Saturday, August 29, 2009
QGM+5
Quick Gun Murugan
Shashanka Ghosh has made a full-length feature film out of a character created for a music channel promo over a decade ago-- a Tamil Cowboy.
The film is part tribute-part spoof on the loud, garish style of filmmaking of a certain period in Tamil cinema, which is sharply observed, well-designed and witty, but perhaps too much to take in such a large dose.
Murugun (Dr Rajendraprasad) is a vegetarian cowboy, whose arch enemy is Rice Plate Reddy (Nasser), who aims to turn every vegetarian restaurant into a non-veg one, and then take over the world with his own brand of McDosa. Murugun has to stop him and rescue the 'Matunga Mamis' that Reddy's henchman Rowdy MBA (Raju Sundaram) kidnaps to get the formula for a perfect dosa.
It's all deliberately nonsensical, madly over the top and delightful in parts. But that kind of cinema is too easy a target for lampooning of the Mad Magazine variety, and a large chunk of today's young audience is probably not even aware of its existence.
Dr Rajendraprasad and Rambha (as a blonde moll) perform with the mindless zest that was required for these films, and are fun to watch. Ultimately the film may be more of academic interest to the film buff than a piece of entertainment for the regular viewer. It may even turn out to be a festival and campus cult film. But at one viewing, it just seems like a skit that didn't know when to stop.
Yeh Mera India
After making a couple of forgettable campus capers, N.Chandra returns to the kind of serious cinema with which he began his career. Yeh Mera India is very inspired by Crash and deals with many issues that afflict Mumbai today.
He starts with a large ensemble cast and throws many strands into the air, that he follows assiduously to the end—and it is all packed in the span of a day. Within that short time, people undergo personal and ideological crises, are shaken, stirred or reformed. It’s over ambitious and as a result too sketchy—so many issues could not possibly have packed into a single film without the risk of being diluted or caricaturized.
There is the Hindu-Muslim imbroglio, the Maharashtrian-Bihari problem, casteism, politics, greed, capitalism, loss of idealism, traffic jams, road rage— but everything remains at the level of a casual coffee table debate. A cop (Sayaji Shinde) hates Biharis, a sleazy builder (Rajit Kapoor) won’t sell a flat to a Muslim (Parvin Dabas), his TV (Sarika) mistreats her maid (Seema Biswas). A Brahmin politician’s son (Purab Kohli) is in love with a Dalit girl (Smilie Suri). There’s a Muslim hitman (Vijay Raaz) and his Hindu cohort (Atul Kulkarni), a judge (Anupam Kher) forced to convict a good doctor (Virendra Saxena), a shrill TV executive (Perizaad Zorabian) who wants to leave India, a Bihari migrant (Rajpal Yadav) looking for work… and dozens of other small characters fill up the intricate mosaic of the film.
Difficult though it may seem, Chandra actually manages to bring all the stories together to a close, some convincing (the story of the judge and doctor is very moving), some a bit ridiculous (the TV exec getting instant spiritual upliftment). Everybody with a mental block has it cleared—the bitter cop is saved by the Bihari; the hitman is reformed by the a secular Muslim, the upper class woman is given a lesson in kindness by the poor maid.
The actors are all competent and well cast, how you wish Chandra had not crammed the film so, made it more contemplative and less simplistic. Still, as films about a city in a flux go, this one may not be in the league of Crash or even Mumbai Meri Jaan, but it is not to be easily dismissed either. Give it a try.
Kisaan
In commercial cinema today, stars in designer costumes are prancing about in foreign locales, as if the only thing that mattered was the NRI; the rest of India could be ignored. So watching a mainstream film set in rural India, about a relevant issue, is a welcome change. The problem is that Puneet Sira, inspired by Manoj Kumar’s Upkaar obviously doesn’t know much about problems of villages today, and gives it the full ‘Bollywood’ treatment—all melodrama, macho bluster and old film stereotypes.
