Director Harish Shankar has defended his kind of cinema. Two years after the failure of Mr. Bachchan, he is yet to accept that the movie was dated.
Here is what the director said in a recent interview. "In Vijayawada, Simha had a better run than Christopher Nolan's Inception. I may have watched all the Netflix thrillers, Korean films, and put in tremendous amounts of research. At the end of the day, my audience is going to expect an item song from me," he suggested, adding that his audiences expect him to make commercial movies stuffed with music, comedy and dance numbers.
Pushpa 2 had an item song. Pushpa: The Rise had an item song. Baahubali: The Beginning had an item song. Why did the audience not get impatient with those songs? They didn't annoy the audience because those films had built a context around those songs, either through plot or characterization. In typical commercial entertainers, the scenes preceding item songs are lifeless and uncreative.
Nobody is really telling our commercial directors to junk action sequences, punchlines, and item songs. Nobody is asking them to make genius-level thrillers. The audience wants them to evolve new treatment styles within the commercial cinema mold. Prashanth Neel has done it. Sukumar has been able to crack it. SS Rajamouli has been a pro from the beginning. Lately, in Bollywood, Aditya Dhar has achieved it with Dhurandhar. Our commercial cinema needs a new kind of grammar. Our heroes need to be put in new worlds.
