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Saturday, March 29, 2014

O Teri  


Dumb As Can Be

They did it again—messed with a classic.  Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron has grown into a cult comedy, and any filmmaker with half a brain should know better than to attempt to copy it.

And copy he does, this Umesh Bist, without even giving credit to the original, and because he doesn’t have the ability to tell the difference between satire and farce, he turns the gold of JBDY into O Teri dross.

A film that has a song with lyrics going You’ve Got Me Going Crazy With Your Butt Patlo, in which scantily clad dancers shake their derrieres into the camera;  a film in which one of the protagonists ogles and almost gropes his female boss gets past the censors.


Two idiot TV reporters called PP (Pulkit Samrat) and AIDS (Bilal Amrohi) are told by their boss Monsoon (Sarah Jane Dias) to get a real scoop, so they run about trying to uncover a scam, while two corrupt politicians (Anupam Kher, Vijay Raaz) try to trump each other to get a lucrative contract for their cohort. A PR lady (Mandira Bedi, obviously inspired by the real life character involved in the telecom scam) “manages the media” as a foot bridge falls and a CD with evidence goes missing.

An inspector gets killed, and like in the original, the two reporters keep finding and losing the corpse, not realising that Monsoon is in cahoots with the corrupt politicians.

Wit and pace makes way for loud slapstick and vulgarity,  plus too many needless and tuneless songs. Not one actor can match up to line-up of talent in JBDY --like Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapoor, Bhakti Barve and Satish Shah (who played the corpse).

As elections draw closer and the political arena is ripe for satire, what the audience gets is this limp rag of a movie. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is still fresh, relevant and very, very funny. Go buy a DVD.



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