Turkey Roast

I owe my abiding love for B-movies to Dabba.

The official name was Sri Ganesh Talkies ad it was located a couple of kilometres from the campus gate at BITS, Pilani. It had four walls, a makeshift ceiling, and the projectionist’s dhoti for a screen. I’m guessing he diligently washed it every February 29th. Front bench (and I really mean bench) seats cost 3 bucks, back bench seats cost 4 bucks and luxury seating in the back row cost 5 bucks. When they increased ticket prices across the board by one buck, we even bargained with the guy at the counter for a few weeks and got a discount. The front row seats were convenient — you could stretch your legs out on the bench. (The fact that there were rats scurrying around might have had something to do with it as well.) They changed the movie every 3-4 days  — not enough film-goers around to run a movie for a whole week.

Much of what made its way to Dabba came direct from Ooty, where Prabhuji Mithun Chakraborty ran a film factory that produced movies as often as Ram Gopal Varma  (but with less variance in quality or box office appeal). The immutable physical laws that govern the universe state that Prabhuji must have either a sister (who usually gets raped/killed) or a brother (who gets killed, leaving him to look after said brother’s girlfriend/fiancee/wife who may also have gotten raped in the process). It seemed to us that there was a virtual glut of interchangeable, well-endowed starlets vying for this role, because I don’t remember seeing the same actress playing his sister twice.

Mithun didn’t have a monopoly on this industry either: a movie called Rakhwaale (not to be confused with the Anil Kapoor starrer, Rakhwaala) remains seared into my neurons for all time. Sure, it had a preposterous plot and a no-name hero who delivered the Great Sequoia of wooden performances. What really made it special was that, every once in a while, there would be a shot of Mukesh Khanna in a tan overcoat and matching fedora watching the action from a discreet spot and then glowering significantly at the camera. Right at the end, it is revealed that he is a CBI officer or some such thing. Absoslutely sublime, I tell you.

But here’s the thing: I do not remember disliking any of these movies. They were honest, sincere efforts at making a B-movie and we received them in that spirit. Nobody went into Dabba expecting Citizen Kane. Nobody came out disappointed.

It was when I went to watch some big name star/director make an ass of himself that I came away disappointed. Mithun delivered exactly what he promised. But Aamir Khan in Mann — that was another matter entirely. These were the real cinematic turkeys, the ones I plan to roast in this post. This is a short, non-exhaustive list of some of the worst such offenders that I have come across. These don’t fall in the category of Locomotive 38 movies — they’re just plain crappy, period.

Aside: You’re probably wondering whether I really needed to take this long to get to the point of this post. I like to digress, okay? If you ever hear me say Abhivaadaye, you might notice the name Polonius slipped in between Bhargava and Jamadagni.

1. Mann: Indra Kumar’s remake of An Affair to Remember, starring Aamir Khan and Manisha Koirala. The first half, set aboard a cruise ship, involves ninety minutes of such abominable filmmaking that it ought to have been banned by the Geneva Convention. A few scenes from that nightmare :  as soon as Manisha boards the ship, she collides with…  no, not the hero, as usually happens, but a desi version of Mike Myers in all his shagadelic glory.  (Funny as the original?  Not so much.)  One character on the ship who keeps laughing like a hyena being sodomized by a cattle prod inside a room filled with nitrous oxide.  Imagine hearing it at the end of one scene, and just to make sure that you stay on the wall you’ve been driven up, a continuation of that in the beginning of the next scene. On top of which, Aamir and Manisha act like a Lifetime Achievement Razzie is up for grabs on the strength of this one performance. I have never prayed harder for icebergs.

2. Jhoom Barabar Jhoom: You get Abhishek Bachchan, Priety Zinta and Amitabh to act in the same movie and what do you do? Put them in something that looks like a musical, sounds like a musical and wants to be a musical but ends up being a pile of guano gone bad. Dress Amitabh up like he had an unfortunate incident involving a peacock and a quantum teleportation device. Painful to the point where regular readers of this blog, such as there are, will immediately understand what I mean when I call a movie a JBJ experience. (Full review here.)

3. Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag: Apparently, the Large Hadron Collider has been working fine for a few years now. RGV tried to produce antimatter by running Sholay from two separate projectors and smashing those beams together. The result so unnerved the scientists at CERN that they shut it down and made up a story about eddies in the spacetime continuum and somebody stealing magnets for their fridge.

4. Baba: I don’t mind the fact that Rajni wanted to showcase his spiritual side in this movie. Nor the fact that he and Manish Koirala looked like the Hobo and the Hippo (some people look good with a quadruple chin, but she isn’t one of them). What I do mind is the fact that Rajni thought he could mix up little bits from the Amman movie genre (the bits involving magicians with diabolical plans and much sinister laughter) with standard Rajni movie staples, add some mystical stuff about immortal ascetics in the Himalayas and get away with it. And a whole raft of actors and a director like Suresh Krishna (who, as it happens, directed Baasha) went along with him. Couldn’t somebody — anybody, really — have whacked him upside the head with something hard, blunt and radioactive? Was the money that good?

5. Anjali: Of the lot, this is the most disappointing. Its child stars won special National awards for their performances. It has a few really good moments and a beautiful story about prejudice and acceptance in various forms. But to get to all of that, you have to get past a bunch of loud performances, annoyingly precocious kids and and scenes set in an apartment that Howard Roark would’ve blown up on general principle. And to top it all off, the most annoying death scene in the history of cinema. If that little girl had screamed “Ezhundiru Anjali, ezhundiru” one more time, Mani Rathnam could’ve made Anjali 2: Night of the Living Dead as his follow-up feature.

Dedication: I don’t know if there is such a thing as dedicating blog posts, but I would like to dedicate this one to two of my friends, Renugopal and Tarun, with whom I have watched more crappy movies than anyone in their right mind ever would.

 

Freeze Frame #143: Baasha

I am sure there are a lot of Padaiyappa fans out there. Ditto for  Chandramukhi, Kuselan and Sivaji. I even know someone who claims to like Baba — for reasons too numerous to mention, I am disinclined to hold it against him, though. But as far as I am concerned, the last great Rajni movie that came out was Baasha.

There are numerous reasons for this, the most important of which is that it carries very little additional baggage. Sivaji had a romantic subplot that pretty much epitomized silliness. Padaiyappa was just too long, almost like someone stole a megaserial script from Radhika’s vault, gave the main character a penis and amped up the star power. Kuselan came close, but sometimes felt like a nice little story jostling for space with Rajni’s stardom. Chandramukhi faced a similar problem — it took a nice little supporting role and gave it more than its due simply because of who was playing it.

Baasha doesn’t do any of these things. It wants to be a great masala movie as much as it wants to be a star vehicle — as a result, although Rajni is present all over it, it doesn’t feel excessive. I think one big reason is the script. I cannot think of too many instances where a remake turned out to be infinitely better than the original simply by introducing a bit of nonlinearity in the storytelling.

For all its commercial success, Hum isn’t a particularly great movie. It starts well — the pervasive sense of fear about Bhaktavar (playing magnificiently by Danny Denzongpa) is well created, and when Tiger (AB) breaks the shackles, it is quite effective. But once he escapes and begins a new life, it all becomes very ho-hum. You know that his past will come back to haunt him, so all that is left is to see how and when. By adding a considerable bit of buffoonery involving two Kader Khans, the tension is brought down a couple more notches. By the time Bhaktavar came back, it was all I could do not to yawn.

Take Baasha on the other hand. Its central choice is very simple: Take the first act of Hum and push it down the order. Start with a man trying to lead a quiet life, with little hints that indicate that there might be more to him than it seems. The man you see is the typical do-gooder hero, but you are never allowed to take that for granted. For one thing, there are moments when he is about to lose his cool and his “other” identity seems to surface briefly, only to be quelled. There is also a moment when he reveals it to someone, but you don’t hear what is said, only the panicked reaction to it. Throughout the first half, the tension mounts. Just to ratchet it up even more, there is a sequence where he allows himself to be beaten up by a goon just to avoid a conflict.

