Wake Up Sid

Rating: 3/4 (Wake Up Sid is a refreshing take on the boy-becomes-man plot.)

I must remember not to form opinions on movies watched on airplanes! I watched Wake Up Sid on an Emirates flight and was extremely unimpressed. I wondered why the background music was all wrong and why the editing seemed botched. I was corrected when I saw the full length version recently. Apparently, the airplane versions of movies are edited for length.

Wake Up Sid is a 2009 movie starring Ranbir Kapoor and Konkana Sen Sharma. Sid (Ranbir) is a rich kid who is super-lazy and has no aims in life. Fate delivers him a kick in the pants and he is forced to live with his friend Aisha (Konkana). Experiences with his college friends and with Aisha finally bring maturity to Sid as he learns to stand on his own legs.

Despite dealing with such a dead horse of a story, the plot is surprising fresh. Kudos to Ranbir on some neat acting, the always-nice Konkana and the cinematography which shows Mumbai in a whole new light. The music is great, reminding one of the awesome tracks of Rock On! This is not surprising since the people behind both are the same: Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. The track Iktara takes the cake with pleasant acoustic guitar riffs and dreamy lyrics. (I cannot understand Hindi that well, so I could appreciate Iktara only after discovering the English translation here.) The other good tracks are Kya Karoon, Aaj Kal Zindagi and Life is Crazy. Wake Up Sid is a refreshing take on the boy-becomes-man plot.

PS: Being a Nikonian and a recent convert to fountain pens, I noticed that Ranbir shoots with a Nikon D90 and Konkana writes with a red Lamy Safari fountain pen in this movie! ;-)