Saturday, November 08, 2008
Ek Vivaah&EMI
Ek Vivaah Aisa Bhi
It's Bhopal..in the present, though it could well be 1908. Because the Rajshris live in a world of their own, and their films are watched by people who probably populate that world too.
Based on of their own productions (Tapasya-1976), which in turn was based on the even older Vachan (1855) and there is always the Ritwick Ghatak classic Meghe DhakaTara, which can't even be mentioned in the same breath as this. They are all about a women 'sacrificing' her own happiness (read: marriage) for the sake of her family.
Kaushik Ghatak, the director of Ek Vivaah Aisa Bhi, used to make soap operas before this and the style remains the same—the restless camera and wailing songs (Ravindra Jain) running almost throughout the film, telling you in verse what you can already see happening on screen. So pervasive is this background track, that there is barely a moment of silence or introspection in the film.
Chandni (Eesha Koppikkar) is an aspiring singer, who lives in Bhopal with her father (Alok Nath) and two younger siblings. She meets another singer Prem (Sonu Sood) at a music competition and they fall in love.
The film is inhabited by stock Rajshri characters – the father's aloo-paratha gobbling doctor friend, the heroine's chirpy Muslim friend, the hero's Sikh and Muslim buddies, an evil aunt and her hen-pecked husband.
On the day of the engagement, the father dies; Chandni is afraid her siblings will suffer if she leaves the house, so she calls off the marriage. Prem, who is devoted to her, promises to wait till she is ready. She becomes a music teacher and he goes on to become a famous singer.
Years later, when the brother (Vishal Malhotra) marries a bitchy rich girl (Chhavi Mittal), she asks Chandni why she could not have sent the kids to boarding school, where their education would have looked after, so that she could have pursued a career. Which sounds like a sensible, practical solution, and makes Chandni's sacrifice (and by association Prem's), needlessly masochistic.
But the rich girl is called Natasha, speaks English, and wants the ghastly decor of their precious house changed, so she must be vamp. She also complains about power cuts—when today, generators are easily available.
Chandni looks increasingly harried, but wants to continue her 'sacrifice' till the sister (Amrita Prakash) gets married and goes abroad too, driving most viewers to tears of frustration, and poor Prem to exasperation.
To make heavy-duty melodrama work—especially since it makes so little sense today—actors of calibre are needed. Eesha Koppikkar doesn't look like simpering comes easy to her and has a harsh voice. Sood appears to be completely out of place, like he'd much rather be fighting in other film than standing around looking gooey-eyed here.
It may nice to see a universe where people are mostly good and noble, and there must be an audience for this kind of film— people who watch domestic dramas with overdressed women on TV, and mistake it for Indian values and culture. That doesn't mean the film is not boring, bland and irrelevant.
EMI
Realistic films about contemporary urban life are so few and far between, that you welcome any such movie that comes along.
Even those who have never taken loans and have a good credit rating, have been harassed at some time or the other with unsolicited calls from banks, peddling loans and credit cards. Newspaper reports about the hooliganism of recovery agents (often they have caught the wrong man!) appear periodically. We live in consumerist buy-now-pay-later times, and what happens if financial disaster strikes is a subject ripe for a black comedy.
Unfortunately, director Saurabh Kabra EMI (with the tagline: Loan liya hai to chukana padega) barely skims the surface of the problem, and then turns it into a Munnabhai kind of romantic comedy.
Ryan (Arjun Rampal--suave) is a DJ, who believes in living on credit, and has a high-maintenance girlfriend (Malaika Arora Khan), and eventually his dues pile up. Anil (Ashish Chaudhary) and Shilpa (Neha Uberoi) are a middle class couple, who take loans to get married and settle down, and can't keep up the installments when they split.
Elderly Chandrakant (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), takes a personal loan to pay for his hopeless son's foreign education and Prerna (Urmila Matondkar) gets into a complicated situation over an insurance claim when her husband commits suicide.
Sattarbhai (Sanjay Dutt) runs the Good Luck Recovery Agency– who is supposedly dangerous, but seems to run a 'Munnabhai' kind of outfit consisting of laidback goons with names like Decent, Chocolate, Bachkana (a dwarf) and Chocolate! In fact a large chunk of Dutt's colourful character appears only in the second half, by which time the film has already lost steam.
