Saturday, October 04, 2008
Drona/Kidnap/RP
Drona
If a film with a title like Drona turns out to be bad, it leaves itself open to endless puns on the name. This Goldie Behl film will have a hard time living down its monumental and expensive stupidity.
The idea of creating an indigenous superhero was fine, but then think of an original and distinctly Indian ethos. Behl's film is an unholy mix of The Lord of The Rings, Amar Chitra Katha, The Matrix, Star Wars, Grimm's Fairytales, Chinese martial arts, and Hollywood adventure franchises like The Mummy and Indiana Jones series. And don't miss the under-the-wheels Stagecoach tribute. On top of it all, Drona is a styling disaster—a superhero in last year's dandiya costume with a dupatta round his neck for god's sake, a heroine in leather and brocade-- both in costumes with bits that flap and fly, most unsuitable for fighting. The pouting-preening villain couldn't scare a cockroach with that hair-standing-on-end look.
Creatures from a mythical village that looks like a tent for a Gurjari exhibition, wear blue eye-shadow and the queen of some ancient palace wears red lipstick. The period seems to be the present, judging by the opening in Prague, but when the action shifts to India, it's curiously medieval—royal families, horses, swords sorcerers, acres of unpopulated desert with the sea nearby and a train chugging along all by itself. Why can't India have cars, jets, guns and light sabers?
Aditya (Abhishek Bachchan) has grown up in Prague with a wicked aunt (why didn't the wimp leave home when he grew up?) and several Hindi-speaking Czechs, who as it turns out, are his secret protectors. One day he find a gleaming bracelet in his closet, brought, ostensibly by a blue rose petal that drifts by occasionally. He looks at it, says "For me?" and wears it. Not moment of, hey, where did that come from reflection?
That bracelet reveals him to Riz Raizada (Kay Kay Menon), who is actually a demon in disguise, looking for the 'amrit' that is in the safe-keeping of a clan of 'Drona's of which Aditya is a last surviving member. Riz, who plays with puppets, makes clones of himself for amusement and talks like a petulant kid asking for a cookie, sends black-cloaked men to capture Aditya, which is when his brocaded bodyguard Sonia (Priyanka Chopra) shows up. Before she tells him who she is and who he really is, she does a Madonna-ish dance with musclemen in a garage. And then takes him home to lullaby-singing Queen Mommy (Jaya Bachchan) in Rajasthan.
Really, at the end there is a mile-high pile of absurdity, with fairly nifty special effects, but nothing spectacularly new. Behl even cancels out the kiddie audience (that Krissh attracted in droves) by making it slow as a snail, with wailing music. Kay Kay Menon will be embarrassed to see himself on screen, and to think the makers claim to have spent Rs 22 crore on him! Abhishek Bachchan does not have the grace or charisma to carry off a superhero, and the costume doesn't help. Priyanka Chopra is the only one who can come out this wreck of a film with her head held high—she looks great and manages to say cringe-y lines like "Babuji kehte the" without looking like she would die laughing.
The audience will be either chuckling hysterically or snoozing. And the makers of this D for Debacle end it with the possibility of a sequel. Give them an Oscar for optimism.
Kidnap
Reading snippets about the making of Sanjay Gadhvi's Kidnap, you discover that Minissha Lamba worked out to lose weight so that she could wear a bikini; Imran Khan wore bronzer and revealed his tattoo; the film was made with Sanjay Dutt in mind. What they don't say is that the plot has been 'borrowed' from Butterfly on a Wheel, and slightly modified.
The title is Kidnap, so that's what it has to be about; the credits have drawings about a kid being tortured in jail, so you know revenge has to be a motive, if you have seen a single promo, it's clear that Imran Khan kidnaps Sanjay Dutt's daughter, Minissha Lamba. Suspense ends in five minutes, might as well skip the rest. The film is so illogical and riddled with so many holes, that watching it becomes game of counting the number of times you say, 'Huh? How come?'
Minissha Lamba as 18-year-old (Huh?) Sonia, prances about in bikini tops and then has a confrontation with her mother (Vidya Malavde) with equally deep cleavage on display, looking like her screen daughter's younger sister. She storms out, wears a bikini and goes swimming, waking up in a dark house with frowning Kabir (Imran Khan) as her kidnapper. Kabir has an axe to grind with Sonia's estranged father Vikrant Raina (Sanjay Dutt), who was divorced and denied custody of the kid over a decade ago, for being too rich and too arrogant! It can happen only in a Hindi film, that the US-based, billionaire, still pines for his ex-wife.
