Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (Hindi)

Wow! I sound angry, once more: “Give me a fucking break someone from these sappy braindead Bollywood romantic dramas. Ridiculous, preposterous, IQ of sub 10, synthetic to the core with weirdly concocted conflicts and self-congratulatory rejoicing in weirder resolutions (what are these people smoking?), its retrogressive and suprisingly a painful bore. The only saving grace is Shahrukh Khan and how he brings in shades to the everyman Surinder Sahni solely through his performance. The opening 15 minutes uptil the Haule Haule song was a nice, enjoyable munch as you see this awkwardly engaged couple (in what has to be the most unsubtly obvious way) try to share common space–its all played straight but SRK’s great fun on screen with his brand of physical comedy. And then, the bomb drops. A talent hunt reality show looking for the ultimate dancing couple lands in this small town and the husband goes for a makeover (i.e. trims his moustache, gels and streaks his hair, plus wears teeny-bopper casuals) which the wife doesn’t recognise. So a conflict is created out of thin air, and you try your hardest to suspend disbelief in the girl’s and the movie’s manipulative naivete. But how? There’s no character progression, the central bimbo’s asked to played straight and being a debutante she obliges and does little else (God, in that one guest appearance song when you see actresses like Preity and Kajol jiving you know exactly what’s amiss in today’s Bollywood-that screen-chewing raw appeal in actors that would make you gulp anything they mouth on screen),  it keeps on going in circles for some godawful 3 hours for no rhyme or reason and trust me, if I see one more Bollywood movie with Shiamak Davar brand of aerobics-choreography and bimbettes + dudes forever dressed in gym shorts and push-up bras, I will rip my clothes off. Its fcking enough already, and as for Adi, how dumb do you think we are? All the while I was thinking of some deep metaphor embedded somewhere in this grossly lookist and superficial drama, but its like looking at the drain–the deeper you dig, the more black sludge you scoop out. The subtext is atrocious and you even used “seeing God in people” (your version of trying to articulate something intangible behind instant chemistry between two people) as a pivot conflict resolutor in which the girl sits hands folded in Golden Temple and just because the hubby is walking in her direction (considering she’s come with him to the temple, isn’t that the most natural thing?) pat she goes–this is who I’ll spend the life with. Please get a life! Even the worst of stinkers courtesy of your banner have had 10 times more thought in them than this stillborn nonsensical pap. 

PS: I was just reading Khalid’s glowing review and this is something I pondered about-maybe there’s some huge metaphor in the conflict of the movie… about a common man trying hard to place himself in the fantasies of his wife… but its sorta undone by dialogue in a key scene where he says something on the lines of “my disguise and dance is for her to laugh with me, but to love me she gotta take me as I am” which is sorta conflicting considering dancing and laughing is what made the wife happy. The disguise as a leap of faith is difficult to take for the viewer because this tacky, chauvinistic, played-straight-with-an-S movie (for most parts) takes the route of a banal dance competition and doesn’t even pursue it properly (the disguised SRK is an irritating wannabe and the actor seems to have improvised on the sets recycling or pastiching his earlier goofy roles), so when the movie fails at a literal level, for me it fails on other planes too.”

 

Don-The Chase Begins: Movie Review

Don (2006): * and 1/2

How do you go about critiquing a movie which is so mediocre it doesn’t evoke any emotion from the viewer? Having just come out of the screening, I am so numb with disappointment, that there’s neither any incentive to praise this piece of crap, nor the energy left to bash it with junky adjectives. Since when did Bollywood mainstream movies become so utterly predictable and so totally boring? Have film-makers absolutely lost the sense of having a proper graph, having good dialogue and good characterisations? Where is the integrity in the screenplay, and where’s the feel or a sense of thrill, tension, pace and seeing something that isn’t simply staged and rehearsed? And all this when its actually a remake of a decidedly over-the-top (it was the 70s) yet taut-to-the-last-scene thriller of the yesteryears. Despite all the special effects and marketing gimmickery, the new Don is proof of Hindi cinema’s storytelling quality spiralling downward with such godspeed that if a few good films don’t release fast, even the most hardcore Bollywood devotees wouldn’t touch the stuff belched out of this industry with a bargepole.