Not being able to pay back a loan or an installment and have gangsters breathing down your neck, can be a scary and embarrassing experience, but EMI does not even go that route. Instead Sattarbhai goes all moony-eyed over Prerna and that takes the sting out of him. Besides, he has political ambitions and is advised to clean up his image.
The film sputters to life only when Dutt is on screen, but then there is nothing new about seeing him as a 'Bambaiya'-speaking gangster-- he must have done this role half-asleep. And then it ends abruptly with a public service like warning to audiences to 'take loans responsibly.' Indeed!
The flimsy material is stretched with badly-picturised songs—Malaika Arora comes to the rescue with her 'item girl' act twice, when bored audiences walk out for a smoke. Waste of a good idea, waste of a good cast, waste of good money (ours and theirs).
It's Bhopal..in the present, though it could well be 1908. Because the Rajshris live in a world of their own, and their films are watched by people who probably populate that world too.
Based on of their own productions (Tapasya-1976), which in turn was based on the even older Vachan (1855) and there is always the Ritwick Ghatak classic Meghe DhakaTara, which can't even be mentioned in the same breath as this. They are all about a women 'sacrificing' her own happiness (read: marriage) for the sake of her family.
Kaushik Ghatak, the director of Ek Vivaah Aisa Bhi, used to make soap operas before this and the style remains the same—the restless camera and wailing songs (Ravindra Jain) running almost throughout the film, telling you in verse what you can already see happening on screen. So pervasive is this background track, that there is barely a moment of silence or introspection in the film.
Chandni (Eesha Koppikkar) is an aspiring singer, who lives in Bhopal with her father (Alok Nath) and two younger siblings. She meets another singer Prem (Sonu Sood) at a music competition and they fall in love.
The film is inhabited by stock Rajshri characters – the father's aloo-paratha gobbling doctor friend, the heroine's chirpy Muslim friend, the hero's Sikh and Muslim buddies, an evil aunt and her hen-pecked husband.
On the day of the engagement, the father dies; Chandni is afraid her siblings will suffer if she leaves the house, so she calls off the marriage. Prem, who is devoted to her, promises to wait till she is ready. She becomes a music teacher and he goes on to become a famous singer.
Years later, when the brother (Vishal Malhotra) marries a bitchy rich girl (Chhavi Mittal), she asks Chandni why she could not have sent the kids to boarding school, where their education would have looked after, so that she could have pursued a career. Which sounds like a sensible, practical solution, and makes Chandni's sacrifice (and by association Prem's), needlessly masochistic.
But the rich girl is called Natasha, speaks English, and wants the ghastly decor of their precious house changed, so she must be vamp. She also complains about power cuts—when today, generators are easily available.
Chandni looks increasingly harried, but wants to continue her 'sacrifice' till the sister (Amrita Prakash) gets married and goes abroad too, driving most viewers to tears of frustration, and poor Prem to exasperation.
To make heavy-duty melodrama work—especially since it makes so little sense today—actors of calibre are needed. Eesha Koppikkar doesn't look like simpering comes easy to her and has a harsh voice. Sood appears to be completely out of place, like he'd much rather be fighting in other film than standing around looking gooey-eyed here.
It may nice to see a universe where people are mostly good and noble, and there must be an audience for this kind of film— people who watch domestic dramas with overdressed women on TV, and mistake it for Indian values and culture. That doesn't mean the film is not boring, bland and irrelevant.
EMI
Realistic films about contemporary urban life are so few and far between, that you welcome any such movie that comes along.
Even those who have never taken loans and have a good credit rating, have been harassed at some time or the other with unsolicited calls from banks, peddling loans and credit cards. Newspaper reports about the hooliganism of recovery agents (often they have caught the wrong man!) appear periodically. We live in consumerist buy-now-pay-later times, and what happens if financial disaster strikes is a subject ripe for a black comedy.
Unfortunately, director Saurabh Kabra EMI (with the tagline: Loan liya hai to chukana padega) barely skims the surface of the problem, and then turns it into a Munnabhai kind of romantic comedy.
Ryan (Arjun Rampal--suave) is a DJ, who believes in living on credit, and has a high-maintenance girlfriend (Malaika Arora Khan), and eventually his dues pile up. Anil (Ashish Chaudhary) and Shilpa (Neha Uberoi) are a middle class couple, who take loans to get married and settle down, and can't keep up the installments when they split.
