Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna: The review

Still interested in reading more about this year’s biggest pretence in the name of maturing cinema?

Omkara

Omkara: ***

I have never read any Shakespeare, and whatever little criminally abridged pieces that had found their way into my school’s English curriculum, have been forgotten. Yes you can read that last sentence again, gape out loud, widen your eyes and fall from your chair. But today, after watching Omkara, it really will be the second time in my life that I felt smug for missing out on a body of work that’s considered universally to be the “ultimate” in drama and literature. (the first time being, if you still are as dimwit to not guess, when I had watched Maqbool 2 years back). Just as the end-credits started to roll, I just couldn’t get this thought out of my head that if I had known the climax way before, I just wouldn’t have bothered with even writing this review. The number of freewheeling shockers jam-packed in the final ten minutes of the movie just wouldn’t have had that impact that (I am so thankful to my ignorance) they had.

But mincing no words now, I have to admit that I was disappointed with Omkara. With a plot pregnant with far far more drama than Maqbool, it simply didn’t have the intensity or the power of the latter. Save for the last ten minutes, when the rein from the bland characters finally passes on to the actual plot which helps it end on an above-average note, the film’s got mediocre written all over it. And that’s not because it settles for anything mediocre but because it always somehow manages to mix something superb with something very ghastly, and the bar, as a consequence, ends up raising only halfway.

Much of the damage for me came from the actors. In a tale that pivots on the central love story, sparks simply fail to fly even when the camera longedly follows Dolly (Kareena’s character) running after Omkara (Devgan) in that supposed-to-be-cutey-and-teasy scene or even when Devgan is furiously necking and pecking the Kapoor lass beneath the covers. When one has a storyline with beaten to death sequences of running away with one’s lover much to one’s family’s disdain, its upto the actors to rise above the banal and deliver. While Devgan does try valiantly to look lovestruck with his beady eyes, Kareena’s just so awfully controlled and held-back, she ends up looking quite uncomfortable and out-of-place. This when really all she had to do was little more than what she did in Refugee–do the simpleton act with a dash of charm.
Both the actors pitch in awfully calculative performances, consistently oblivious to their respective characters’ spirits, and because you are never quite convinced of the characters they are playing and their feelings for each other, right from the onset you care way too less than you should about the aftermath of Omkara’s henchman plotting against his cohort using Omkara’s love as a mere tool. Still, surprisingly enough, somehow both of these performers somehow get their act together in the scene that mattered–the climax. Its about 120 minutes too late to feel for them, but the director’s really given his all to those final fifteen minutes and ends up being successful in squeezing some sympathy from cynical watchers like me for the unpredictable and shockingly brutal end to Omkara’s love story.

It must also be said that there actually are a few things which rival the boredom of watching a whole episode of Bhabhi on Star Plus. One of those is watching Bipasha Basu do a whole 7 minute jhatak-matak dance routine. And to actually survive through two such full-length songs where we have to bear her giving the whole set of adayein complete with nain-matakka from her squint is really so bad, its funny. The girl, with due respect to her miniscule acting talent, is blatantly miscast here and absolutely thanda as the UP nautch girl Billo.

Saving the day from the aforementioned three performers are the next three lead performers who bring in some credibility to the whole set-up. Konkona Sen Sharma is totally identifiable and just downright adorable as Devgan’s sister, Indu. Right from her dialect to her lived-in maternal affection for everyone around her, she’s just right. Not a single wrong note here or there, she really brings a broad smile everytime she holds the chin of the distressed characters around her and utters “hansi badi mehengi ho gayi hai aaj kal” . Thankfully, as the second half draws to a close, her character’s scope becomes bigger and bigger until the spotlight shines solely on her and Konkona’s all too glad to oblige us with some well-felt theatrics. This is the stuff real performances are made of and I am so glad that even in the company of mainstream heavyweights, Konkona’s given enough screentime to leave a lasting impression.

