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Post by rose on Feb 20, 2014 3:29:37 GMT
What the title says, let's talk about how stars are dealing with their aging careers. For men I'd say 15 years plus and women 10 years plus. Those numbers might seem close as men can work The Hero role into their 40s BUT I'm taking into account that it normally takes them until their late 20s to make it big. The women usually start their teens or early 20s.
So you do you think is handling well, who do you think is handling it poorly?
I think the best, basically by sheer luck, is Salman Khan. He's the Hindi Masala Southie Hero, (*cough* withoutthedancingskills) but he's still got the box office and he doesn't try and play 20 year olds. He's made it work.
Then there's the rest of the Khans. And some actresses like Kareena Kapoor and Rani Mukerji.
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Post by elizabennet on Feb 20, 2014 7:47:14 GMT
I think the actor who best handled aging is Aamir. In some films by simply refusing not to and making it work and in some films with his usual great performances. I don't remember any of his films doing bad BO except Mangal Pandey (I liked it). He was excellent in the Southie Masala adaptation (and probably have started that trend if I'm not mistaken).
Well he is a bona fide oldie but I think Amitabh Bachchan has aged greatly. His acting is excellent and he still looks good too.
Rani is my favorite Indian actress and I too think she is doing well (once she got out of YRF). I especially liked Aiyyaa and NOKJ. She was also great in Talaash but her role was not the centre one there. Which brings me to Kareena and I agree with you there too. Actually she acts better now imho.
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on Feb 20, 2014 15:19:27 GMT
My impression is that the guys I call the 90s veterans are mostly running their careers along the same lines they have for the past decade or so. {Click to view assessments of individual performers} Salman's been in one of his phases of making films based on his commercial instincts, but his 2014 releases (Jai Ho and Kick) seem to be cases of him agreeing to films because he likes the message and is close to the people who wants to make them (brother Sohail for Jai Ho and producer turned first-time director Sajid Nadiadwala for Kick). Both (the commercial approach and the for-sentimental-reasons approach) are things he has a history of doing. Only time will tell which one the Sooraj Barjatya project is. In his more lucid interviews, he strikes me as someone who understands the film industry pretty well but is kind of jaded about it; left to his own devices he would probably drop out of it altogether at some point. With that huge, only marginally useful family of hangers-on who need supporting, I suspect he will turn into Dev Anand Mk II: making moderately interesting movies with bright new talent well past his heyday, while his fans hail him for being "evergreen" and people who haven't seen him in his prime act puzzled at his popularity. He's the best equipped in terms of screen persona and popularity for something like Amitabh's elder statesman position, but Amitabh's late-era success is defined as much by his disciplined personality as anything else, and Salman is, to put it charitably, a lot more emotional and mercurial than that.
Ajay's been alternating middlebrow films about gangsters and/or politics with lowbrow entertainers for some time with a fair amount of success; 2013 was not a great year for him in that dep't-he had initially accepted Special 26, dropped it quite late in development (I suspect he was the one who recommended Kajal Aggarwal to the filmmakers), and was a bit sour-grapey about that film when someone asked him about it in later interviews, especially since his own films Himmatwala and Satyagraha didn't do well. He seems to be throwing himself into the lowbrow commercial movies with more abandon this year, with Singham 2 and a Prabhudheva action masala coming up. Aamir is doing his usual thing of leisurely picking ONE project and reshaping it to his own preferred parameters and marketing it intelligently. The results combined with his screen persona don't make me want to rush out and see them, but I respect his approach and the critical/financial results speak for themselves; if you're going to be fiddley and leisurely about your filmmaking process, he's a much better role model than Hrithik. My own guess is that he won't bother with acting when he gets to the point where he can no longer handle the kinds of lead roles that appeal to him; he'll turn producer and/or director on a full-time basis.
