Filimstaan - Why competence is sometimes not enough

I finally saw Filmistaan – two friends starred as the terrorists keeping the hostage. I was surprised that it turned to be quite watchable (the trailer did dreadful injustice to it), managing to engage me from the first scene to the last. Given the stasis inherent in the plot – a man being held in a rude brick cell almost through the length of the film, with only a few ramshackle huts and the desert beyond – I thought that the screenplay was good, the acting and direction capable. It definitely deserved a watch in the hall. But unfortunately, it never rose above this level of competence.

The issue with me was that the film set itself up so that it could never rise beyond the level it was being played at. The protagonists – Sunny Arora, a wannabe-actor from Bollywood held hostage in a border-post Pakistani village, and a Pakistani bootlegger of Indian films – are that and that alone. The fact that Sunny is Punju explains everything about him. Their inner narratives, their dialogue, almost never rises beyond the simplistic paradigms of their shared obsession, Bollywood, and since the plot does not allow for too many moments beyond these for character development, in the end, their characters and their relationship seem too easily arrived at; worse, contrived.

We never see Sunny’s isolation beyond his empty-headed optimism, nationalism and nostalgia. The thought of imminent death over many days does not change him, make him introspect deeper beyond a confession of knowing he was a bad actor all along. No relationship – friend, family – is mentioned beyond a brief brush with an old hakim where the two reminisce about the lives they left beyond the border. We never really get to know Sunny, the hero, forget the bootlegger. It seemed that Nitin (the writer-director) was just not interested in building the characters beyond the competent first-ideas.

And so you have the same clichés someone in Alaska who’s seen five-six of such stuff can write – what did Sunny remember his grandfather telling him about Lahore – Jinnne Lahore nai dekhiya... blahblah – that’s it. What do the protagonists talk about when they realise the irrationality of the border – the dreamteam with Sachin and Inzi opening. And these are two instances I remember because they ending up mediocratising some potentially very-good scenes building up. (The latter almost hurriedly stanching a potentially powerful turn when, to Sunny’s musing of what might have happened if the partition had not happened, the bootlegger darkly replies that rivers of blood would have flown then.)

And since besides these brief superficial excursions into their real lives, the fantasies they discuss are not exactly world cinema, or even stuff like Filmistaan itself, the depth of their inner worlds revealed in these fantasies remains at the level of Maine Pyaar Kiya and KKHH they watch together. No ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ here where the fantastic dialogic world the protagonists build to escape the reality reveals almost everything about them.

I am reading some collected stream-of-consciousness oral narratives from Rajasthani villagers these days. The stuff is so, so dense with overlapping references to their lands, their cattle, their folklore, their society, their history – the various categories and norms of their world – a world as rich as any, with its own grammar and vocabulary. If only the filmmaker had cared to dig these worlds out for his two protagonists a little deeper. If he had researched more to imagine them beyond first ideas, and brought forth what people from such two different worlds, overlapping but not quite, might really experience and share under this extreme and peculiar circumstance.

But alas. And so, as so many times before, a film in my mothertongue again settles for competency and I have to go back to the old favourites or scout elsewhere for true transcendental greatness.

An adulterated Barfi

Anurag Basu’s established penchant for stealing is trickier than that of other Bollywood filmmakers because, unlike them, he pretends to be a serious filmmaker making meaningful character-centric cinema. But what he really does is lift entire storylines and plotpoints and hammers the characters into their slats. In Life in a Metro, the central storyline (Sharman-Kangana), lifted entirely from Billy-Wilder’s irritating 1960’s “The Apartment”, was marketed as a zeitgeisty story of today, of BPOs and the Metropolis as a condenser of our many-headed lives. In a stolen scene in the stolen plot, rampant affairs between skirt-chasing middle-aged bosses and their young secretaries were claimed to be as commonplace in the industry as fake accents. CII should have taken this denigrating movie to task:  for reducing a sunrise industry (of which the future workforce it badly needs and their gatekeeping parents are still trying to get a handle of)­ to a romping orgy. Imagine what might have happened if a bukkake scene had caught Mr. Basu’s fancy?

Where Metro postured as a serious exploration of urban morality, Barfi would like you to believe it is an organic love-story and important, even landmark, cinema because the two central characters are disabled: one physically, another mentally. Barfi, the effervescent deaf-and-mute protagonist  (Ranbir Kapoor), is the new tramp with the kid (Priyanka Chopra) in tow and playing hide-and-seek with the cop (Saurabh Shukla). Since the character is built from various stolen scenes from Chaplin, Keaton, Chan, Kelly and various others, it’s a confused pastiche (like the rest of the movie) and whatever credibility Barfi has comes from Ranbir’s own conviction. Likewise, PC’s autism is fitted into the plot, much like not-a-terrorist Khan’s, and credit is to her for the extreme vulnerability she suffuses her Jhilmil with (Imagine Kareena Kapoor playing the character and you’ll know what I mean.)

The movie is set in the hills like many slow-paced comedies and dramas are ­ to reclaim the romance with time lost in the jostling urbania; and for some picturesque cinematography. In Barfi’s case, it does not let the well-groomed and fair-skinned pauper-hero stand out and detract from the director’s serious-cinema claim, as it might have if the story had been set in the plains. And it gives the fashion-designers enough room to dress this handicapped-son-of-a-driver as if he’s just stepped out from the greens of a Woodehousian drama instead of phati-bundies. (Even when later, B&J have to escape briefly to Calcutta, instead of letting the grime settle on the hero’s rakish golf-cap, the director transforms the   City-of-Joy’s famous poverty  to match Barfi.)

Also, the hills, still frozen in Raj grandeur, provide a set seeped in colonial nostalgia and sensibilities where, again, the pauper-hero, fairer and better-dressed than the brown-sahib poseurs does not stand out like a black native might have in the plains.

(A measure of a good character sketch is who his friends are and what they reveal about the character, and Barfi’s purported best friend is as well-rounded as a mumbled lie.)

With these borrowed scenes and sensibilities, Barfi is thrust into the audience’s face as a life-affirming character because nothing disaffirming happens to him. His disability is a constraint that he acts within (­like being inured to being booed)­ but it’s never an inconvenience; he does not have to fight prejudices to lead a normal working life like Koshish’s Sanjeev Kumar has to. And before the audience can frown and intone to themselves “But surely it’s not possible that…”, the filmmaker will spin another needless suspense in the non-linear narrative to distract it from its inherent implausibility.

In the end, Barfi is a dishonest and an unethical movie, despite some excellent acting. Saurabh Shukla stands out (his best work to-date for me and he defines Barfi more than the character himself does) and should definitely be up for all nominations. But I doubt he would receive even the recognition due to him in an industry that awarded Mr. Basu’s Metro for “original” screenplay. I am afraid that instead of severely criticizing Mr. Basu for exploiting serious disabilities to unite various stolen scenes and ideas, as much as that detestable travesty My Name is Khan, it would again end up awarding him.

PS: Just after penning this article, I find that Barfi is now our official entry to the Oscars. Can there be bigger shame than this?

inception

With inception, Nolan returns to his favourite, and well-mastered, themes of time and memories.

Memento was about a man who remembers for only three minutes – his tale told backwards. Prestige was a tale of two men told from somewhere near the end, and weaving and cutting through their lives before and after in no particular chronological order. (The mere lyricism of it makes me rate it as his best.) There was little room to experiment with time in the franchised Batman series but Batman Begins dwells on Bruce’s repressed memories more powerfully than any movie before.

