Friday, January 15, 2010
PI and DMG
Pyaar Impossible
In spite of having one of the country’s biggest banners backing him, Uday Chopra’s acting career has not exactly taken off, though he did display some comic flair in the two Dhoom films.
This time he has written and produced Pyaar Impossible for himself, with Jugal Hansraj as director. And the result can be summed up as ‘impossible.’ In all fairness, he has played an unattractive geek, who is not even noticed by the girl he loves. Problem is he has played Abhay like a caricature geek—glasses, bad clothes, oily hair, braces on teeth—which makes him look awful, but adds nothing to the performance. Geekiness is not just a ‘look’, and only an actor not sure of his acting skills would play him as such a broad caricature. Unless the idea was to spoof geek-goddess romcoms, which this isn’t. In fact Hansraj directs without even a touch of lightness. The result is a film that sinks before it even starts to swim.
Abhay loves Alisha (Priyanka Chopra) in college, and continues seven years afterwards, when he is still a geek, so dumb that he lets his prize software be stolen by the smooth talker Varun (Dino Morea—well cast), because he left his laptop unattended, without even password protection. Geeks of the world will howl with laughter or outrage or both.
His dad (Anupam Kher) tells him, go to Singapore and get the software back, like he did in DDLJ, in which he told Shah Rukh Khan to go to India to get his girl. SRK had sneaked into her home, Abhay sneaks into the office of the computer company. In between, he also plays nanny to now-divorced Alisha’s six-year-old monster of a brat.
There has to be something wrong with a woman who leaves her daughter in the care of a male stranger. Odder still, she works for an IT company and doesn’t know how to use a computer. In a Singapore school, the kid does a Karz kind of expository song and dance in Hindi—gyrations and all-- and nobody wonders what’s going on
Priyanka Chopra gets to wear super short, super glam outfits, even though they don’t exactly go with her harassed, single working mom character. Because the plot is such a cliché in Hollywood movies, she also acts as if she were in an American film or sitcom, pretending to be Jennifer Aniston—all overdone twitches, giggles, shrugs and simpers.
This film’s tough to sit through, almost impossible to enjoy.
Dulha Mil Gaya
A fifties story palmed off in 2010—even if the film had not been long in the making, it would have been outdated anyway.
Rich Trinidad playboy Donsai (Fardeen Khan) has the rug pulled from under his feet, when, according to his father’s will, he has to marry Punjab village girl Samarpreet (Ishita Sharma). He marries her and leaves, never expecting that a simple Indian girl will land up “saat samundar paar” looking for him.
A model called Shimmer (Sushmita Sen) takes the girl under her wing and glams her up so that Donsai really falls in love with her, without realizing she is the wife he abandoned. Somewhere in 1969 Hrishikesh Mukherjee had made Pyar Ka Sapna, with the same plot; before and since many ugly ducklings have been turned into swans with cosmetic make-overs and contact lenses instead of glasses—the formula is now worn threadbare. Not to mention how regressive it now is for a girl to try and win over a caddish husband. This Miss Punjab also tells Shimmer that Indian girls ought to put career before marriage, which prompts the commitment-phobic model to run and propose to her suitor (Shah Rukh Khan) on her knees.
The character Sushmita Sen plays, with two loony sidekicks, is so over the top as to be hilarious—unintentionally so. She has never looked or acted worse. Ishita Sharma is okay, considering it is her debut. SRK’s knight in designer suits only puts this one out of its misery with less suffering… too little, too late.
In spite of having one of the country’s biggest banners backing him, Uday Chopra’s acting career has not exactly taken off, though he did display some comic flair in the two Dhoom films.
This time he has written and produced Pyaar Impossible for himself, with Jugal Hansraj as director. And the result can be summed up as ‘impossible.’ In all fairness, he has played an unattractive geek, who is not even noticed by the girl he loves. Problem is he has played Abhay like a caricature geek—glasses, bad clothes, oily hair, braces on teeth—which makes him look awful, but adds nothing to the performance. Geekiness is not just a ‘look’, and only an actor not sure of his acting skills would play him as such a broad caricature. Unless the idea was to spoof geek-goddess romcoms, which this isn’t. In fact Hansraj directs without even a touch of lightness. The result is a film that sinks before it even starts to swim.
Abhay loves Alisha (Priyanka Chopra) in college, and continues seven years afterwards, when he is still a geek, so dumb that he lets his prize software be stolen by the smooth talker Varun (Dino Morea—well cast), because he left his laptop unattended, without even password protection. Geeks of the world will howl with laughter or outrage or both.
His dad (Anupam Kher) tells him, go to Singapore and get the software back, like he did in DDLJ, in which he told Shah Rukh Khan to go to India to get his girl. SRK had sneaked into her home, Abhay sneaks into the office of the computer company. In between, he also plays nanny to now-divorced Alisha’s six-year-old monster of a brat.
There has to be something wrong with a woman who leaves her daughter in the care of a male stranger. Odder still, she works for an IT company and doesn’t know how to use a computer. In a Singapore school, the kid does a Karz kind of expository song and dance in Hindi—gyrations and all-- and nobody wonders what’s going on
Priyanka Chopra gets to wear super short, super glam outfits, even though they don’t exactly go with her harassed, single working mom character. Because the plot is such a cliché in Hollywood movies, she also acts as if she were in an American film or sitcom, pretending to be Jennifer Aniston—all overdone twitches, giggles, shrugs and simpers.
This film’s tough to sit through, almost impossible to enjoy.
Dulha Mil Gaya
A fifties story palmed off in 2010—even if the film had not been long in the making, it would have been outdated anyway.
Rich Trinidad playboy Donsai (Fardeen Khan) has the rug pulled from under his feet, when, according to his father’s will, he has to marry Punjab village girl Samarpreet (Ishita Sharma). He marries her and leaves, never expecting that a simple Indian girl will land up “saat samundar paar” looking for him.
A model called Shimmer (Sushmita Sen) takes the girl under her wing and glams her up so that Donsai really falls in love with her, without realizing she is the wife he abandoned. Somewhere in 1969 Hrishikesh Mukherjee had made Pyar Ka Sapna, with the same plot; before and since many ugly ducklings have been turned into swans with cosmetic make-overs and contact lenses instead of glasses—the formula is now worn threadbare. Not to mention how regressive it now is for a girl to try and win over a caddish husband. This Miss Punjab also tells Shimmer that Indian girls ought to put career before marriage, which prompts the commitment-phobic model to run and propose to her suitor (Shah Rukh Khan) on her knees.
The character Sushmita Sen plays, with two loony sidekicks, is so over the top as to be hilarious—unintentionally so. She has never looked or acted worse. Ishita Sharma is okay, considering it is her debut. SRK’s knight in designer suits only puts this one out of its misery with less suffering… too little, too late.
Labels: Cinemaah
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