He comes down quick on the kidnapper's demand and is given a set of clues with tough tasks like stealing from a rival's well-guarded safe, springing a prisoner out of jail and finally shooting a man. Meanwhile Kabir has supplied Sonia with a wardrobe of tiny clothes, a white nightgown with slit sides and sleeves, so that when she demands a bath, he can take her to the nearest pristine waterfall, with not a soul in sight—all this in and around Alibag!
Suddenly Sonia figures out that the house she is in, is her own childhood holiday home, and Kabir tells her how her mean dad had sent him to jail when he was a kid, for stealing a car, with Sonia in it and crashing. Are kids sent to jail? Do they come out speaking fluent English, experts in electronics and computers, guns and cars, with Ninja skills and enough cash to float this kidnap enterprise? Maybe like compulsory conscription in some countries, our pub-hopping teens should be sent to jail for an education!
Why was Kabir trying to steal the car? To take his wounded buddy to a doctor... in the nineties, there were no phones in or around the orphanage where he lived? Later, how does Kabir know that Vikrant has hired a hot shot security guy who can tell him about the safe from where the money is to be stolen? Would Kabir try to enter Vikrant's house when he doesn't answer the phone? Would Sonia stay back to tend to a wounded Kabir instead of running away and maybe phoning a doctor if she was feeling sorry for him (Stockholm Syndrome)? How does Kabir know of Vikrant's fear of water? Why does Vikrant fear water?
So on and so forth… you know in the first few minutes of the film, that cleavage and current hottie Imran Khan (and he needs to work on his speech) aside, this isn't going to be a slick Dhoom. Better luck next time Mr Gadhvi, and may you learn see beyond the bustier and the belly button.
Ramchand Pakistani
Some time back Ashvin Kumar has made an Oscar-nominated short film Little Terrorist about a Pakistani kid who wanders over to the Indian side and is protected by a Hindu family. Mehreen Jabbar's film Ramchand Pakistani, takes up a somewhat similar idea and expands on it.
What's remarkable about the film is its absence of jingoism. An Indian film Deewar Let's Bring The Heroes Home, about Indian prisoners of War in across the border, painted the Pakistanis as absolute monsters. The Indian army and police in Jabbar's film are decent chaps forced to do an unpleasant job, because of the strained relations between the two countries.
Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussain) is a seven-year-old Hindu tribal boy, living with his parents in a Pakistani village on the border. One day, after a quarrel with his mother Champa (Nandita Das), he wanders over to the other side; his father Shanker (Rashid Farooqui) follows him and both are picked up as spies by Indian soldiers. There has just been a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, and nobody is in the mood to listen to their protestations of innocence. They are sent to a prison and locked up with other 'spies', while back home a distraught Champa waits for news, wondering if they are even alive.
After setting up an intriguing opening, the director lets the film drift into dull, documentary-like routine about the father-son coping in prison and Champa waiting or slogging to pay off the debt to the landlord. In the uncomplicated, mostly slow and boring film there are little sparks to arouse some interest in the family's plight—Ramchand's funny relationship with a female jail official (Maria Wasti), who won't touch him because is a Dalit, but uses him as a go-between in her secret affair with a colleague, and as a companion for her movie-watching sessions.
In Pakistan, Champa has an aborted distant romance with a sympathetic merchant —one of the few times in the film appears human. The other is the scene when the angry child squashes his pet bug and when the father accuses the boy of having caused all the trauma, but rises like a wounded lion to attack the prison pervert.
The film stays simple and low-key (perhaps too low) in his style of narration and shooting, concentrating instead on the performances. Strange that the usually meticulous Nandita Das let vanity get the better of her, and wore bright new costumes all the time, though her performance gives no cause for complaint. Maria Wasti as the dour, reluctant carer of the kid, Rashid Farooqui as the helpless father and Navaid Jabbar as the older Ramchand, who acquires a swagger after five years in jail, have all performed with feeling. If the hard-hitting and topical Khuda Ke Liye had inclined a section of the audience to Pakistani films, this one may not deliver in terms of drama or entertainment, but may be as a well-intentioned plea for humanism.