Inception is, on the surface, about the architecture of dreams, and from there out subconscious – and the memories embedded in it. Though fantastic, there is little of the dream within a dream concept that I haven’t seen and read of before – but here (to my limited knowledge) Nolan adds the concept of expanding time as dreams unfurl within one another. Hence, between the fourth level of the nested dreams being played in real time, at the first level, a car is plunging into a river in ultra-slow-mo. Decades to minutes. Very interesting.

Inception is going to be one of the most talked-about movies of the year but just misses cult status as it’s an amalgamation of themes that have been visited before.

Somebody compared it to Matrix and I could only shake my head and sigh at how time compresses memory. First, Matrix revolutionised sci-fi in movies like T-2; even after eleven years, the stunts, special effects and cinematography can stand up to inception and in portions look better. Second, Matrix brought the possibility of our world being unreal in a way Jurassic Park made dinosaurs alive for us. True, there had been similar movies before but our imagination was never fired so before. If people didn’t walk out of the hall shaking their heads and asking what it was all about, it was so because of 1999. People might have forgotten but the now seemingly-simple theme of Matrix left first-time viewers visually overwhelmed but totally at sea about which world was what.

But that was just a hyperbole that had to be shot down.

Inception is brilliant and worth a watch. I don’t know how far it could have still gone without Leonardo. And that, I feel, was the movie’s biggest flaw – the casting. Having Michael Caine do a cameo playing himself from a zillion movies, a clueless Ellen Page in a role similar to OmPrakash to Amitabh’s Sharabi (“Yeh aadat chhod de, Vijay. Yeh tere ko aur baaki ko bhi le doobegi.”) and Leonardo. It’s the lesser cast that shines and fires the movie. I like Leonardo but there is no difference of the Leonardo from Shutter Island to that of Departed to here. An anonymous weather-beaten protagonist (why does my mind always wander to John Cusack in his days of relatively lesser fame?) would have brought the freshness, and unexplored dimensions, that DiCaprio never brings. Sad for a guy who gave us Christian Bale; and could imagine Ledger as the boy to fill the giant shoes of Nicholson.

Wanted:The Review

I am surprised to find that most reviewers have dismissed Wanted as an action masala belonging to the golden era of the eighties – Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra, Jeetendra in their prime, dancing, beating people to pulp and weeping over raped sisters even before the usher has pointed your designated deathchairs with his steel torch. The movie starts with the sound of gunshots and blood splattering on the screen, the hero makes his entry in a basement warehouse reminiscent of Big B’s Deewar sequence and beats them in a fashion jo maanav kalpana se pare hai, unfunny spoofs crowd upon each other, the chief comedian’s punchline is his obese physique and his hilariously impossible desire for the heroine (who carries more weight on her front than the comedian on his entire frame) and one of the gags involves the shlokas – “Teri ma ki choobeep, teri ma ka bhonbeep”.

Honestly, does this sound to you anyway like a cheap masala flick? It’s obvious that the critics have missed the heavy symbolism hidden in the folds, as manifold as the folds on Ayesha’s love handle.




The movie starts in the fashion of a Bhansali period drama: a woman kick boxing sequence with roaring East Asians around and a Bihari Don (a bloated Abhishek Bachchan) watching the proceedings. The don is the character Dawood has based his life on and is now on his way back to Mumbai. A brief sequence follows the narrative of Company then: a Mohanlalesque honest cop arriving in Mumbailand with the resolve of cleaning it of its filth – the Shahid Kapoors and Dino Moreas– but is advised to start small and then told about the evil Bihari migrant workers who threaten to take the cake from the mouths of the Manoos who just by virtue of being born in a place now deserve to have them all and eat them too, even though if others have baked it. Montages from Company are quickly shown to refresh our memories.

The cop immediately pulls away a lowly officer from his duty patrolling the waters outside Gateway of India to the task of protecting Mumbai from a greater threat than a bunch of strafing terrorists – Bihari workers. For that purpose, the hero has been given a double O to take out any Bihari eking out a living. He hangs around with a bunch of peons at Churchgate, Andheri stations, taxi stands staring stiffly ahead all the time but with excellent peripheral vision. Immediately, the cop lays a trap to encounter a bunch of workers who have just landed at Virar and induces them into an abandoned PSU factory, with showering sparks and molten metal but abandoned by the striking workers, with that old North India weakness – supari.


Now, the run-up to this introductory sequence is MCed by the head peon, a puffy Indra Kumar who once, along with Armaan Kohli, defined the rank bottom of Indian hero type, with “Abe, woh Rambo ka baap hai, Terminator ka chacha hai, Rocky ka dadu hai, Bruce Lee ka nana hai, Last Action Hero hai woh!” And then surprise o’ surprise, emerges from the shadows not Tusshaar Kappor but Raj. Not the Malhotra one, but the Nunnu Thackrey, played by Salman, the inspiration evident in the announcement by the faux rappers: “Super Killer Demented, Momma says he’s Wanted!" Raj then proceeds to stamp his “Immigration Denied” seal on the poor bunch of workers in the manner of South Indian Action flicks.

Tired from a day’s work here, he steps outside to get some fresh air where about a thousand Manoos wait to garland him and do what they used to do in the workless halcyon days – taking out Ganpatis and dancing on the roads to synchronised PT steps – before the migrants came and made their gaan fatis. [A note here: Watching Prabhu Deva and Govinda dance together was a history-being-made moment only a diehard masala fan can understand.]

And then he goes back to lolling around the stations waiting for the next batch of the desperate migrants masquerading as the mafia, and Prabhuji keeps spewing truckloads of them every time Raj disposes of a battalion of them while filing his nails. And that is every fifteen minutes into the movie.


Enter Uddhav, played by who else but Mahesh Manjrekar as a corrupt cop, who remains surprisingly restrained and hence just a million decibels over the top. Uddhav is in the same business as Raj – killing Biharis at random – and indeed their territories, and constituencies, might have never overlapped had not the case of the Bihari baloonwaali fallen in both their laps.




Now the gubbarewali was not always a gubbarewali. As the brilliant transcripts accompanying my CD suggest here, she started as a weatherman (sorry – weatherperson) who gets thrown out of her TV show because of her excellent English. Forced to rely on her wits, an impossible task on any day, she becomes a vendor of balloons but does not know enough of Marathi to get a license to sell her wares and has to carry them around under her clothes while pretending to work in a BPO. Indeed, the balloons become twin symbols for her ethnic and sexist stereotyping. In a scene when trapped in a hot lift (full of delicate romantic moments reminiscent of Mere Mehboob like when the heroine sits between the hero’s crotch and asks what is vibrating and he answers – my cell phone) the hero blows air in her mouth and just as he asks her to blow him in her turn, the doors of the lift part.


A lot of critics have unfairly panned Ayesha’s role saying her presence in the movie is as good as a chair with two cushions. I disagree on two counts. First, a doormat would be a better home furnished example. Second, the symbolism embodied in her character is difficult to understand for the unsubtle. Branded for her English, gender and ethnicity, the heroine carries the painful burden of this hate on her chest courageously; her immense onus suggested only in delicately framed shots like these.

You might say that Ayesha is the script of the movie. Had it not been for her the movie would have been endless streams of Bihari workers, deprived of their rakhwala trapped in the Big Boss house, massacred at the station by Raj and Uddhav.The introduction of Ayesha introduces the very dilemma Ralph Fiennes faced as a concentration camp officer in Schindler’s list – the temptation of the gubbares of someone you have been taught to blindly hate.


In all, Ayesha propels the movie with four scenes along.



1. First, she goes to an aerobic run by Vinod Khanna to pretend that the only secret to her bloated top is a fine fitness regimen and no balloons.