And then there’s Saif, who’s surprisingly convincing as Langda Tyagi. From his hilarious, expletive-filled opening sequence to the slimier-by-every-successive minute routine where he’s supposed to bitch and plot and bitch and plot and bitch some more of how Dolly’s dating Kesu Firangi, how Kesu Firangi gifted the bejeweled waistband from Omkara’s heirloom to Billo and so on and so forth, Saif pulls it off with laudable ease. Though you have seen it all in the form of Pallavis and Mandiras in saas-bahu serials, still its reasonably entertaining watching this despicable character use reverse psychology and perfect timing of letting the wrong people hear the right thing in the wrong way to his own advantage. The havoc that just this one character creates would have carried far more punch if, as I said before, I was affected by how deeply the two protagonists (Omkara and Dolly) were affected. Instead, its the collateral damage on Kesu’s and Billo’s relationship thanks to Langda again that is far more sincere even with one tenth the screentime that Vivek Oberoi [consistently enthusiastic] gets with Bipasha.

The trend of mixing something worth lauding with something worth moaning about continues behind the camera as well. While placing a Shakespeare play in the heart of small-time crook infested UP has been done as deftly as one would expect of Mr Bhardwaj (quite unlike others, being a UPite from birth, all those dialects, jokes and expletives really hit home with me), the fact that the politics and action sit very clumsily in the screenplay (atleast to me, the magnitude of Omkara’s strengths and power came across as very vague and rushed), the central love story doesn’t have its moments and things really never warm up in the first half, it does take away a lot.

While the decidedly fresh and earthy soundtrack had gems like “Namak Ishq Ka”, “O Saathi Re”, “Sabse Bade Ladaiya Re” and “Naina Thag Lenge” which literally smelt of a remote Uttar Pradesh kasba (for want of better expression) right from their sound to their lyrics, the fact that my favourite, “Naina Thag Lenge” is used way too carelessly in the movie (as a background score to Kareena’s courtship with Devgan five minutes into the movie and it doesn’t work as the mournful suggestions of suspicion and mistrust are way too early and uncalled for) and that two full-length dance routines have the most bland picturisation ever (thanks to Ms Basu), I hold a gripe here as well.

Even the cinematographer is up playing tricks with the viewer feeding our eyes with reels on reels of unstimulating imagery until the climax *SPOILER ALERT* when a lone camera capturing a newly wed bride swinging dead above the dead groom on the floor has a shock value that’s way higher on the Richter scale than the whole film combined.

To sum it all, I haven’t lost faith in the film-making skill of Vishal Bharadwaj and I sincerely hope he continues to adapt more Shakespeare plays, but doesn’t miscast the way he has with Omkara. Yes, there are emotions running the entire length of the movie, but they are nowhere quite as deep as they should have been. There’s this nagging unshruggable feeling that something really is amiss this time around and surprisingly enough its got nothing to do with the excellent plot.

Still, the film’s worth a watch once for its intricate storyline (a rarity in our films nowadays), for watching Saif and Konkona perform and for a genuinely good climactic half an hour.

Journey down the memory-lane–on buses.

*Long, rambling post warning*

Even as a child I used to treasure the most inanimate and bizzarely mundane objects. Like buses. I mean when I look back its both intriguing and oddly embarassing that I could be obsessed by an ugly rectangle of iron on wheels.

But I just was. Paying homage to another one of my weird hobbies in this random post, I’d like to thank Jedi for his well felt article on a bus ride.

The School Bus:

As a kid, the word bus was synonymous with taking a bath, getting ready quickly, and running off lugging a 20 kg bag. Yes, I used to love my school bus. And given that I was about 10-12 kms far out from the BHEL industrial town where my school DPS was, my bus stop usually was the second one (Notice the use of the word “my” hehe). Freshly scrubbed and neatly combed with water bottle hanging down my neck, I used to religiously sit with my bag neatly sat on my thighs and from the open window, enjoy the trees and houses whiz past.

