{notes about who is cletis tout? and its Bollywood bastard[0] Anthony kaun hai?}
Raj Kaushal hits an all-time low with this Sanjay Dutt-Arshad Warsi vehicle that continues the growing tendency of current Bollywood filmmakers to reference and quote from film history to elicit some support on the grounds of nostalgia. The narrative references Yash Chopra films[1], the guy caught on video killing a girl[2] is called Lucky Sharma[3], Gulshan Grover's character hums old Hindi films songs[4], albeit grossly out of tune, the dead guy is named Anthony Gonsalves[5], Sanjay Dutt's hitman is named Master Madan[6] (and he watches Bollywood movies[7]). Warsi's character's name (Champak "Champ" Chaudhary) raises a laugh once and then proceeds to become just as irritating as a persistent itch.
Spotting Ravi Baswani convincingly impersonate a piece of prime ham will induce more grief and anguish than watching European art cinema without subtitles. VJ Anusha Dandekar, who shows up as Rosa, the former object of Champ's attentions, merely serves as the object of ogle-aasans by a drooling male audience. Minissha Lamba, who, by deductive logic, is the "heroine" of the piece, replaces Rosa as Jiya and offers some pelvic[8] perspective in compensation for oomph.
There are bad lines but these rarely transcend the sporadic genius of "the kiss of conjugal bliss." If you think that's enough reason to watch this enthusiastically excerebrose jejune jaunt, I have to say no way, no way[9].
This has been a floccinaucinihilipilification of farraginous film.
[1]: Dutt's character gets Warsi's character to revisit his flashback in the style of the Chopra style of films; it's an inspired touch and marks one of the few specks of originality that the film can sport (even though the joke doesn't fly higher than an ill-fated chicken fleeing about at a poultry farm)
[2]: When we see Lucky kill the girl, we also see our friend Anthony filming the whole deal. All this is done through a series of edited shots. In a spectacular exploitation of stochastic serendipity, the video that Anthony films also contains the same set of edited shots. This not only gets POV wrong, but also makes the evidence inadmissable (because it was doctored); you would think that something as simple as a video clip would not be subjected to the machinations of the gangrenous minds of Bollywood filmmakers, but ... whom am I trying to kid here??!! (October 27, 2006: JR gently notes that everyone's favourite black comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro also featured a similar abuse of POV and montage when the bridge havaladaar recounts his encounter with Vinod and Sudhir on TV: I could now eat humble pie or claim that this was a creative exercise mixing surrealism (um, who was on the bridge filming this anyway?), parody and expressionism (yeah! right!); I choose the latter.
[3]: The clean-shaven twin who woos the rich gardener's lass in Gol Maal
[4]: Songs include and ham hai.n raahii pyaar ke and suhaanaa safar
[5]: The Christian third of the most popular ternary secular offering from Bollywood, who gatecrashed an Easter party in a tux with gibberish to boot
[6]: This is culturally the most egregious nod, but one must not err on the side of purism by condemning the perverted reference to the child prodigy
[7]: very few really, given that such an embellishment would distract our furacious friends from their mission of furnishing us with specious flummery
[8]: She, who is obsessed with her growing hips
[9]: The opening credits are accompanied by an impassioned attempt at cool that sports these words as lyrics. The Nose[10] strikes gold with this film, and people who ignore the warning during the opening credits are served a reminder at the end of the film in the form of an incongruous (does that surprise you puTTan?) music video featuring Dutt and Warsi and a sea of thongs; As if this wasn't bad enough to jar your sense of time and space, another music video hits you: this one features The Nose with cap and coat rendering another cover of "The Rhyme Of Runny Nose"[11]
[10]: 'nuff said
[11]: The song's ishq kiyaa kiyaa, or, to be precise, i.Nshq ki.nyaa.N ki.nyaa.N; and you've really had enough with the footnotes, haven't you?
No comments:
Post a Comment