Unless the entire movie watching community of India has bladder control issues, I dare to bring about a motion to do away with Intermissions (a.k.a Intervals) in movies.
The film-maker goes through various dilemmas - how many songs before and after the intermission? Should I place the item song after the break so that people wait to watch it? Should the first half be longer than the second half? See, these important decisions take them away from concentrating on the actual f***ing story!
The formula for most Indian movies is that first half is breezy with lighter moments and enjoyable songs while the second half takes a serious note (yes, even in comedy movies) and the movie tries hard to have a engaging and illogical climax. Even the critics have to evaluate the movie in halves. Something that you'll see quite often in reviews is "the first half was great, the second was slow paced and predictable". I guess most film-makers exhaust their ideas while keeping the first half interesting and resort to mediocrity during the second half.
However, I think most film-makers spend more time deciding on the fonts, color, size and the animation of the words "Intermission" appearing on the screen. I'm pretty sure one of the side-kicks of the Director would go "Sir! This is the most innovative way of showing the word 'Intermission'! Will be the talk of the town!" while the producer scratches his head..
Obviously the economic need of the theater owners is what is still keeping this practice thriving. In India, they leave breaks even in Hollywood movies that are less than 90 minutes (which BTW is the normal running time for the first half of an Indian movie!) An opportunity for them up-sell popcorns & show more advertisements.
An alternative economic sense would be to make shorter movies (less than 2 hours) and run 6 shows in a day instead of 4 without changing the ticket price. It's as simple as that! Grab the money during the opening week before the bad word of mouth spreads and make your movies profitable. Hollywood adopted this model long ago and we still haven't learnt from them.
Obviously, the greatest advantage of Intermissions to the audience is that they get a chance to consider the first half as sunk cost and excuse themselves from the rest of the show rather than sit through a tortuous second half! And of course there's also the reason that I quoted in the first line of this post, which surely could be avoided through "pre movie urination" as Sheldon Cooper would have quoted it.
I believe that there is correlation between the concept of Intermissions and we Indians making lousy movies. Imagine a film-maker's thought process while writing the script. He/She has always to figure out where to place the interval and what plot twist to introduce before the interval to keep the people engaged while they unzip their flys in the loo or stand in the queue to puff themselves up with popcorns during the break. These breaks makes it increasingly difficult for film-makers to grab back the attention of the audience after a 10 minute break (not to mention the annoying advertisements and trailers-we-don't-care-about that are forced on the captive audience).
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| They don't show it anymore like this! |
The formula for most Indian movies is that first half is breezy with lighter moments and enjoyable songs while the second half takes a serious note (yes, even in comedy movies) and the movie tries hard to have a engaging and illogical climax. Even the critics have to evaluate the movie in halves. Something that you'll see quite often in reviews is "the first half was great, the second was slow paced and predictable". I guess most film-makers exhaust their ideas while keeping the first half interesting and resort to mediocrity during the second half.
However, I think most film-makers spend more time deciding on the fonts, color, size and the animation of the words "Intermission" appearing on the screen. I'm pretty sure one of the side-kicks of the Director would go "Sir! This is the most innovative way of showing the word 'Intermission'! Will be the talk of the town!" while the producer scratches his head..
Obviously the economic need of the theater owners is what is still keeping this practice thriving. In India, they leave breaks even in Hollywood movies that are less than 90 minutes (which BTW is the normal running time for the first half of an Indian movie!) An opportunity for them up-sell popcorns & show more advertisements.
An alternative economic sense would be to make shorter movies (less than 2 hours) and run 6 shows in a day instead of 4 without changing the ticket price. It's as simple as that! Grab the money during the opening week before the bad word of mouth spreads and make your movies profitable. Hollywood adopted this model long ago and we still haven't learnt from them.
Obviously, the greatest advantage of Intermissions to the audience is that they get a chance to consider the first half as sunk cost and excuse themselves from the rest of the show rather than sit through a tortuous second half! And of course there's also the reason that I quoted in the first line of this post, which surely could be avoided through "pre movie urination" as Sheldon Cooper would have quoted it.
well written...
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