After 8 hours of playing in the sun, poem recitals, drawing and sums in a typical school day, I still remember the way our class teacher used to form 3 queues for 3 different school buses which used to leave all non BHEL kids to various neighbourhoods in Hardwar. Now the Green Bus, (which was my bus) was, to me, the most insignificant of them all. It had only three stops, all in close vicinity, but the part that made it most boring was that it was the only bus owned by the school. So the seats were standard metal bar-atop-hard cushion stuff. And when it was hot, we really had a hard time for the whole half hour it took for the bus to reach home.

Compared to our Green Bus, the kids travelling by Yellow and the Brown buses really seemed to have it all–the buses each took an hour long trip around Hardwar taking them everywhere from Har-Ki-Pauri (famous bathing ghat on Ganges) to Jwalapur (a hustling bustling market) through atleast 5 over-Ganges bridges and 3 over-railway bridges. On top of the sightseeing, since the school had given the contracts of both the bus routes to private coach companies, the kids had luxury coaches with television sets and individual bucket seats which were foamed so generously, the kids practically sat in them and not on them.

But to my utter dismay, concepts as complex as “softer seats and movies on TV” were lost on my fellow mates back then. Like sheep getting herded, they used to lug themselves obediently to their own buses with their colour coded bus passes safety-pinned to their shirts, day in and day out. And I remember reluctantly following them to my Green Bus as all my attempts to use my Camel crayons to turn green into yellow or brown were in vain.

My only hope of getting on those luxury buses was if I wanted to go to my daadi’s (grandma’s-god bless her soul) place, who used to live in proper, old, ashram-infested part of Hardwar. At this point it must be said that my mom-dad had separated from my daadi and decidedly wicked buas and the only way I’d ever get to go to daadi’s place is if mom stomped her way out on an argument (always thanks to my buas and co. let me add) with dad to a friend’s place. So even though my heart bled when my parents fought over some family problem, secretly a part of me was glad that a trip on the Yellow Bus was very close. So yea, I was that mad for travelling on buses even back then.

I also quite clearly remember how I was rebuked quite hard by my mom as I was smugly reciting to her an incident where I had raced with one of my sworn bus-enemies to loot a seat. She actually was quite surprised that I used the word “loot” and behaved bandit-like when it came to getting seats on the bus. And then went a long lecture on the lines of “you don’t own the seat” and so on, none of which had any effect on me back then. All that mattered was “my seat” in “my school bus” and I made sure I had it every morning and every afternoon. What really was so special about this seat was that firstly, it really was housed atop the rear-wheel arch, which meant that standing atop the arch I could get a high view with the elbow neatly rested on the window’s perimeter. Also, it was the only seat perfectly aligned with the window’s start and end which made the seating position just a tad more special.

The bus-drivers we had for school buses were also more like rally drivers in the making and in the not-so-common co-incidence of two buses exiting the school at the same time, the race that ensued after that was the stuff lovers of truck racing would give an eye and a tooth for. There were bets, there was cheering and there was booing and every roundabout, every common bus stop became the place where destinies were changed. The winning bus would suddenly lose it at the last bus stop if a 6 year old girl forgot her water bottle on her seat and had to go back to get it.

And then, during the rains, when the sides of roads were filled with shallow puddles, there was something bizarrely hypnotic about the bus splashing through every one of these. This, and the tyres sending a trail of dust on the more drier days–I just wouldn’t tire out of finding such mundane stuff fascinating.

The Toys and the Games:

The Hot Wheels buses I used to play with (ditto these)

From Hot Wheels to clunky wood to plastic Leo, I was always adamant on getting only the bus and truck models. And not the keyed or remote-controlled ones which used to bug me with the mind of their own, flashy artificial lights and monotonous sounds. I remember keeping it always real and simple with my playthings. They were all manually draggable models and I used to stage full blown traffic scenarios of dangerous over-takes and traffic jams by humming the throttle sounds and mouthing peep peep, pom-pom for horns.

From verandahs, to porches, to beds, to parapets on roofs, to balustrades in balconies, almost every place in the house was a life-like simulation for the real roads. Especially the balconies, where a single hard hit or brush with my own sleeve ended some swanky new cars in the open drain two floors below. Almost like a bus falling in an avalanche.

