Friday, January 28, 2005
Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav
We are used to filmmakers, shamelessly lifting foreign films and almost always making a hash of them. But sometimes an inept director will have the guts to take on a comic favourite, and then you feel there should be a law against such criminal mangling of movies.
Mahesh Manjrekar picks A Fish Called Wanda, one of the best comedies ever made, and turns it into a crass, vulgar, cheap farce. And when these guys steal, they don’t just steal ideas, they steal scenes, gags and even lines of dialogue. (Sunil Shetty who plays the Kevin Kline character is even given the “The don’t call me stupid” running gag.)
Padmashree (Masumeh) goes to South Africa to reclaim a cache of diamonds stolen by her father’s partner. Laloo (Sunil Shetty), her philandering boyfriend, with whom she is fed-up, follows her there. Padma steals the diamonds with the help of local don John (Gulshan Grover) and his stuttering half-witted sidekick Yadav (Johnny Lever), both of whom are smitten by her. Masumeh is hardly a femme fatale type, but John’s hen-pecked lawyer Prasad (Mahesh Manjrekar) also flips for Padma.
The stage is set for a mad scramble for the diamonds and to decide who wins the heart of Padma. But even with a foolproof source like the perfectly written, perfectly timed original, Manjrekar gets it all wrong. And the actors are all hideously off the mark – watching Johnny Lever having chips stuffed up his nose is not a funny sight, but Michael Palin had made the scene crackle. Also, watching Manjrekar stripping or doing a dream sequence with bikini-clad women is cringe-worthy.
The real Shri Yadav makes a special appearance— what a film for a politician to appear in! Tough to find anything likeable about PLPY, except for the great-looking South African locations.
Mahesh Manjrekar picks A Fish Called Wanda, one of the best comedies ever made, and turns it into a crass, vulgar, cheap farce. And when these guys steal, they don’t just steal ideas, they steal scenes, gags and even lines of dialogue. (Sunil Shetty who plays the Kevin Kline character is even given the “The don’t call me stupid” running gag.)
Padmashree (Masumeh) goes to South Africa to reclaim a cache of diamonds stolen by her father’s partner. Laloo (Sunil Shetty), her philandering boyfriend, with whom she is fed-up, follows her there. Padma steals the diamonds with the help of local don John (Gulshan Grover) and his stuttering half-witted sidekick Yadav (Johnny Lever), both of whom are smitten by her. Masumeh is hardly a femme fatale type, but John’s hen-pecked lawyer Prasad (Mahesh Manjrekar) also flips for Padma.
The stage is set for a mad scramble for the diamonds and to decide who wins the heart of Padma. But even with a foolproof source like the perfectly written, perfectly timed original, Manjrekar gets it all wrong. And the actors are all hideously off the mark – watching Johnny Lever having chips stuffed up his nose is not a funny sight, but Michael Palin had made the scene crackle. Also, watching Manjrekar stripping or doing a dream sequence with bikini-clad women is cringe-worthy.
The real Shri Yadav makes a special appearance— what a film for a politician to appear in! Tough to find anything likeable about PLPY, except for the great-looking South African locations.
Labels: Cinemaah
Blackmail
First of all, why is this film called Blackmail? Nobody blackmails anyone in it!
Misleading title apart, what the film proves again is that if you give an ignorant person a bag of gold, he won’t know what to do with it. Which is more or less the case with Anil Devgan, who takes up Clint Eastwood’s profoundly moving A Perfect World, and by the time he has finished Indianising or ‘chutnifying it’, it is a boring, unpalatable mess.
In the original, a criminal and a child who comes from a dysfunctional background, bond and for a few days create their own perfect world, which is then crushed by the well-meaning cruelty of the law-protectors.
In Anil Devgan’s Blackmail, a criminal Shekhar (Ajay Devgan), kidnaps the child of a cop Abhay Rathore (Sunil Shetty), not knowing it is his own son (Parth Dave) by his dead wife (Dia Mirza). By the time he finds out, it is too late to forge a real relationship with the boy, though he tries very hard.
Director Devgan adds a don (Mukesh Rishi) so that some more action sequences can be put in, plus the usual quota of song and dance, including the worst item number ever seen in Hindi films.