Elderly Chandrakant (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), takes a personal loan to pay for his hopeless son's foreign education and Prerna (Urmila Matondkar) gets into a complicated situation over an insurance claim when her husband commits suicide.
Sattarbhai (Sanjay Dutt) runs the Good Luck Recovery Agency– who is supposedly dangerous, but seems to run a 'Munnabhai' kind of outfit consisting of laidback goons with names like Decent, Chocolate, Bachkana (a dwarf) and Chocolate! In fact a large chunk of Dutt's colourful character appears only in the second half, by which time the film has already lost steam.
Not being able to pay back a loan or an installment and have gangsters breathing down your neck, can be a scary and embarrassing experience, but EMI does not even go that route. Instead Sattarbhai goes all moony-eyed over Prerna and that takes the sting out of him. Besides, he has political ambitions and is advised to clean up his image.
The film sputters to life only when Dutt is on screen, but then there is nothing new about seeing him as a 'Bambaiya'-speaking gangster-- he must have done this role half-asleep. And then it ends abruptly with a public service like warning to audiences to 'take loans responsibly.' Indeed!
The flimsy material is stretched with badly-picturised songs—Malaika Arora comes to the rescue with her 'item girl' act twice, when bored audiences walk out for a smoke. Waste of a good idea, waste of a good cast, waste of good money (ours and theirs).
Labels: Cinemaah
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Fashion&Golmaal
Fashion
Every time Madhur Bhandarkar makes a film, there must be at least half a dozen filmmaker kicking themselves because they didn't think of the idea before. He always picks up subjects that were right there in front of everyone, but nobody could see them.
Fashion could be said to be the third of his upper crust trilogy consisting of Page 3 and Corporate—his most ambitious and stylish, but also his weakest, in that he uncharacteristically pulls his punches. While he plunged into the seedy world of bars in Chandni Bar or exposed high society hypocrisy in Page 3 or laid bare the beggar mafia in Traffic Signal, his Fashion barely touches the rim of the couture industry, and leaves out much more than it reveals. His characters are surprisingly naïve and unreasonably brittle and there is very little of the grime behind the glamour on show.
However, those who don't know much about the world of fashion, might find it an eye-opener. Bhandarkar's heroine Meghna Mathur (Priyanka Chopra) comes from Chandigarh to Mumbai to become a super model. She meets overly helpful people, gay designers (not ALL are gay, surely), faces no struggle or exploitation and gets to the top without any problems--not at all convincing. She replaces the reigning queen Sonali (Kangana Ranaut), a drug-addled, arrogant woman, who does not see her downfall coming. As soon as she becomes famous, Meghna becomes arrogant too, and goes down the smoke-booze-drug-sex route, alienating her friends and lover (Arjan Bajwa).
She willingly becomes the mistress of fashion industry honcho, the married Abhijit Sareen (Arbaaz Khan), and her collapse comes when she gets pregnant and is quickly replaced by the next flavour of the season. Fashion is about her fight to return to reclaim her place, and it is clear Bhandarkar is on her side— though his stand on successful women could be debated. Since the film sees just one group of the fashion power set, and just a handful of designers, Meghna's comparison is only with the wild Shonali (who faces the infamous wardrobe malfunction) or the placid Janet (Mugdha Godse), who realises her limitations and marries a gay designer (Samir Soni)-- what other models go through to get there and stay in the circuit is not even explored.
The director's unidimensional view is that if a women has to succeed, she has to drop her morals, and once she gets where she wants to be, she cracks under pressure and starts to drink and do drugs. The fashion industry may have its ugly side, exploitation, anorexia, self-destruction (which the usually hard-hitting Bhandarkar glosses over), it is also frighteningly competitive and professional, with no room for weakness or failure. The film may be set against the backdrop of the fain world, but there is very little of an inside view; Gia, Pret a Porter or Rags it isn't, though Bhandarkar's strength as a director gives it some really dramatic and disturbing high points – but one can't help thinking that had he really gone beyond the glamour (the mistreatment of the workers, manipulation of the media, and so on), he would have made a much better film. His sympathies always lie with the underdog and somehow neither Meghna nor Shonali seem like they deserve sympathy.
