जोधा अकबर

Finally I finished watching Jodha Akbar in 3 days! watching 15-20 mins for the first two days before I would get to sleep, but on second day the music impressed me a lot and I could not wait to watch the entire movie.

What can I say now? Movie is a brave attempt on part of director. But again lack of knowledge and research was evident, as is the case for most of bollywood movies. There were tribals.. typically from North East dancing in the show put up for Akbar. What the hell were north eastern Indians doing there? I thought director thought to include them in the dance show to make it look grand!

But no doubts, the music was really imposing, particularly the background score. It was indeed AR Rehman music. And it had the grandeur needed for the royal story. It did remind me of mughal-e-azam. Of course one falls short of wards to describe this music. It's really nice to see some film makers and musicians do not shy away from having classical music. Effective use of sitar. But the lyrics were not great in most of songs.. Manmohana could have more touching lyrics, it was really straight forward colloquial of current times.

Most of the movie had scenes in day light. Some scenes look good in night. The dance show could have been put up in lamps and candle lights rather than in bright sun... I mean there were so much of tents pitched up around in that dance show.. it looked as if we were watching the sets themselves. Compare that too 'Mohe panghat pe' from Mughal-e-azam.

I guess image of one grand thing of past can just not be erased by any number of newer versions in the recent times. Like original ramananad sagar's ramayana is still fresh in our memories, and still looks much more real than all the clones made after that. Similarly, comparison of Jodha Akbar with K Asif's master piece is inevitable.
In terms of communal harmony, they could have shown more. In the end Amitabh bacchan says this was the story of Jodha Akbar. I am sure there could have been lot more to that. The movie in fact showed very few instances of their love.. most part was about war and politics. In the old movie.. we also saw Akbar celebrating Janmashtmi, can giving rides to bal gopal krishna.

But anyways , this was indeed different.