While returning she runs into and gets groped by Uddhav or some Bihari goons (In fact, Uddhav is so desparate that he even threatens to rape the heroine’s lighter-by-quintals mother! – another definite first in Hindi cinema)

2. Second, she summons Raj through her irritating and fat Maggi brother with a mobile


3. Raj turns up and stamps his double OOs

4. Fourth, when Salman turns to her and wants to move to the other O with her, she weeps copiously and engages in philosophical dialogues with him like here where she questions the preconditions of affection thus, “Jisse bas logon ki jaan lena aataa hai, woh kisee ki feelings ko kya samjhega!” All Raj can do is look desperately bored and checking her balloons with his amazing peripheral vision and wishing she was peddling grapes and he could just walk away.







These four scenes run endlessly in a loop and indeed threaten to do so forever till, fortuitously, two things happen. Vinod Khanna dies and the gym closes. And then, Raj kills all the Biharis, and even Uddhav, who could have molested the heroine. And the picture ends thus abruptly – a bare-chested Raj (I seriously thought that after a decade I might be able to survive a Salman flick with seeing his shaved nipples but no – the villains had to throw Molotov cocktails at his shirt) heaving over the corpse of Uddhav and staring at the camera and realising it is over. The End flashes.

3 Idiots Review

The answer, I hear, Hirani gave a 44 year old Aamir when asked why he was being cast as a 18 something was that Hirani could not imagine someone else. (Much like the directors in the 80s couldn't imagine anyone else other than a Jeetendra or a Rajesh Khanna to play a college heartthrob.)

Well, Hirani. That is why we have a process called casting. And a thing called thinking afresh – something your movie touches in words but not deeds.

3 Idiots is not about 3 idiots, it’s about The Idiot. Not the Dostoveosky one, not the Bhagat one, but Aamir Khan. The King has been toppled. Aamir is the new crowned king of Bollywood without a doubt. Nothing but him can explain the BO numbers he’s generated with Ghajini and the undermarketed Taare Zameen Par (Mangal Pandey doesn't count as the implosive effect of AmishaHamPatel can offset fifty explosive Khans); nothing can explain why even after a mega-successful run Hirani felt insecure enough to rely on this real ikka of Bollywood.

Aamir is an excellent actor. He is the only big Khan who doesn’t ham and hence he is an excellent actor. I like Aamir. He knows he is not as good as people make him out to be and he tries hard – and honesty of intent is a worthy attribute in a hollow industry like BW.

Coming to the Idiot. The film takes off from where all movies like these have taken from since DCH. Only this time instead of another Khan to steal the idiot’s limelight, the two Chunnu-Munnus from RDB are added. There might have been the Tunnu but he was rolled into the character of Munnu himself, the Muslim-un’-like-us Madhavan. That way another painful subplot is avoided when all that the character has to do is weave his life around the leelaayein of Rancho and drop his mouth to his chest in awe, grin and shake his head at another of his antic-cum–miracles and weep and give him butt salutes now and then (a ceremony only Kareena is exempted from). Sharman Joshi tries bravely to eke out something for himself but Madhavan, clearly on the fag end of his hero career in BW, doesn't even try. They don’t even get a token side-heroine to romance. What happens to the Isha Koppikars and Amrita Raos when you need them?

To complete Prabhu Khan’s dasavtaram, there’s even a sequence in a song reminiscent of DCH’s Saif and Sonali’s song (btw, the music is pretty sad in the Idiot), where Aamir does a news anchor, chef, Hanuman, astrologer on the boob tube in front of another boob, Kareena. And no – it was not an ad by Coca Cola. And he becomes the only junior in the history of Indian ragging to get away with electrocuting a senior in the gonads. (By the way, the senior is played by a noted actor from Bangalore theater scene – Rajeev Ravindranathan. How pitifully these actors get wasted by BWood!)

And the new Jadoo ki Jhappi, from previous instalments, is All IZZ Well – stated with more emphatic thumps atop bus roofs by the real Prabhu Deva a decade and half ago as Take it easy policy.

Oh, don’t mistake me. The movie is entertaining. And I disagree with many when I say that the second half is better than the first. The subplot of Javed Jaffrey is deftly handled to explain Rancho’s decade long absence and still get something out of it. The movie is neatly, if unimaginatively, directed and the script is crisp despite the loopholes. What really make the movie work are Irani and Chatur. Aamir, never a spontaneous actor, is so busy trying to decide on the next cutesy mannerism to impersonate a 20 year old – blinking, craning his neck forward, scratching his head, look over that spot over the fulminating father's shoulder, sticking his hands deep in his pocket, wide-eyed – that he looks like he’s dividing pi with e in his head.

A pause here to establish my own credentials on why I might be able to connect to the lives portrayed.

1. The protagonists as Madhavan mentions were born around the year 1978. At least, he was. Ahem.
2. The movie is supposed to be life in the campus of an engineering institute I went to. Though not the Delhi one.
3. The movie is shot in my other campus – the MBA one.

Yes, my emotions might have colored my judgement had I found an inkling of my own life in the life described in the movies. But the kind director rarely let that awkward situation arise and beside Boman, nothing else in the movie – except for its moments like Sharmaan’s “per plate cost” question, two typical engineering students touching themselves under the vest as they browse Hindi cheapies on exam eve, students again praying to every possible god and animal on the eve of the results – touched me as strongly resembling my life in engineering and I quickly adapted myself to enjoy just some other fantasy ride. Which I did.

Where I did have a problem was when the film drawls its messages at me.

In what I would suppose it supposed a key scene, Aamir tells the professor about how ‘Yehaan par koi naye ideas ki baat hi nahi karta… baat karte hain to sirf marks ki…’

Oh yeah? And what new ideas have you offered to press that point? Recycling done to death urban legends, jokes and clichés.

Aamir asks the prof boasting about a pen built my Americans for space, why they could not just use pencils. Actually, the done-to-death urban legend is about Americans spending billions in research for the elusive pen while the Russians took pencils aboard.

How is a funeral filmed? A Christian cemetery, rains, black umbrellas.(For this only the dead character was a Lobo; beside the point that he died waiting for his convocation while the rest of his batchmates were waiting for the results of their first semester.)

Sharman, when told that nothing is impossible, presses the paste out of a tube and asks Maddy to try and put it back.

And having a 44 year old portray a teen never had anything to do with the BO marks scored right?

Yes. The movie truly stumbles where it tries to get serious. Suicides are thrown in like rapes in a Ranjeet movie. There is that obligatory suicide due to pressure that all half baked college movies and books resort to as a dramatic device to suddenly turn the mood from flippant to serious. When a nanha idiot is asked to make a choice between getting rusticated or turn a witness, he gets a nayaa idea and jumps out of the window. (‘But not a snitch!’ – as Pacino would have thundered here.) The prof’s own son had committed one, his bawling daughter tells him – like we did not see that coming since his introductory passage. Curiously, there is only one man behind all these suicides – Boman Irani who remains impervious to his Axe effect, even ignorant. When he breaks down, it’s only when the hero saves the day for his daughter - much like in his previous avatars in the Munna Bhai series. New ideas indeed.

Boman Irani’s character is a caricature – and credit to the man to bring it out in living flesh and blood. He’s the only totally credible piece to the movie and I could very well picture him stumbling into a class in Kanpur. The finest performance. I have studied for four years from professors like him and I can attest that 9 out of 10 of them would go behind the whiteboard and push it rather than pull it from the front. It is details like these that make Boman’s genius all the more special. Unlike the movie, he alone tries to be plausible not to the general but the people whose lives they portray.