All this might work well enough even with some other actor, but what really sells it is the fact that we know who Rajni is. Every time you see him controlling himself or going out of the way to avoid conflict, you’re not just wondering why the character would do this. You’re wondering why Rajni would do this. The movie takes his image as an invincible hero and asks him to rein it in, so that the audience is primed for the moment when he finally cuts loose.

This comes at around the midpoint of the movie, when the aforementioned goon goes too far and hurts his sister. This is, as far as movies of this ilk are concerned, The Unforgivable Sin. In what has since become a  tradition in action sequences involving a hero facing off against multiple goons, the first man unfortunate enough to make a move is hit so spectacularly hard that he doesn’t get up again.

I watched this movie in a little single-screen theatre in Chennai and when that blow landed, the entire audience erupted in cheers. The cheering didn’t die down until the fight sequence got over. And you know what, I could perfectly understand the feeling. Because I was whooping and hollering along with them.

ps: Shankar seems to have understood this strategy quite well. Throughout the first half of Sivaji, Rajni takes what is dished out to him. It is in the second half that he starts hitting back. Now, if he hadn’t made Rajni play such a lovesick twit in the first half, it would’ve worked sooo much better.

pps: Can you come up with instances where the remake turned out to be much better than the original? Might make for a good (if short) list.

ppps: And no, Hum Aapke Hain Koun doesn’t count, even if it made more money. I thought Nadiya Ke Paar was the better movie by far.

 

Three reviews, one post

I went on a spree recently and ended up watching three movies in more or less quick succession. Hey, people gorge on chocolate, I watch two movies back to back at a multiplex. So sue me. None of them really deserves a longish review (actually they do, but I’m a lazy bum), so here’s a paragraph or two about each of them.

---

Quick Gun Murugun

After a minor tribute to Tarantino’s Kill Bill right at the beginning, the opening credits of Quick Gun Murugun show our hero being ferried to heaven by Yama on what seems like Thailand’s answer to the buffalo. Heaven turns out to be something like a large Government office, complete with an old watchman sleeping at the gate. When Murugun alights, Yama asks him, half-sheepishly, “Saar, meterukku mela konjam…” And when the former walks on without even responding, the latter mutters what must be the most appropriately worded insult in recorded human history: Saavu kirakki. (My apologies to those who do not understand Tamil — my translation skills aren’t quite sufficient to make this joke work in any other language.)

With such auspicious beginnings, one would expect QGM to be an absolute laugh riot. Sadly, this doesn’t turn out to be the case. Like Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, it all sounds amazingly funny until you actually sit down and watch it. It’s eminently chuckle-worthy all right, and one never really tires of all the sly references (lines like “Make my day, machchaan” abound), but by and large, the movie manages to be clever without really tipping over the edge into laugh-out-loud-funny.

I have watched both of Shashanka Ghosh’s movies now — Waisa Bhi Hota Hai and this one. Neither of them will rank as a work of comic brilliance, but maybe these will turn out to be the opening notes in a brilliant career. Who knows, the man might even give us our own Annie Hall sometime in the future.

---

Dil Bole Hadippa

Dear Yash Raj Productions,

Despite my better judgement, I have watched most of the movies you have come out with in recent times. I do not need a refresher.

Sincerely,

Ramsu

The trouble with DBH, I suppose, is that while it isn’t really a bad movie per se, it doesn’t seem to be bothered much with being a good one. Then again, if all you have is the idea of an ambidextrous Punjabi kudi wanting to play cricket with the boys and masquerading as one in order to do so, just how good can it get? At least Twelfth Night added more complications (like the business of twins) to disguise the fact that it was basically just fluff.

Nobody really stands out. Rani Mukherjee tries gamely, but quite frankly, she just doesn’t have what it takes to elevate this material. The best you can expect from her is to do justice to a well-written part — this one isn’t. Shahid Kapoor moves his career up one square by playing an essentially likeable character yet again, except with a bigger banner paying him to do nothing this time around. Rakhi Sawant moves her career up one square by getting a more-or-less non-speaking 5 minute part in addition to her item song. Sherlyn Chopra turns up with seemingly one purpose — to increase the per capita exposure in the movie by a few dozen square inches. She does well at that. A non-speaking part would’ve been even better, but as it stands, it doesn’t really hurt the movie. The others convert O2 to CO2. On the whole, I’d have been better off doing the same at home.

