Friday, January 27, 2012
Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu
Perfectly Average
In Shakun Batra’s Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, the male lead, Rahul Kapoor (Imran Khan) is surprised to discover that a girl is happy to find him “perfectly average.” She thinks she is paying him a compliment.
The term more or less describes the film and its modest romcom ambition—to appeal to urban teens, who are happy debating about the ratings to be given to the lead characters “bums”, since some screen time is expended on derrieres. Real emotions, real trauma, real love? Forget it...this is Karan Johar territory. Everybody—including those making the film—is out to have a good time. Who even demands more that Rs 200-300 worth of ‘time pass’? Get to see the bright lights and sights of Las Vegas, shot with gusto by David MacDonald, for the price of a ticket. Like the West, we also have to have Valentine’s Day attractions for the young urban multiplex audiences, who have started dating in earnest and so, need a steady supply of date movies. Produce Karan Johar is only too glad to oblige.
In Karan’s world, it is perfectly normal for a middle class Rianna Braganza (Kareena Kapoor) from Mumbai to be struggling as a hair stylist in Las Vegas. Have big budget, will blow up on foreign location.
Typically, she is the chronically happy chatterbox with a great “capacity” for booze, and, amazingly, no friends. He is the uptight, bullied-by-parents (Boman Irani-Ratna Pathak Shah), sulky architect. The meet cute is at a supermarket where he lends her change and then they both go to a “psychologist” (Batra probably means psychoanalyst) as if it’s the most natural thing to do, when you have broken up with boyfriend or been sacked.
In films, loosening up or having fun means getting drunk or stoned or both; like What Happens in Las Vegas, the two get drunk and wake up with a hangover and a marriage certificate. With predictable script contrivance, she is left homeless, moves in with him and loosens him up so much that he falls in love. All this is so close to Jab We Met, with actor and location change, it emits déjà vu. Kareena just changes her wardrobe.
Move to Mumbai, to her home populated by the extra-nutty (Hindi-speaking), noisy Goan family. Perhaps, with the usual Bollywood stereotyping of ‘open-minded’ Catholics, Riana is shown to be a Braganza, so that she can have a family that doesn’t mind her landing up with a guy; her father even asks if he’d like to stay in Riana’s room.
To cut to the point, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu is a formulaic romcom, with a slightly different end, which doesn’t exactly make it eligible for an Oscar. There are some nice touches, some funny scenes—like Rahul’s dinner blow-out towards the end, that’s all.
A film like this depends on the actors, and both deliver exactly what’s expected because they’ve done it so often before, they could act (or not act in the case of Imran Khan) in their sleep.
Can’t say EMAET disappoints; in fact it comes up to the generally low expectations of a romcom. It is just meant for keeping your eyes on the screen for the running time, and then leave behind with the empty popcorn tub.
Labels: Cinemaah
Agneepath
Those Were The Days
Somewhere in the promotional blitz, Agneepath (1990) has taken on the status of a cult classic. Whatever emotional reasons Karan Johar may have had to remake this Mukul Anand film, produced by his father Yash Johar, it wasn’t at all great, or even an original film. Mukul Anand, one of the early birds in the breed of style-over-substance directors, had taken a very routine Bollywood revenge drama and given it some Hollywood-ian touches.
Twenty-two years down the line, the plot and over-the-top narrative style still belongs to the eighties, and the gangland story has become dog-eared from its many tellings. Karan Malhotra’s “reimagining” of the old film, is a technically sound, but otherwise uneasy mix between old and new Bollywood. Old where family ties and loyalty matters; new where the hero has to take his shirt off and an item girl has to be recruited to attract first day audiences. That audiences are actually missing the heart and core of old Bollywood is proved by the reportedly huge opening of the new Agneepath (and also films like Dabangg and Singham of the same genre). Karan Johar’s budget can garnish it will all the elements needed today—extravagant set pieces, lavish song picturisations and a Voldemort –style villain in Sanjay Dutt.
Like the original, the story begins on the island of Mandwa, where a young Vijay Chauhan (Arush Bhiwandiwala) watches the evil Kancha (Dutt) frame and lynch his father (Chetan Pandit). With his mother (Zarina Wahab) he moves to Mumbai with revenge in his heart. When he allies himself with the flesh trader and drug dealer Rauf Lala (Rishi Kapoor), his mother disowns Vijay and raises her daughter Shiksha (Kanika Tiwari) alone.
Vijay starts his climb up the ladder by killing a cop and then 15 years later (played Hrithik Roshan) is still fuelled by revenge. He plots to get Lala out of the way so that he can meet Kancha on equal terms. In the interim, there is also a cursory romance with the chirpy Kalli (Priyanka Chopra, simpering away).
You are not supposed to count the illogicality or plot holes, like why the cops are always twiddling their thumbs, or why Kancha stays put in Mandwa to run it like a concentration camp, or why cop Gaitonde (Om Puri) has such a soft corner for Vijay? Because Vijay is a philanthropist too? Why does Vijay plant bombs around Kancha’s lair then go for a fist fight with the massive man? It all builds up to the inevitable clash in the climax, which takes too long to arrive, what with all the song-and-dance (too much!) Chikni Chameli (Katrina Kaif) was just not needed, but the grim film could have done with just a smidgeon of humour.
Nobody could do rage as well as Amitabh Bachchan (of all his great performances, he inexplicably got a National Award for this one!), but Hrithik Roshan does seething pain better. He keeps Agneepath afloat along with Rishi Kapoor. The actor who has played romantic heroes all his life, plays a rotten criminal with kohl-eyed menace, more scary than the cartoonish Kancha, who is bulky, tattooed and spouting faux philosophy. Rishi Kapoor walks away with every scene he is in, but to be honest, each blow he takes is hard to bear, because you can’t believe he can be lecherous and foul. Though you applaud the performance, you secretly hope he won’t be bad again.
The thing they didn’t get right then, and still don’t: A Maharashtrian would be Chavan not Chauhan and no person of Marathi origins would name a daughter Shiksha – it translates as punishment.
Labels: Cinemaah