The public transport:

Since the first few years we were living on rent, we had to move our house every couple of years within the town. Now in a place like Hardwar, there were only two “real” roads, one–the main road which used to run along the town’s midway and the other, a no-speed-barred national highway running on the other side of the river. Both were connected supremely well with bridges and streets and kutcha roads and galis. But being the only two roads, bus-sighting could only be done if you lived anywhere near these two roads. And sure enough, I was in for a treat when we moved just off the main road when I was about 8-9 years. Here, I developed a new hobby of observing the public transport buses in my free time and reading where they went. And I used to love the logic behind it all. Each bus with a specific destination had its own time. And its own unique personality. Like the buses going to Rajasthan were always Ashok Leyland models with sharp grunting exhaust than the ubiquituous TATA models which had a balmier, low pitched gruff to them. And then there were the Punjab and Haryana buses which besides being coloured all funny (grey on the whole with multi-coloured stripes on window bars) used to be driven with such godspeed that I would never used to make out the destination. Mostly they were written in Gurmukhi anyway. There were also the regular Delhi buses always painted in white and always stating out their status in red paint “semi-deluxe coach” or “super-deluxe coach”.

Other than the state-by-state classification, one could easily deduce the en-route conditions (atleast I thought I could) just by looking at the state of the buses. The ones travelling to towns like Muzaffarnagar, Chutmulpur, Etawah, Nazibabad, Saharanpur had their sides stained with streams and streams of dried vomit and paan stains. And their wheel arches clogged with tons and tons of mud. Even the windows tended to be cloudiest in such buses (proof of people lying about with their thickly oiled heads on the panes). Every bus had a story to tell, and I used to enjoy every minute of fly-past inspection of mine.

Although I myself had travelled to Delhi innumerable times by DTC’s semi-deluxe and deluxe coaches, the memory of one incident circa 1995 still sends shivers down my spine. It was mid-August and my family had taken a night-bus from New Delhi at about 8 PM. Now, by schedule we should have been home by 1 or 2 AM, but given the rainy season, we had to traverse through many semi-flooded (2-3 feet deep in water) towns and villages, so we added 2 hours more to the equation. But halfway through the journey, we entered a jam that extended to as far as we could see. Given that our national highways are never ever lit, cars and buses standing one behind the other revealed precious little about the cause of the jam.

Half an hour and some voluntary enquiries later, it was revealed that a newly built bridge had been burst by a big monsoon river (apparently a sight of every monsoon thanks to the ever-corrupt thekedaars) and that we’d have to wait till morning before the flow subsided. Cut to 10:30 AM the next morning and our bus was crawling along with the traffic ahead as we finally entered the point where the road abruptly led to a river bed. The bridge was nowhere in sight and it was quite a horrific sight on the right side as some of the brave ones who had tried to rush it during the night time had their Marutis and Ambassadors smashed and upturned brutally on the river bank. Amidst this sight, our driver began the slow march into the river bed. Within a matter of hours, the river had visibly reduced from a muddy monster to a deceptively innocuous, clear-watered, shallow (albeit still broad) river. Upon entering a relatively muddier patch, our driver did the unthinkable. He pressed on the gas pedal to gallop past the crawling traffic and the one thing we all were dreading, occurred. Yes, you guessed it–in the middle of that river-we got stuck. Given the luggage (both human and otherwise) that everyone carried, I remember everyone deciding against getting off the bus and the conductor finally getting two tractors from a nearby field to tow us out of the quicksandy bed to the road. What a trip that was and to sit in the bus while its been towed from the front (risen from front) was quite something.

Many moons later, around 2001, when I was doing my 11th Std. at school, we had moved to Rishikesh (30 kms from Hardwar) in 1999 but I had never changed my school. This meant that I had to catch a public transport bus at 5 in the morning to get 13 kms closer to Hardwar at a huge army cantonment in Raiwala from where an Army Bus carrying all the kids from the Army families went all the way to school. Now, Rishikesh being a smaller and less developed town had a single bus stop to its credit. And the only bus to start that early in the morning was a Punjab transport one. Now, to get to the bus stop alone, I had to catch a motorised three-wheeler (also called Vikram) and after 15 minutes of loud hollering of “Tum to Thehre Pardesi” by godawful Altaf Raja first thing in the morning, I was subjected to a drive of my life. The Sardar drivers with their newly-oiled-and-pinned beards pushed the accelerator so hard, that it hardly ever took them more than 9 minutes to manuvere through 13 kms of potholes, scooters, rickshaws, Vikrams, oncoming lorries and stray cows. I vaguely remember the thrill ride, sitting on the edge of my seat watching through the front windscreen in case we hit something.

