Break ke Baad: Dear John

Dear Movie, we have got to break up. Wake up Sid, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, Anjaana Anjaani, I Hate Luv Storys, Bachna Ae Haseeno… and now Break ke Baad, directed by Danish Aslam. The title of which made me laugh because we’ve essentially been watching the same movie starring Ranbir Kapoor and Imran Khan in turn, over and over and over again.

If I see one more middling movie about a likable pair of youngsters (the male confused yet ultimately correct; the female focused yet ultimately proven wrong) who stumble around in the dark before finding each other without too much fuss… well, I guess I will be well-rested because I’ll just turn over and go back to sleep. It’s not like I’ll lose my temper because that would be an actual reaction which is more than these things aim for.

[Digression 1: That’s not strictly true. The first couple of times I saw this plot, viz. Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na and Wake Up Sid as well as parts of Bachna Ae Haseeno, I was interested. With each subsequent installment, I quickly got over it.]

I’ve been wondering why this is, this utter lack of any response other than a shrug and a meh. Was it the careful result of much planning on the filmmakers’ part – did they deliver the innocuous movie they set out to make? Or was it inadvertent – an attempt to speak Gen Now gone terribly boring?

It finally struck me as I was watching Break ke Baad that (as a member of Gen 10 Minutes Past) the problem appears to be the romance. On their own, as angsty young people, all these movies feature interesting characters.

In Break ke Baad, for example, Abhay Gulati (Imran Khan) is that guy from college who kind of coasted along, uninterested in reaching for anything because he knew his (extremely unvillainous, terribly nice and supportive) father had an office all ready for him at home. And then once he got into that office, it began to pinch because he was like a balloon filled to bursting with all these half-formulated ideas and desires that had never been expressed because he hadn’t even tried to put them into words before. And yet, nothing short of a life-changing event can knock him out of his stupor and into experimenting a little with his idea of self.

Aaliya Khan (Deepika Padukone) is that girl you’re friends with because life is always so much more entertaining when she’s around to fuck things up. Your boyfriend hates her and thinks she’s a terrible influence on you, your other friends wonder what you see in her, and you shrug them off because your friendship is inexplicably based on giggly minutes spent fixing your makeup after throwing up in the restroom of a club or convincing a bartender to slip you free drinks. Everyone else got you really nice, safe, thoughtful gifts of books and knickknacks for your birthday but hers is the one you’ll always treasure – she made it herself, it serves absolutely no purpose (not even decorative because it’s fucking hideous), and is absolutely perfect to remember her by because you know and she knows that once these brief, few years are over, you’ll probably never meet her again although you’ll never forget her.

The difference between these two characters is that when they get to the big screen, Abhay is still sympathetic enough to be portrayed as he is while Aaliya turns into this monstrous vampire that feeds off the emotional energy of other people. In other words, you’ll see those exact scenes in Abhay’s portions of the movie, while the Aaliya I described above is crammed into a few scenes of pottery in a sunny courtyard and drunken revelry in inappropriate places. Even so, there’s a sense of drama lurking under the surface in her interactions with her mother, her frequent references to her adulterous absentee father, her determination to hack her own path and give no quarter.

[Digression 2: Aslam joins his long line of fellow debutant directors in making a movie in which the parent-child relationship comes off as much more genuine and heartfelt. A trend that first came to my attention in Wake Up Sid.]

Drama. Which brings us back to my big problem with movies like Break ke Baad – these are the most comatose romances I’ve ever seen in my life. I appreciate that they’re trying to set a tone that isn’t as hysterical as your classic Bollywood romance can be, with cruel parents and promises to die with sweeping background music. But as much as things have changed, falling in love is same old hysterical business, I’m afraid. Lovers are still fighting over trifles, irritating and boring their friends in turn by assuring them that none of them know the true meaning of love, bursting into storms of tears and accusations and other sappy stuff.

Compare that to movies like Anjaana Anjaani, which turned even the concept of suicide for love’s sake into a drawn out yawn. I know a real life version of that story and it is so much more entertaining. Meanwhile, people in these movies are so articulate, so soft-spoken, so polite I imagine their sex life consists of strenuous cuddling. In Break ke Baad, when Aaliya flips out at Abhay in the midst of the most uneventful beach rave Australia has ever hosted, the best she can do is grit out that she’s on a break in a half-raised growl before throwing the phone on the soft sand of the beach. I mean, she doesn’t even destroy her phone! What kind of tantrum is that for a capricious, self-obsessed creative? And yet, not a single character in the movie misses an opportunity to inform us that Aaliya is indeed all those things.

[Digression 3: Apart from Dev D, which is really a beast of a different sort, and perhaps a bit of Jaane Tu… how come all these cool, hip young folk go to the most boring parties where nothing ever happens? No brawls, no skeevy middle-aged men scoping out the latest batch of teenage girls, no catfight in the restroom, no puddles of vomit in random corners, no idiot adolescent tripping out for the first time and nearly killing him/herself, no cops who’ve totally been paid off, no sleazy waiters who know all the shady gossip about all the patrons, no drug peddling kingpins recruiting fresh customers… Aaliya would have found much better parties in her hometown of Delhi instead of going all the way to Australia to play with a surfboard.]

