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Friday, October 28, 2011

Damaddam 



Much Noise, No Dum

The ads are off-putting enough—Himesh Reshammiya making faces with accompanying text going “Boink, Poof, Wham.” Really now! Even Mr Bean would have trouble getting away with that.
Himesh Reshammiya, still hungover from the surprise success of his Aap Ka Suroor, is churning out one dud after another. In the process he is also losing out in the fans of his nasal singing and admittedly zingy compositions.  He can’t act, and he certainly does not have a flair for comedy.
In Damadamm, produced by himself and directed by Swapna Waghmare Joshi, he plays a marketing wiz at a film company. The plot is not too bad—about a man caught between a possessive, nagging girlfriend Shikha (Purbi Joshi) and a rich, classy colleague Sanjana (Sonal Sehgal).
Sameer has been in a relationship with this girlfriend-from-hell, so when she goes out of town, he celebrates by dancing in the street and getting drunk! If she is so suffocating that he sings about wanting his space and freedom, why did he put up with her for five years? (That is explained in a way later, but not convincingly.)  Anyway, next he falls for his boss’ (Rajesh Khattar) sister. Naturally when Shikha returns, she is mad.
This is the kind of thing that could happen to any ordinary guy. But Himesh is incapable of projecting distress, guilt, confusion or even happiness credibly—all he can manage is a pout. And when he is in the same frame as the accomplished Purbi Joshi, he looks even more gauche. Mercifully, the other girl is not a nasty number. What the two of them see in Sameer would be the subject of a thesis, or maybe, another romcom, better thought out than this one.
As in all Himesh Reshammiya film’s so far, the music is the saving grace, especially Umrao Jaan (even with its inane lyrics) and Madhubala. If he feels the uncontrollable urge to be on screen, he must choose a project that would suit him and his limited acting skills.

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Tell Me O Kkhuda 



Mamma Mia!
Hema Malini, an enduring screen icon, who has handled her career remarkably well, was not a director when she made Dil Aashna Hai in 1992, and is not a director now, when she makes Tell Me O Kkhuda.  No matter how level headed a woman and a star may be, there’s no telling what lengths a mother would go for her daughter.
Esha Deol, tried for a spot in Bollywood, got an easy break with parents Dharmendra and Hema Malini by her side; but pedigree get a star kid only this far. She was not an actress then (in 2002 when she made her debut) and is not an actress now. Plus, she has to face constant comparisons with her ethereally beautiful mother, and come out poorly.
Hema Malini, using the girl-looking-for-parent idea from her first film, tries to add a dash of Mamma Mia, but does not have the courage to show a Meryl Streep-like character who doesn’t know who her daughter’s father is, so the girl feels the need to find out.
In Tell Me O Kkhuda, Tanya (a best-selling writer, if you please), discovers accidentally that she was adopted (by Farouque Shaikh and Deepti Naval).  The clownish hospital clerk (Johnny Lever) tells her that her father was a Rajasthani royal (Vinod Khanna), so accompanied by her boyfriend (Arjan Bajwa) and a silly spare wheel (Chandan Roy Sanyal) sets out for the palace.  Amidst family intrigues and an atmosphere of rampant female foeticide, she wins a camel race and proves that daughters are as good as sons… but turns out she is not the one.
Next stop: Turkey, where Altaf Zardari (Rishi Kapoor) looks after his mentally disturbed wife (lovely Turkish actress Meltem Cumbal).  She helps ‘cure’ the mother, but this one’s not the right gene pool either. Over then to Goa, where gangster Tony Costello (Dharmendra) and his estranged girlfriend Susan (Hema Malini) turn out to be the real item.  Dharmendra in horrendous get up and Hema Malini as a nun are so off the mark, that the film that had built up a weak little emotional structure till then just collapses in a heap of unintended comedy.
Maybe Esha Deol has sparks of talent, but this kind of heavy duty emoting is beyond her. Maybe a comedy or an actioner (she was best in Dhoom) NOT directed by her mother could work for her. She also needs a better stylist and make-up person.

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RA.One 


Aiyyo?

There was a cartoon floating around cyberspace in which a woman leads a man looking like SRK home and tells her astonished husband, “I found him in the market. He said he’d do the household chores for a day if we promise to see his film.” Totally captured the mood.
Shah Rukh Khan’s RA.One  (Anubhav Sinha’s actually, but how many interviews of the director have appeared?) is supposedly the most expensive film ever made, and with this kind of hit ’em on the head and drag them to the moviehall marketing, it will probably recover its investment. But here was a true-blue sci-film film from Bollywood that had the opportunity to drag Hindi cinema up by its bootstraps into today… tomorrow, even.  Not only does it fail to impress beyond the usual low expectation, ‘timepass’ levels, it was pipped to the post by Endhiran/Robot.
The VFX, which money (Rs 150 crore?) can buy is excellent, but money can’t but imagination, originality, innovation, intelligence, heart or soul. And in each of these areas RA.One fails spectacularly.  For some unfathomable reason, Bollywood wants to outdo Hollywood, not realising that our strengths lie in our own stories, told in our own emotion-splattered way.  Which is not to say that nobody should attempt a whacky sci-fi thriller, but if that alone is the raison d’etre of a film, there’s something wrong right at the drawing board.
Trying to catch a kiddie audience (obviously well-off kiddies, poor ones don’t have Xboxes and gaming computers), Shah Rukh, oops, Anubhav Sinha, goes into a virtual reality world—that has to be explained by a character (Shahana Goswami) to Londoners (in Hindi).  Her colleague, a curly-haired Tamilian Shekhar Subramanian, gets grief from his bratty kid Prateek (Armaan Verma), because he is uncool (he eats noodles and curd with his fingers!) To please the boy (badly in need of a haircut), who believes that villains should be invincible, he creates a game in which the villain RA.One, a shape-shifting demon is almost indestructible, while the hero is a spiky haired, blue-eyed G.One, who could, if the player reached Level 3, find a way of beating the villain.
RA.One (Arjun Rampal) escapes from the game, kills his creator and goes after Lucifer, which is Prateek’s gaming avatar. The kid and his mother Sonia (Kareena Kapoor—looks good, acts dumb) come back to India, with G.One in tow.  G.One looks like a sleeker version of Shekhar, and some laborious comedy is attempted as the android tries to be human. All this is just padding till the climactic face off between Ra.One and G.One… and guess who wins!
For a film targeted at children, the vulgarity and profanity is inexcusable. The only truly heart-stopping sequence involves a runaway local train, which brings down CST (nobody bats an eyelid.) The science is not wow-making, practically every action sequence has been seen before in a Hollywood film; the romance is tepid, the relationship between father and son is not bitter-sweet enough.  The film is let down by its script, its over-the-top silliness and fanboy-ish tribute to other Hindi films.
As an actor, Shah Rukh Khan is not afraid of poking fun of himself, can do comedy really well if he gets a good gag, and had this film had managed to insert a real heart into its steel-and-cable body, he would have wrung out a few tears too. His star power is undiminished... he should have just let YRF and Dharma do their number with him. He isn’t made to play an oily-haired nerd, who says “dyood;” nor is he meant to play a poker-faced android. He is the eternal, ageless loverboy.


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