Other than him, the movie remains mostly indifferent to what life in an engineering college in North India ten years ago might have been. Mobiles ring galore, people sport hairdos and fashion of the last few years, the GPA system is discarded in favour of a mysterious department-independent ranking system, a college of considerable stature is run autocratically by a single professor who cuts into classes at will, and a climax is resolved via a laptop to laptop live streaming delivery. And Kareena steps into a male engineering hostel in the dead of the night and steps out alive.

And there lies the movie’s biggest fault. Its lack of empathy – to a time, a context, a class. A reality away from colleges where the DCH cast hangs around. Times when most Indians still did not have the choice of doing whatever they wanted to do with their lives (and still don’t). The film shows no understanding of the deeper constitutions of its subjects: an engineering student, genius, a topper, a professor, a system. It’s no surprise therefore that the film’s second half does better than its first because now the protagonists are driving a SUV in picturesque valley, much like the DCH gang en route to Goa, and have brushed off the dust and lint of their humble bothersome and alien contexts from their classless metrosexual suits.

Other than that, the Idiot works just fine. (I would not have labored over its faults if it had not tried to preach.)

Tho’ I have never rested easy since I saw how suddenly my past from ten years back can land up at the door in a helmet – and a red wedding-sari.

Avatar

I came out of Avatar with a headache but that was only the glasses. the movie passes well for a timepass.

But a lot of hype has been created about Avatar and somebody needs to let some of the hot gas out.

First of all, Avatar is not going to sweep you off like they tell you. Pandora looks like a video game world and we have seen enough of that.

That Australian lead star (why are all the Bollywood actors now Punju and the Hollywood ones Australian: have the "brawn without brains" stereotype finally won?) passes well but I have read people rave too much about his anonymity. i hardly think having ben affleck, which worthington resembles a lot, would have made any difference.

the only hype justified is the luscious saldana. who had already fired all the space ships enough in star trek. I suspect, if she hadn't been black, after these two stunning appearances, she would have been crowned as the next Julia Roberts (tho' it still beats me why JR got crowned in the first place). And make no mistake - color still does matter in a still largely WASPish Hollywood mindset.

As for the plot, it's Dances with the Blues in the 3D -- the only difference being that the natives win and manage to transfer the white Costner to a red native in the end. But it still fares against the cliched plot of Cameron's last outing - Titanic.

In the end, Avatar is a watchable flick about everything which is already done and everything which is fashionable - a story against imperialism (only about a half to two centuries late in its time) taking its inspiration (and admitting it) from a 3-D Gollum conceived about seven years ago and a concept - Avatar - which is as mundane in the digital world now as a tweet.

Now digitialising the original Avatar with a panting-blue Shabana Aazmi (her male Avatar spelt as Shabana Aadmi) trekking along with Kanchan screaming about a call which came beyond nature -- that would have been far more interesting. I have always dreamed about a pink Rajesh Khanna in jock straps. Blue is close enough.

This is my 100th post for the year.

By the way, Na'vi (what's with the frigging apostrophe) spells Ivan in reverse. Is it again one of those tiresome tributes HW keeps patting itself with?

Luck -- The review

It’s tough to dispute a movie which sticks to its promise so tenaciously.Luck is about luck and it will keep reminding you about that after every 15 seconds.

Sample this one exchange:

Sunjay Dutt (who, being Musa, is always accompanied by an Arabic sort of music whenever he makes an entry, which is all the time, or does something like whirl a pistol in his hands in silhouette): Maqsood ki taqdeer (luck) ko nazar lag gayi. Who kehte hain na: duniya saali jalti hai, jab taqdeer(luck) chalti hai. The only things sure about luck is that it will change. Luck saalaa ek hi cheez ki guarantee ke saath aataa hai – ki who saalaa kabhi bhi badal sakta hai. Kyun Major?

Mithun (Major): Na luck badalta hai, na insaan ki taqdeer (luck). Insaan ka waqt badalta hai, Musa!

Despite hailing from “Luck”now, I have never heard “Luck” so many times in my entire life as I did in these two hours.

Luck is about a Roadies type game where the girls do not fight and the contestants are, thankfully, allowed to die. It is impossible to review the movie by conventional measures – just like a triple rated adult movie would be. (Though I am reminded of a friend from college whose comment after one such movie was – “Story mein dam nahi tha.”) Acting, character development, and even thrills are all incidental. This movie is about luck – its different forms – and in how many corny manners it can be spoken of. It lifts its material from famous short stories, B-grade Hollywood flicks, and the cheesiest Bollywood fare.

In short, I enjoyed Luck. It’s like Ghaayal showing major yesterstars in a series of hospital beds, all ghaayal, exchanging dialogues about how they got there.

Sanjay – Major, meri yeh yalgaar thi ki main kabhi gaar-yal nahi hunga.

Mithun – Musa, insaan hosh mein tab aataa hai jab woh disco ki stage par ho aur Rajesh Khanna usse Gaa-yell kar raha ho.

Ravi Kissen (to Imraan) – Oye chikane, hee-hee-hee, tu banegaa meri paayal?

Imraan – Nahi. Tab tu karega mujhe peechhe se ghaayal.

Danny enters – Generator mein tel khatam ho raha hai. Tum sab logon ka life support chalaa jayega. Kisee ke paas ho–gaa aa-yal(oil)?

Yes. It’s something like that. If you think there is anything in Luck other than word-play around kismet, taqdeer and luck, do find it and let me know. Even the songs are about luck aazmaa-ing and choreographed with the actors cramped in giant letters of – take a guess – no – not that – what? Why the hell would.. anyway.. not that too – give up? LUCK.

Sanjay Dutt is the lucky man – which has nothing to do with the fact that he’s allegedly humped every moving thing of the feminine persuasion in Bollywood – who arranges lucky men to test their lucks against blank cartridges, non-functioning parachutes and sharks (Other than the Citifinancial ones most of them are trying to evade). He chooses Ram, via his hechman Danny – again this has nothing to do with his having exhausted with all the females and Imran with his luscious lips being the next best thing – for a game because he’s so lucky. So lucky that he was born in the house of Aamir Khan. In the movie though Imraan has one bad luck – his father – who dies after, as the policeman, tells doing what harshad did in 1992. this is the director’s way of showing that the story is as grounded in Indian reality as Sunju baba's helicopter landing in the middle of a Bombay Coffee Day; even Dhanbad is mentioned in passing. Ram’s mom is Rati Agnihotri and Ram does as many facial expressions as her prolific cousin, Atul Agnihotri, once did in Aatish, again with Sunju, and which has since inspired countless such no-brainers.

Mithun is an army major who never gets killed (Indian fauj's lucky mascot) though a rather incompetent one, always ending up getting his entire batallion massacred. Rupa Ganguly, who with every passing year reminds me more of Anju Mahendru, his wife refuses to die and he has to arrange some 20 lakhs for an operation, the details of which are never made clear to even Mithun. Mithun fishes out the calculator and makes the right choice of getting the money by risking his life – and luck. He figures that the cost of the kilometres of kafan needed to swaddle the erstwhile Draupadi would be much higher.

Ravi Kissen is a serial killer who is hanged for murdering some 11 girls but the knot of the rope of his noose slips – which again reminded me of the chain of a rickshaw in Lucknow which slipped at least a million times the day of my ICSE board making me an hour late. Unfortunately, I was never pardoned from that exam; but Ravi is because of a loophole in the law that no man can be hung twice (yes, it’s illegal to be twice hung – in case you were planning to get an extra implant). A distortion of “can’t be tried twice” but hey! This is Bollywood. And, to think of it, Indian law.

