Iqbal
It is very easy to make a bad movie about sports because it is "apparently" very easy to make a good movie about sports. Sports, by its very nature, offer all the elements which you need in a good screenplay – which can for simplicity be divided into "conflicts" and "resolution". Conflicts can be class conflicts (Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, Breaking away etc.), underdogs versus leaders (Lagaan, Rocky), good versus evil (Escape to Victory) etc. You have tears, joys, struggles, adulations, suspense etc; everything you need in a good melodrama. Probably the last Ashes series or the 2001 Ind-Aus cricket series was as good as a movie. Against this backdrop, most writers tend to ignore that you need a good screenplay to bind things together.
Iqbal in that sense was better than many other recent sports movies. There was a decent script, good acting and a general feel good factor. In fact it was quite an entertaining movie. The issue i have with Nagesh Kukunoor is that his movies are very simplistic - script wise and narration wise. Knowing the director, you would even foresee that there would be a happy ending. It takes some of the joy out of watching a movie.
Of course, there are those who argue that the simpler the better as you are taking movies to what they are supposed to be, a bare bones, stripped-down-to-the-essentials narrative. But after a point in your movie-watching experience (or book reading experience) you want to be deal with complex characters and challenging narrative structures. A probably analogy would be with R.K. Narayan, the books are great but after a point you need grow beyond them to stretch yourselves.
In a nutshell, Iqbal is a “nice” movie just as R.K.Narayan books are “nice”. Just as the word “nice” is not being used nowadays, similarly Iqbal harks back to an age when sensibilities were simpler.
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