I sat there, one part of my brain watching Break ke Baad while the other ran through all the lovelife drama I’ve witnessed over the past year alone and no contest – every one of my friends had a more eventful, drama-filled story to tell. And this includes the ones that aren’t even in a relationship! Hmmm. Maybe I need new friends! 😛

Having said all that, if there are young kids out there who’re watching these movies and coming away with the lesson that it pays to treat each other with respect (which, to give these movies their due, is a statement they eventually deliver) in a relationship, I couldn’t be happier. I’d rather watch a million versions of Break Ke Baad than a single Kambakkht Ishq.

 

Listen!

Just a note to remind you all that Masala Zindabad is now up and running. We take no prisoners in this week’s podcast about Current Actresses – what’s wrong with them and how do we fix it?

Keep the red sweater but teach them some table manners, probably.

If there are topics you’d like to see covered, drop us a note. We probably won’t use them but it’ll be nice to know how far off base we are. 😛

 

On Guzaarish

Everything that’s wrong with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie-making is evident in the opening scene of Guzaarish: Sophia (a deliciously zaftig Aishwarya with heavily painted face, wearing some Victorian granny’s trousseau) carefully wakes and takes care of quadriplegic Ethan (Hrithik, in the one avatar left out in Kites: Jesus on the cross). It’s a great scene – or it would have been if we didn’t have Dominique Cerejo singing Smile in the background, reminding us that sadness lurks just beneath the artfully bleached surface.

Everything that’s right with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie-making can be seen in the song Udi by Sunidhi Chauhan: the normally contained Sophia takes Ethan out on the town to celebrate a rare outing and throws off her inhibitions to do it. Ethan is a man who likes to make jokes about all the sex he isn’t getting (among all the other things he can’t do any more) and needle Sophia in the process if he can; Sophia is a woman who keeps tight control of her feelings, quicker to scold than coddle. They’re surrounded by people as she taps along to the rhythm, strums an air guitar, and occasionally breaks into dazzlingly graceful steps – he never takes his eyes off her for a second and she meets them at the end of her uncharacteristic performance, making it absolutely clear that it was all for him.

It’s a searingly intimate moment for these two people. Sophia who knows every inch and working detail of his body, and Ethan who will never see more of her than what she allows him. Some movies can’t evoke that sense of amour even by making the actors take their clothes off.

And that to me is Guzaarish‘s big problem: it’s half a great movie. Because it’s made by that most tragic of beings, half a great film maker.

Personally speaking, here was a subject that pushed my buttons. It’s partly because euthanasia is a topic close to my heart for a number of reasons, not least of which is family history. But also because it addresses my greatest fear: a loss of control.

There is a scene in which Ethan proves a point to the cartoonishly unsympathetic prosecutor (Rajat Kapoor) by locking him up in a box. “I couldn’t move at all!” says the indignant lawyer, gulping in deep breaths. Well, sure. But the bigger issue was that for those terrifying 60 seconds, he was absolutely powerless.

The most vile crimes in our world are when man forcibly exerts control over his fellow man. Torture, rape, murder, home invasions, kidnappings… to find yourself at the mercy of a fellow human being, to have your agency stripped away from you, is grotesque. Ethan, of course, is not victimized by those around him – but the results of their good intentions are the same. And his life is a series of confrontations where he is forced to accept his helplessness. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a nightmare.

A less sentimental filmmaker would have let Ethan’s tragedies speak for themselves: his empty threats that turn to pleading, his fantasies of feeling the surf rush through his elegant feet, the dreams in which he soars on beams of light, the easiness with which people grant or withhold his desires, the way he’s repeatedly urged to remember what his life means to others as though that’s the reason for his existence.

These are not experiences that need particular emphasis or gilding. You’d have to be an unimaginative, insensitive moron if you can sit through a scene in which a doctor (Suhel Seth) threatens to declare his perfectly rational quadriplegic patient mentally unsound if he explores all his legal options and fail to be enraged with an overwhelming sense of WTF.

But storytelling, in all its forms, requires a certain amount of manipulation. You need to take your audience with you. Bhansali, ironically for a man who made a paean to the right to make your own decisions, is hell-bent on dragging you by the arm to a foregone conclusion.

He manages to sneak in a couple of renditions of What a Wonderful World – one by Marianne D’Cruz for a picture-perfect Nafisa Ali and one by Hrithik himself – and underscores Ethan’s utter helplessness with the help of a leaky roof and (a hilariously out-of-place) Makrand Deshpande among other things. He even throws in a languidly morose ex-girlfriend (Monikangana Dutt) who apparently lives in a mausoleum sans furniture and repentant nemesis (Ash Chandler). Worst of all is his protege Omar (Aditya Roy Kapur, lately of Action Replayy), an imbecile wrapped in a hideous pink bow – I kept hoping Sophia would take a knife to him some dark and stormy night but she never did, alas.