Abhay’s son Chirag, comes from a stable family (Priyanka Chopra plays the mother), where he is not deprived of anything, except that his father does not give him too much time. Why would this child go along having a picnic with the kidnapper, instead of shouting for help! Perhaps if the kid were younger-- but this kid is shown to be eight years old, big enough to have more sense.
Devgan does a good job with the action sequences, and the film is quite well shot, but he misses the point of the original; so Blackmail is just a meandering, meaningless crime flick that fails even to thrill at a surface level. Getting the audience involved in the story of the two men fighting for the love of a child, is way beyond the ability of the director.
Only an actor like Ajay Devgan could have carried off this role, towards the end, he does manage to wrench the audiences’ sympathy. But one performer against a host of ‘lamp posts’ -- it’s an uneven match.
Misleading title apart, what the film proves again is that if you give an ignorant person a bag of gold, he won’t know what to do with it. Which is more or less the case with Anil Devgan, who takes up Clint Eastwood’s profoundly moving A Perfect World, and by the time he has finished Indianising or ‘chutnifying it’, it is a boring, unpalatable mess.
In the original, a criminal and a child who comes from a dysfunctional background, bond and for a few days create their own perfect world, which is then crushed by the well-meaning cruelty of the law-protectors.
In Anil Devgan’s Blackmail, a criminal Shekhar (Ajay Devgan), kidnaps the child of a cop Abhay Rathore (Sunil Shetty), not knowing it is his own son (Parth Dave) by his dead wife (Dia Mirza). By the time he finds out, it is too late to forge a real relationship with the boy, though he tries very hard.
Director Devgan adds a don (Mukesh Rishi) so that some more action sequences can be put in, plus the usual quota of song and dance, including the worst item number ever seen in Hindi films.
Abhay’s son Chirag, comes from a stable family (Priyanka Chopra plays the mother), where he is not deprived of anything, except that his father does not give him too much time. Why would this child go along having a picnic with the kidnapper, instead of shouting for help! Perhaps if the kid were younger-- but this kid is shown to be eight years old, big enough to have more sense.
Devgan does a good job with the action sequences, and the film is quite well shot, but he misses the point of the original; so Blackmail is just a meandering, meaningless crime flick that fails even to thrill at a surface level. Getting the audience involved in the story of the two men fighting for the love of a child, is way beyond the ability of the director.
Only an actor like Ajay Devgan could have carried off this role, towards the end, he does manage to wrench the audiences’ sympathy. But one performer against a host of ‘lamp posts’ -- it’s an uneven match.
Labels: Cinemaah
Black Friday
At the Mumbai Film Festival recently, there were two films screened, based on two events that still evoke bitter memories where they happened, and it is interesting to compare the style/approach of two filmmakers in different parts of the globe. Both controversial subjects, both fictional accounts of real events, and both requiring extreme caution and political correctness in their handling—one fails and the other succeeds to some extent.
In Mumbai, Anurag Kashyap made Black Friday based in S Hussain Zaidi’s book about the bomb blasts in Mumbai that followed the riots caused by the Babri Masjid demolition. Antonia Bird’s Hamburg Cell is about the 9/11 World Trade Centre attack.Both films capture the people and the preparations made for these well-planned, well-coordinated attacks on innocent people by Muslim fundamentalists or terrorists—whatever fits better.And here’s where the similarity ends.
Antonia Bird’s film seeks to understand what happened, why educated, upper class Muslim youth were swayed by communal rhetoric. There is one scene, powerful in retrospect in which a terrorist (who comes from a wealthy, privileged family) tells his uncle that he wants to fight the forces that are exploiting him, and the uncle asks with genuine puzzlement: but who is exploiting you? The fact that she uses minimal documentary footage to show the actual incident proves that she did not want to either sensationlise the event, nor does she want to reopen wounds.Anurag Kashyap’s film seeks to justify what happened and though his long and boring film captures the most mundane incidents leading up to the attack and the police investigation, and gives the smallest cog in the machinery a lot of footage, he manages to somehow sensationlise everything and makes heroes out of criminals.Just a couple of examples—when Dawood Ibrahim (Vijay Maurya) makes his first appearance on screen, he is seen through the eyes of a character who is in awe of him and all but prostrates himself in front of the Dubai don.