A view of downtown Rishikesh with Vikrams and its lone main-road which doubles up as the gateway to Himalayas.

In the Jan of 2001, there actually was a bomb-blast on the Republic Day night at the bus depot the remains of which, some two days later, I remember seeing. To see a bus so completely blown-up (I remember its roof curved all the way to the sky with the blast’s impact) with cloth, suitcase tatters and glass pieces all spread around it–there really is nothing more sombre a sight than to see such a scene.

London:

Cut to 2002, and its been more than four years that I have relied on the buses for commuting.

The No.25–the bus to my uni.

The double deckers, the bendy ones, the short ones, the old ones with TCs–you name it. Given my lax time-management skills, I have pleaded drivers to open doors at traffic lights, have had my breakfast, lunch and dinner more than once atop one of these, have done a full change of clothes atleast 2-3 times getting ready for rowing straight after a lecture at uni with more than 20 people on-board. Yea, its been fun and games alright, but the four things that make the london buses what they are, for me would be:

1. The Fares: From a tolerable 70p a commute (can be anywhere between 1 stop ahead to the last bus stop) four years ago, to a steep £1.50, the bus tickets are a rip-off. The one-day and weekly bus passes are still a bargain. But the way the fares are managed on the new bendy buses—the drivers don’t check whether your bus pass is valid and you get through any of the doors–means its easier than ever to hop on and off free of cost than ever before. Which pisses the regular fare payers like me no end.

2. The Bus-Stops: Given that you live in London, you are never more than a few yards away from one. It infiltrates every imaginable street and minor road, the connections are impossible to find fault with and in just every way, bus routes are tailor-made for the local people to get to anywhere and everywhere they’d like.

3. The Buses: One really does feel well looked after amidst 4 CCTVs (2 if its a single decker), reasonably comfy chairs for seating and always enough space to stand or hang from one hand. The automated platform-lowering and a wheelchair-wide space inside for prams and wheelchairs are design benchmarks for accessibility. Even after all these years, I still quite like touching my Oyster card on the ticket-checking machine which sits with the driver or pushing the Stop button on any pole to stop at the next stop. That, and the heaters running longitudinally all through the bus are a blessing in the winters. The plasma screens now been fitted in buses city-wide for advertising and what’s on is quite classy indeed.

4. The Cliches: They are most impunctual when you need them the most. You-wait-for-one-for-an-hour-and-then-three-come-along kind of thing which really does one’s head in. This, and the fact that there are no windows (just flip-open ventilators) mean inside temperatures can go upto 51 deg C (like it did today).

So, there you have it– my memories with buses as small as the Hot Wheels drag bus to the London double decker. Now let me get some sleep to be ready for an early morning commute tomorrow to my workplace by bus in what’s reported to be London’s hottest day in years.

The dilemma of what to read!

*Lousy post warning!*

Of late I have become so fussy about buying a book, that I am actually quite amazed that there was a time when I was mad about fiction. But seriously what do you pick? Almost everything has a sense of deja vu attached to it. Enter any WHSmiths store and you have fiction easily classifiable into these catgories:

1. The wannabe Da Vinci Codes: This phenomenon has been on the book shelves since early last year, and it sucks. And I am referring to the Grail which the whole publishing world is frigging mad about . The plot–A murder mystery that spirals into some weird kind of historically revealing quest. Give or take a few changes, the basic story is a mere means to an end of some bizarre revelation about some sect or some secret society. I mean why would I read 600 pages of something that’s no-way as controversial or relevant and tries to be as smart as the Code. Some worthy new examples:

2. The chick-lits: Terribly sexist I know, but I just won’t pay up to read a good 500 pages just to find out how a certain Kathryn reacted when her friend slept with her fiance. And no I don’t care if a certain Ms Darcy Rhone starts to think that there’s more to life than just getting inside a size 6. Worthy new examples:

3. Hey! Look I am quirky: Now these are the sort of books which have plotlines not complicated just because they should be, but because they can be. Bizarre covers and blurbs add to the shock value but its the same old family yarn/scandal from the first page. Give me one good reason why I should spend my £10 and 5 hours on these and not watch another episode of EastEnders or Hollyoaks. Yes, you won’t find me holding any of these:

4. Yet another generic thriller: These are vomited out in dizzyingly rapid succession by the supposed thespians of the genre but are indeed so minimalistic and rushed (that, and shamefully spaced out and margined by publishers), it only takes reading one or two to know that you have just been ripped off for reading something that CSI on Channel 5 (which is free) would have shown you with far more speed and audio-visual razzmatazz. So no I am not reading any of these:

5. Read my sob story: Blame Dave Pelzer and his “A Child Called It” for this depressing stream of books where everyone seems to be kicked, bruised, strangled and made to drink Baygon in their childhood. It happens-yes. Do I want to spend my leisure time reading every such account of abuse in graphic detail? Hell no. So, these are out as well:

And no, I am not into classics, biographies, autobiographies, Terry Pratchetts or any of the fantasy world ilk, tired and I am past the age of getting any fun from Stephen Kings, Dean Koontzes, Robin Cooks, John Grishams and Michael Palmers. And yes, I have had enough of Jeremy Clarkson’s wisecracks too. So I won’t be reading all of this as well:

Yea, you can accuse me all you want for my shallow comments and my stinginess on books-to-be-picked, but seriously nothing on the bookshelves catches my fancy nowadays.

And no I just can’t trust a newspaper critic’s opinion on something I am going to spend much of my week with. Yes, I have seen some very ghastly and truly horrible pieces of writing applauded and awarded for being the best writing ever, and so I have stopped following newspaper reviews altogether.

So where does that leave me? With my gut instinct. I finally I left it to sheer luck to fetch me a book that’s fresh, intelligent, dense, incisive, sharp, honest, funny, inventive and above all has the ability to hook me all through and is worth my time. Did I find it? Oh YES.

And its called… All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses An Eye.

I am halfway through the book and I can’t believe how good it is. To sum it up, its more of a Dan Brown meets Ian McEwan (just what I wanted!). Yup, its got the speed, the thrill, the menace and its a brilliant character study. Atleast in my reasonably credible (so much for modesty hehe) reading vocation, I have seldom come across a thriller which treats the characters with as much respect as the plot. And what language! I have never read a book in this genre that’s this quotable or that actually feels as if some thought really has gone into sentence construction. Plus its fiendishly inventive. It doesn’t feel like a story crafted to get the sales and the bucks. Its real. its funny. Its just downright fantastic.

For those interested, here’s a synopsis:

“As a teenager Jane Bell had dreamt of playing in the casinos of Monte Carlo in the company of James Bond, but in her punk phase she’d got herself pregnant and by the time she reaches forty-six she’s a grandmother, her dreams as dry as the dust her Dyson sucks up from her hall carpet every day. Then her son Ross, a researcher working for an arms manufacturer in Switzerland, is forced to disappear before some characters cut from the same cloth as Blofeld persuade him to part with the secrets of his research. But they are not the only ones desperate to locate him. A team of security experts is hired by Ross’s firm: headed by the enigmatic Bett, his staff have little in common apart from total professionalism and a thorough disregard for the law. Bett believes the key to Ross’s whereabouts is his mother, and in one respect he is right, but even he is taken aback by the verve underlying her determination to secure her son’s safety as she learns the black arts of quiet subterfuge and violent attack. The teenage dreams of fast cars, high-tech firepower and extreme action had always promised to be fun and games, but in real life it’s likely someone is going to lose an eye … “

I am just glad I waited a good four months after McEwan to finally finish this book. I am already your fan Mr. Brookmyre, and going by the list of books you have written, I look forward to be entertained for the rest of the year. Yoohoo!