More mystifyingly, after making a huge hue and cry about how absolutely everybody is against his decision, the movie is at great pains to show public opinion careening on to Ethan’s side, complete with banners and slogans. “Good luck, Ethan!” smiles a reporter on TV as the judge prepares to deliver his verdict. I mean, I’m sure he appreciated it, but… you know? A little tact, lady.

When Guzaarish fires, though, it’s the hands-down weepie of the year.  “I can’t live without you,” a battered Sophia tells a sulky Ethan. It’s one of those things people say when they fall in love. And then she offers him a way out, because when you love somebody so much that you can’t live without them, you do things for them you would never dream of doing for anyone else.

PS: Because I simply couldn’t resist – here is Robert Downey Jr. (who played the lead in Chaplin) singing Smile.

What? I’m not crying. I have allergies, okay!

 

Action Replayy: Q & A

Q. What is Action Replay?
A. British for “instant replay”; mostly used in the context of sports.

Q. No, no, the movie starring Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai.
A. Oh, you mean Action Replayy.

Q. Yes, excuse me: Action Replayy. Does that extra Y mean something?
A. They can’t spell?

Q. You’re going to be difficult about this, aren’t you? I can tell already.
A. Sorry. Action Replayy is a movie directed by Vipul Amrutlal Shah (Namastey London, London Dreams) about Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapur), a commitment-phobe, who hops a ride back in time to fix his parents’ non-existent love story so they don’t end up unhappily married years later.

Q. And this takes place in London?
A. No, Mumbai.

Q. Oh. Well, that sounds sweet.
A. Eh.

Q. Come on! The kid wants to save his parents’ marriage!
A. Right after he said he doesn’t believe in the institution and wished that his parents had never got together. Not that I blame him. If you had two miserable people like Kishen (Akshay Kumar) and Mala (Aishwarya Rai) as the shining example of the institution in front of you, you wouldn’t be all that eager either.

Q. Why do they hate each other?
A. She’s a bitch and he’s a loser.

Q. O.o
A. Fine. She wanted him to pay attention to her but he was too busy with his work, so she tried to fill in the emptiness by buying things. A lot of things. About 9 crore plus change worth of things that must be extremely dodgy going by one example he carries around in the car with him. As for him, he thinks she’s always hated him and never wanted to marry him, might even have been in love with another man, except they were forced into marriage by their parents.

Q. That’s terrible.
A. Right. But! Conveniently for Bunty, his girlfriend’s grandfather Anthony Gonsalves (Randhir Kapoor) just built a time machine in their drawing room –

Q. Excuse me?
A. Built a time machine in his drawing room. At least, I think it’s his drawing room. I’m pretty sure I noticed a table lamp. Don’t worry, though, it’s not important – it’s one of those science-y things that you note in the “Oh Yeah, And This Happened. Continuity!” column. So he hijacks the thing and runs off into the sky with it and lands in Bombay 30 years ago. Where he finds out the awful truth about his parents.

Q. Which is?
A. She’s a bitch and he’s a loser.

Q. o.O
A. It’s true! She’s the terror of the neighborhood because she has no father and she’s trying to be the man of the house while he’s the neighborhood punching bag because he has no mother and he’s trying to be the woman of the house.

Q. Is this funny?
A. Occasionally? It’s the monstrous love child of that other movie made by illiterates, Singh is Kinng, and one of the director’s earlier efforts, Waqt: The Race Against Time, except this one is more of a movie rather than a collection of comedy skits and doesn’t have extended death scenes surrounded by plush toys. It must have helped to have Back to the Future as their Plot Guide for Dummiez. Also, they swapped in The Original Salman Girlfriend instead of The Girlfriend Doll, so she comes equipped with extra features like Be Convincingly Mean and Dance in a Variety of Styles. Thus Mala is both in spades: truly unpleasant and very hot. And there are weird scenes in which Bunty, the son, encourages his future father to think of his future mother as a potential hate-fuck.

Q. Sounds like an interesting movie.
A. It has its moments and most of them are unintentional.

Q. But you’re not offended by it.
A. I suspect I would have been if it wasn’t a variation on a very well worn theme: For True Happiness in the Indian Home, A Woman Needs to Know Her Place and A Man is the Only One Who Can Show It to Her. I mean, Mala+Kishen v.1.0 might have been textbook examples right out of Psychology 101 but there was a sense of real drama there, which just got reduced to Bollywood Characterization 101 via time travel. At a certain point, you just shrug and move on.

Q. Blah blah blah. Does it bring the pretty?
A. Sure. Well, Aishwarya does. The way she does.

Q. Sold!
A. I thought so.

 

Rakht Charitra: Suckered Again

Here’s a sentence I type less and less often as the years go by: I was truly excited to watch Ram Gopal Varma’s new movie. A fictional account of the blood-soaked real life of Andhra Pradesh politician Paritala Ravi, Rakht Charitra sounded interesting and right up RGV’s alley. Gore, politics, revenge, it had to be a knock out of the RGV park.

