B.Tech Babulu Review

Midget In A Bikini (if you get this reference, we can be friends): This reviewer has doled out three one-star reviews in the last three weeks and gained some infamy while doing so. He says that made him feel bad to a certain degree, yet he found peace with the fact that those films were pale imitations of what cinema was supposed to be. He says they were cheap cash-grabs that tried to draw in audiences with the promise of titillation, and hence deserved low scores and scathing critiques.

But on a cold evening on December 8th, 2017, he was faced with a moral dilemma. He found himself watching B.Tech Babulu. It is objectively one of the most incompetently made films of all time but it is a film powered by some good intentions and poorly realized morals. Do good intentions and morals excuse a film, which is just one speck away from Manos: The Hands Of Fate, from a written evisceration? Is this man the pariah of film criticism? Let us talk to him and find out. Give out a worst possible welcome to, T J Reddy.

(I walked in and was serenaded by a chorus of boos and heckling.)

Me: Thanks, Midget. Can't really say this is an honour.

Midget: Well, no wonder people hate you. Get on with it and tell us the plot of the film.

Me: There is nothing fresh to talk about in...

Midget: Please hold all your critiques until the end of the plot description mate. This show has to clock in at under 1,000 words.

(The audience erupted in laughter.)

Me: Um, on his wedding night, Shankar's wife (no name given) and a random Tagubothu Ramesh (I really don't know why he's there) persuade him to tell them all his B. Tech. stories.

Midget: She wants to hear this supposedly atrocious story instead of having sex?

Me: I thought we were supposed to hold critiques till the end of the synopsis.

(More boos)

Me: So, the story follows four boys, Shankar (Shakalaka Shankar), Raja (Novel Kishore), Rahul (Vizag Shankar) and Abhi (Surya), as they experience love, breakups, losses, laughs and tears through their four years of B. Tech. and come out the other side as fully-grown men.

Midget: That doesn't seem that bad. It is a Happy Days clone if not anything else.

Me: If only it were that simple. B.Tech Babulu wants to be Happy Days but it wants all the integrity of that film without possessing any of the finesse. I'm not implying that Happy Days is a great movie but...

(The crowd erupted into boos again and started throwing bottles at me.)

Midget: Yeah, throw another bottle at this Happy Days criticizer.

Me: Okay, I'll lay off your beloved film. In Naga Chaitanya's debut Josh, he talks about how there are multiple books written about how to handle children but none wrote about how to relate to the youth. That is because we make hundreds of films a year talking about said youth. These films are the conduit through which we understand this gigantic set of society. B.Tech Babulu, however, is a hundred times more sloppily stitched together when compared to Josh, and is also painfully unfunny and unbearably long.

Midget: So it's that irredeemably bad?

Me: It kind of is. Its heart is pure but also naïve. Even if we set aside the fact that the writer and director had no idea of how to string a script and scenes together, the morality of the film is out of whack.

The film wants to stress the importance of education and making something of oneself. But it also paints women as harmful shrews who only want to be a part of a man's success but not his struggles. It approves of its lazy characters by allowing them to cheat which negates the whole message of working for your success. It throws off elaborately constructed unfunny scenes with Ali and Tagubothu Ramesh that add zilch to the overall story. And worst of all, it gives no reason for the audience to care about any of the characters. Watching paint dry would have been a more exciting exercise.

(Deafening silence)

Midget: You say the film has Ali, Tagubothu Ramesh and Shakalaka Shankar in it. In my experience, seasoned actors make bad films enjoyable.

Me: Not when faced with bad scripts, my good man. The seniors understand the standard here and don't give enough of a f***, and the novices give too much of a f***. This creates a weird condition where the veterans are reaching at straws for credibility and the novices are sadly left breathing in and choking on the dust they leave behind.

Midget: You make it sounds brutal.

Me: Well, it's me - what did you expect?

(A guy in the audience yelled out "you suck")

Midget: Do I dare ask about the music?

Me: You had enough of the "daring" to bring it up. This film's audio-visual grammar and editing put all my previous 1-star ratings into perspective. Not to get too technical here but the film's audio channels are not in sync. The film forgets the sound levels one needs to follow when dealing with dialogue, background music and ambient noise in any given scene. Each of those individual aspects overpowers the other which gives the film weird spurts of loudness and quietness. Combine this with some hoarse ADR, and I'd say this movie is a borderline health code violation.

Also, the movie looks no better than the video you shot last week on your phone. Scenes are cut together with no transition shots or inserts. The colour palette is off. Camera moves cut off actors from shots. There are dissolves inserted into a scene even though it doesn't cut to another one. There is a daylight of space between hands and cheeks in slapping scenes. It is a minor miracle that a film this technically inept got made.

Midget: We are almost out of time. Wind it up.

Me: A goldfish almost dies and a character has a seizure somewhere close to the halfway mark of this film. I found myself caring about the goldfish more than the character. Honestly, I'd save the goldfish before the character. If that doesn't tell you about how all-around terrible this movie is, I don't know what will.

(The crowd that booed me so much at the start had glum looks on their faces when I was about to leave. The guy who heckled me threw one last bottle at me which helped the crowd smile a bit. Good that they finally found an iota of joy with this film.)