---

Wanted

I doubt I can say it any better than Amrita has in her absolutely wonderful review of this movie. The best I can do is say the following: Wanted is exactly what it claims to be, and it is very good at what it aims to do.

I was initially skeptical about the casting choices — I felt Salman was too old for the part, and that Prakash Raj’s performance might not work as well in Hindi as it did in Tamil and Telugu. I was wrong on both counts. Both of them seem to be having the time of their lives, and from what I could see in the multiplex, the public absolutely loved it. Ayesha Takia proves yet again that, were it not for the occasional little gem like Dor or Socha Na Tha, all we might end up remembering of her is how she fills out a t-shirt. (Very well, I might add.)

As for the supporting cast: Vinod Khanna has a nice little role doing nothing. Inder Kumar seems to be raking in millions in steroid endorsements. Mahesh Manjrekar is suitably sleazy while managing to be a mite less over-the-top than his counterparts in the Southie versions — which is saying very little and very much at the same time. And a bunch of interchangeable goons seem to growl and die in the background often enough to keep the story going. One even commits suicide instead of letting the hero kill him — I’m not sure how he sees this as a better option, but I’m disinclined to argue the point.

On the whole, this is an absolutely wonderful B-movie. And if you need any other reason to watch it, here’s one: as toothpaste ads go, it’s much better than Hum Aapke Hai Kaun.

 

Manjal Veyyil

There was a short-lived show on TV called Love Monkey starring Tom Cavanagh as an A&R rep for a record label. In the pilot episode, he starts off by saying that he’s a crime fighter, and his job is to ensure that criminally bad music doesn’t hit the music stores. If I were to be so deluded as to describe my blogging about the movies in such terms, then this movie would have to be The Joker. And I gotta admit, I got my ass handed to me by this particular clown.

Manjal Veyyil stars Prasanna and Sandhya as childhood friends, presumed to be lovers by the world and its grandmother-in-law. Not that they are lovers, but none of this matters until the bad guy comes into the picture. Said bad guy is betrothed to her elder sister but decides that he wants her instead. It so happens that the sister is a diabetic, so he messes with her medications and causes her to collapse during their engagement. His parents throw a hissy fit and her dad offers Sandhya’s hand in marriage instead. This, after the groom’s mom gets abusive enough to warrant calling off the match, diabetes or not. And not once does the dad ask his daughter if she is okay with this, or even apologize after the fact. She reacts by running away with Prasanna. I’ll give you a minute to try and work out which asshole she was running away from.

While everyone thinks that the two have eloped, we discover that he is actually helping her find her lover (who went missing sometime ago). When the lover eventually turns up, so does the villain. Cue a standard fight sequence, in which the bad guy does, but not before badly injuring Prasanna. The doc says he’ll live, but will need someone to care for him for the rest of his life. So Sandhya tells her lover that she has to sacrifice her love in order to take care of her friend. He is disappointed, but agrees with her reasoning and leaves. Now, since the two of them have this conversation within earshot of the critically ill but conscious Prasanna, he decides to simplify matters by taking the breathing mask off his face and committing suicide while no one’s looking.

Now you’re probably waiting for me to tell you all that is wrong with the movie, in the most vitriolic language I can summon up.

I ask you: After that plot summary, do I really need to?

 

Shahrukh Aman?

I just watched bits and pieces of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi last night and it occurred to me suddenly that it was essentially a gender-swapped version of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, with SRK in the Zeenat Aman role and dancing instead of boinking.

Does anyone else agree, or is it just me?

It’s genetic, I think. My dad happened to watch Bombay on TV one day and commented that the song Kannalanae was simply a gender-swapped version of Maankuyilae Poonguyilae from Karakattakkaran, with Manisha in the Ramarajan role.

ps: While on the topic of SSS, could someone please assure me that it was all meant to be symbolic? Otherwise, I’d be up all night screaming at those characters to have their tubes tied and do the gene pool a favour.

 

Freeze Frame #137: Pasumpon

I remember watching Pasumpon years ago on TV and thinking, there’s no earthly reason why this movie should work.