Well, I don’t know which angel RGV decided to piss off by taking a dump in its bed, but Rakht Charitra is terrible. Not in a lights come on and you look over at your date and immediately apologize for picking this movie of all the tens available kind of way, but in a shoulders slumped in defeat as you slowly huddle into your miserable seat and sadly shake your head way.

Rakht Charitra is an orgy of all the hacky bits of filmmaking that have become the RGV hallmark of late, from mysterious/dizzying camera angles to boomingly obvious background scores to attention-destroying close ups of every other actor’s nostrils… now with the added benefit of the worst narrator ever employed by a movie. Bar none. His one direction seems to have been: “Pretend every word you speak is a breech baby to which you’re giving birth.”

And what words they are! After introducing us to the town of Anandpur, the kind of skeevy, dusty, violence-strewn place that we’ve now come to expect of our rural interiors at the cinema, our narrator helpfully informs us in his over-enunciated, weirdly accented manner that blood is the accepted way to settle things here – especially when it’s a matter of ego, women or privilege. And therefore, he continues, the history of Anandpur is a history of blood. A rakht charitra in fact! So clever.

Apparently RGV only expected idiots to come watch his movie (and yes, I feel like one now, thanks for asking!) because this distressing pattern doesn’t end after the introduction. Instead, the narrator regularly puts in an appearance to thunderously explain a scene, after which you see the scene take place.

• “The snake is coming out of his lair!” – the villain is about to leave his house.
• “She didn’t know this then but he had set out on a long journey.” – and our hero hops on a scooter and rushes off to his faraway, troubled homeland.
• “His ego was hurt by X event so he asked his assistant who was behind this deed.” – three guesses what happens next.

The sad part about all of this, the reason I’m so viciously disappointed, is because there’s actually a good movie hidden somewhere in the middle of this mess, performed by actors who’re pretty good at their jobs.

I feel especially bad for Vivek Oberoi, a man on the Ben Affleck road to redemption, who turns in a what I suspect was a fine performance if only I could penetrate that cacophony of tricks RGV unloads on top of it. There was his (unintentionally) hilarious entry scene, for instance, wherein he exudes menace, riding a Bajaj scooter and opening the unoffending gate of a suburban house in a nice neighborhood so he can ask for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage. The one standout scene, before it succumbed to the everpresent trowel-full of obvious ham, comes late into the film when he stands before the pawn he’s just utilized to his best advantage, standing bathed in the golden glow of the sun, a well-barbered young man in shining white, all the better to appeal to public opinion.

I try really hard to go with the movie presented in front of me, rather than the movie I think ought to exist in its place, but every so often I come across one that is the equivalent of an old friend who greets me by slapping a dead fish in my face. It gets rather difficult to look past the fish to the friend standing beyond. I honestly feel RGV is a man with a lot of interesting, creative ideas who, in the wise words of Tim Gunn, doesn’t know how to edit. So he just sticks everything in there.

Anysmellydeadfish, the movie begins with an easily manipulated politician called Narasimha Reddy whose righteous friendship with his lower caste protege Veer Bhadra lasts all of two watered-down Scotches after it is given the evil eye by a painfully obvious manipulator called Nagamani Reddy (Kota Srinivasa Rao). The fallout results in a simmering caste war that promises to play out at the local elections, threatening to unseat the Reddys from their power base. Nagamani, with Narasimha’s blessing, then takes his grudge just that teensy envelope-pushing bit too far and assassinates Veer Bhadra.

His mantle of idealism thus falls on elder son Shankar (Sushant Singh), who carries it with grief, pride and a healthy dose of guerrilla warfare. This obviously gets him murdered in short order as well, leaving just Pratap (Vivek Oberoi) to carry out the family mission: kill all those who wronged their family and, time and energy permitting, society as a whole.

Unfortunately, once Narasimha and Nagamani have been despatched, with a modicum of elan I might add, Pratap finds his troubles aren’t over. Now Pratap is a wanted terrorist and Nagamani has left behind his infamous son Bukka (Abhimanyu Singh), who “changed the definition of vile” the ever-knowledgeable narrator informs us over a montage of said Bukka being suitably changing the definition of vile. Sigh.

Happily for Pratap, Bukka is an equal opportunity son-of-a-bitch and has succeeded in pissing off Shivaji Rao (Shatrughan Sinha), a carpet-bagging movie star turned politician, whom he hilariously scares away from Anandpur with a few well placed bombs. Outraged that he, the man who regularly beat up entire armies single-handedly on the big screen, was forced to turn tail and run offscreen, Shivaji wants to know: “How can a demon like Bukka exist in a democracy?”

“What do you mean how?” asks his befuddled assistant. “He exists therefore he is.”

I chuckled far more heartily than this little sally deserved but at a certain point, you take your joy where you can get it.

