After watching Black, I wished I were blind and deaf so that I would never have had to endure this movie or its fantastic reviews.<br /><br />When I watch a film like Black, I can say that the director is definitely talented. He manages to make a film without any songs, with most dialogues in English and an unusual story-line and get away with both rave reviews and house-full theatres. Or maybe, it has got away with rave reviews and house-full theatres because it has no songs, has many English dialogues and an unusual story line. Maybe people are so tired of the usual good film that an unusual bad film seems extraordinarily good.<br /><br />Despite all its unusuality, Black is filled with clichés and highly predictable "sentimental" dialogues. The only thing moving in this film was me, shifting in my seat, trying not to run from the theatre. Rani Mukherjee, who plays Michelle, a girl blind and deaf from birth, and Amitabh Bachchan, who plays her teacher have been said to have delivered fantastic performances, yet I found it to be their worst performances that I know of. Rani Mukherjee has her head cocked to one side through the whole film, yet it is only the blind who do that, to catch sound, which is out of the question with Michelle. It seems critics and audiences see overacting as brilliant acting; in some scenes there is so much overacting, the movie seems bizarre and unreal.<br /><br />What is most unreal is the script and the dialogues. Michelle joins a university where the teachers are not trained to deal with a student like her, and because of this, Michelle graduates only ten years after she joins. Why? Simply because her typing speed on a Braille typewriter is too slow for her to finish her examination within the time limit. Surely a college that has managed to handle a blind and deaf student can find a different way to test her. The script does not even deal with the problem in the end. They take the easy way out: after having failed several times, Michelle, in a fit of rage, suddenly manages to type at a furious speed after ten years of not being able to do so. The location and time-setting of the movie are very unclear. The whole movie takes place in an English-Hindi speaking town when Charlie Chaplin movies are releasing. They seem to be completely cut off from the rest of the world.<br /><br />Then there's the case of Michelle's sister. She is a normal person, who gets an abnormal lack of attention from her parents because of Michelle's constant needs. When she gets frustrated with her parents and Michelle for the same reason, she is portrayed as a sister who isn't understanding, who is completely to blame, who is a character made to take the audience's fury. One should really sympathise with her, someone who from childhood gets a highly inadequate amount of her parents' attention.<br /><br />After all the other fantastic reviews that this movie got, mine must seem like blasphemy. Well, everyone's entitled to their opinions, and I'm expressing mine. What really bothers me is not how bad Black is, but the fact that the Indian audience considers something of such mediocrity to be fantastic. And that's my opinion on everyone else's opinion.