In a Punjab village, where men drive around in fancy cars, there is no school. So farmer Dayal Singh (Jackie Shroff) sends his older kid to the city to study, while the younger stays with him. Aman (Arbaaz Khan) grows up to be a lawyer and Jigar (Sohail Khan) a farmer. An industrialist from the city, Seth, (Dalip Tahil) wants to buy up the land in the village, and whoever resists is bumped off by Seth’s evil henchman (Romeo).
In this world, a ‘real man’ avenges an attack on his honour not by going to the cops and filing a case, but by chopping off the hand of the man who hit his father. Jigar goes to jail and in his absence, the bad guys run riot. The end is so predictable, because that’s how it used to be in the old films—brothers reunite and fight the villains. But the old filmmakers did it all with so much conviction that even the most clichéd scenes could draw applause or tears. Here it seems too much like city boys playing ‘farmer-farmer’ and flexing their gym-built biceps.
To be fair, Sira drops one stock character- that of the evil daughter-in-law, the city girl (Dia Mirza) is good and sympathetic; but retains that of the giggly village belle (Nauheed Cyrusi). The actors do a fairly competent job, considering they are playing characters in situations they don’t really understand. And it is unforgivable that the mandatory music video song with the end credits has the actors dancing in a disco to ‘Mere desh ki dharti’, but then the Khan brothers (who produced the film) and Puneet Sira are not exactly a voice of rural India. At least they pretended for a while… which is to be appreciated; though credit still goes to ‘Mr Bharat’ Manoj Kumar.
Daddy Cool
Had it not been for some vigilance on the part of the producers of Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral, the makers of Daddy Cool would have gotten away with plagiarism. They still do; the rights may have been bought, but the credit is given to Tushar Hiranandani, who has lifted the English film scene by scene, and just shifted the action to Goa.
Improbably, the characters in the film directed by K. Muralimohana Rao, have Catholic names, but speak Hindi, with only Jaaved Jaaferi putting on a faux “wot men” Goan accent. Which goes to show that the plagiarists don’t even have the sense to Indianise the story suitably. It’s the funeral of Douglas Lazarus (Sharat Saxena), which starts with a problem as the undertakers (called Coffins with Karan—haha!) deliver the wrong body.
The wife (Suhasini Mulay) and daughter-in-law Nancy (Aarti Chhabria) are at loggerheads. The sons, long suffering Steve (Suniel Shetty) and successful novelist Brian (Asish Chowdhry) are squabbling too. And around them, there’s a whole lot of drama going on among the other relatives. The drugs hidden by a nephew (Chunkey Pandey) in a bottle of medicine are mistakenly administered to his sister Maria’s (Tulip Joshi) boyfriend (Aftab Shivdasani), who gets stupidly high.
Another nephew (Jaaved Jafferi) is having problems with a suspicious wife (Kim Sharma), when a hot model (Sophie Choudhry) lands up mistaking him for her ‘casting couch’ employer. Add to this a nasty old uncle (Prem Chopra), and a blackmailer (Rajpal Yadav) and it’s a free for all.
Despite all the right indredients, the film doesn't work, because a lampoon of stiff upper lip English country lifestyle is dumped into Goa and performed by out-of-control actors who think comedy calls for overacting and making faces. The lines do not sound right in Hindi, and all in all, it’s a recipe for disaster. Think of the comic potential of a film set at an Indian funeral, and wonder why our filmmakers can’t think up their own stories set in their own milieu.
Toss
A little after the film begins, you know exactly how it is going to end. Ramesh Khatkar puts together a fast paced thriller, with a young cast; unfortunately it is so predicable that it is a wonder anyone even wanted to produce and release it.
A group of friends find a fortune in stolen money; it belongs to a trio of demented brothers, so you can guess that one by one the friends will be killed—in order of importance. Goa is the location again, with a bunch of Hindi speaking Catholic characters. A cop (Zakir Hussain) who insists on the D’Cunha being pronounced correctly, speaks with a Hyderabadi accent.
