Sunday, October 14, 2012

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

4 comments:

J Ramanand said...

* I didn't have too much of a SSH - more of a slight drag.

* laavaNii follow-up during the end-credits: the same dancers with handycams are spotted

* The Malayali accent was evident; also some of the language used wasn't necessarily Iyer-esque, but not too much to complain. Pakkara Pandi was a natural :)

* The mom: I've seen the lady in other Tamil films/serials, I think. I thought her accent was Telugu-ish - definitely lacking Tamil accent.

* Just like Vicky Donor, nice to see regional/linguistic collisions - more of this side of India please.




George said...

didn't you recognise kaaverii ammaa from Swades?

George said...

some of Rani Mukerji's lines were also not quite Maharashtrian-Hindi-esque either, but there was more Marathi and earnestness in her lines than I had expected. I should be placated.

Anonymous said...

i want to watch it plainly because I am drooling over prithviraj. And hoping that he's on screen forever!

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