2 hours later, after calming down a little, I was able to put together a few thoughts about why this movie simply didn’t work for me and have randomly stuffed them in a few points below:

1. I must have repeated this line so many times reviewing the biggies from Bollywood this year (Fanaa, Phir Hera Pheri, Krrish, KANK), its probably lost all its meaning. But still I’ll say it again–Don is unpardonably boring; a staged, fake bore-a-thon that’s neither got the pace nor the tension that a good thriller so badly needs. And for a mainstream movie, that is a sin. A cardinal sin. Its a general rule that whatever it takes, your prime focus should be to involve the audience in such a way that a common thread or theme keeps them intrigued with charismatic stars; elaborate, showy dance numbers; over-the-top melodrama; plot-holes so big you can ride road-rollers in and co-incidences to drive home the point under 3 hours only adding to the fun factor.

To start with, Don doesn’t have a common thread or theme to speak of. It starts off as a bland cat-and-mouse chase between the police and the ever-growing-self-professed-kingpin SRK, then quickly changes gears to this kingpin getting seduced and attacked by vengeance-driven women (aka Kareena and Priyanka) thanks to his itch of bumping off his right-hand men who always turn out to be seductresses’ bhais, then somewhere in between him getting bumped off and replaced by a UPite-bandwala twin by a cop (Boman Irani) who plants him as a mole in this stylised cocaine-land, and then a whole load of fuss about a CD containing all the account details and passwords of drug lords of the world the semantics of which are so braindead, my head hurts. There’s another angle of an IT security fella (Arjun Rampal) who’s had his wife and son held at ransom and when asked to rob hundreds of crores worth of diamonds, the guy obliges and gets caught by the same cop who’s leaving no stone unturned to expose the drug mafia. Unable to complete his part of the deal, Rampal’s wife is killed and his son, who’s left to fend on the streets, is adopted by the UPite bandwala twin of DON. The two big twists of the movie are *SPOILERS*–Is the cop really doing what we think he’s doing? And Is the UPIte twin of the DON really the one we think he is? I guess the tone of these two questions have given them off but since I am not recommending the movie anyways, I am not bothered. And the question really isn’t whether the two twists shock or not, its actually–do we care? The answer is a resounding no.

2. Shahrukh Khan is hopelessly miscast as the DON. As the shaking, spindly, anorexic, and irritatingly animated ganglord he’s basically the twitching loverboy who’s seen the old Don probably too many times. Not only is the actor crippled by his own physicality (its just the wrong baritone–lines like “I’m the king” are unintentionally funny, wrong physique–even Boman Irani and Arjun Rampal look more upto the job of bashing people up and indeed kick some serious SRK-ass) which makes him look eerily like a kid playing “let’s pretend” amidst hefty men; his perpetual pouting, and hyper-expressing gives away the lines much before he’s mouthed them. And there’s simply no presence or no meany threatful menace to this Don, which is quite saddening as SRK was really in his element when he played grey in Darr and Baazigar not forgetting his hilarious yet convincing turn as Baadshah. Now, everytime the fidgety SRK attempts a swagger, its more of a catwalk, and everytime he utters the supposedly tough-yet-cool lines from the old Don, it looks like a college teenager cheesily trying to make a pass. And this when the movie isn’t even a spoof. His now-routine attempts at sauve sarcasm and rustic tomfoolery fall totally flat not because they are badly written, but because he does them in a way that shouts “Can I have some claps for what I just did?”. Of late, he’s also mistaken acting for a collage of similar windblown close-up shots of his goggled face which is becoming very tiresome to watch. Its all disheartening as this character had some brilliant scope had it been done with silent, sauve unpredictability-words this Khan has flushed down his toilet sometime in the late 90s. Compared to him, both Boman Irani and Arjun Rampal pitch in far more believable performances.