If a film with a title like Drona turns out to be bad, it leaves itself open to endless puns on the name. This Goldie Behl film will have a hard time living down its monumental and expensive stupidity.
The idea of creating an indigenous superhero was fine, but then think of an original and distinctly Indian ethos. Behl's film is an unholy mix of The Lord of The Rings, Amar Chitra Katha, The Matrix, Star Wars, Grimm's Fairytales, Chinese martial arts, and Hollywood adventure franchises like The Mummy and Indiana Jones series. And don't miss the under-the-wheels Stagecoach tribute. On top of it all, Drona is a styling disaster—a superhero in last year's dandiya costume with a dupatta round his neck for god's sake, a heroine in leather and brocade-- both in costumes with bits that flap and fly, most unsuitable for fighting. The pouting-preening villain couldn't scare a cockroach with that hair-standing-on-end look.
Creatures from a mythical village that looks like a tent for a Gurjari exhibition, wear blue eye-shadow and the queen of some ancient palace wears red lipstick. The period seems to be the present, judging by the opening in Prague, but when the action shifts to India, it's curiously medieval—royal families, horses, swords sorcerers, acres of unpopulated desert with the sea nearby and a train chugging along all by itself. Why can't India have cars, jets, guns and light sabers?
Aditya (Abhishek Bachchan) has grown up in Prague with a wicked aunt (why didn't the wimp leave home when he grew up?) and several Hindi-speaking Czechs, who as it turns out, are his secret protectors. One day he find a gleaming bracelet in his closet, brought, ostensibly by a blue rose petal that drifts by occasionally. He looks at it, says "For me?" and wears it. Not moment of, hey, where did that come from reflection?
That bracelet reveals him to Riz Raizada (Kay Kay Menon), who is actually a demon in disguise, looking for the 'amrit' that is in the safe-keeping of a clan of 'Drona's of which Aditya is a last surviving member. Riz, who plays with puppets, makes clones of himself for amusement and talks like a petulant kid asking for a cookie, sends black-cloaked men to capture Aditya, which is when his brocaded bodyguard Sonia (Priyanka Chopra) shows up. Before she tells him who she is and who he really is, she does a Madonna-ish dance with musclemen in a garage. And then takes him home to lullaby-singing Queen Mommy (Jaya Bachchan) in Rajasthan.
Really, at the end there is a mile-high pile of absurdity, with fairly nifty special effects, but nothing spectacularly new. Behl even cancels out the kiddie audience (that Krissh attracted in droves) by making it slow as a snail, with wailing music. Kay Kay Menon will be embarrassed to see himself on screen, and to think the makers claim to have spent Rs 22 crore on him! Abhishek Bachchan does not have the grace or charisma to carry off a superhero, and the costume doesn't help. Priyanka Chopra is the only one who can come out this wreck of a film with her head held high—she looks great and manages to say cringe-y lines like "Babuji kehte the" without looking like she would die laughing.
The audience will be either chuckling hysterically or snoozing. And the makers of this D for Debacle end it with the possibility of a sequel. Give them an Oscar for optimism.
Kidnap
Reading snippets about the making of Sanjay Gadhvi's Kidnap, you discover that Minissha Lamba worked out to lose weight so that she could wear a bikini; Imran Khan wore bronzer and revealed his tattoo; the film was made with Sanjay Dutt in mind. What they don't say is that the plot has been 'borrowed' from Butterfly on a Wheel, and slightly modified.
The title is Kidnap, so that's what it has to be about; the credits have drawings about a kid being tortured in jail, so you know revenge has to be a motive, if you have seen a single promo, it's clear that Imran Khan kidnaps Sanjay Dutt's daughter, Minissha Lamba. Suspense ends in five minutes, might as well skip the rest. The film is so illogical and riddled with so many holes, that watching it becomes game of counting the number of times you say, 'Huh? How come?'
Minissha Lamba as 18-year-old (Huh?) Sonia, prances about in bikini tops and then has a confrontation with her mother (Vidya Malavde) with equally deep cleavage on display, looking like her screen daughter's younger sister. She storms out, wears a bikini and goes swimming, waking up in a dark house with frowning Kabir (Imran Khan) as her kidnapper. Kabir has an axe to grind with Sonia's estranged father Vikrant Raina (Sanjay Dutt), who was divorced and denied custody of the kid over a decade ago, for being too rich and too arrogant! It can happen only in a Hindi film, that the US-based, billionaire, still pines for his ex-wife.
