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Saturday, September 19, 2015

Katti Batti 

Woeful Romance



Madhav and Payal live together, play ‘let’s marry’ games which they film on home video. Why don’t they get married? Just.  Because they think living in is some major achievement.

Just goes to show how out of touch with the times Nikhil Advani is, though his Katti Batti tries so hard to be cool, cute and youthful. Madhav aka Maddy (Imran Khan) and Payal (Kangana Ranaut) meet in college where he is studying architecture and she god-knows-what.  Maddy’s all knowing sister (Mithila Palkar) says that Payal is wrong for him because she has more friends than him on Facebook and has travelled much more than him.  Her family situation is also vague—absentee, astonishingly indifferent parents, who remain offscreen.

Payal has the kind of look that is meant to suggest that she is freespirited, which means she is nutty and has a pet tortoise called Milkha. Maddy is an out-and-out wimp who gets dumped by Payal and then carries around that tortoise in a heart-shaped box, and also drinks phenyl to commit suicide!

When his constant whining fails—and he has friends who have nothing to do but sort his romantic mess—he stalks her friends and tries to stop her wedding to another guy. In this misguided adventure he has help from some random Delhi strangers who call themselves Fosla, which stands for Frustrated One Sided Lovers Association.


The film that goes back and forth in trying to tell the trite and tired Maddy-Payal love story, is meaningless, derivative (right from Love Story, to 500 Days of Summer, to The Fault In Our Stars) and boring. The lead pair and their army of idler friends are annoying. It doesn’t help that there is no spark between Imran Khan and Kangana Ranaut; that he has been playing basically the same character over and over, so that he should have perfected it by now. And if she is going to be dumped with Tanu-like Quirky with a capital Q characters henceforth, then her newfound superstardom is not going to last too long.

Hollywood does the quite romcom well, Bollywood is struggling to catch up, so much so that English lines are translated literally into Hindi.  Who says woh aage badh chuki hai,  for she has moved on?














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