3. The action sequences are a mess and not even remotely as swanky as the smartly edited preview would have you believe. The flash-cut-left-right-cut–centre-cut-top-flash technique sucks even the minutest bit of rawness or excitement, not to mention the fact that you see them coming much before they do. What’s even worse, when the camera remains still, the actors look like in the middle of a dance sequence than an action one (there’s a SRK-Arjun Rampal martial-art one-on-one which is possibly the fakest Bollywood fight I’ve had the oppurtunity to see. Not only are the actors unconvincing, the sound design and the camera angles are shockingly mundane). Also, the superhuman genes have been sprinkled generously to the whole male cast, and not just the hero. So there are scenes when Boman Irani, the cop, would get shot at visibly heart-level, blood would spurt out from both the holes in chest and the back and he would not only run but shout, strategise and point a pistol with both hands for the whole of the remaining sequence a hundred times before all of its conveniently forgotten.

Then there’s this sequence where an otherwise limping Arjun Rampal who uses a walking stick trots away on top of a 300 feet high walkway’s glass roof with his son on the back. There are shots of him slipping over the parapet often, but the guy’s agility with his otherwise lifeless leg can give circus tightrope walkers some competition. Fight-or-flight reaction is the probable explanation. And the grand daddy of them all is the one where during a fight in the plane (that’s transporting Don and his company to some godforsaken land I can’t be bothered to remember), Don himself pushes the lever of the emergency exit door mid-air and gets sucked out along with the poor Irish thug who had picked a fight with him. The funnier bit is, despite free-falling without a parachute much before the Irish guy who has suspiciously managed to get sucked into open air with one, Don’s perfectly able to pick a fight mid-air, exchange a few slaps and punches, snatch the parachute away and land safely without a scratch. And I thought I was dumb at physics.

The thing is, stunts and sequences so larger-than-life are a staple of this genre and can be easily digested if they flow with the plot or are a daredevilry showcase of a likeable character. With not even a remotest semblance of plot-graph or characters, over-ambitious scenes like these only add up the bigger joke that this movie is.

4. The only thing that tops SRK’s hamming and the outrageously embarrasing action sequences is the background score. The monotonous techno-trance music continues to thump away carelessly and endlessly with little credence for scene or situation, timing or mood compounding the headache. The music, when re-living past melodies from the old Don, is admittedly very well-orchestrated (Yeh Mera Dil’s tempo, rhythm and mood is light years ahead in sensuality than the original while Khaike Paan Banaraswala manages to retain the rustic cheekiness with electronic beats to boot), but the original melodies are plain mediocre. And despite having such names as Saroj Khan and Farah Khan in the credits, the choreography is not only downright ordinary but sometimes even shoddily put together. And we are talking of a film-maker who gave us Woh Ladki Hai Kahaan (DCH) and Main Aisa Kyun Hoon (Lakshya).

5. Now to my favourite part of the review–the girls. Like a good ole’ Bond movie, they look gorgeous and sumptuous, but within a defined range. Kareena would look utterly ravishing in some poses but is downright scary when she tries to overdo the come-hither-me routine (and boy does she overdo it or what!). There’s a veil of artificiality that never leaves Priyanka’s eyes for a good part of her screentime (with a character as shoddily written as hers, I wasn’t surprised) and her lollipop figure profile (large face and head atop a petite body) still freaks me out a bit , yet this talented girl thankfully puts an effort in creasing her facial muscles and selecting a better designer which helps in bailing out her performance as creditworthy overall. The one thing that Isha Koppikar always did with aplomb was move right but here not only she manages to look consistently bland, she hams like no tomorrow and her dance moves brought back some very painful memories of Manisha Koirala.

6. Finally I am once again, for the 5th time in a single year, shocked and infuriated as to how weak this movie is, how B-grade its treatment is, how it doesn’t even have the basic ingredients of an entertainer, how it completely fails even when compared to a tackily made original let alone contemporary police-n-spy thrillers, and how it all comes from the same guy who re-wrote the format of mainstream urban Bollywood movie hardly five years back.

I sincerely hope this movie flops miserably and leads to talented-but-now-over-confident guys like SRK and Farhan Akhtar do some soul-searching and return to their roots.

This Don really is one big yawn.

Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna: The review

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

Veer-Zaara (2004): *** 

First things first. Veer Zaara’s somewhat better than SRK’s previous three pseudo-stylish “love-legends” Main Hoon Na, Kal Ho Naa Ho and Chalte Chalte. In the same breath, let me add that the genre-defining quality of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Dil To Pagal Hai this simply doesn’t have.