Pirates of the Caribbean fest!

Yes, I am a sucker for everything that falls under Hollywood blockbuster category. Sure enough, its feasting time with yet another comeback of a stupendously successful franchise. A franchise that somehow eluded my watching resume for one reason or another. But with time finally on hand, I made it a point to finally watch this Disney extravaganza back to back (regardless of the fact that the first movie was a downright pain). And this is what I think of them.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003): **

Let’s get this straight at the very start–this movie is a bore and a big, fat one at that. And for me this is all that matters. All the creative intelligence and technical wizardry be rubbished, if its a story not well told, a story that fails to elicit any response, then for me that film just isn’t worth watching. And this first Pirates movie is just that. Gore Verbinski just isn’t able to infuse any life into the characters. Yes, he’s crippled by a plot that’s way too complex for its own good but given that this is supposed to be an intro to the world of supernatural Caribbean piracy and an English Royal family, the setting just doesn’t have enough build-up or interactions to be convincing.

The action starts head-on with a pirate called Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) arriving at the Jamaican port, incidentally rescuing governor’s daughter Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) who has two secret admirers– the local blacksmith (Orlando Bloom) and Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport). An argument or so later with Commodore, Jack’s put away in the gallows as the port is invaded by a ghost ship called Black Pearl. Now Black Pearl is a vessel crewed by a huge bunch of “undead” hoodlums who are apparently under this weird curse of remaining undead until every single gold medallion is returned to a chest they stole and spent from years back. That and a small blood sacrifice from every thief. Now the twist in the tale is that while abducting and looting the port, they capture Elizabeth (who has that last medallion they need thanks to a chance encounter she had with Orlando Bloom when the latter was found stranded at sea. Bloom’s father, Bootstrap, was one of the pirates who, angered by his crew’s disobedience to the cursed treasure, posted the medallion to his son back then). And then there is another thread of Jack Sparrow also being the captain of the Black Pearl who was mutinied back then and marooned on an island.

Believe me, there’s nothing more unexciting an exercise than sitting for a good two and a half hours only to get answers to questions like “Is the curse finally broken?”, “Does Jack Sparrow get his due?”, “Do Elizabeth and the blacksmith get together?”. For the only question that really matters is “Do I care?”. And I really don’t. The undead pirates might as well have skinned Elizabeth alive and burnt the blacksmith at stake and probably that would have stopped my head from bobbing with sleep.

One look at the length and clearly Disney’s tried their hand at creating their own LOTR. But one really wonders where all the production money really went. For alongwith bland direction of a convoluted story, the film is far from breaking any ground in terms of shot-taking, cinematography, acoustics, action or even dialogues. The swordfights are unforgivably repetitive and absolutely unimaginative. And to talk about how the people in this film talk would probably even make Virginia Woolf wince in her grave. From the first to the last scene, everyone is vexed, peeved, miffed–I mean its really tiring to see the actors go through the motions of fighting and pouting some gibberish about rum and cursed coins with a single expression. Oh, and it all ends the Bollywood way. That and there’s something disastrously wrong with Keira Knigtley’s teeth which makes her more of a scathing witch than the petite princess she ought to be.

So, in this whole fake dark cloud, thankfully the silver linings just about refrain you from breaking the DVD in two. Johnny Depp for once. The guy is an absolute riot as the flamboyant (read almost feminine) and smooth-talking pirate. That is, until he’s painted with the same pale colour that most of the film’s coloured in. Him and the one scene where Elizabeth drops off the edge of a castle into the sea thanks to her overtly tight corset just as the Commodore Norrington is proposing to her are very funny. Sadly, the film isn’t. Infact I don’t even know what this film is. There simply isn’t a sense of surprise, dread, menace, urgency or anything.

