A friend of ours had booked tickets at the Imax Adlabs a week or so ago on a Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoon for me is peak-sleeping time; we have a full Gujarati lunch with rice-dal and then take the phones off their cradles, put the mobiles in the sleep mode (or turn them off), draw the curtains and sleep for around 3-4 hours; woe betide anyone who dares to come home at this time. I was a little crabby as it is. Then we realized that in the theatre, we would all have to split up; there were eight tickets for the four couples, but only four each together; like good Indians, the men and women decided to sit separately (actually it was because the wives were friends and we were accompanying spouses and they were only too happy to sit together and act like school-kids) and so instead of my wife, I found myself sitting next to my wife's friend's husband, who is a nice guy and all that, but not the ideal replacement.

What all of us really wanted to figure out was where they had spent their Rs 50 crores. One of the guys who has an inside track in the movie industry was sure that they must not have spent more than 30 or 35 crores, but had just inflated the figure to get a better deal from the distributors (it gets very complicated, but this is the gist).

One thing I can say; the costumes and the interiors used are lavish, but if they have paid 50 crores for all this (okay 40 crores, after taking care of the payments to the staff and actors), then someone has gypped the producer big-time (and let's face it; the producer was behind bars most of the time when the movie was being made and probably unable to monitor the goings-on).

I have not seen any of the previous Devdasis (sorry Devdas') and I have not read Saratchandra Chatterjee's book and so I had no baggage. The movie really seems to be a chick-flick; all about women power. It is the women who seem to do everything; they are the ones with the powerful characterizations, the best lines and the best get-ups. They don't take things lying down and the only reason they suffer is because they make the mistake of falling in love - with a guy who is completely stupid and brain-dead. Eventually he finds solace in drink and dies; however, I suspect that a sequel would have found Paro and Chandramukhi living happily ever after, after picking up the pieces of their lives.

Oh, okay! Shahrukh is good as Devdas, Aishwarya is beautiful as Paro and Madhuri is brilliant as Chandramukhi (a fitting swan-song). And they had better-be, in a 50-crore film. Jackie Shroff however, should stop acting; he is just going from bad to verse.

Sometimes I wonder whether the theatre makes a difference. The Imax Adlabs by itself is such a terrific movie-watching experience, that it probably makes bad movies look average and average movies good. I will need to sort out, as time goes by, the movie-watching experience from the movie-experience. There will be more about this in a later entry, when I go after "Bend it like Beckham", an enjoyable, but definitely over-rated, cliched piece of work.