Saturday, December 10, 2005
DHP & The film
Deewane Huye Paagal
The whole college is crazy about Tanya, a bespectacled nerd informs us. What we see is a half a dozen (give or take a few) men besotted by Rimii Sen, and this is the most unbelievable thing about Deewane Hue Paagal. The girl’s hardly such a knockout!
But since Vikram Bhatt’s film is ‘inspired’ by the Farrelly Brothers’ hit There’s Something About Mary, you have to believe there is something about Tanya, though eyes and ears insist otherwise.
Vivek Oberoi makes for a very irritating ‘sutradhar’ as he introduces the complicated tracks of the film, which include a scientist (Om Puri), his twin who is a don, a formula for eternal youth and a parrot that holds a crucial code.
Shy college kid Karan (Shahid Kapoor) is in love with Tanya (Rimii Sen). She witnesses the scientist’s murder and flees to Dubai. (Bhatt didn’t have the courage to show the zipper disaster, which remains one of the most hilarious scenes of all time!)
Karan hires Rocky (Akshay Kumar) to trace her, but he flips for her himself, and spends most of the movie warding off her other suitors, that include a crippled Sanjay (Sunil Shetty) and Tommy (Paresh Rawal). Karan and Rocky are both given sidekicks – Vijay Raaz and Johny Lever respectively—in case the leading men run out of comic steam.
Sometime after the interval, the director remembers there’s a formula-parrot-gangster sub-plot dangling, so Om Puri and cohorts also land up in Dubai to add some action to the sand dunes. Who gets the girl? Is that so hard to guess?
Deewane Huye Paagal is Akshay Kumar’s film, from getting to dance dirty with scantily clad white babes to bashing a black hunk (totally pointless sequence), to getting the film’s best gags-- he has it all on a platter. The other stars are no better than junior artistes (poor Shahid Kapoor).
Akskay is getting better and better at comedy, but he is still not effortless. He does get a few chuckles (some of the lines are admittedly funny), but by straining every nerve and muscle on his face, and practically turning cartwheels. He just has to turn sideways to see how natural Vijay Raaz is.
Deewane Huye Paagal is not half as entertaining as There’s Something About Mary, whose grossness was covered by Cameron Diaz’s innocent beauty and a fine comedian like Ben Stiller.
This is a season for comedies, and DHP has a good chance at the box-office. Luckily for Bhatt, our audiences are now eager to laugh at anything.
The Film
He calls himself ‘Nirdeshak’, this debut director Junaid Memon, who had an idea that could lend itself to satire or pathos equally well, but he ends up making a movie called The Film, which is painful to sit through.
Seven strugglers live as paying guests in the palatial mansion of Mrs Braganza (Sulabha Deshpande, very hammy). From their healthy appearances and extensive wardrobes, they don’t seem rundown or desperate enough to gain any sympathy. None of them seem to have families or friends, so when they are in a crisis, they run about like headless chickens.
There are the usual scenes of them being humiliated or propositioned as they go about looking for work. They see and hear cases of extortion by an invisible Dubai Don Shamimbhai, and the writer among them (Mahima Chaudhary) gets the bright idea of extorting money out of a diamond merchant.
Amateur criminals that they are, the phone they steal happens to belong to a cop (Nasser Abdullah), and very soon they are on the run from both cops and gangsters, and dropping down dead one by one.
The Film is not a dark comedy, it’s not a thriller and it’s not even a really compelling tale of ambition, failure or how the film industry can force people to sell their souls. Plus it is marred by some really awful acting.
All that can be said in favour of The Film is that Memon has come up with an unusual subject (and there is a bit of a twist at the end)—but made a hash of it.
The whole college is crazy about Tanya, a bespectacled nerd informs us. What we see is a half a dozen (give or take a few) men besotted by Rimii Sen, and this is the most unbelievable thing about Deewane Hue Paagal. The girl’s hardly such a knockout!
But since Vikram Bhatt’s film is ‘inspired’ by the Farrelly Brothers’ hit There’s Something About Mary, you have to believe there is something about Tanya, though eyes and ears insist otherwise.
Vivek Oberoi makes for a very irritating ‘sutradhar’ as he introduces the complicated tracks of the film, which include a scientist (Om Puri), his twin who is a don, a formula for eternal youth and a parrot that holds a crucial code.
Shy college kid Karan (Shahid Kapoor) is in love with Tanya (Rimii Sen). She witnesses the scientist’s murder and flees to Dubai. (Bhatt didn’t have the courage to show the zipper disaster, which remains one of the most hilarious scenes of all time!)
Karan hires Rocky (Akshay Kumar) to trace her, but he flips for her himself, and spends most of the movie warding off her other suitors, that include a crippled Sanjay (Sunil Shetty) and Tommy (Paresh Rawal). Karan and Rocky are both given sidekicks – Vijay Raaz and Johny Lever respectively—in case the leading men run out of comic steam.
Sometime after the interval, the director remembers there’s a formula-parrot-gangster sub-plot dangling, so Om Puri and cohorts also land up in Dubai to add some action to the sand dunes. Who gets the girl? Is that so hard to guess?
Deewane Huye Paagal is Akshay Kumar’s film, from getting to dance dirty with scantily clad white babes to bashing a black hunk (totally pointless sequence), to getting the film’s best gags-- he has it all on a platter. The other stars are no better than junior artistes (poor Shahid Kapoor).
Akskay is getting better and better at comedy, but he is still not effortless. He does get a few chuckles (some of the lines are admittedly funny), but by straining every nerve and muscle on his face, and practically turning cartwheels. He just has to turn sideways to see how natural Vijay Raaz is.
Deewane Huye Paagal is not half as entertaining as There’s Something About Mary, whose grossness was covered by Cameron Diaz’s innocent beauty and a fine comedian like Ben Stiller.
This is a season for comedies, and DHP has a good chance at the box-office. Luckily for Bhatt, our audiences are now eager to laugh at anything.
The Film
He calls himself ‘Nirdeshak’, this debut director Junaid Memon, who had an idea that could lend itself to satire or pathos equally well, but he ends up making a movie called The Film, which is painful to sit through.
Seven strugglers live as paying guests in the palatial mansion of Mrs Braganza (Sulabha Deshpande, very hammy). From their healthy appearances and extensive wardrobes, they don’t seem rundown or desperate enough to gain any sympathy. None of them seem to have families or friends, so when they are in a crisis, they run about like headless chickens.
There are the usual scenes of them being humiliated or propositioned as they go about looking for work. They see and hear cases of extortion by an invisible Dubai Don Shamimbhai, and the writer among them (Mahima Chaudhary) gets the bright idea of extorting money out of a diamond merchant.
Amateur criminals that they are, the phone they steal happens to belong to a cop (Nasser Abdullah), and very soon they are on the run from both cops and gangsters, and dropping down dead one by one.
The Film is not a dark comedy, it’s not a thriller and it’s not even a really compelling tale of ambition, failure or how the film industry can force people to sell their souls. Plus it is marred by some really awful acting.
All that can be said in favour of The Film is that Memon has come up with an unusual subject (and there is a bit of a twist at the end)—but made a hash of it.
Labels: Cinemaah
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