Ended up seeing Swades a day after HKA. What a load of crap Swades is. I mean you can make an unrealistic, mushy, chocolate-coated love story and that's perfectly fine because it serves a purpose in this world but a chocolate-coated social reform story is just ridiculous.
I wouldn't normally care but the general branding of Swades as 'good' cinema is just so irritating.
It's interesting to compare HKA with Swades. In some sense the two are about the same thing-idealistic people going out into the great backward open spaces to do good. (The NRI angle in Swades is just a marketing thing-HKA's Delhi is as far from its Bhojpur as Swades's village is from its Washington, DC.)
But the similarity ends there, and with a vengeance. HKA's woman from Delhi is raped by cops in a police station in remotest Bihar and the movie refuses to make us comfortable by bringing down any justice or revenge upon the rapists. In contrast, Swades' golden-hearted NRI manages to cure casteism by risklessly singing a song and showing the villagers an educational film about the stars above.
And why is this damn movie so long? I think Bollowood believes that any movie whose VCD release requires three disks automatically qualifies as an epic.
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