When Tiger Memon (Pawan Malhotra) finds that his office has been burnt down during the riots, he shouts Amitabh Bachchan kind of dialogue—you burnt my office, I will burn the whole city.How could Kashyap’s film he be different from the dozens of commercial films that use riots and bomb blasts as pivots (including recent films like Dev and Insan)? He tries to put in enough thrills and cop chases, at the same time painstakingly reconstructing parts of the story that need not have been told in such excruciating detail—Badshah Khan’s (Aditya Shrivastav) travels, for instance.
On the one hand the dialogue is unbelievably mature—like the investigating cop Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay) lecturing Badshah Khan on the wrongs of communalism; or horribly provocative—like Tiger telling his cohorts that targeting the commercial core of Bombay will break the spine of the Hindus so that they will never be able to look them (Muslims) in the eye, and that they will ‘piss in their pants when they see us’. This followed by scenes of death and destruction gives the impression that the bomb blasts actually succeeded in destroying Bombay, when in fact, people were back at work the next day; a few weeks later it was impossible to tell where the blasts had taken place and today, most people would have to strain their memories to recall when exactly they happened.
Kashyap captures the indoctrination of Tiger Memon’s men, their training across the border, and their travails after the bombings, but fails to stress that the mission eventually failed.Black Friday is as technically accomplished as it is politically immature and dangerous. It lacks the compassion of a film like Amu (about the anti Sikh riots) for instance, or the detached analytical powers of Hamburg Cell. It reminds a city of the terror it went through, it rips off the bandages of time, but to what purpose? To heal or to hurt?
In Mumbai, Anurag Kashyap made Black Friday based in S Hussain Zaidi’s book about the bomb blasts in Mumbai that followed the riots caused by the Babri Masjid demolition. Antonia Bird’s Hamburg Cell is about the 9/11 World Trade Centre attack.Both films capture the people and the preparations made for these well-planned, well-coordinated attacks on innocent people by Muslim fundamentalists or terrorists—whatever fits better.And here’s where the similarity ends.
Antonia Bird’s film seeks to understand what happened, why educated, upper class Muslim youth were swayed by communal rhetoric. There is one scene, powerful in retrospect in which a terrorist (who comes from a wealthy, privileged family) tells his uncle that he wants to fight the forces that are exploiting him, and the uncle asks with genuine puzzlement: but who is exploiting you? The fact that she uses minimal documentary footage to show the actual incident proves that she did not want to either sensationlise the event, nor does she want to reopen wounds.Anurag Kashyap’s film seeks to justify what happened and though his long and boring film captures the most mundane incidents leading up to the attack and the police investigation, and gives the smallest cog in the machinery a lot of footage, he manages to somehow sensationlise everything and makes heroes out of criminals.Just a couple of examples—when Dawood Ibrahim (Vijay Maurya) makes his first appearance on screen, he is seen through the eyes of a character who is in awe of him and all but prostrates himself in front of the Dubai don.
When Tiger Memon (Pawan Malhotra) finds that his office has been burnt down during the riots, he shouts Amitabh Bachchan kind of dialogue—you burnt my office, I will burn the whole city.How could Kashyap’s film he be different from the dozens of commercial films that use riots and bomb blasts as pivots (including recent films like Dev and Insan)? He tries to put in enough thrills and cop chases, at the same time painstakingly reconstructing parts of the story that need not have been told in such excruciating detail—Badshah Khan’s (Aditya Shrivastav) travels, for instance.
On the one hand the dialogue is unbelievably mature—like the investigating cop Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay) lecturing Badshah Khan on the wrongs of communalism; or horribly provocative—like Tiger telling his cohorts that targeting the commercial core of Bombay will break the spine of the Hindus so that they will never be able to look them (Muslims) in the eye, and that they will ‘piss in their pants when they see us’. This followed by scenes of death and destruction gives the impression that the bomb blasts actually succeeded in destroying Bombay, when in fact, people were back at work the next day; a few weeks later it was impossible to tell where the blasts had taken place and today, most people would have to strain their memories to recall when exactly they happened.
Kashyap captures the indoctrination of Tiger Memon’s men, their training across the border, and their travails after the bombings, but fails to stress that the mission eventually failed.Black Friday is as technically accomplished as it is politically immature and dangerous. It lacks the compassion of a film like Amu (about the anti Sikh riots) for instance, or the detached analytical powers of Hamburg Cell. It reminds a city of the terror it went through, it rips off the bandages of time, but to what purpose? To heal or to hurt?
Labels: Cinemaah
