the audiences. reason - plain and simple, how many of us have seen a movie like Old Boy, or read a Godfather had it not been made into a movie. It just gives these classics a wider audience to view such great works. That said I also want to add that shamelessly copying such a creation and then calling it your own is sinful, I mean at least have the guts to say u have copied or "adapted" .. don't use words like inspired ... sarkar was nor "inspired" from godfather , it was godfather and thankfully RGV had the sense to have Amitabh play Don Corleone and Abhisekh Michael ... perfect star cast .. so was K.K. playing Sonny ... if this involves royalty issues then that's something that I wouldn't know or want to comment about.



Coming back to why this post was written in the first place "Shaurya" ...A good plot from Few Good Men .. spoiled because of bad acting, extremely poorly written dialogues, senseless sub plots and the snail like speed the movie moves baring the last 10 minutes .... the movie would have been much better if it were made on same lines as its original movie , it would have had a better impact . Alas neither or Hindi film makers not the Hollywood ones who remake greats like ring, shutter, eye, grudge and thousand other Asian movies would ever realize to not alter classics. Do remake them put please do not alter them, it ruins it for everybody , those who have watched/read the original and those who missed out on the original but after seeing the poor remake decide not to see the original.