Power to all of you who love this tripe and have made it a blockbuster that it is. For me it just didn’t work.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006):***

Ah! Now this is more like it. Its almost as if one fine day a child discovers that the showpieces in his living room are indeed the best toys. Yes, Verbinski and his team finally have some fun with the savourless characters that populated the dead-beet of a first film. Much to my relief and everyone’s mirth. Forget the sequel curse, this is a boon on the lines of Shrek 2 and Spiderman 2. Almost everyone get their act straight and finally are up for some play.

Though, for some bizarre reason, the script and the screenplay writers are still way too uptight about doing away with the unnecessarily numerous subplots which means the film is still awkwardly dense and long. The only respite being the fact that it is this way only sometimes.

Elizabeth and Will Turner are arrested by the new Lord from the East India company on the day of their wedding for aiding in the rescue of a pirate like Jack Sparrow from his execution (picking up where the last film left off). A deal is struck to abate the discomfort if Will is able to bring Jack’s “broken” compass.

Meanwhile Jack has an old debt to settle with another legendary captain (Davy Jones) of yet another ghostly ship (Flying Dutchman) for reviving Jack’s Black Pearl. The captain has his heart stowed away in a remote island in a chest (the same one that gives the film its title) and Jack must find a key to that. And then there’s also a thread about Will Turner’s father, Bootstrap, meeting again with his son Will. And even Elizabeth is ready to take some matters in her own hands if she wants to rescue Will. And so abounds another epic of alliances, duels, secrets, curses, chases and swordfights.

Yes, its way too complicated for its own good but somehow everyone’s in a lighter mood and it more or less ends up pieced almost together by the time the end credits roll.

Just like her blouses which have a newfound depth, Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth’s swashbuckling incarnate is pure eye candy. To see the lady do more than drape herself in bustle-n-crinoline skirts and exaggerated sleeves is quite a pretty sight and thankfully she’s used the right dental floss (pardon the sudden change in my critique of the girl’s aesthetic anatomy but this is supposed to be a follow-up comment from the review of POTC 1). Her scenes with Depp’s Jack Sparrow are crackling with a visible chemistry and thankfully, there is enough screentime given to the main characters alongwith her to finally bother you with what’s happening to them.

Johnny Depp is an absolute hoot as Captain Jack Sparrow. He has the best lines and he has them all through. All the comic sequences are written around him and they become ten times funnier with Jack’s drunken gait and his now inimitable verbal gymnastics. Be it the time when he’s enjoying every bit of the reverance from a superstitous tribe (or when he’s running from them), or when he’s in a three-way duel with Will and Norrington or just generally uttering lines like “Oh bugger”, he’s just howlarious. And you know you root for him just a moment before he’s about to enter the mouth of a giant octopus-like sea creature called Kraken shouting “Hello, beastie”. If at all this movie is remembered ten years from now, it’ll be for Depp’s no-holds-barred spirited performance.

Orlando Bloom does the stereotypical hunk act with elan and understatement. Which leaves me a bit clueless on the ubiquitous Orlando-bashing. Two other things which the makers get right this time around is dialogue and SFX. There’s humour galore and the special effects are in the league of King Kong (sometimes, even suspiciously inspired–esp the tribal scenes and the giant Kraken’s mouth). Though the menacing Flying Dutchman and its barnacled, tentacled crew really are originals, and quite excellent ones at that. Hans Zimmer’s score finally makes its presence felt too and just as a compliment to some breathtaking cinematography, the opening scene where we see a drenched bridal Elizabeth sitting amidst a courtyard full of dining tables, chairs, cups, saucers which are getting carelessly splattered by rain is haunting.

There are still elements which just don’t quite sit comfortably together (you still don’t know how seriously to take the characters in this utter tosh for Verbinski’s handling of drama still remains quite bland and archaic). So there’s none of that freewheeling epic feel that Lord of the Rings has but at Disney they are hellbent on proving otherwise. They are successful to some extent in this grandiose sequel which has had me intrigued what the final film in the trilogy will have on offer next year.

But till then, you can have a bite at this enjoyable fare which has enough wham-bam, physical slapstick and self-deprecating one-liners to see you through the sometimes dragging plot.