Now Ravi wants to loosen some other knots – those of the bikini of the debutant Shruti Hassan who passes muster (Her being Saar’s daughter – how can I say otherwise?!) and thankfully looks more like Sarika than Kamal. Otherwise it would have been really disturbing seeing Imraan woo her and Ravi try to rape her.

There is that Haryanvi girl from Chak De who does a good job in a role written as an afterthought. As part of her contract she has to speak about camel, since she rode camels (in a decent way) in Pakistan, every now and then and that’s understandable.

Then there are the extras, black white and yellow contestants, who never know they’re dead the moment they signed up for a luck-to-death game in a Hindi channel. I have heard that Tom Alter is livid he did not get an opportunity to recite some Urdu poems on taqdeer.

Did I miss anyone?

Yes, there was Mr Mukku Ambani doing a cameo (a cameo and not a camel – and no, Miss Haryana doesn’t ride him) as a South Indian don as the picture on the right shows. Nice try, Ambu! You thought you would escape unnoticed? Bad times, huh?

The one positive I got from the movie is that Danny and Mithun are signing up movies. Somebody please take these fine actors and give them the movie they deserve while they last.

Given that there was little to look in the movie other than the letter Luck (which, like Tyler, appeared in blinks throughout the movie), I still managed one astounding discoveries.

The Chosen. Nothing less.

For years I have despaired that Kishan Kumar never had a worth successor. Just like my grandmother hints at my marriage by asking me to show a pota before she ummm you know (It’s been a shock for me in the past couple of years in how many elderly relatives in my family have turned out to be salivating paedophiles), I know I can die peacefully now.

I had heard about Imran but this is the first time I am seeing him. Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me about his fantastic eyebrows? You can lose a wallet in them! Of course, the greatest of them still remains untouched as the snap below amply shows.

You don't have to be a big high-brow to join us -- just big eye-brows would do.

Truth about London Dreams

It has been widely reported that London Dreams is Rock on revisited. Nothing like that. The movie is a straight lift from The Comparative Study of Class Struggle in Eastern India in the 1870s and the rise of the Balban Movement in Ghaznavi in 1110 by KA Rizvi – especially the bibliographic bits.

The plot stays static but three characters revolve around it. Ajay Devgun plays a young RSS scholar searching for the relics of a lost civilization which he claims created the zombie disco-dance a couple of hundred years before the rest of the world. His belief in his own claims is fortified when he find what he is sure is a yellowing parchment with – Hello! – English script that he is sure belongs to this greatest of civilizations. But at the ASI institute, the scholars throw him out with the lie that the parchment was just a torn scrap from the TOI which had been subjected to disgusting nocturnal emissions around a year ago. Ajay picks up himself from the street he’s thrown on and brushes the dust off his coat – a gang of IronMaiden wannabes headbanging to “Betty bought a bit of butter… bitter” in the background underlining his bitterness all the more. Ajay swears to never wash the right side of his body till he gets his revenge.

In the meantime, Salman Khan is Ajay Devgun’s chawl neighbour, unknown to each other, but known to Amitabh Bachchan who makes a cameo at the end as a camel smoking Camel. Salman is in love with a hole on the east wall of his room for five years now but can’t muster the courage to confess his love. He orders take home chai and vada-pav one evening, lights an agarbatti and proposes to the hole finally one day. The hole remains silent and Salman interprets the silence as acceptance. In the first such scene between a wall and a man, or any inanimate object and a man for that matter, they make love that night – picturised to Kanchan’s mata bhajans and a Parindaesque blueness. As Salman enters the hole, he hears a sob and realises with a shock that the hole had been a virgin all along. But the sob actually comes from Ajay, his neighbour at the other end of the wall, who’s come back to his room realising that the bastards didn’t even return him his treasure – the parchment.

The two heros get eviction orders; the chawl is to be brought down to pave way for a pavement. Salman panics and approaches his neighbour, an inconsolable Ajay, to help take down the portion of the east wall with the hole in it. The two delicately saw off the portion and start lugging it away when, with a cry of “Joy Mukherjee!”, Ajay discovers another portion of the parchment under Salman’s bed and lunges towards it, dropping his end of the wall. The hole cracks, and becomes a hol-aa, and as Salman stares shell-shocked at the widened rift – he realises that the hole had been sleeping around in his absence. Anger follows this discovery of treachery and he wheels towards the man he is sure is the man who destroyed his love’s intact and tight virginity, Ajay. In the meantime, Ajay has also realised that he has been tricked, the parchment is HT and not TOI, and he wheels to face his nemesis also. (This part of the movie is sponspored by a blining Wheel neon seen from the open window separating the estranged heros right now.) The two heroes face eachother, fire in their eyes, their breaths angry snorts, bending and digging in for the final charge – when suddenly the door flies open and a bare breasted Asin rushes in with a banshee-like cry and buries each of their faces in her ampleness. (This part of the movie is never fully explained except that she is the daughter of the owner of the building, Asit Sen.)

And these are the first five minutes of the movie.

Watching Halla Bol

I just finished watching halla bol. The inspiration came from an evening at Safdar Hashmi Marg in Delhi and remembering the name of the street play he was murdered performing – Halla Bol. But the movie is not a biopic on Hashmi as I naively expected. In fact, what had struck me the irony of how the government which had had Hashmi murdered in cold blood in public view, and never had had to face any difficult questions for it, had now so graciously granted a road’s name to the man – I believe that these rich narratives will only be discovered two hundred years from now. Instead it’s blatantly about the Jessica Lal murder case, where a rag-to-riches actor Sameer Khan and a witness to the murder rediscovers his conscience and fights the “system” to speak the truth. The last scene is a tribute to the memory of Hashmi tho’ – and despite being delivered with the bollywood stridency of Sukhwinder shouting in the background, is well rendered and a fitting tribute to the courage of that man.

I have followed Santoshi with a slient wait – waiting for the time when he would rise above his Bollywood mindset completely and do justice to the bold themes he chooses. In Daamini, a movie where the script held the promise of making it one of the most important movies of those times, he squandered the chance when he chose the thousand-expressions-a-minute Meenakshi Sheshadri, whom I’ve heard he was desperately wooing then, to essay the role of a woman who undergoes a thousand-revolutions within and that multiplied meant a million expressions every minute of the movie – like watching Jim Carrey essay the role of a neurotic hyperactive man with multiple-personalities; thus he traded the promise of celestial fame for a celestial lay – something I would have done too. I liked China Gate, despite Mamta Kulkarni, a more faithful copy of Seven Samurai than Sholay, even though he drew the Hindu-Muslim conflict in Amrish Puri and Naseer to the point where the audience wept every time they came on the screen together.

Raj Kumar Santoshi somehow reminds me of Sudhir Misra in terms of the themes he chooses. But somewhere his desperation to keep it mainstream makes him keep committing mini hara-kiris in between.

In his working, a more apt comparison would be Vidhu Vinod Chopra. The difference between the ranting VVC (this is the VVC network vrought to you vy Johnson Vavy Powder) and RKS is that the former is a technically-proficient mostly-mediocre person who fancies himself a genius and blames the junta for not understanding his pathetic mix of “commercial art” (in Mission Kashmir, Hrithik, to pave way for his eventual deliverance, is a feared terrorist who never kills the soldiers but just kicks them around – and with that condition he flushes the movie into the realm of the comically absurd and then expects the audience to lap it as serious cinema). RKS is a man with genuine talent for finding good scripts and characterisation and yet he fails to live up to the promise of his scripts by riddling it with many mediocre plot-points, letting some characters become caricatures, bad music, and inability to escape the mental clutches of Bollywood masala.