Sammy (Prashant Raj), Josh (Ashmit Patel), Ryan (Rannvijay Singh) and their girls (Aarti Chhabria, Madhurima Banerjee, Shruti Gera) get into trouble with their hidden cache. One murder leads to another, one lie to another; friends and lovers are betrayed while greed takes over.
The gangster brothers (Mahesh Manjrekar, Sushant Singh and an oversmart kid) happily kill and cut up people, but they are not as bad as the supposedly good guys and gals without scruples. There’s also a scary looking garden gnome that gets so many close-ups you think it might just come alive and start chopping people too. Maybe it should have, at least the audience would have been surprised.
Love Khichdi
Notice how today’s six-pack film hero is such a wimp that his creators dare not have him suffer heartbreak. So unworthy though he may be, he always lands up at the wedding of the girl he rejected, and succeeds in winning her over. (Why, in Love Aaj Kal, he got her after she was married to another.)
In Srinivas Bhashyam’s bachelor world, Haryana migrant to Mumbai, sous chef Vir (Randeep Hooda), ogles every woman in sight, beds a few, and gets manipulated by almost every woman too. Nobody is straightforward and honest in this Love Khichdi; if it was meant to be a humorous look at sexual politics in urban India today, it fails quite miserably. The film has a ‘sach ki ghanti’ ringing whenever a true observation is uttered, but no bells ring in the viewer’s ears when suffering Vir’s travails along with him.
Hooda is not too bad at playing the shallow, selfish stud, but look at the women he encounters—a predatory career woman (Kalpana Pandit), a hypocritical housewife (Divya Dutta), a precocious schoolgirl (Riya Sen), an older, “intelligent” but insecure woman (Rituparna Sengupta), a chatty maid (Sonali Kulkarni), and the ‘just friend’ (Sada) who turns out to be the slyest of the lot. Boys will be boys, the film says, and women will be sneaky shrews. Try this tasteless glop if you can.
Shashanka Ghosh has made a full-length feature film out of a character created for a music channel promo over a decade ago-- a Tamil Cowboy.
The film is part tribute-part spoof on the loud, garish style of filmmaking of a certain period in Tamil cinema, which is sharply observed, well-designed and witty, but perhaps too much to take in such a large dose.
Murugun (Dr Rajendraprasad) is a vegetarian cowboy, whose arch enemy is Rice Plate Reddy (Nasser), who aims to turn every vegetarian restaurant into a non-veg one, and then take over the world with his own brand of McDosa. Murugun has to stop him and rescue the 'Matunga Mamis' that Reddy's henchman Rowdy MBA (Raju Sundaram) kidnaps to get the formula for a perfect dosa.
It's all deliberately nonsensical, madly over the top and delightful in parts. But that kind of cinema is too easy a target for lampooning of the Mad Magazine variety, and a large chunk of today's young audience is probably not even aware of its existence.
Dr Rajendraprasad and Rambha (as a blonde moll) perform with the mindless zest that was required for these films, and are fun to watch. Ultimately the film may be more of academic interest to the film buff than a piece of entertainment for the regular viewer. It may even turn out to be a festival and campus cult film. But at one viewing, it just seems like a skit that didn't know when to stop.
Yeh Mera India
After making a couple of forgettable campus capers, N.Chandra returns to the kind of serious cinema with which he began his career. Yeh Mera India is very inspired by Crash and deals with many issues that afflict Mumbai today.
He starts with a large ensemble cast and throws many strands into the air, that he follows assiduously to the end—and it is all packed in the span of a day. Within that short time, people undergo personal and ideological crises, are shaken, stirred or reformed. It’s over ambitious and as a result too sketchy—so many issues could not possibly have packed into a single film without the risk of being diluted or caricaturized.