The son (Prabhu) of a zamindar is estranged from his mother (Radhika) for two decades because she remarried after her husband died. He grows into adulthood and still carries around that resentment, although by now it has become more of a habit than a conviction. Indeed his own actions as the local lawmaker are in favour of widow remarriage. It is only in the end, when his mother is on her deathbed, that he manages to swallow his pride and reconcile with her.

The entire movie is replete with scenes of dramatic excess. Take the timing of the reconciliation scene, for instance. The son finds out that his mother is seriously ill, and spends an entire night lying awake before walking over to her (and his stepfather’s) home. Why would he do this other than to draw out the tragedy?

And yet, the closing moments manage are so powerfully moving that it comes as a surprise. Nothing about the scene is surprising, you could second-guess every line of dialogue, subtlety isn’t even on the same continent… And yet it worked. Or is it just that I am an utter sap? (Most people who know me reasonably well would nod, smile and say yes, that’s exactly it. But humor me for a moment, will you?)

My choice of standout scene in the movie, however, wouldn’t be the aforementioned. It would be one that comes a bit earlier, where the son beats up a local goon who insults and hits his mother and half-brothers. At the end, he tells the goon that, if anyone has the right to beat up on his brothers, it would be himself.

I was midway through my groan when the camera panned to his mother’s face. As she is led away from there, she speaks in a voice tinged with such pride in her firstborn, yet such sadness at their separation… Two decades worth of price and sadness, distilled into two minutes of dialogue.

 

Freeze Frame #131: Kalloori

Something interesting is happening to Tamil village cinema these days. It is as if a bunch of directors have decided to throw away the Nattamai — Morai Maaman playbook and write a new one instead. This new cinema is defined, above all, by real characters. I could spend ages in the interiors of Tamil Nadu and not find a single individual similar to the ones Sarath Kumar and Vijayakanth play in their village movies. On the other hand, I could go to Periyar bus stand in Madurai, get into any bus going out of town and come across one of the guys I see in movies like Kalloori or Vennila Kabaddi Kuzhu. I cannot adequately express how refreshing that is.

Kalloori, for me, is a near-perfect example of how one could make a movie about a bunch of friends in college. It is not without its missteps, but none of them really stay in mind when the movie is over. What remains is the memory of spending two-odd hours in the company of real people from a village in Tamilnadu.

It is also the movie in which I got introduced to Tamanna Bhatia the actress. I had seen Tamanna the Babe in movies like Padikkadhavan where she did not, to borrow a phrase from Miss Congeniality, do anything better than convert Oxygen into Carbon Dioxide. But in Kalloori, she actually acts. And quite well at that.

She is well cast, to begin with. As the beautiful, fair-skinned city-bred outsider in a college full of rustic, dark-skinned people, she stands out. I am not being biased about skin color here — this is how the filmmakers want her to be perceived. In the context of the story, it works.

My favourite moment comes towards the end of the movie when Shobhana (Tamanna) finds out that Muthu (Akhil) reciprocates her feelings towards him. That it is done through that oldest of standbys — her handkerchief, treasured by him, falling out of his pocket at a critical juncture — is something I am willing to overlook in light of what follows.

Shobhana sees it, realizes what it means, and exults briefly before rearranging her features and joining a friend. That friend represents a complication of sorts — her views on mixing friendship and love is one reason why the couple refrain from expressing their feelings for one another. Cue a rather tearful conversation between the two girls, which seems to resolve things satisfactorily.

And then an ending that comes almost out of nowhere and changes everything. I am not going to reveal it here, but let me just say that it rules out the possibility of the couple singing happy songs in some scenic location somewhere.

Now think back to that moment where Shobhana spots that handkerchief. For Tamanna, it is a crucial moment because those three seconds are all she has to express her joy over her discovery. No songs, no scenes of her standing tall, looking up at the heavens and smiling while flowers rain down upon her and a thousand violins play in the background, nothing. Just a few seconds to herself where she needs to look like she’s bursting with joy. It is to her credit that she makes those seconds count.

