Cinemaah

Many Idiots!


Ever since Aamir Khan and 3 Idiots have made it cool to defy parents and do your own thing, idiots are crawling out of the woodwork.

What do the teens in Roshan Abbas’s Always Kabhi Kabhi want? It’s not quite clear, but by the time the interval rolls around after a lot of singing, dancing and making fun of teachers, the four lead characters have a problem, which doesn’t seem earth-shattering to the viewer.

Sameer (Ali Fazal—the only real actor of the lot) can’t communicate with his parents, so when he us caught in a drug raid (and he is stoned), the cops blackmail him.  Aishwarya (Giselle Monteiro) is being pushed into a film career by her mother; Nandini’s (Zoa Morani) parents have to time for her and she suspects she may be pregnant by a guy called Toy Boy (really!). Tariq’s (Satyajeet Dubey) father wants him to go to a top US university.  All this petty griping is happening against rehearsals of Romeo and Juliet for an inter-collegiate drama competition.

To make it look and sound like  ‘young’ film, there is talk of status updates and smses, and songs in hybrid lingo (Undi the condi of my heart? Ouch!) So the teens come to the conclusion that parents are a problem and the only way to communicate is through Shakespeare, because, you see, if Romeo and Juliet had been able to sit across the table and talk to their parents, the story wouldn’t have been tragic.

Shah Rukh Khan’ company produced this, he endorsed it… Groan!  Ticket money down the drain.

Double Fry


Sagar Ballary’s Bheja Fry had turned out to be a surprise hit, restarting yet another wave of small budget comedies, and turning Vinay Pathak into a leading man.

A few years later, Pathak is still reprising the oily-haired simpleton role in most of his films (eg Chalo Dilli)— with Bheja Fry 2 he plays the ‘idiot’ Bharat Bhushan again, but this time the humour refuses to rise.

What had made the annoying Bharat Bhushan such a winner in the first film (copied from the French film Le diner des cons) was that he was the innocent in a nasty world, where cruel rich men want to use him for their amusement and he neatly turns the tables on them, without once going out of character.  The way the film went, if you found Bharat Bhushan with his film music obsession irritating, you aligned yourself with the snobs who treat him shabbily; as a result Pathak turned the character into a likeable idiot.  And, one could see the potential of turning Bheja Fry into a franchise with Pathak as its figurehead.

However, for a part two to work, the script has to be equally good, which means either an equally good foreign film has to be plagiarised, our the writer’s bheja strained to come up with a better concept. Then Bharat Bhushan has to be put in a situation where, no matter what he does, the audience’s sympathy remains with him. The whole point of the character is lost if he remains simply annoying – to the others in the film and to the audience.

In Bheja Fry 2, the music-loving income tax Bharat Bhushan wins a reality show and gets to holiday on a cruise ship.  On it is dishonest, tax-evading businessman Ajit Talwar (Kay Kay Menon) and his buddies, as well as BB’s Income tax crony (Suresh Menon) Shekharan (Suresh Menon), in disguise. There’s also a possible romantic interest for BB in the form of TV executive Ranjini (Minissha Lamba), which is left hanging.

In trying to get rid of BB, Talwar falls overboard too, and both are washed ashore on a deserted island.  It would take considerable comic skills to go beyond the expected scenario—BB being his loud, singing, aggravating self, and Talwar looking suitably incensed.  Then they run into an eccentric photographer Raghu Burman (Amole Gupte, overacting madly), living in the wilderness, equipped, however, with electricity and telephone.  By the time he appears, the already low on humour script runs completely dry.

Vinay Pathak does the role as best as he can, but this time, the character has no shades to balance the annoyance he causes. Kay Kay Menon looks lost and Minissha Lamba does nothing of interest.