aiyyaa: mainstream meets oddball

• Rani Mukerji goes down Vidya Balan lane and does her own Dirty Picture (with aplomb, gumption and enthusiasm)
• the first half works really well in setting up the oddball universe
• after the interval, SSH kicks in, unfortunately
• great showcase for Pune and Punekars (Sambhaji Bridge, Subodh Bhave, Satish Alekar)
• Hats off to Amitabh Bhattacharya for the lyrics (please, just listen to them really carefully)
• nice touch having the laavaNii backing dancers in savaa Daa.clar wield digital video cameras
• Finally a film that features a poster of Chashme Baddoor (in addition to introducing fandom for Farooque Sheikh and Deepti Naval and resurrecting the name Dhurandhar)
• A Bengali star plays a Maharashtrian girl who falls for a Tamilian played by a Malayali star (you can spot the accent when he speaks his lines in the second half) and gets her cue for Dreamum Wakeupum (this film's ooh la-la) from Silk Smitha dance with Chiranjeevi in a Telugu film called Goonda (you wonder why you've heard that name before? Surely, you've seen golii maar, the rip-off of Michael Jackson's Thriller): this is seriously twisted
• What's this obsession with the statutory warning about cigarette smoking? The opening has the English and Hindi warnings presented on the screen with Rani Mukerji reading them offscreen; this shows up again after the intermission; each time we see Meenakshi's chain-smoking (literally!) Dad, the statutory warning reappears at the bottom right of the screen: This is just as bad as those tickers marketing cigarettes in those videotapes from the Gulf in the 80s and 90s. Please, Mr. Ramadoss and ilk, stop it!.
• Sachin Kundalkar does really well expanding a story from ga.ndha into an oddball romantic comedy, but just needed some tighter editing and shuffling of sequences in the second half (ijjat paapaD, allthough quirky enough, just feels like a drag in its fuller form: it might have fared better intercut with another scene, waakaDaa could well have become the song for the closing credits)
• most awesome device that later goes unused: the voice of Vividh Bharati providing introduction to and commentary about the goings-on
• You can see Kashyap's universe growing in the references: John Abraham, Dev.D
• +1 for featuring The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Volume 2. Make that +2.
• subtitle goof: Azharbhai Chawl for Azerbaijan
• which part of Tamil Nadu was Surya's mother from? I thought I spotted some Malayalam in her Tamil