He comes down quick on the kidnapper's demand and is given a set of clues with tough tasks like stealing from a rival's well-guarded safe, springing a prisoner out of jail and finally shooting a man. Meanwhile Kabir has supplied Sonia with a wardrobe of tiny clothes, a white nightgown with slit sides and sleeves, so that when she demands a bath, he can take her to the nearest pristine waterfall, with not a soul in sight—all this in and around Alibag!
Suddenly Sonia figures out that the house she is in, is her own childhood holiday home, and Kabir tells her how her mean dad had sent him to jail when he was a kid, for stealing a car, with Sonia in it and crashing. Are kids sent to jail? Do they come out speaking fluent English, experts in electronics and computers, guns and cars, with Ninja skills and enough cash to float this kidnap enterprise? Maybe like compulsory conscription in some countries, our pub-hopping teens should be sent to jail for an education!
Why was Kabir trying to steal the car? To take his wounded buddy to a doctor... in the nineties, there were no phones in or around the orphanage where he lived? Later, how does Kabir know that Vikrant has hired a hot shot security guy who can tell him about the safe from where the money is to be stolen? Would Kabir try to enter Vikrant's house when he doesn't answer the phone? Would Sonia stay back to tend to a wounded Kabir instead of running away and maybe phoning a doctor if she was feeling sorry for him (Stockholm Syndrome)? How does Kabir know of Vikrant's fear of water? Why does Vikrant fear water?
So on and so forth… you know in the first few minutes of the film, that cleavage and current hottie Imran Khan (and he needs to work on his speech) aside, this isn't going to be a slick Dhoom. Better luck next time Mr Gadhvi, and may you learn see beyond the bustier and the belly button.
Ramchand Pakistani
Some time back Ashvin Kumar has made an Oscar-nominated short film Little Terrorist about a Pakistani kid who wanders over to the Indian side and is protected by a Hindu family. Mehreen Jabbar's film Ramchand Pakistani, takes up a somewhat similar idea and expands on it.
What's remarkable about the film is its absence of jingoism. An Indian film Deewar Let's Bring The Heroes Home, about Indian prisoners of War in across the border, painted the Pakistanis as absolute monsters. The Indian army and police in Jabbar's film are decent chaps forced to do an unpleasant job, because of the strained relations between the two countries.
Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussain) is a seven-year-old Hindu tribal boy, living with his parents in a Pakistani village on the border. One day, after a quarrel with his mother Champa (Nandita Das), he wanders over to the other side; his father Shanker (Rashid Farooqui) follows him and both are picked up as spies by Indian soldiers. There has just been a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, and nobody is in the mood to listen to their protestations of innocence. They are sent to a prison and locked up with other 'spies', while back home a distraught Champa waits for news, wondering if they are even alive.
After setting up an intriguing opening, the director lets the film drift into dull, documentary-like routine about the father-son coping in prison and Champa waiting or slogging to pay off the debt to the landlord. In the uncomplicated, mostly slow and boring film there are little sparks to arouse some interest in the family's plight—Ramchand's funny relationship with a female jail official (Maria Wasti), who won't touch him because is a Dalit, but uses him as a go-between in her secret affair with a colleague, and as a companion for her movie-watching sessions.
In Pakistan, Champa has an aborted distant romance with a sympathetic merchant —one of the few times in the film appears human. The other is the scene when the angry child squashes his pet bug and when the father accuses the boy of having caused all the trauma, but rises like a wounded lion to attack the prison pervert.
The film stays simple and low-key (perhaps too low) in his style of narration and shooting, concentrating instead on the performances. Strange that the usually meticulous Nandita Das let vanity get the better of her, and wore bright new costumes all the time, though her performance gives no cause for complaint. Maria Wasti as the dour, reluctant carer of the kid, Rashid Farooqui as the helpless father and Navaid Jabbar as the older Ramchand, who acquires a swagger after five years in jail, have all performed with feeling. If the hard-hitting and topical Khuda Ke Liye had inclined a section of the audience to Pakistani films, this one may not deliver in terms of drama or entertainment, but may be as a well-intentioned plea for humanism.
Labels: Cinemaah
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