Thus, Shivaji and Pratap join forces – Pratap’s no dummy after all, and he’s powerfully attracted to Shivaji, the most Machiavellian figure he’s ever met, and his amazing ideas like keeping Pratap out of jail by turning him into a politician so he can murder all he wants while staying above the law. Oh, Nagamani, if only you and your pitiful tumblers of Scotch were alive to watch and learn, abashed, the art of skillful manipulation from a man who prefers to stroke the heads of gold tigers than rapey sons.

As the problem of Bukka is solved, with more helpful exposition from the narrator, Pratap sets about his business, cleaning town and taking names. In between all this is an honest cop (Ashwini Kalsekar) who shows up to remind you that honesty never pays, especially in an RGV movie; and various wives, widows, sisters, hookers, pillion-riders, billboard models and girlfriends, all of them sad, desperate and sinned against, except for Nandini (Radhika Apte). Pratap’s college sweetheart turned wife, she is the sort of fool who calmly listens to her beloved telling her he’s indeed a much-discussed murderer who plans to murder again and decides that’s just what she’s looking for in the father of her children. Off she goes to walk silently by his side in the forest and give meaningful looks in the background. She’ll get hers, I guess.

In the sequel! Wherein Pratap will be presented with his butcher’s bill. But apart from the little “scenes from our next movie” they tacked on to the end of this one, I have no idea what that will look like because here’s a sentence I will never use again: I am truly excited to watch Ram Gopal Varma’s new movie.

 

If Only the Movie & I Were Anjaana Anjaani

I was going to write a review of Anjaana Anjaani, but I got bored. Here’s a handy ad that makes the same point – shorter, cheaper and 100% more delicious!

 

Southern Comfort

There are people out there who need to medicate their obsessive selves. And then there are folks who manage to exert a bit of control over their compulsions – I choose to channel it into tight spirals of in-depth immersion to burn the subject down to manageable levels. Whenever this happens to me, which is more often than it ought, I describe it as having fallen into a wormhole and I hope to come out the other side.

My wormhole for the past week or so has been Mahesh Babu. It’s sort of mystifying – I saw Pokiri a while back and I was perfectly fine putting it out of my mind. Then I saw Athadu on Cinema Chaat’s recommendation and it was hello-madness-my-old-friend time again.

However, while the rules of the wormhole dictate that I must ceaselessly hunt down and devour every last bit of everything connected to the central subject, it does not demand I lobotomize myself in the process. In the present case of Mahesh Babu, for instance, I was perfectly able to understand that the man has oodles of that mysterious-yet-all-important It factor that marks a charismatic star, while recognizing that half the stuff I was watching (particularly the early movies although the fairly-recent, pseudo-scifi, pedotastic-by-inference, all around weird fantasy Naani co-starring Ameesha Patel was pretty terrible too) was almost irredeemably bad.

There’s Takkari Donga, for instance: apparently an homage to father Krishna’s groundbreaking portrayal of a cowboy in Telugu cinema, it stars Mahesh as a Wild West robber full of derring do who intentionally courts unnecessary trouble, hoping his notoriety would lead him to his father’s murder. In the process, he’s stalked by a skimpily-clad (at one point, completely unclad) Bipasha Basu and carts around a half-naked (at one point, completely naked… you get the picture) Lisa Ray who keeps trying to get his pants off so she can check if he’s The One she’s supposed to marry. There’s also a mine right out of an Indiana Jones movie where diamonds grow like crystals inside stalagmites and an adorable little puppy whom he heroically saves from certain death – I mean, I can’t recommend this movie enough except for the times when I’m strongly warning you against it.

So I was really happy to see Sainikudu. All your questions answered here:

Q. What is Sainikudu?
A. A Telugu movie starring Mahesh Babu. Duh.

Q. Okay, smarty pants. What’s it about?
A. In flood-ravaged Andhra Pradesh, government corruption is destroying the lives of the poor. So a group of university students, led by Siddhartha (Mahesh Babu) decide to do something about it.

Q. Oh dear. That kind of stuff never works out, does it?
A. For reals. They get framed as terrorists by evil villain Pappu Yadav (Irrfan Khan) and his brother-in-law Mondi Naani (Prakash Raj) when they try to field a student as a candidate against him in the upcoming elections.

Q. That’s a very not-nice thing to do.
A. It is a properly villainous thing to do! Especially when Pappu wins the election and ends up as the Home Minister.

Q. Set a thief to catch a thief, so to speak!
A. Right! Except he doesn’t want to catch any, he just wants to fix it so he doesn’t get caught! The students say nix to that and kidnap Pappu’s bride Varalakshmi (Trisha Krishnan) under his nose on their wedding day and hold her hostage in exchange for Pappu completing his election promises.

Q. How does that work out?
A. For Siddhartha? Probably better if Varalakshmi hadn’t been the bride. For the viewer? Fabulously! The way it does when the heroine isn’t just your random naive village belle – but a deeply romantic, naive village belle, convinced (rather understandably, if she watches Telugu blockbusters where such threats fly around like confetti) the world is full of rapists, and hilariously overconfident about her fighting-capabilities. I was prepared to find her completely annoying, but she was absolutely charming – even Siddhartha thought so and she was either trying to get him killed, lecturing him about her purity, or questioning his manhood.