There is the Hindu-Muslim imbroglio, the Maharashtrian-Bihari problem, casteism, politics, greed, capitalism, loss of idealism, traffic jams, road rage— but everything remains at the level of a casual coffee table debate. A cop (Sayaji Shinde) hates Biharis, a sleazy builder (Rajit Kapoor) won’t sell a flat to a Muslim (Parvin Dabas), his TV (Sarika) mistreats her maid (Seema Biswas). A Brahmin politician’s son (Purab Kohli) is in love with a Dalit girl (Smilie Suri). There’s a Muslim hitman (Vijay Raaz) and his Hindu cohort (Atul Kulkarni), a judge (Anupam Kher) forced to convict a good doctor (Virendra Saxena), a shrill TV executive (Perizaad Zorabian) who wants to leave India, a Bihari migrant (Rajpal Yadav) looking for work… and dozens of other small characters fill up the intricate mosaic of the film.
Difficult though it may seem, Chandra actually manages to bring all the stories together to a close, some convincing (the story of the judge and doctor is very moving), some a bit ridiculous (the TV exec getting instant spiritual upliftment). Everybody with a mental block has it cleared—the bitter cop is saved by the Bihari; the hitman is reformed by the a secular Muslim, the upper class woman is given a lesson in kindness by the poor maid.
The actors are all competent and well cast, how you wish Chandra had not crammed the film so, made it more contemplative and less simplistic. Still, as films about a city in a flux go, this one may not be in the league of Crash or even Mumbai Meri Jaan, but it is not to be easily dismissed either. Give it a try.
Kisaan
In commercial cinema today, stars in designer costumes are prancing about in foreign locales, as if the only thing that mattered was the NRI; the rest of India could be ignored. So watching a mainstream film set in rural India, about a relevant issue, is a welcome change. The problem is that Puneet Sira, inspired by Manoj Kumar’s Upkaar obviously doesn’t know much about problems of villages today, and gives it the full ‘Bollywood’ treatment—all melodrama, macho bluster and old film stereotypes.
In a Punjab village, where men drive around in fancy cars, there is no school. So farmer Dayal Singh (Jackie Shroff) sends his older kid to the city to study, while the younger stays with him. Aman (Arbaaz Khan) grows up to be a lawyer and Jigar (Sohail Khan) a farmer. An industrialist from the city, Seth, (Dalip Tahil) wants to buy up the land in the village, and whoever resists is bumped off by Seth’s evil henchman (Romeo).
In this world, a ‘real man’ avenges an attack on his honour not by going to the cops and filing a case, but by chopping off the hand of the man who hit his father. Jigar goes to jail and in his absence, the bad guys run riot. The end is so predictable, because that’s how it used to be in the old films—brothers reunite and fight the villains. But the old filmmakers did it all with so much conviction that even the most clichéd scenes could draw applause or tears. Here it seems too much like city boys playing ‘farmer-farmer’ and flexing their gym-built biceps.
To be fair, Sira drops one stock character- that of the evil daughter-in-law, the city girl (Dia Mirza) is good and sympathetic; but retains that of the giggly village belle (Nauheed Cyrusi). The actors do a fairly competent job, considering they are playing characters in situations they don’t really understand. And it is unforgivable that the mandatory music video song with the end credits has the actors dancing in a disco to ‘Mere desh ki dharti’, but then the Khan brothers (who produced the film) and Puneet Sira are not exactly a voice of rural India. At least they pretended for a while… which is to be appreciated; though credit still goes to ‘Mr Bharat’ Manoj Kumar.
Daddy Cool
Had it not been for some vigilance on the part of the producers of Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral, the makers of Daddy Cool would have gotten away with plagiarism. They still do; the rights may have been bought, but the credit is given to Tushar Hiranandani, who has lifted the English film scene by scene, and just shifted the action to Goa.