Despite its faults, misses and superficialities, Fashion is worth a look because it's the first (and possibly only) film that will go down the ramp. And yes, the performances are first-rate—Priyanka leading the pack with a bold, non-holds barred act, or Kangana Ranaut doing the deranged number one again with vigour, or the quietly confident debutante Mugdha Godse.
Golmaal Returns
Golmaal Returns comes at a time when people are in a mood to laugh off their worries, so this, and the memory of the madly funny Golmaal, will probably work in the favour of this Rohit Shetty sequel.
As far as comedies go, it's passable, taking its plot from the 1973 film Aaj Ki Taaza Khabar, and just adding some more characters and a whole lot of Bollywood in-jokes—Saawariya comes in for particularly wicked battering.Ajay Devgan is a Goa-based fishery manager called Gopal Kumar Santoshi (geddit?), whose TV-addicted wife Ekta (Kareena Kapoor) is of a suspicious nature. Living with them are her mute brother Lucky (Tusshar Kapoor) and his bimbo sister Esha (Amrita Arora).
One night, Gopal saves Meera (Celina Jaitley) from molesters and since their cars break down, they are forced to take shelter in a friend's yacht. Here is one of the film's really funny scenes—every TV channel the harried Gopal switches to, has sexy songs or scenes on it, making him feel really uncomfortable.The next morning, unable to tell his wife the truth, he invents a friend called Anthony Gonsalves and persuades a job seeker Laxman (Shreyas Talpade) to play Anthony.
The real Anthony (Vrajesh Hirjee) also turns up and to add to the confusion, a man Gopal had threatened at work turns up dead the same night that Gopal was missing, that makes him a suspect.Esha's boyfriend is a cop (Arshad Warsi) called Madhav Ghai (there we go again!), who is rather too eager to nail Gopal. Then there's Laxman's girlfriend Meera and the real Anthony's wife (Rakhi Vijan) adding to the dizzy merry-go-round of misunderstanding.
The situation is crazy enough as it is, but to milk more humour out of it, Shetty puts in too many gay jokes, and plenty of guys being hit on the crotch. And the mute Lucky is a stand-up comic by himself, what with his goofy expressions and the weird sounds he emits— if one can forget political correctness for a while, he gets all the laughs. Tusshar and Shreyas Talpade's loony energy keeps the film afloat for most part, filling in for all the times when the script flags. Arshad Warsi is curiously subdued—maybe because his role isn't much.
Ajay Devgan has done better work before and Kareena Kapoor is wasted – but she makes good eye candy with her trendy wardrobe (with mangalsutra hanging out, like that of the women in her favourite TV soaps). Surprisingly the music isn't hummable—though a couple of songs are extravagantly picturised.
People who don't expect much more from Golmaal Returns than some chuckles, might just be satisfied with what they get, but if anyone goes expecting a comic masterpiece they are likely to be let down.
Every time Madhur Bhandarkar makes a film, there must be at least half a dozen filmmaker kicking themselves because they didn't think of the idea before. He always picks up subjects that were right there in front of everyone, but nobody could see them.
Fashion could be said to be the third of his upper crust trilogy consisting of Page 3 and Corporate—his most ambitious and stylish, but also his weakest, in that he uncharacteristically pulls his punches. While he plunged into the seedy world of bars in Chandni Bar or exposed high society hypocrisy in Page 3 or laid bare the beggar mafia in Traffic Signal, his Fashion barely touches the rim of the couture industry, and leaves out much more than it reveals. His characters are surprisingly naïve and unreasonably brittle and there is very little of the grime behind the glamour on show.
However, those who don't know much about the world of fashion, might find it an eye-opener. Bhandarkar's heroine Meghna Mathur (Priyanka Chopra) comes from Chandigarh to Mumbai to become a super model. She meets overly helpful people, gay designers (not ALL are gay, surely), faces no struggle or exploitation and gets to the top without any problems--not at all convincing. She replaces the reigning queen Sonali (Kangana Ranaut), a drug-addled, arrogant woman, who does not see her downfall coming. As soon as she becomes famous, Meghna becomes arrogant too, and goes down the smoke-booze-drug-sex route, alienating her friends and lover (Arjan Bajwa).