Q. Good stuff!
A. You bet. And a lot of it depends on Mahesh’s ability to just be silent. There aren’t a lot of actors who can resist the impulse to “do something” (at the 7.00 mark) when the camera is on them, but he can. You could argue that it’s a lack of ability, but having seen his earlier movies, I think it’s a sign of evolution. He also goes a little darker in this movie, doing stuff that is distinctly un-hero-like (albeit in a dream), has what appears to be a drinking problem, and thinks nothing of using dead children as party table centerpieces. Very affecting! But then, I like my action stars strong, angry and silent, which is probably why I don’t much care for it when he starts singing and dancing.

Q. You didn’t like the music of Sainikudu?
A. This was actually an exception – I liked the soundtrack. In fact, I was thinking about it when reading Beth’s CurrySmugglers interview: it’s unusual for me to really love film music in a language I don’t understand because lyrics matter a great deal to me, but either Harris Jayraj’s score was really that good or else the subtitles managed to work well enough for me to like it. Probably a combination of the two.

Q. The subtitles were good?
A. Well, I’m sure I missed a great deal of the wordplay and stuff – in fact, I’m pretty sure I did because there were certain segues that were distinctly odd – but going by various comments around the net, I’m better off that way because the original seems to have really pissed people off.

Q. Why is that?
A. I dunno. Maybe they didn’t like the political bits? They seemed pretty dire in a recycled way. Or maybe there wasn’t enough of it? Who knows! Personally, I thought it flirted with the borderline where I was just able to restrain my fast-forward finger.

Q. But you still had a good time watching it?
A. A bowl of Maggi noodles (original Masala please – none of this “new and improved”, “healthy” jiggery pokery), a bottle of wine and this movie? Totally my Sunday.

Q. That’s disgusting.
A. Sez you. Viva la revolucion!

 

Dabangg for the Buck

10 minutes into Dabangg, written and directed by Abhinav Kashyap who previously wrote the dialogue for Manorama Six Feet Under, and you realize why Hindi has all but ceded this kind of territory to Telugu and Tamil cinema: it requires a very specific kind of movie star to work.

First, you need a Star. Somebody with a rabid fan base and the kind of charisma that can’t be manufactured, no matter how many years you spent assisting famous directors or learning to dance from master choreographers or who you call Pop.

Next, he must willing to embrace a dhishum-dhishum flick entirely unironically. He’s not trying to re-interpret, deconstruct or elevate it. He’s simply and methodically bashing in the heads of random people who get in his way in a manner that makes you feel like he’s doing it for you as a personal favor.

And the cherry on top is that he must do all of this with enough style to sell it. “It” being whatever it is he’s peddling. Explosions, murder in broad daylight, defenestration, stealing, drinking, hookers, you name it. You want to be him, your wife wants to do him – at no point do you think, “Who’s he kidding?” or “What a psycho!” even if it’s true. That kind of ruins the movie.

Even in South India where they like to keep in practice, this is a tall order. You might think your average gorilla in shades could pull it off, but watch Salman Khan prove you wrong. The man is absolutely in his element as he joyfully smashes up a small town, blows shit up, creatively murders various people, courts a girl by threatening to beat currency upon her… and still effectively convey the idea that at heart he’s just a sad little boy who wants someone to love him. Awww.

I can’t think of a single other actor in Hindi today who could have pulled this off. Salman’s Chulbul Pandey is a beast held barely leashed by a crisp white shirt, and his offscreen persona only feeds into the animal magnetism onscreen. Movies like these channel the fantasy of the exotic pet – the heady rush at the thought of taming such a potentially lethal creature through nothing more than love. But for it to work, you need a believably dangerous persona to fuel the character – and there’s nobody more enigmatic or unpredictable in today’s carefully manicured Bollywood than Salman Khan.

Is it “good” cinema? Well, it’s entertaining cinema. A more cohesive follow-up to Wanted, the only thing it aspires to is a good time and that it delivers with glee. Into every life a little popcorn must fall and Dabangg a.k.a. The Adventures of Chulbul “Robin Hood” Pandey is exactly that. What is it about, who goes where and why – it’s about watching Salman Khan beat the ever-lovin’ hell out of everything in sight, animate and inanimate. No false advertising here: it’s everything the trailer promised and then some.

Somewhere in this Salman-fest you’ll also find producer Arbaaz Khan perfectly cast as the dimwitted half-brother, the delectably Amazon-esque Sonakshi Sinha as the unexpectedly grim love interest who squares off with Khan the few times she’s allowed on screen, and Sonu Sood putting all the Villainy 101 lessons he learned down South to good use. Additionally, there’s a short but honorable list of character actors to give able support: Dimple Kapadia, Vinod Khanna, Mahesh Manjrekar, Om Puri, Tinnu Anand, Anupam Kher, Mahie Gill and Malaika Arora in an item number when she ought to have been off eating a sandwich.