Improbably, the characters in the film directed by K. Muralimohana Rao, have Catholic names, but speak Hindi, with only Jaaved Jaaferi putting on a faux “wot men” Goan accent. Which goes to show that the plagiarists don’t even have the sense to Indianise the story suitably. It’s the funeral of Douglas Lazarus (Sharat Saxena), which starts with a problem as the undertakers (called Coffins with Karan—haha!) deliver the wrong body.
The wife (Suhasini Mulay) and daughter-in-law Nancy (Aarti Chhabria) are at loggerheads. The sons, long suffering Steve (Suniel Shetty) and successful novelist Brian (Asish Chowdhry) are squabbling too. And around them, there’s a whole lot of drama going on among the other relatives. The drugs hidden by a nephew (Chunkey Pandey) in a bottle of medicine are mistakenly administered to his sister Maria’s (Tulip Joshi) boyfriend (Aftab Shivdasani), who gets stupidly high.
Another nephew (Jaaved Jafferi) is having problems with a suspicious wife (Kim Sharma), when a hot model (Sophie Choudhry) lands up mistaking him for her ‘casting couch’ employer. Add to this a nasty old uncle (Prem Chopra), and a blackmailer (Rajpal Yadav) and it’s a free for all.
Despite all the right indredients, the film doesn't work, because a lampoon of stiff upper lip English country lifestyle is dumped into Goa and performed by out-of-control actors who think comedy calls for overacting and making faces. The lines do not sound right in Hindi, and all in all, it’s a recipe for disaster. Think of the comic potential of a film set at an Indian funeral, and wonder why our filmmakers can’t think up their own stories set in their own milieu.
Toss
A little after the film begins, you know exactly how it is going to end. Ramesh Khatkar puts together a fast paced thriller, with a young cast; unfortunately it is so predicable that it is a wonder anyone even wanted to produce and release it.
A group of friends find a fortune in stolen money; it belongs to a trio of demented brothers, so you can guess that one by one the friends will be killed—in order of importance. Goa is the location again, with a bunch of Hindi speaking Catholic characters. A cop (Zakir Hussain) who insists on the D’Cunha being pronounced correctly, speaks with a Hyderabadi accent.
Sammy (Prashant Raj), Josh (Ashmit Patel), Ryan (Rannvijay Singh) and their girls (Aarti Chhabria, Madhurima Banerjee, Shruti Gera) get into trouble with their hidden cache. One murder leads to another, one lie to another; friends and lovers are betrayed while greed takes over.
The gangster brothers (Mahesh Manjrekar, Sushant Singh and an oversmart kid) happily kill and cut up people, but they are not as bad as the supposedly good guys and gals without scruples. There’s also a scary looking garden gnome that gets so many close-ups you think it might just come alive and start chopping people too. Maybe it should have, at least the audience would have been surprised.
Love Khichdi
Notice how today’s six-pack film hero is such a wimp that his creators dare not have him suffer heartbreak. So unworthy though he may be, he always lands up at the wedding of the girl he rejected, and succeeds in winning her over. (Why, in Love Aaj Kal, he got her after she was married to another.)
In Srinivas Bhashyam’s bachelor world, Haryana migrant to Mumbai, sous chef Vir (Randeep Hooda), ogles every woman in sight, beds a few, and gets manipulated by almost every woman too. Nobody is straightforward and honest in this Love Khichdi; if it was meant to be a humorous look at sexual politics in urban India today, it fails quite miserably. The film has a ‘sach ki ghanti’ ringing whenever a true observation is uttered, but no bells ring in the viewer’s ears when suffering Vir’s travails along with him.
Hooda is not too bad at playing the shallow, selfish stud, but look at the women he encounters—a predatory career woman (Kalpana Pandit), a hypocritical housewife (Divya Dutta), a precocious schoolgirl (Riya Sen), an older, “intelligent” but insecure woman (Rituparna Sengupta), a chatty maid (Sonali Kulkarni), and the ‘just friend’ (Sada) who turns out to be the slyest of the lot. Boys will be boys, the film says, and women will be sneaky shrews. Try this tasteless glop if you can.
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