The so-called epic’s tale is as simple as simple can get — love buds between a boy (SRK) and a girl (Preity Z) (here’s the clincher– “from two different countries”). At the crucial moment of boy’s proposal, the girl’s fiancee (Manoj Bajpai) enters the scene. As expected, the girl’s been engaged under much pressure from her parents (particularly her father who sees the alliance as his political-career’s springboard). This vexed fiancee and the girl’s mother (Kirron Kher) persuade and pressurise the dedicated loverboy to spend the rest of his life as a captive with a different name to shield the girl from any societal disgrace and the loverboy agrees. Yes, you heard it right– he agrees without as much of a frown here and a pout there. Fast forward to 22 years… while the loverboy graduates to being a mute lovelorn oldie in the cell, the girl’s life is a mystery. Things are set right by a die-hard feminist-cum-lawyer Saamiya (Rani) and all’s well that ends well.

There are so few things that work for Veer Zaara. And there are so many that just don’t. Let’s get over with the positives first:

It doesn’t burn the screen, but SRK-Preity chemistry is warm and simmering alright. Both the actors have been given minimal dialogues (I say kill the screenplay and the dialogue writer!), but right from the yearning expressions of the lovelorns to the raw passions of lovers- they both get everything damn right. It won’t be wrong to quote that its all thanks to these two actors that I could survive this painfully stretched flick.

Preity-dimples-to-die-for-Zinta finally graduates to being the archetypal Hindi film heroine in this dreamy-surreal avatar. The coyness, the innocence, the anguish, the dilemma… everything’s seeped in dollops of nubile feminity which was so missing in her previous performances. With none of those tomboyish in-your-face antics (which so killed her performance in Kal Ho Naa Ho) and free of those look-at-my-gait-and-my-cleavage-and-my-hour-glass-figure antics (so very present in every other actress in the industry today), Zinta makes for one hell of a Zaara.

As Veer, even the otherwise high-on-hamming-and make-up Shahrukh pitches in a controlled performance. All compliments aside, seeing him making a false thick baritone whenever asked to mouth the Punjabi dialogues made me laugh.

Speaking of Punjabi dialogues, its Amitabh Bachchan who gets them right to the last syllable in his gazzillionth special appearance. Supremely endearing as the rustic “jatt”, his moments with his screen-wife Hema Malini are some of the few watchable ones in the film.

For once, the Chopras aren’t obsessed with Switzerland, England, Italy, GAP, Gucci, Nike and the works. If there is someone who has really relaxed, its costume stylist Manish Malhotra and production designer Sharmishtha Roy. Ironically enough, these two names are why Yash Chopra’s last film Dil to Pagal Hai is still talked about. Clearly, this time around the director isn’t keen on giving his “love-legend” a radical look and resorts to “punjab ke khet”, “punjab ke gaanv”, “lahore ke bazaar” and its quite relaxing to see SRK finally don a dirty blanket in the cell rather than some faded Adidas trousers.

A stray subplot of women’s education in rural India comes across brilliantly as we see Zaara dedicating her 22 years constructively towards village people. I expected her to cry herself to death in some kaal-kothri like SRK!

The film boasts of three bewitching melodies — Do Pal Ruka, Tere Liye and Main Yahaan Hoon and all three have been sewn in the screenplay with fantastic timing and feel.

So where does the film falter?

As if you haven’t yet realised, Veer-Zaara is basically a Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge hybrid with the India-Pakistan dosti angle thrown in. The only thing that the film’s nonsensical screenplay can actually boast as its “own” is the redemptory stretch of 22 years during which the lovers live separately. Or probably I am wrong. Even this 22 year angle is lifted from Yash Chopra’s very own “Waqt” (a Balraj Sahni multistarrer of the ’70s). So this otherwise 3 hour long saga is basically a collection of some forced songs and some forced scenes.

The Preity-SRK love story though kept aloft by the lead pair’s performances is jeopardised heavily by cliched sequences and umpteen number of songs. Both Veer and Zaara are your typical do-gooders, think-gooders, sacrificial lambs who are trampled under the feet of the cruel society (sob sob).