The two self-made men, SRK and Akshay, are interesting in that their basic approach towards filmmaking over the past few years hasn't changed that much: SRK is basically a less artsy and leisurely, more commercially minded version of Aamir with a somewhat different screen image to maintain; Akshay still thinks selecting projects involves a lot of throwing spaghetti at the walls and seeing what sticks, and still thinks that executing the selected projects is like working in a bank: you get up early in the morning and go to work, industriously but somewhat mindlessly, every day for ten months of the year. Both have been getting the same results they always have: steady stream of hits with occasionally dips in box office for SRK; yoyo-like ups and downs for Akshay. What seems to be changing is what they want out of their projects; they are the only two who seem to be working on a kind of cinematic "bucket list" of projects they want to tackle before their time as stars run out. SRK's taking on multi-starrers (Happy New Year), middlebrow/arty films with middlebrow/arty people (Raees), taking chances on much younger directors (Fan, possibly Shuddhi?). Emboldened by the success of OMG and Special 26, Akshay's apparently trying for a two-channel silly/serious career along the lines of Ajay's: Holiday is a comparatively grounded thriller with a romcom track instead of a "general silliness" comedy track; It's Entertainment is pure silliness, from the guys who cowrote the Golmaal movies and Housefull 2; Gabbar will probably be a darker and more dignified cousin of Salman's Jai Ho. He's also rumored to be doing a spy thriller with Neeraj "Special 26" Pandey; a lowbrow entertainer with Prabhudheva and the producers of It's Entertainment; a sequel to the romance/family drama Namastey London; some kind of horror movie (no one's quite sure what, including him); and a low-budget, AIDS-themed drama for his friend Priyadarshan, similar to Kanchivaram in tone.
I would vote them both, alongside Ajay, "most likely to gracefully accept character actor status". All three men try to "youthen down" in looks and behavior for their film roles, with decreasing amounts of success, but wear their ages fairly honestly on their faces in private life and in roles that permit them to do so; unlike some of their more botox-prone peers. SRK's theater background will serve him well in whatever elder statesman period he enters; I suspect Older!SRK's screen persona would resemble Rishi's rather than Amitabh's. Ajay is pretty clearly cut out to be an analogue to late-period Vinod Khanna/present-day Mithun Chakraborty-the sometimes dour, sometimes humorous, over-the-hill tough guy. Akshay's main love is just the fun of actually working on film sets: he's fairly clueless about the upper-level creative processes involved in filmmaking, he hates just about every aspect of film promotion except live performances, and if he figures out a way to make as much money by being a supporting actor in 10-15 movies a year as he currently makes starring in and promoting in 3-4 movies a year, he's likely to go that way sooner rather than later, IMO. I could see him turning into a kind of over-the-top Gulshan Grover type who's in every second film. Failing that, his best bet is probably to either join or start a recording company; he's not really creative about music but he's a passionate consumer and talent-spotter; the fact that even his less successful self-produced movies often have hugely popular soundtracks chosen by him speaks to his grasp of pop-music tastes in his own country.
Most of the people above are doing things that seem like reasonable judgment calls to me, even if the Bollyviewing public isn't always happy with the results, even if the results are not necessarily things I would care to watch. Saif's the only one who IMO kind of looks like he has lost the plot. His recent successes (Cocktail, Race 2) have been about anything and everything but him; his attempts at more youth-oriented movies (Go Goa Gone) and masala movies (Bullett Raja) have done poorly at the box office although it sounded like they were both good fun if you liked the kind of thing they were trying to do; the pictures from Humshakals makes it look like it combines everything unlikeable about Sajid Khan movies while ditching most of the things that made the Housefull franchise palatable, including Farah's choreography and Sajid Nadiadwala's production values. Phantom (the Kabir Khan thriller with Katrina) looks like it might be good; certainly has decent production values, and falls early enough in the spy movie craze to where it might succeed. Happy Ending...could go either way; it has a good cast and a pair of directors who sound intelligent and a genre where Saif has had good luck in the past, but it is the same team as Go Goa Gone. He's talked about directing, and possibly directing pretty soon, since he specifically wants to direct his wife Kareena in a movie. We'll see how that goes; I think he'd be a pretty cerebral, detail-oriented director, based on his personality. Pretty much all these people are coping with various health problems; Saif has his former smoking habit, Akshay seems to have chronic pain issues from various old injuries; it wouldn't surprise me if Ajay did too; SRK has a bit of both; Aamir has an eating disorder related to his obsession with transforming himself for his roles; Salman has a neural issue that I have trouble spelling the name of. The women are going to rate a separate post all by themselves, I'll get to that later.