With hardly any gore in spite of the hailstorm of violence that surrounds Chulbul Pandey, just a hint of sex, and a tragic mother who fails to make you weep even as her sainted memory turns her son into The Incredible Bulk, Dabangg is just what I needed this weekend.

 

When We Are Family No Longer

“Do you remember So-and-So?” my mother asked. “Auntie Such-and-such’s daughter?”
“No,” I said. I never did.
“We went to her wedding,” Ma reminded me.
In all my life, I’ve never wanted to attend the wedding of anybody. Consequently, I do my best to forget all about them as soon as decently possible. “Nope.”
So, of course, Ma proceeds to give me all the details. It took place at that venue, I wore that dress, I argued against it this long, and this funny thing happened when we got there.
“Oh yeah, I remember,” I say at last, just so she’d stop. “What about it?”
“Well, she got divorced.”
I thought about it. “Wait, didn’t this take place last week or something?”
“Three months,” she sighed. “She apparently doesn’t want to relocate.”
“She didn’t know she’d have to move before they got married?” I asked.
“That’s what I said!” Ma said, pleased to hear me display proper feeling for once.
“Is that long enough for her to keep the wedding gifts?” I asked. A girl’s gotta know these things, just in case.

At one point in our lives as young things, it appeared that the average life expectancy of a marriage amongst people of our generation was roughly one year. I do not speak of celebrities with their Las Vegas prank weddings or whatever – I’m talking about people as ordinary as you and I.

Cousins married their long-term partners and were divorced within months; friends had carefully arranged marriages that collapsed before the first anniversary. It was a freaking epidemic and for a while there in the mid-Noughties, this was all that concerned uncles and aunties could talk about: Why Can’t Our Children Stay Married? Things got so bad, my best friend’s grandmother felt compelled to take her aside and inform her that not all marriages were like these. Some actually did survive and hers might well be one of these, so she shouldn’t get turned off the whole idea, OK?

To this day, I feel like congratulating people my age who got married in their early 20s and are still making it work. The point being, divorce is no longer an exotic experience for a great many Indians, especially of the urban variety. There are a number of people out there who’re starting out on their second (or more) marriages, some of them with kids.

Now back in the day, at least as far as I’ve observed in my own family, when a couple got divorced despite the intense social stigma attached to the condition in that era, it generally did not point towards an amicable separation. You really had to loathe the other person to your very core and have a family who hated them right along with you before you could even think about dissolving your marriage.

And once you took that step, in nine cases out of ten, the mother might as well have been widowed because the father just disappeared. I know men who haven’t had any contact with their kids in thirty or forty years even though the children live in the same city as them, move in the same circles and pretty much live down the street. Wife gone, kids went with her.

Not that it was any better when the father won custody. Because then, the mother disappeared instead and was replaced within a matter of minutes by a stepmother who was then expected to carry the full responsibility of someone else’s kids.

Somewhere in the middle of all this are the kids, stuck in a limbo where they’re expected to play along to this game of parental musical chairs and keep any objections they might have to themselves or their psychiatrists if they have such a huge problem with it. Imagine growing up watching your parents battle it out, until one day your father just disappears, a new one shows up, you get a new surname, and presto! this is your new reality and nobody wants to talk about your old one, except this is India and everybody knows about it and you know they’re talking about it all the time behind your back.

It is bizarre. And awful. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt by imagining that they simply didn’t have an approved template of behavior for situations like these back then but…

These days, however, things are a lot better. The people I know who’ve separated despite having children are definitely making an effort to remain involved in their kids’ lives. I still hear about absent fathers and mothers who’ve been supplanted by grandmothers / stepmothers, but unlike the older cases, this is uncommon in my immediate circle at least. Baby steps.

Produced by Karan Johar, Siddharth Malhotra’s We Are Family, a remake of the Susan Sarandon-Ed Harris-Julia Roberts starrer Stepmom, is rooted in this new reality with decidedly mixed results.

Maya (Kajol) and Aman (Arjun Rampal) have been divorced for three years and have settled into an amicable relationship in which Maya does all the parenting while Aman plays support during weekends and special occasions. On his days off from being a dad, Aman has a sexy romance going with Shreya (Kareena Kapoor), a klutzy career woman who doesn’t know much about kids.

You understand early on that while Aman loves his children – Aliya (Aachal Munjal), Ankush (Nominath Ginsberg) and Anjali (Diya Sonecha) – they are not his priority; and the reason he can get away with that is because Maya’s life centers around them. His recognition of her superior parenting skills comes off as  relief that there is a real adult in charge of the unpleasant things. It’s a dynamic that works for them but is thrown into instant confusion the moment a third person shows up to share responsibility.

“I don’t want to be your mother,” Shreya says. “You already have a mother.” It’s the extremely correct thing to say, of course, but the fact is when the kids are at their father’s for the weekend, their father’s partner will be an authority figure in their mother’s absence.

