A detour from the mainstream hindi cinema? Maybe. Maybe not.

Yesterday I was cursing as to why did I have the privilege of watching Nagesh Kukunoor's latest flick 8x10 tasveer. The movie starts normally with Akshay showcasing his acrobatic antics as fast as Salman khan can remove his shirt but then in this movie AK also gets the opportunity to do some actual acting and he fares well. So bottom line is AK can act if he wants to and if the director wants him to but what can AK do if the director doesn't want to direct. I think thats what happens in the last 20 minutes of the film. It feels like some amateur who while trying to complete Beethoven's unfinished symphony totally totals it. It almost feels like Kukunoor for some sadistic reason decided to take one of the best suspenses in Hindi cinema and push it down the very cliff from which Akshay takes his fantastic leap at the start of the movie.

I think Nagesh Kukunoor went blank and he could never really figure out what to write for the climax. In my opinion he should have appointed Anurag Kashyap for the task . That would have been a cracker of a movie. Agreed that AKashyap is a highly self-indulgent film-maker but what 8x10 tasveer needed was a whacky/shocking/revelating climax and he seemed to fit the director's bill perfectly. Overall the 8x10 tasveer has a very good international feel to it. The scenery selection is excellent and the NRI characters look just right. As a counter-argument, Kukunoor did well to take the film into familiar Indian cinema grounds rather than taking a very abstract detour. So to sum up the movie is a decent effort that raises the technical bar of hindi movie making but lacks a good script and ends up in a banal climax.

If you haven't seen either DevD or "No Smoking" you should. They set foot into a totally new territory never before ventured by any Hindi movie director and kudos to Kashyap for making such movies. Of course, it takes a twisted mind to make one and yet another one to understand such movies but then Kashyap knows there are too many of these twisted minds around. For people who saw "No Smoking" and didn't get it please read Stephen King's Quitters Inc short story and if you still don't get, forget it you are the one of the few unlucky ones with an untwisted mind