She willingly becomes the mistress of fashion industry honcho, the married Abhijit Sareen (Arbaaz Khan), and her collapse comes when she gets pregnant and is quickly replaced by the next flavour of the season. Fashion is about her fight to return to reclaim her place, and it is clear Bhandarkar is on her side— though his stand on successful women could be debated. Since the film sees just one group of the fashion power set, and just a handful of designers, Meghna's comparison is only with the wild Shonali (who faces the infamous wardrobe malfunction) or the placid Janet (Mugdha Godse), who realises her limitations and marries a gay designer (Samir Soni)-- what other models go through to get there and stay in the circuit is not even explored.
The director's unidimensional view is that if a women has to succeed, she has to drop her morals, and once she gets where she wants to be, she cracks under pressure and starts to drink and do drugs. The fashion industry may have its ugly side, exploitation, anorexia, self-destruction (which the usually hard-hitting Bhandarkar glosses over), it is also frighteningly competitive and professional, with no room for weakness or failure. The film may be set against the backdrop of the fain world, but there is very little of an inside view; Gia, Pret a Porter or Rags it isn't, though Bhandarkar's strength as a director gives it some really dramatic and disturbing high points – but one can't help thinking that had he really gone beyond the glamour (the mistreatment of the workers, manipulation of the media, and so on), he would have made a much better film. His sympathies always lie with the underdog and somehow neither Meghna nor Shonali seem like they deserve sympathy.
Despite its faults, misses and superficialities, Fashion is worth a look because it's the first (and possibly only) film that will go down the ramp. And yes, the performances are first-rate—Priyanka leading the pack with a bold, non-holds barred act, or Kangana Ranaut doing the deranged number one again with vigour, or the quietly confident debutante Mugdha Godse.
Golmaal Returns
Golmaal Returns comes at a time when people are in a mood to laugh off their worries, so this, and the memory of the madly funny Golmaal, will probably work in the favour of this Rohit Shetty sequel.
As far as comedies go, it's passable, taking its plot from the 1973 film Aaj Ki Taaza Khabar, and just adding some more characters and a whole lot of Bollywood in-jokes—Saawariya comes in for particularly wicked battering.Ajay Devgan is a Goa-based fishery manager called Gopal Kumar Santoshi (geddit?), whose TV-addicted wife Ekta (Kareena Kapoor) is of a suspicious nature. Living with them are her mute brother Lucky (Tusshar Kapoor) and his bimbo sister Esha (Amrita Arora).
One night, Gopal saves Meera (Celina Jaitley) from molesters and since their cars break down, they are forced to take shelter in a friend's yacht. Here is one of the film's really funny scenes—every TV channel the harried Gopal switches to, has sexy songs or scenes on it, making him feel really uncomfortable.The next morning, unable to tell his wife the truth, he invents a friend called Anthony Gonsalves and persuades a job seeker Laxman (Shreyas Talpade) to play Anthony.
The real Anthony (Vrajesh Hirjee) also turns up and to add to the confusion, a man Gopal had threatened at work turns up dead the same night that Gopal was missing, that makes him a suspect.Esha's boyfriend is a cop (Arshad Warsi) called Madhav Ghai (there we go again!), who is rather too eager to nail Gopal. Then there's Laxman's girlfriend Meera and the real Anthony's wife (Rakhi Vijan) adding to the dizzy merry-go-round of misunderstanding.
The situation is crazy enough as it is, but to milk more humour out of it, Shetty puts in too many gay jokes, and plenty of guys being hit on the crotch. And the mute Lucky is a stand-up comic by himself, what with his goofy expressions and the weird sounds he emits— if one can forget political correctness for a while, he gets all the laughs. Tusshar and Shreyas Talpade's loony energy keeps the film afloat for most part, filling in for all the times when the script flags. Arshad Warsi is curiously subdued—maybe because his role isn't much.
Ajay Devgan has done better work before and Kareena Kapoor is wasted – but she makes good eye candy with her trendy wardrobe (with mangalsutra hanging out, like that of the women in her favourite TV soaps). Surprisingly the music isn't hummable—though a couple of songs are extravagantly picturised.
People who don't expect much more from Golmaal Returns than some chuckles, might just be satisfied with what they get, but if anyone goes expecting a comic masterpiece they are likely to be let down.
Labels: Cinemaah