And despite her best intentions, this is the reality that bites at Maya after she invites Shreya into their home with the idea of training her as her replacement. Maya has already had to accept that she is officially her husband’s ex; now she has to stand by and watch as her kids leave her behind and move into the future with the same woman who’s taken her position in Aman’s life. Even supermoms aren’t that saintly. Maybe especially supermoms.

Kareena, as the somewhat reluctant other woman, is pretty darn good, particularly when Shreya is calling out Maya and Aman on their respective blind spots. She stands up to the Kajol juggernaut and comes out unscathed, which is more than you can say for poor, delicious Arjun Rampal.

Rampal, yummy as ever, mystifyingly chooses to underplay his role by cutting his expressions in half, leaving him with just one: tortured. Maybe it’s because he knew the women were kicking his ass all over the place. Aman furtively slinks about the place, hoping nobody would set him chores, and even leaves it to Maya to inform the kids about her illness. Of course, the one time he has something pertinent to say, he chooses the absolute worst moment. Aman is just That Guy and, as far as that goes, Rampal nails it.

Kajol, obviously, walks away with the movie. She is, by turns, perfect as the Mama Bear, the jealous ex-wife, the bitchy housemate, and the shattered cancer patient. She even cuts into the ham in the hospital scenes.

And unlike the rest of the cast, she only annoyed me a little bit at the end when the interminable Okay-Let’s-Hurry-Up-And-Wait-To-Die segment began, festooned with large helpings of cheese. Which, I realize, is the reason why I disliked Stepmom as well, even if Susan Sarandon didn’t get to float about in a starry sky.

Should have listened to Aliya when she said she didn’t want to do it, movie. Smart cookie that one.

 

Peeping Through My Fingers at Peepli Live

Written and directed by Anusha Rizvi, Aamir Khan Productions’ Peepli Live is about as funny as a heart attack.

Farmer Natha (Omkar Das) is the very picture of the word gormless. He’s bullied by his elder brother, the marginally more cunning Budhia (Raghubir Yadav) before whom he regresses into a state of infantile uncertainty; pegged as a twerp by his mother (Farrukh Jaffar) whose selfish refusal to die when she gets sick in her old age leads the brothers deeper into poverty and debt; and harassed by his wife Dhaniya (Shalini Vatsa) whose native shrewishness is only exacerbated by a pretty good recognition of her husband’s lackluster character.

It is easy to laugh at Natha’s stoic bovinity as he shuffles along behind his brother, trying to make sense of his life. If his hapless form makes an easy target for his wife’s taunts, his mother’s deprecations and his brother’s manipulation, it is no less convenient a target for the blows of the pissed-off local politician’s goons, a young reporter’s ambitions or our own derision. But it’s not quite so funny when you realize that those dazed eyes that peer out underneath that tangle of dirty hair and facial scruff no longer dream of anything but escape.

One particular day, when death is all anybody can talk about, a few careless words from an uncaring overlord, an equally carefully engineered conversation with his brother and a momentary impulse to do something, sets him on the path to what could be the ultimate escape: death.

A chance meeting with Rakesh (Nowaz), a young man who also wishes to do something – and suddenly Natha is an unlikely national headline in an election year. Everybody wants to know if he’s going to kill himself for the compensation money or not; if yes, then when; if not, then how come. Even as his unhappy family is imprisoned in their home, the area around his miserable hut turns into a fairground as the media, politicians and the locals turn his possible suicide into a thriving mini-economy where everything but reality has value.

Like any other movie, Peepli Live works best when it forgets that it has Important Things to say and show. The climax in particular with the big boom that kills real journalism was unworthy of a movie that gave us an exquisite scene in which the Agriculture Secretary daintily drinks the finest Darjeeling tea while passing the buck on poor farmers killing themselves on his watch or the hilarious scene in which Natha receives a “Lal Bahadur” and is sternly informed that he can no longer kill himself because the long dead Prime Minister has come to his rescue… even if his largesse has absolutely no bearing on Natha’s problems.

The news bits are particularly plastic. Cable news in India is so incredibly fevered, trivial, kiss ass, shrill and just terrible overall that a partially deaf blind man could see it – as the actors self-consciously attempt to parody something that is already a parody of real news, the cardboard scene collapses flat on its face. And rightly so.

The one standout of the whole news section is the vainglorious Deepak, star reporter for a Hindi channel and an unparalleled master of bull (and other species’) shit, played by Vishal Sharma with an earnest egotism that is instantly memorable. The political bits, meanwhile, are mostly ho-hum even if Naseeruddin Shah periodically makes an appearance to spray silky venom and a bureaucrat takes you on a brief yet entertaining tour of red tape in our republic.

In stark contrast are the scenes of the village. Perhaps somebody who has actually lived in a rural area might have a different opinion, but to this city brat Peepli Live came alive in the dying fields of Peepli.

“What is the answer to farmers committing suicide?” asks the shiny reporter.
“Industrialization!” replies the Agricultural Minister.

Peepli Live is funny but I’ll laugh the day I can eat a steel curry with iron rice.