Santoshi’s success has always come in the subplots of the powerful plots he squanders. In Daamini, Sunny stumbled halfway into the movie as a has-been alcoholic lawyer and lit the screen. In China Gate, it was the Amrish-Puri-Jagdeep chemistry which was the crowning point (a similar chemistry was evident in the now forgotten Muskuraahat, a remake from some SouthIndian movie starring Revathi and the launch pad of the producer-son hero). Even though these themes work, the movie hinging on the central plot gets lost.

The subplot here is Guruji.

Here, the director very intelligently chooses Pankaj Kapoor for the role (Any other country, and Pankaj Kapoor would have had the top billing, above Ajay Devgun and Vidya Balan.) It is Pankaj Kapoor who elevates the movie to its moments of greatness every time he is on the screen. (He even makes a re-entry into the script in the fashion of Daamini’s Sunny Deol when the hero hits the nadir of no-hope ala Daamini.) Pankaj’s character too is very well fleshed out. A dacoit who had his change of heart while slipping into a play performance (but did it have to be the totally literal ‘Raja Harishchandra’?) while evading the police and became a theatre actor – a nice and full sketch except for the RHC part which made his eyes water even after decades (maybe a nukkad-naatak on second chance would have sounded more credible.)

If I see the movie a second time, I will keep fast forwarding the movie till I see Pankaj Kapoor on the screen, watch it till his exit and then hit the remote.

I wonder why RKS lets subplots dominate his Bollywoodishly-rendered plots. Subplots are supposed to bolster the central plot, to add nuances and dimensions to it, and not to take away the spotlight from them completely. The central plot and dialogues is like any other Bollywood movie. Since the hero is a Muslim who marries a Hindu, vignettes from his past force down the harmony of his M parents with their Hindu neighbours though, and this is a Bollywoodian dichotomy only the Indians can understand, by Bollywood standards it is actually subtly done. Vidya Balan’s character is a character in wait to play the role of the wife-standing-behind-the-husband-on-dock in the latter part and the romantic bits in the start are recommended to be followed while talking dirty to a stranger over the phone and cutting your toenails. Anjan Waagle Srivastava essays the role of the father with the same innovation with which Alok Nath essays his. Ditto for Sulabha Arya. * as the actor's secretary repeats an old act, but you don’t mind it, since he does it with the same finesse as he’s done it earlier.

Actually, the choice of characters points to the same lapses of imagination which plague RKS. He takes fine actors by the roles they have already essayed instead of discovering a Langda tyagi in Saif and Deepak Dobriyal in Rajoh. If there had been a grandfather, it would have been AK Hangal who would have midway through the movie made a heart-wrenching statement about fighting for ethics to the hero while the other characters stood around, heads hung in shame, and then left after hearing the azaan.

The new element is Darshan Jariwal, who takes over from Amrish Puri to play the villain of the same mold as those of Ghayal and Daamini. There’s even a tribute to ‘Jhatakna bhool jaoge’ with a ‘ting’y confrontation between Ajjay Deol and darshan Puri. Darshan is totally out of elements – the more I see of this actor, the more I realise that earnestness is not quite a perfect substitute for aptitude.

The movie moves from one screaming level to another, like all BW fare. When the hero in the start is a dissipated soul, within minutes he lies to old out-of-luck directors, screws starlets, tramples on other people’s careers and acts like Salman Khan all the time. Then after a murder most unsubtly-rendered his pangs are still suitably shown. But once his isolation starts, the hysteria of the world against him becomes absurd. The politician dad incites the public opinion against the hero and he’s thrashed unrelentingly by the press and the public; Prabhu Chawla does himself no favours in a badly-scripted talk show where he attacks the actor for changing his stand and speaking out. I feel a lot of people would have dismissed the movie here. Since when did people start believing in politicians, other than the managed goons who burn books and thrash couples on their behalf? The day YSR’s chopper got lost, discussion forums were flush with gloating glee that a politician, usually surrounded by more police than our smaller towns, is in any sort of physical danger. In fact, Jessica Lal case has brought to fore the estrangement of public opinion with the feudal system – the politicians, the police and the ineffectual judiciary. A grave error, I think.

Also the irony hit me again when the movie, after showing for half an hour how easily the politician schemes a superstar’s reputation to the dustiest and brownest of dust in weeks, despairs over a street-play performance announced to be performed. Ironic considering how easily Hashmi’s own death was effected and how easily the dust of its protest and public memory swept away and buried beneath the well-paved road bearing his name.

Part of RKS’s dilemma, and people like him who want to inject some discussion on our society in the distorted escapist world of cinema which surrounds us all the time, is the total dumbing of the audience that BW has effected. In a scene where the hero is approached by some Muslim-brethern to give his victimization a communal angle, the hero rises screaming to the duo, caricaturised from the beard to their tummy and the gamchha on their shoulders, telling them it would be a disgrace to cite his Muslimness as the cause of his being targeted (as opposed to his standing to a system of lies and feudal tyrannies) when the PM is a Sikh and the Prez a Muslim. Loud as this scene is – how else do you communicate a scene to the Indian masses – I write this after reading a report where a Mumbai college-student derides HallaBol as being too arty.(!)

In the end, Halla Bol is a movie which disappoints like a book where the author, in haste, dissipates a good plot and idea. And yet I would rather read it to the end, perhaps even buy it, than a sanitized bestseller.

A funny cure for Hangover

The Hangover skims over a territory soiled by a million B-grade comedies – bachelor parties, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, road trip, etc. To be honest, it falters a little here and there but largely sails smoothly over the dredges of clichés and unfunny slapstick muck; and tells the same clichés in a refreshingly funny manner.

It largely owes its success to a good script and having some genuine actors for start – being totally anonymous to me, they came without any baggage – there was nothing I expected from them and, to be honest, they almost blew my socks away.

Stu, the Jew, suffers from some clichés. A Holocaust-survivor grandmother’s ring, a girlfriend made in hell, and his own denial – the bit about actors discussing how his gf cheated on him and how he tries to extenuate it every time could have been avoided as it’s a standard gag from every unfunny comedy with a henpecked character I have ever seen. Yet when not trying to do the denial gag, he brings a lot of character to an otherwise routine character. Ditto for Phil, suave yet fallible, who reminds me a lot of Church(Jack) in Sideways. There’s also a nicely-added touch to him in the end when it’s shown that despite all his marriage-phobic stunts in Vegas, he’s a happily-married dad – done pretty subtly for a goofball genre.

Alan, of course, gets the cream of the role. His is a character who can be goofy in a thousand ways, so mixed is his story, and the way Zach interprets does justice to the scriptwriter who created this character. A little more could have been done with it but I guess it would have totally taken the focus out of the rest of the story. A stretched example but during the making of the Padosan, after seeing KK’s interpretation of the character, Mahmud and Sunil Dutt had to majorly rethink their own characters lest the movie and the plot be totally hijacked by the great KK. Similarly, I read somewhere how Danny DeVito’s character’s scenes had to be shortened in Get Shorty to bring the spot back on Travolta’s Chili Palmer – in the few scenes together, you can see how Danny totally burns the screen in front of stalwarts like Gene Hackman, Rene Russo and Travolta.

But in all, Zach does a fine job in playing Alan. The scene where he confronts a nasty looking boy he just provoked some time ago facing him with a stun gun in his hand, the face frowning and puzzled, still uncomprehending the disaster coming his way bang on, is classic! That, it tells us, is what the problem with Alan is -- a thousand times better than the scene when Stu tells him he's too stupid to insult.