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on Feb 20, 2014 17:35:43 GMT
The women: this is complicated by the fact that some of them have gone away and come back, or gone away and talked about coming back, and some of them have been in the film business longer than you think (did you know that Vidya made her debut in a Bengali film eleven years ago? Or that Asin's earliest films in Kerala date back about that far?) Rose commented that the women usually start younger (or with a younger official age) than the men; they also tend to bail out earlier, both due to social conditioning (they're mostly raised to believe that they won't need to work after marriage), and the industry's obsession with youth and seeming innocence for its women (go look at the more favorable Pinkvilla comments on any Alia Bhatt story; the emphasis on how "fresh" she looks gets kind of disgusting after a while). It's conventional to blame the 90s veterans for failing to do anything about this; it is true that they're totally lacking in the social crusader instinct on this issue; it's probably true that they find the younger female leads a boost to their ego; but I've seen some things that make me think they may not be entirely comfortable with the status quo, and like the women they are caught in a broader web of social expectations that makes bucking the system difficult. {Click to view thoughts on individual performers} Madhuri and Sridevi: the thing is, they've already accomplished more than most actors of either gender could ever hope to-they made some films that are considered enduring classics (and their fair share of duds, but who hasn't?), they've given some critically acclaimed performances in movies that weren't quite worthy of them, they've worked with everyone who's anyone. Aish is basically a younger version of these two, and Kajol is basically a dancing-impaired, unconventionally pretty version of Aish: if you have all kinds of awards and starred in a respected classic that has never stopped running at the theater, does it really matter whether you will ever make another movie? I'm not quite clear on whether Sridevi's taking it easy after English Vinglish or her husband's decided to actively stonewall projects he can't control/doesn't approve of; I've gotten the impression it may be both. Madhuri's projects from Aaja Nachle onwards strike me as things that look good on paper, that are perfectly reasonable things for her to want to do, but may or may not work at the box office for reasons largely beyond her control. I think her time abroad may also have limited her ability to stay on top of the politics (see Gulaab Gang) or the populist trends that would affect her projects; hopefully that will change as she spends more time in India. I like the slightly edgy but still heroic quality she gives off in the Gulaabi Gang promos; I would not mind seeing her do more crusader roles.
Juhi's been very low-key about her comeback projects; a small role here in Son of Sardaar, a villainous role there in Gulaabi Gang. There is a lot of positive buzz around her work in the latter movie; I could see her growing into the kind of sweet-but-steely, occasionally villainous (cf. Beta) character roles Aruna Irani used to get. Karisma's "comeback" vehicle was something she took on mostly because it sounded like an interesting challenge; if it had succeeded, maybe she would have followed up on it, but she hasn't really shown any interest in coming back since then. Raveena Tandon dabbles in item numbers, and glam/"vampy" roles that appeal to her. Shilpa's apparently trying her hand at an item number in her home production Dishkayoon. Sonali Bendre got a small role in OUATIM Dobaara, and some positive reviews out of it, but only took it because she was friends with most of the people involved. She and Shilpa mostly work on reality tv shows now. Tabu has mostly moved onto greener pastures in regional (Southern) cinema.
Rani's and Vidya's projects seem to exist in a kind of tension between what their boyfriends/husbands want to see them in, and what they personally want to make; Ghanchakkar and Shaadi Ke Side Effects seem like the former, and Bobby Jasoos seems like the latter; Mardaani is probably an Aditya/Rani compromise. Asin had a longish and successful career down South, then patiently made herself a fixture in Bollywood by taking generic "girlfriend" roles, and now seems to be going after more critic-friendly movies (All the Best, with Abhishek and the OMG director). Priyanka is a hardworking yoyo; downs like Teri Meri Kahaani and Zanjeer, ups like the Ram Leela item number and Gunday. Kareena has mostly proven that she's a really good actress with dubious instincts when it comes to choosing projects; the best I can say about her upcoming projects is that Singham 2 will at least probably give her a hit, Bombay Samurai will give her a change of pace. She has enough industry goodwill to weather one more bad period if she has to. Priyanka/Kareena probably most closely mirror the Akshay/Ajay/Saif model of filmmaking: people who try for (or impulsively wander into) a variety of projects, some of which work and some of which don't, but whose careers are ultimately defined by their will to work, rather than their detractors' desire to see them stop working.
