DVD REWIND
MAQBOOL – 2003
The famed Maqbool was released in India and finally made its debut on Home video and DVD a few months ago. I had heard about the rave reviews of this Bollywood Film that was executed more like an independent feature film rather that typical Bollywood fanfare. I must say I was duly impressed with the execution of this film. The performances were excellent, but moreover the script and plotlines where are distinctive and structured something uncommon in this type of film. This is probably the reason why is wasn`t commercially as popular in India. But certainly the film exhibited more of a gritty "real-life" quality to it rather than the pomp and circumstance of typical Bollywood films of the recent past. It`s the kind of film I wish would garner distribution for foreign release. Irfan Khan and Tabu were both exceptional and the intimate look at the inside of a mafia family lifestyle was quite intriguing to say the least. The film was quite inspired and engaging throughout, I did recognize a very familiar ending however. The ending is an almost identical copy to Luc Besson`s 1994 Smash Hit "LEON". But then again they do say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery!
Film
***1/2 out of *****(3 1/2 out of 5 stars)
Dvd special features
*** out of ***** (3 out of 5 stars)
Nothing spectacular in terms of special features, there are trailers, subtitles etc, but it would have been nice to have an Anamorphic widescreen presentation as well as a cleaner print for DVD. It seems that the actual film print was just transferred as is to DVD which contains a lot of scratches etc. in the quality of the reproduction.