A vast majority of our movies involve requited love, or at least require that both people know what the other is feeling, even if circumstances dictate that they can never be together. And where that cannot happen, there is much gnashing of teeth so that the audience knows exactly how much pain one of the protagonists is in. It is often overdone to the point where every bit of emotive power has been leeched out of the situation. The cardinal rule of storytelling is: Don’t tell the listener what to feel. Lead him there and let his mind do the rest. Amazing how few filmmakers understand this.

Which is why, when a filmmaker does it right as in Kalloori, it hits us so much harder.

ps: While on the subject, think about this: In Ghajini, if Sanjay had had the opportunity to tell Kalpana the truth about himself, do you think the flashback would still have been  as effective?

 

Padikkadhavan

I dreamt of being a boy scout last night, so let me start with the most charitable thing I can say about Padikkadhavan:

It is a steaming pile of crap.

There, my good deed is done for the day. Now let me talk about the movie.

Dhanush seems to have gotten into the business of making movies that have the same name as his illustrious father-in-law’s movies. This business is two movies old (Polladhavan and this one), and if I were to do a pairwise comparison of these movies in terms of quality, I’d say the score is now 1-1.

Padikkadhavan tells the story of Radhakrishnan a.k.a Rocky, the titular black sheep of a well-educated family. Rocky spends his time hanging out with his equally no-good friends, who convince him that the best way to get his family to respect him is to marry an educated girl. Enter Gayathri (Tamanna), cue much nonsensical wooing while assorted goons ostensibly search for Dhanush in the background. And then…

Now this part is actually interestingly done — with three different bad guys in the picture (Atul Kulkarni, Suman and Sayaji Shinde), the plot finds a way to link them up in a manner that is more interesting than having them all on one side and the hero on the other. But before you could stop to admire the way the plot has set up the conflict, the screenplay throws more crap at you and you’re left sitting there wondering if it could get any more stupid.

The trouble, I think, is that when the director sits down to narrate the story, he doesn’t start off by saying, “So you have this guy named…” He seems to start it off by saying, “So you have The Hero…” Or worse still, “So we have Dhanush on board, and here’s what we’re gonna have him do…”

What this means is, you don’t have a real character put in a situation where he has to be heroic. You have The Hero doing his shtick. There’s never a moment when you actually buy into either the character or his motivation. So when he’s beating up twenty goons or trying to get the girl, you’re wondering, “Okay, so he’s gonna win this round, what next?”

There were times when I looked at what some character did and wondered, “How does a maker pitch this role to this actor?” Is there a filmmaking equivalent of a date rape drug? Or do they just plonk a huge wad of cash in front of the actors and ask them to turn up and do what they’re told. Maybe they should save some of that money and and use it to offer free lobotomies to the audience. Then again, I did spend the price of a ticket to go watch this, as did a bunch of others in the movie theatre, so why bother?

Maybe we should be thanful that curiosity only kills cats. If it worked on humans, we’d be extinct by now.

 

Five Rahman moments

Thanks to his Golden Globe for Slumdog Millionaire (and the possibility of an Oscar), Rahman is now the flavour of the month. While I haven’t been too impressed with much of his recent work, it made me think about his career over the years.

I heard Roja when I was in high school — to say that we were gobsmacked would be an understatement. It was like nothing any of us had heard before. But while it was new and exciting to us, there were also many who felt it was too synthesized and artificial and wouldn’t stand the test of time. Seventeen years later, it now seems fair to say that he has accomplished enough to earn his place among the greats of Indian film music.

This post is not about Rahman’s contribution to Indian film music (I may do that later), but simply a recollection of five Rahman moments that have surprised  and delighted me over the years.