Chitrangda may be moving into more commercial movies if No Entry Mein Entry with Salman (where she is rumored to have an eye candy role) goes forward; Bipasha seems (I could be wrong) to be just taking a few last pet projects and chances to hang out with cool movie people before her semi-inevitable marriage to Harman. I do like the idea of her playing a femme fatale in Bang Bang. Preity's career issues are more about trusting the wrong people, I think, there were a lot of stories about the people working on Ishqk in Paris taking advantage of her goodwill. In terms of female-friendly films, the Hindi-language film industry is in a similar spot to the late 60s to mid-70s timeframe, when there was a small but steady trickle of movies that could be described as female centric. The shift towards more macho A-list films (basically a mainstreaming/upmarketing of 60s style b-movies) in the mid/late 70s and throughout the 80s was I think what crippled this subgenre of films back then. The fact that the current female friendly movies are continuing while the recent "macho masala" craze appears to have crested and the men who headline those films are retreating towards projects like Jai Ho and Holiday, which are still macho but strongly emphasize the hero's responsibility towards the community, is I think a positive sign. We also have a rare opportunity here, with so many of the actresses from the 90s and early 00s looking fit and fab and ready to work, for the 90s veterans to retreat towards more age-appropriate costars without compromising on the "glam factor" of their movies or the chick-magnet aspects of their images. It's unfortunately likely to be squandered, because the people who need to make the judgment call on that are precisely the ones least capable of thinking outside of the box, and there's always the problem of someone's spouse objecting to the re-pairing of a couple of real-life former lovers, but the opportunity is there. If nothing changes-if actresses don't manage to challenge and expand their audience's expectations from them, if the more established actors continue to bury their heads in the sand about the age gap between them and the bright new female talents, if the people behind the cameras continue to (mostly) fail at giving the actors and actresses intelligent material in this regard-things could get, well, not a lot of fun to watch in about five years.
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Post by rose on Mar 1, 2014 8:43:11 GMT
I think the actor who best handled aging is Aamir. In some films by simply refusing not to and making it work and in some films with his usual great performances. I don't remember any of his films doing bad BO except Mangal Pandey (I liked it). He was excellent in the Southie Masala adaptation (and probably have started that trend if I'm not mistaken). Well he is a bona fide oldie but I think Amitabh Bachchan has aged greatly. His acting is excellent and he still looks good too. Rani is my favorite Indian actress and I too think she is doing well (once she got out of YRF). I especially liked Aiyyaa and NOKJ. She was also great in Talaash but her role was not the centre one there. Which brings me to Kareena and I agree with you there too. Actually she acts better now imho. Aamir's got the box office and the legit good movies but he's also playing 20 something year old college students (when he's old enough to have a college student ). I feel one element to having a great aging career is also getting roles that respect your age. I'm sure there's good scripts that call for 40 year olds ya know? I didn't mention him but I agree, Amitabh Bachchan has aged his career with himself perfectly. I actually think Kareena's kinda lost right now. She's had way more flops than hits these last few years and no acclaimed roles.
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Post by dancelover on Mar 1, 2014 19:39:41 GMT
ISTR that Kareena was acclaimed for Talaash. D. Rani [snip - d] was also great in Talaash but her role was not the centre one there. Which brings me to Kareena and I agree with you there too. Actually she acts better now imho. [snip - d] I actually think Kareena's kinda lost right now. She's had way more flops than hits these last few years and no acclaimed roles.
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Post by rose on Mar 2, 2014 7:41:28 GMT
ISTR that Kareena was acclaimed for Talaash. D. I actually think Kareena's kinda lost right now. She's had way more flops than hits these last few years and no acclaimed roles. She always gets positive reviews for her performances, but she hasn't been a real contender for an award for a couple years now. Like, for all the positive reviews, she didn't get any nominations for Talaash (the whole movie was kinda passed over). On a personal level, I enjoy her work a lot these past few years (Gori Tere Pyaar Mein shouldn't have flopped!) I just feel her place in the industry might be coming up on a crossroads soon.
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