The DDLJ hangover is so strong and so obvious in every damn scene that one wonders if Sr. Chopra has actually lost it as a film-maker. You can’t help but go back to Kajol prancing about in the rain in “Mere Khwabon Mein” as Preity wiggles about in “Hum To Bhai Jaise Hain” (albeit in ahem ahem salwar-kameezes). In fact the resemblance is so uncanny that even a sequence in choreography is there (Kajol woken up-Preity woken up, Kajol bathing-Preity bathing, Kajol in rain-Preity in rain). Seriously, can’t we have a different way to introduce the heroine? The song-borrowing from DDLJ carries on with “Aisa Desh Hai Mera” and “Do Pal” feeling more and more like “Ghar Aaja Pardesi” and “Ho Gaya Hai Tujhko To Pyar” with every passing shot.

And it doesn’t end there. The whole SRK-falling-for-already-engaged Zinta, Zinta realising her love for SRK after he leaves; the corny, tear-jerking dialogues between SRK and Zinta’s mother Kirron Kher when Mrs Kher pleads to SRK to leave Zinta; and even the characters– Zinta’s slimy fiancee and intolerant father… its all so damn DDLJ and so damn repetitive. Simply goes on to confirm what our mainstream Hindi cinema has finally become– a recycling factory.

I wouldn’t even hesitate accusing the SRK-coming-back-for-Zinta sequence for being a photocopy of the SRK-winning-Kajol sequence in DDLJ. Its just the geography of the matters stopping me in doing so. In DDLJ, our SRK had to traverse some many thousand miles from London to a village in Punjab. Veer Zaara sees him travelling from the Punjab village to Lahore in Pakistan.

Which basically leaves us with two minute novel “issues” that the film so forcibly tries to address– one’s of “women’s status in today’s society” and the other is of “Indo-Pak friendship”. Let’s see how touchingly these two “issues” come across–

The “women’s status in today’s society” angle comes across through this headstrong lawyer called Saamiya whose dialogues are written more for the seetis and taalis of the frontbenchers. In fact there’s a noticeable trend you notice as Ms Saamiya Siddiqui pouts a humanitarian dialogue, swashes around and then catwalks as the just-outsmarted opponent looks on, mouth wide open. This trend is noticed everywhere… whether this smug-with-righteousness is talking to a police officer, replying to her opposition… its so in-your-face and so spoonfed, it makes you crack up. Like with all the other characters, Saamiya’s character lacks any real depth and however hard the- otherwise-efficient Rani Mukherjee tries, this Chopra-brand underdog is nowhere near to Karisma’s Nisha of Dil To Pagal Hai or Vinod Khanna of Chandni.

The “Indo-Pak friendship” angle is conveyed through lyrics like “jaisa desh hai mera, waisa desh hai tera” or dialogues like “Mere bharat ki izzat ka sawaal tha, aata kaise nahin” or “Yeh ek pakistani ka waada hai”. In fact, its hilarious as lovers boast more about their countries in their few moments together than talk about themselves (no wonder Preity forgets to tell SRK that she’s engaged.

Some of the characters suck so much, they actually end up funny. Take Zinta’s father for instance– poor man gets such a massive shock on hearing about Zinta’s affair, he ends up on a death-bed. Its another thing that the very next shot sees him stripped off all the ventilators etc and smiling as Zinta nods to the alliance. Ditto for Zinta’s maid (Divya Dutta) who speaks in a hybridised cockney-Kabuli-Punju-Hindi dialect. While I am at it, there’s no explanation given as to why Manoj Bajpai lets SRK rot in the jail when Zinta doesn’t marry him. If only Mr Chopra didn’t spend so much screen time on songs like “Lodi” and “Hawa”, maybe I would have got some clues.

Moral of the story– If in love, get ready to be a sissy. Get ready to be ordered around to spend the rest of your life in captivity if need arrives, for all you do care about is your lover’s respect in society. (My take– f*ck this society.. stand up to your love!)

Finally– Go watch Veer Zaara. Just don’t presume it to be a love-story of this planet– the world (read India and Pakistan) and its people are nowhere as black and white as the film shows them.

In the closing shots, as Saamiya utters “Jaane yeh Veer aur Zaara kahaan se aaye hain… zaroor khuda ke bande hain”, I couldn’t agree more.