1. The repeated shehnai notes in Yeh jo des hai tera (Swades). The song is nice, but what makes it unforgettable is the use of the shehnai. (Aside: Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy achieve a similar effect with bagpipes in the title tune of Salaam-e-Ishq.)
2. The use of the tanpura in Hai Rama (Rangeela). My friend Ratul brought this one to my notice. Who would’ve thought of using a tanpura to bookend a steamy song involving Urmila Matondkar and Jackie shroff prancing around in their underwear?
3. M. S. Viswanathan singing Vidai kodu engal naade (Kannathil Muthamittal). Instead of any of a dozen conventional singers, he picked a veteran composer with a voice that belied his age and got him to sing this one about leaving one’s homeland. (More on his unconventional choices for singers here.)
4. The second sax interlude in En kaadhalae (Duet). The credit for this probably goes at least partly to the director K Balachander. Nonetheless, what he accomplishes here is beautiful. Two brothers (one a singer, the other a composer and sax player) in love with the same girl, singing a song at a function where she might make an appearance. When she does, the sax player announces it with four happy notes that are the musical equivalent of jumping up excitedly, then launches into his theme for her (Anjali Anjali). But as he gets into it, he is reminded of the fact that he is estranged from his brother because they both love this girl, so he quietly segues into a sadder theme. It was so well done that I didn’t even realize until later that it was all done through a musical instrument.
5. Tu Bole Main Boloon (Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na). Exactly how often have you heard a jazz tune in Hindi film music?

Memsaab has a lovely post on her favourite Rahman numbers. Worth a dekko.

 

Wanted

By time time Wanted got over, the only thought remaining in my mind was: What if one were to make it in Tamil with Vadivelu, Nayantara and Parthiban and call it Bullet Bhoopathi?

There are two reasons for this. First, the movie isn’t conducive to thoughts of a coherent nature. Second, the hero gets beaten up so often in the first half that it really does make me think of the man who has made a career out of getting beaten up.

Wanted tells the story of a milquetoast named Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) who finds out that he is destined to be a super-assassin like his father (whom he never knew and is now dead). That this revelation comes first from Angelina Jolie (who oozes sexiness) and then from Morgan Freeman (who oozes credibility, even in a movie like this) might have a lot to do with why he accepts what they say at face value. Which turns out to be mistake in some ways.

On the action front, I don’t have too many complaints. The movie starts off with one of the most interestingly filmed action sequences in recent memory. It starts with a Matrix-esque disregard for the laws of physics, but then adds its own flavour in the form of a bullet that seems to bend around an obstacle. When we first see it, we think that maybe it’s just an optical illusion. Then it turns out that some characters in this movie can indeed do the Beckham thing with a gun. And that, my friends, is one of the movie’s many attractions on the action front. Bullets collide in mid-air, cars get around their passengers rather than waiting for the passengers to get into them, people shoot the wings off a fly…

Now, this sort of thing doesn’t really faze me. For one thing, if it’s well done, I’ll willingly suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride. For another, I grew up on a diet of masala movies where a hero would hold a knife’s edge to a gun barrel so as to split the bullet and shoot two bad guys at once. So, if anything, I was gratified to see that the movie ripped off some action sequences from Indian cinema. (To be honest, it was my wife who spotted many of them and told me, which makes me wonder if I am a bad influence on her.) The only thing Wanted can claim to its credit is that its special effects are more slick.

So, like I said, the action is fine, fine, fine. It is the other stuff that doesn’t work. Like I said, the plot really doesn’t matter much. But when the characters start talking about the loom of fate which divulges the names of the targets through errors in the weave (and I mean literally — there’s an actual loom and actual fabric involved)… that’s when it all goes wahoonie-shaped for me.

Listen, you wanna blow people up, go ahead. You wanna break the laws of physics, be my guest. Just don’t add quasi-philosophical bullshit unless you have the nous to at least do it a modicum of justice. The first Matrix movie wouldn’t necessarily have made Nietzsche drool, but at least it seemed to hold its own. (Then of course they made two more movies and it all went to hell in a handbasket.) This one seems to be loaded with so much preposterousness that bullets have to bend if they need to escape the bullshit and hit something. Frankly, once the thrill of watching the innovative action sequences subsided, I found the movieto be quite tedious despite its short running time.

Now, if you wanna make something like this work from start to finish, you need something extraordinary to keep people’s attention off all the shit you’re shoveling. Action and Angelina seem to do that job up to a point. But when even they fall short, you realize that the movie needs more than just a sexy babe and things going bang.

It needs Vadivelu.

ps: The term Bullet Bhoopathi is a relic from my college days. I can’t remember who came up with it back then, so if any of my classmates from BITS is reading this and can remember, please drop me a line and let me know.