Sahil Rizwan rips Bollywood films apart - in cartoon form. Suhani Singh reports.
When it comes to movies, Sahil Rizwan can’t get enough of them. The 22-year-old business administration graduate says he watched more than 200 films in 2009, shuttling from home and Inox, the multiplex in which his friends and he can be found every Friday night, watching the latest releases. These weekly outings have prompted Rizwan to start posting his own reviews on his website, thevigilidiot.com. They’re fun and frank. Rizwan highlights flaws in the logic of plots and offers a scathingly hilarious scene-by scene analysis. Unlike the majority of the movies that he writes about, Rizwan’s reviews are an experiment in form: he draws out his opinions in the form of a comic strip. “Bollywood has movies which have huge plot holes and they pretend to be something that they really are not,” he said. “It works for my sarcastic sense of humour.”
Admittedly, the stick figures that represent the film’s characters are not works of art. Instead, Rizwan focuses on his text, which appears in the form of speech and thought bubbles and introductions to scenes and characters. Rizwan said that his material comes from straight-forward observations while watching the movie and long telephone discussions that follow with his friends on Saturday morning. “So long as the content is good, the presentation doesn’t really matter,” Rizwan said. “I wish Bollywood directors would learn from this example.”
Started in March 2009, Rizwan’s pet project has developed a fan following with its brazen style. Unlike most film reviews, which don’t reveal key plot twists and the climax, the ones on his website are full of spoilers. Some even contain offensive language. The readership has increased from 10 visitors in the first few months to over 70,000 in the last two months. The popularity is not surprising because Rizwan’s sensibility is very similar to that of the average moviegoer.
“It’s not like when I go and watch a movie I am trying to manufacture humour out of it,” said Rizwan, whose reviews are classified under “Unintentionally funny, must-watch Bollywood movies”. “If a movie is good, I am the first one to put my hand up and say it.”
Rizwan works from home, spending around two hours a day managing the site. He devotes the same amount of time to writing and drawing. “I have had people come up to me and say, ‘We read your review and now we want to see whether the movie is really that awful.’” But despite their popularity, Rizwan’s delightful creations haven’t made him any money yet. He says that he hopes that his site will offer him a livelihood, but he isn’t willing to become all-out commercial and change his style. “It’s nice how it is working out – rough and raw,” said Rizwan. “That’s how people appreciate it.”
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