Of late, a strange phenomenon has been steadily creeping into the Bollysphere and it threatens to define a new genre (or sub-genre, if you will) of Bollywood filmmaking. It's a composite of genres (the multi-starrer, for one) and familiar tropes blended with post-modernism (or post-post-modernism, if you will) -- song and dance routines become self-conscious and auto-referential, emotional sequences get their gravitas from decades of dross, napkin fodder and cheap dense vacuous blather. What we have now is an army of roustabouts (some seasoned, others green) rustling up recrement (some call it a script others call it vapourware) fuelled by an imagination tempered by a stack of foreign DVDs and a creative imagination as dead as the object of a necromaniac's amorous attentions. The recipe, when broken down into the essentials is simple: take a few several stars (with reasonably high guarantees of box office draw, competent to deadly sigh and oomph factors boosted by luscious vital statistics and Bowflex blandishments), convince the gents to gambol in muscular glee, convince one or more of the ladies to experiment with a state of undress that challenges the line between PG and PG-13, elicit the services of one of the many successful plagiarising paladins of song and swing to conjure booty-friendly poetic overtures to familiar objects of attention as well as to a canon of song and dance numbers over the ages and capture all the goings-on on film. What we get as a result of all this, are reels of "entertainment" laced with eye candy (PG-13 only, we are Indians saar) promising more (yeah right! when the GDP hits the ceiling and pigs truly fly) and reels and reels of mind-numbing buffoonery.
Not-so-recent "classics" in this mould include Dhoom (in which Esha Deol stepped out of the gym and into a swimsuit) and its sequel Dhoom 2 (featuring basketball, cricket references, the missing link named Aditya Chopra, Bipasha Basu in a double role -- playing semi-clad lassies in different states of undress to titillate different areas of the male imagination and Aishwarya Rai attempting to go down the road of ephemeral epidermal embellishments while trying to look like a character out of Masters Of The Universe).
A fresh piping hot sample is Abbas-Mustan's Race that features combinatorial coitus, multi-layered betrayal, eye candy (duh!) -- 3 women (all three known for being the cynosure of drooling gents than for making Lee Strasberg proud). Only a patient viewing will reveal more gems therein.
Vijay Krishna Acharya, the pensmith behind the two D-busters described above, made his directorial début with Tashan, a potential candidate for selection, although there is but one lassie and she has gone to great lengths to be able to shimmy into a two-piece and cavort about hoping that no one notices that she could do naught to fix the unyielding horror of her visage. Moreover, there seem to be hints that this film might have been more of a failed attempt at cinemeta-cinema (something that Shaad Ali pulled off well with Jhoom Barabar Jhoom) than at Bollycool. As always, only a screening will offer more insight. Meanwhile, one awaits the next blitz of the muscular and the mammiferous, the strong and the steatomammate, the brawn and the booty. Long live Bollycool.
Woo hoo! This post got a nod at DesiPundit.
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