Fun!

Rating: 9/10 (25 November 2012)

I love Chetan Bhagat's novels. I work with many engineers who immigrated to the US from India. Bhagat's novels (especially "2 States") help me appreciate the land they came from, that schooled them, and is still attached to their souls.
Both "Five Point Someone" and "3 Idiots" tell about students suffering through college and the transformation to adulthood. Both stories are engaging, cleverly constructed and funny as hell, but they show different things, at a different pace. Novels show internal transformation, while movies show the transformation of relationships. Neither story is biographical. Neither story depicts "reality". Both stories work as fiction and frivolous entertainment. Both are respectful of their characters.
If you want great art, read Tolstoy. To learn How Things Work, read Darwin. If you like the Marx Brothers, and you want to laugh your ass off, watch "3 Idiots". This is not a movie to make you think (Of COURSE universities in developing countries are lethally competitive) but to bombard you with the unexpected. Which for this westerner included the jarring Bollywood "let's stop the plot and dance", though in this case it is "let's use dance to fire-hose a different set of sight gags at the viewers". One part of your laughing brain can rest while another takes over. This movie will definitely engage all your humor muscles, including engineer and college nostalgia humor muscles if you have them. If you enjoy "funny machines", there are plenty of those, too.
Some parts were beyond me - Silencer's idiosyncratic Hindi becomes mere word-substitution jokes in subtitle, and I'm left to imagine how his non-standard pronunciation and mannerisms are 2/3 of the humor Still, even Silencer and Virus were treated with respect - all the characters were victims of a situation created by colonialism, poverty, desperation, and ambition displacing love. You can cry or you can laugh - choose your movies accordingly. If you want to cry about abused students, watch "Dark Matter" (2007). If you don't like fart jokes, don't watch this movie, or read Benjamin Franklin, either.
India turns out a lot of films. I'm sure all the elements of this movie are borrowed from others, and if you've watched a thousand movies you won't see much new stuff here. Good artists plagiarize, great artists steal, and these artists robbed the entire film vault. They pasted their swag together pretty well, and in some surprising (to me) ways.
IMHO, a 170 minute movie is too long, which is why I give it a 9. But if they edited it down to 90 minutes, and kept all the best humor, I might have died laughing. It was never plodding, though it slowed from manic to almost sane in places.
I'm buying 4 copies for Christmas presents - I have some godchildren that need their humor centers stretched. This ought to do it.