Doug – the white one – underplays his own role magnanimously. Compared to the three main actors his is only a minor part, even though he best fits the movie description of a leading man.

Doug – the black one – still believes he’s the black man in a B grade comedy and is unfunny and bad.

My only peeve would be that they didn’t go for the whole hog. It could have avoided some of the clichés and nudity and it would have been a classic.

The ending credits where the actual bachelor party is shown in snaps underlines the essence of why this movie scored. It did not show the bachelor party because it did not have a script for it – the slide show clearly explains all what had happened – but because the sophomoric gags which usually accompany comedies based on Bachelor parties (Tom Hank’s ‘Bachelor Party’ being one of the better examples) was not the point of this movie. It takes a script corrupted by scores of cheap unfunny comedies and weaves something more sophisticated out of the tired gags.

Watch this movie to see how those horribly executed gags should have been done. And that's it's still possible to have a good bachelor comedy if you do not let Seth Rogen within a hundred miles of it.

Slumdog Millionaire

Before the media launches on to the Globes with a tag like Slumdogmania; before we link our weird notion of patriotism with an Irishman’s grit and grime take on the “real” India; before we sit outside the Taj Mahal and start praying for an Oscar miracle (as seen on Independence Day) – just hold on. And watch the movie.

Alas. It’s got nothing much for us Indians – since we know the story better. We know that slumdogs do not speak in faint-British accents, we recognize bad acting from good (the middle Salim is so blatantly a rich kid trying too hard to slum-dunk his way through) and we know India.

After reading all the reviews, I sat to watch the movie with the intention of liking it. I didn’t end up hating it in the end; but it left me indifferent. It was like watching a movie where one of the key themes is the indecipherability of Hindi to a foreigner – which it is not fo me.

Having read Q&A last month, the problem is that even the founding script of this movie is weak. The book is built on what we used to call (during skit writing sessions in engineering college) fatte. What if the questions in a quiz show are answered by your life?

Unfortunately, though a short-story might survive on a single fatta, you need moe than a dozen to sustain a novel.

The book, though written in effortless flair, gets quickly tiring after the first two questions – and too predictable. And it’s a book obviously written keeping the white man in mind – sample this dialogue where a satta player explains the game to the young Jamaal – “It is another name for illegal betting. Satta is organized by powerful underworld syndicates in Mumbai with a daily turnover of millions of rupees –“
Sounds more like an edification by a guide to a fat American in shorts and a videocam – doesn’t it?

Coming to the movie, the movie is just a glorified Bollywood love story. As far as the grit goes, the trial-through-shit scene falls flat (a director’s desperate attempt to recapture the glory of his most famous scene) and the realism has been captured better in Mithun flicks. When the young Jamaal breaks into a dance for his Lathika, the thought that went in my mind was that clearly the director had never seen a slum kid dance.

What holds the movie together is Rehman’s juggernaut of a score – shifting moods in a blink. The acting is mostly good – despite the accent, Dev Patel is good (I figure that our own chhora Shahid Kapur might have fancied a chance and shudder at the thought); so are the rest – especially Anil Kapoor (but then where Anil Pappu Kapoor shines as one of the best actors speaks volume about its grittiness – right?) Mahesh Manjrekar is cast as a gangster but thankfully he underplays it – I guess in a Bolly flick he would have hammed and screamed the curtain apart.
Watch the movie, leaving your baggage of reason at the same spot where you leave it when you go for masala flicks. But don’t expect either a Salaam Bombay or a TrainSpotting.

The wrath of Gods: Rab Ne Banaa Di Jodi

After a long time, I submitted myself to the tortures of a mainstream (incidentally the main streams in India are the gutters running proud and gushing in the middle of the streets) Hindi movie.

The movie was Rab ne banaa di jodi – from the messiah of love himself, Aditya the Chopra.

Aditya Chopra was born in the year 1955 to a family of renowned surgeons. Unfortunately, he lost his father to a brain surgery that he attempted on himself, and his mother to an accident where she sat on a scalpel. After his adoption, the young Chopra spent most of his time sighing and drawing tattoos of breasts around his young nipples (Incidentally, in an interview, he claimed that he still has nipples the red of a Washington apple: thankfully, the reporter didn’t ask him to prove his claim).
It’s around this time that devotees claimed that Aditya first uttered the word – “love”. Adtiya, again in an interview, claims that the idea sprang on him when he saw a dog in heat hold in abeyance a horde of others for a bitch. Unfortunately, what had really sprung on him that day was a close friend, young Karan Johar, who, so far, had restricted his “weirdness” to begging his male friends to let him shake off the last drops of their pee.
This was the start of Aditya’s first relationship and, tho’ too timid for drugs, he confesses that he did experiment with agarbattis and dhoops.
Growing up, Aditya fell into a depression and confided in his dad about his condition. ‘Well maybe it’s because you’re so fucking stupid’, his dad helpfully suggested.

The rest of the story is well known. Frightened by the complicated adult heights that his father had taken the notion of relationships with movies like Silsila and Kabhi kabhi, Aditya plotted a return to a pristine-white naivety. Not for him the idea of cheating husbands and wives, the contradictions and ambivalence of relationships. For Adi all it takes to have a romance is billowing curtains, heroines in white drenching in the rains and SRK named Raj smirking to glory and lifting his eyebrows even higher than Jack Nicholson.


Aditya’s success that followed derived from a shrewd insight into three critical factors that make Indian romance flicks Indian romance flicks.

1. India is a poor country. And frightfully aware of it. Not for it, the reality waiting to bite outside the cinema hall: instead, throw in the white babes and the Swiss Alps.

2. Most Indians have repressed relationships. Most men and women in India do not get to date before marriage: even the marriages are arranged by the elders. Hence, most Indians do not get to romance.

3. The Indian society runs on clichés. Education is usually vocational and, hence, technical: subjects like psychology and sociology are restricted to the inner walls of a few colleges. Indians are not taught to express themselves emotionally, their social awareness of their conditions is abysmal, their ideas of sex chastity and virginity medieval in its morality, their treatment of women horrible and… to put things in perspective, in any survey, a romance from Mills and Boons will be voted as a “mature depiction” by not less than 95% of the respondents.

Aditya had seen the failure of his father’s Silsila and realized that most Indians do not want to see even this tempered down reality (in the last scene, in an attempt to reconcile the errant man and wife to their spouses, the director resorts to a plane crash rescue, no less!) Most Indians who come to see romance flicks do not come to see a reflection of their own experiences (coz sadly they don’t have much to share there) but live a dream vicariously. Since, with the taboos clichés mindless-customs, most Indians have very dumbed down emotional quotient, they crave for loudness, repetition, clichés and an idea of romance usually associate with early teens in the developed world. And yes, like the father in DDLJ mouths, they want their heroes to live the lives they never would have.

Hence, the swiss Alps, red sports cars, leather jackets, flash of gori-chamdi, and the myth of ascendancy of Indian values above everything else.

The success of Aditya’s first film, DDLJ, lay in not the intrinsic value of the film but how it successfully adapted itself to the naïve idea of romance in India to a T. In the movie, the idea of consenting adults is never even mentioned. Heroines, even foreign-bred, weepingly succumb to the wills of their fathers and heroes, when having the opportunity, refuse to run away with them. And, of course, their love is so pure that they never even kiss.

Sample this dialogue from the movie (source: IMDB) –

Raj Malhotra: Do you love me?
Simran Singh: More than anyone else.
Raj Malhotra: Do you trust me?
Simran Singh: More than I trust myself.

Now sample a few dialogues from Closer (I know it’s not a fair comparison but I regard the latter as a watershed movie in the depiction of relationships):

Anna: I'm sorry you're...
Larry: Don't say it! Don't you fucking say you're too good for me. I am, but don't say it.

Larry: Is he a good fuck?
Anna: Don't do this.
Larry: Just answer the question! Is he good?
Anna: Yes.
Larry: Better than me?
Anna: Different.
Larry: Better?
Anna: Gentler.
Larry: What does that mean?
Anna: You know what it means.
Larry: Tell me!
Anna: No.
Larry: I treat you like a whore?
Anna: Sometimes.
Larry: Why would that be?


I do not wish to present a contrast between the movies’ maturity quotients but their contexts. Imagine, screening a DDLJ to an audience nurtured on a diet of reality-probing films like Closer and releasing Closer to an Indian audience.

It is the quintessential argument most of Indian media has forgotten: a thing’s popularity is not a statement on its intrinsic value.

After DDLJ, Adi tried his hand on four multiple romances (five if you add the disastrous imitation of Pankaj Kapoor’s Santa by the under-talented Anupam Kher). Mohabattein was supposed to be a showcase “first time in screen together” for the big B and the small S but there’s little much to showcase when each of the stars is a horrible two-dimensional caricature: one mouthing pratishtha sammaan samriddhi even while taking a dump, the other playing violin and talking to ghosts. With veteran thespians like Jugal Hansraj, Uday Chopra, Preeti Jhangiani and Kim sharma, the movie is now best known for its stellar performances, lucky Uday’s minute-long pappi and Preeti’s kathak, or whateveritwas, in the rains.

RNBDJ is the third on the block from this purveyor of love.

It’s been three weeks since I saw it and much of my initial reaction is now tempered down. But if there was only one word that I could use to describe it, it would have to be – horrible.

I think the movie started with the director’s desperation to connect with the audience that he lost to his langotiya-yaar Mr. K Johar (in an interview, Aditya quoted ‘Pehle he stole my innocence, now he’s stolen my plots!’). Why not plant the idea of a SRK-Yash Chopra banner romance in every Indian romance. SRK quoted (and this is as an actual quote) that he picked the idea of his two characters for participants he saw on one of his shows. While the second character is played to a T, since it is essentially a small-town SRK duplicate, the main character – the resilient and silent Indian middle-class – is a farce. Is this how the director and the actor really see the character? I forgive Adi – the scion of a famous producer-director, his idea of middle-class India is susceptible to be a clichéd warp-zone. But what about SRK and his humble Delhi beginning? Is this how he understands the emotional constructs and motivations of the middle-class?

This actually demonstrates a theory of mine: if the daily activities of any man become constant news feeds, if the man is seen on interviews over interviews regarding his views from choli designs to world peace, if a man starts talking about himself in the third person, if his private jokes become grist for plot-lines and compering contracts: that man is gone. His sense of reality and self-perception as acute as ol’ Canute’s (tho’ Canute knew he could not order the waves back).

The premise is so stretched that even the director is not convinced about it. Hence, the hero has to mouth fifteen-minutes long rationale for his actions to a yaaraa, a mannequin and the audience (as stoned to boredom as the mannequin) after every half an hour.

One quality that needs to be appreciated in the movie is the principle of minimalism. Everything is there only for a purpose. Not for it, tangents and threads that clutter our daily lives.

Hence, the movie starts with SRK visiting a wedding at an old teacher’s place. The teacher has only a few scenes to plod the story along and is only present in those sequences: first to introduce SRK to is daughter as his best student ever (the best student goes on to bag an exciting job in Punjab Powers and the personality of a doormat), have a heart attack to the news of a tragedy and then get his daughter married on deathbed. The daughter, when she moves to her sasural, does not even carry a picture of him with her – so quickly are the dead forgotten.
The daughter is depicted as the socializing and bubbly sort: in fact, that, one guesses, is the reason for her grouse with her new hubby’s fidgeting inhibited personality. Yet no name is mentioned after the father’s death and no relative or friend comes visiting the bride. I guess that this might be a hidden tribute to the anonymity of character of Satya, of whom the only fact revealed was that he came from Hyderabad.

The heroine’s grouse with her new hubby tho’ is entirely justifiable. Not only had he gone to develop a personality befitting the gods, he also has the following strange characteristics: a habit of pulling his shirt-tails in front of his crotch every five seconds, a queer disinterest regarding sex (with a wife like that sleeping downstairs in another bed the – what one gathers – virgin hero coolly walks about in his pajamas with no tell-tale frustrated bulges on display), and ( in another tribute) no relatives and friends except for an impossibly mismatched yaaraa. The yaaraa tho’ is quickly explained: the plot needs his hair-dressing skill and saloon for the hero to transform into his other role.

As for the main plot, do you really want me to go there?


I think the movie might one day be hailed as the dawn of the absurd in Indian mainstream cinema.

For all its box-office collections, this movie is the first note in the death-knell of the half-career of Mr. Chopra. Do remember that even Khalnayak was a resounding success – nevertheless it did start the decline in the fortunes of Mr. Ghai.

Stepaway from these brothers

Some of the greatest scripts start off with the question – what if? Unfortunately, so do the worst.
The prime example in recent times would be Adam Unfunny Sandler’s Click where the scriptwriter raised the cilched question – ok what if life could be controlled by a remote? And the monstrosity followed

Step Brothers apparently starts with the pairing of rather similar body-structured John Reilly and Will Ferrel. What if we got them together as retarded brothers?
If the 80s, outside the Monty Pythons, marked the acme of Hollywood comedy scripts (‘All of me’, ‘A fish called Wanda’), the 2000s must definitely mark the nadir.
Sample the comedies it’s delivered – The scary movies series, the ‘teen date’ type flicks, and movies like ’40 year old virgin’ and anything starring Katherine Heigl in a comic turn. In fact, a decade where comedy has been dominated by the likes of Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider.
It all started with Something With Mary. The hair-raising scene gave licence to just locker-room talk pass for comic timings. Genitalia and the various so-far private affairs that come along with owning one became plot plodders. Be it the stuck zipper in something about Mary or erections in Road Trip, Scary movies and 40-year old virgin. In Step Bros, of the 1hour 20 minutes movie, almost five minutes are spent on a scene where one guy threatens to bang the other’s drums with his balls and is then explicitly shown to do so (prosthetics, I assume; and hope).
When I was churning comic scripts in college, it became a challenge to get the laughs without sexual innuendoes. Not that I was a prude but simply it was too easy. Have Anil Kapoor mouth a ‘Teri maa ka...’ and then trail off and 90 times out of 100 you would get a laugh. Heck, even fardeen khan might register that average. And then ask Fardeen to deliver something really funny and count the laughs.
Risqué turns have always been a major theme in comedy – and no one has handled it with as much hilarity as that genius - Woody Allen. Everything you wanted to know about sex has got to be the best sex comedy ever. The last episode is entirely about a man making out and ejaculating and it’s HILARIOUS.

But there’s a line between risqué and tasteless, unfunny and funny that is as thick as Reilly and Ferrell together.
Step Bro never judges the line, the script and the direction waste two very good actors.
Reilly is no Jeff Daniels and Will Ferrell is no Carrey. And this is certainly no Dumb and Dumber.
Avoid this one unless you think one-minute long farts in interviews is the funniest thing you have ever seen.

On a side note, as soon as I saw this guy in a guest role, I knew that there was no rescuing the movie anymore.
With classics like Knocked Up, 40 year old virgin, zack and mimi make a porno under his belt – he makes Ben Stiller look like Chaplin.

The unfunniest man since Jinnah, someone please put the likes of him to sleep!

what a cat fight