staying.cool

having experienced ‘yuvvraaj’, i firmly urge a.r.rahman to sue subhash ghai for mutilating a perfectly good soundtrack into something you cringe at when the first notes hit your ears. not just because mr. ghai has recut the songs, no.. he’s gone one better. he has remixed them. recut them. added sounds and clips from all over the place. “improved” them, i guess?

almost seems like a case of plagiarism to me.

please, mr. rahman, please. i beg you. sue subhash ghai’s sorry ass. for killing your songs. for murdering tune, tone and beauty. for ensuring that gulzar’s lyrics make even less sense than they did when we listened to them without the vision of salman and boman irani miaowing and growling at each other, while prancing around like a bad case of elves on acid. add anil kapoor doing his best hammy himesh impression while OD-ing, as well as getting a chance to acting permanently brain-dead. katrina talking. boman irani playing something that yowls and prances with a morsing. zayed khan never forgetting the 2 most important things when saving someone’s life: a gun and taking off your shirt. while shakin’ the booty with african women. and of course, a wigged-up salman who gets to pretty much.. well.. i have no words to describe what he does. i don’t want to stray and review a movie that is so far gone that, as galadriel pointed out (paraphrasing from friends), it makes you “want to put your finger through your eye into your brain and swirl it around”. or even “rip your arm off just so that you can have something to throw at it”.

indeed. i kid you not.

to sum up. mr rahman: destroy mr. ghai. ensure he cannot inflict such torture on us again. ensure he never asks you for another song again. request salman to stop acting. katrina to stop talking. boman to stop whatever it is he’s doing in place of a career. convey sympathy to the others for their being beyond redemption. riddle mr ghai with bullets, and bring him back to life just so one can have the satisfaction of watching him suffer in death. while being stampeded by bulls.

and, of course, prabhuji has the final say: “indipendunt ve liwe, yunitud we staand.. a huppi phamilee.”

the hard-hitting realist movie maker is back. it is ironic that his movie lives in a dreamworld of his own making.

this is the guy who made ‘chandni bar’. which actually leaves you gasping at the brutality of life. then came ‘page 3′. which captured the very essence of the socialites. it appeared as though a new sense of film-making would soon eclipse an industry that revels in dreams. especially dreams with srk in them.

’satta’, ‘corporate’, ‘traffic signal’ started a slippery slope, but he had set standards too high. the rot was setting in. still bearable, a sense of heart, of portrayal remained.

and now, ‘fashion’.

if nothing else, that long-winded intro would have given you a sense of what a madhur bhandarkar film has degenerated to.

there is a protagonist, who has also degenerated from being a victim, or maybe an observer (in his early films).. to a central character (in his current movies). there is a path to going up, a path to coming down. attempts at redemption. some kind of weird conclusion that shows how life goes on. some intermittent attempts at incorporating real-world events, and snarky commentary. and a few mandatory gay characters all over the place.

‘fashion’ manages to pull all the cliched set pieces from previous films, some soppy acting and production values, and deliver something that you stare at in disbelief 20 minutes into the movie. seriously, models are supposedly thin and generally are meant to exhibit some modicum of attractiveness. some of the supposedly female people cat-walking here look like men. catwalks of all sizes and arenas have bad lighting, lines running all over them. every single designer is gay. every single person talks with a thick bihari accent, yes, even those oh-so-gay designers. we have a conclusion that tries to be as filmy as it gets, in the process violating any possible thought process that you might conceive, no matter how insane or stupid you are.

but enough of general comments, we should focus on the ’sow-stoppar’ (actual pronunciation): priyanka chopra. she goes from wearing jeans and minimal make-up, to jeans and lots of make-up. and cannot catwalk anymore (didn’t she used to be a model or something?). there are attempts to justify showcase the inevitable self-destructive tendencies of models.. or, something like it. she takes to smoking intermittently in a plausible manner, i am willing to grant that. before you know it, she is permanently sozzled, stoned, and surrounded by cig butts. impressive. she bitches about stuff and people because… because? she is supposed to! she’s gone from being a good middle-class girl (albeit stupid: contracts, affairs and sex have an equally shocking effect on her about 20 minutes after they should) to a snooty hoity-toity model. her a-class performance consists of staring blankly forward, laughing, pouting, and staring blankly forward. you feel a tad touched at the (expected) breakdown, her eyes have it - the despair, the feeling, the pathos. which goes away in 30 seconds flat as she rubs her eyes repeatedly in some weird symbolic way.

kangana ranawat is having a ball in bollywood. she gets to stay drunk, stoned and behave insane in all her movies.. which look like all she has been doing for a while. she appears intermittently, when madhur-ji gets bored of his hard-hitting female character who is decaying. she is also the worst offender on that ‘accent’ thing. ’selebrayshans’ and ‘cungratulashans’ indeed. [and, as pointed out by uber-t, the series of 'busturd' expletives that she attempts to mouth, in one of the most laughable scenes in the movie. which exists for no other purpose than to further underline what an addict she is. which you are well-convinced off by then]. there are a couple of supporting characters, the names of whom i could not be bothered to remember (ha! i can be snarky too!) who try very earnestly. there are a bunch of the standard supportive characters, straight and otherwise.. which stand around talking hinglish and pouting about something or the other. when they are not being interrupted by a hideously grating techno-type soundtrack.

the question remains: why? why does warsha think this movie is halfway even close to good? why did she spend an hour arguing with me about the merits of the movie?

why? why? why?

the k’s and the a’s have it: ektaaaa kaaapooor has done it. she has reinvented the greatest epic of our time. to the greatest maahaaa epic of our time. the wikipedia admits it: the six-pack, the half body armor, the musculature have been inherited, nay, evolved from 300.

our story begins in a galaxy far, far away.. where dice is played by men. we know they are real, true men as they all flaunt six-pack flabs, and stare moodily into space while dialogues are screamed. the skies scream, whether in protest we are not informed, but they scream. a real true man acting like a half-gay hyena (shenzi, banzai or ed?) - read shakuni - cackles in glee when he lands a 2 and a 1 with some ancient looking dice. a real true man broods moodily, rather.. continues to brood, while words are screamed at him. a hand comes into focus… and our new sherkar - read duryodhan - gestures in his direction.

one listens for the ‘govinda’ chant.. but then we get ahead of ourselves.

the net is abuzz with the latest google move: google chrome. people are trying to figure out why ? what ? how ?

i type this post from chrome, and i see: a combo of ie8 and firefox3. to go. with bits of safari and opera all thrown in. even this review is just thrown together from initial impressions.

disclaimer: i firmly believe that firefox 3 is the best browser around.

back to the show.

we have speed dial. we have the ‘omnibar’. we have privacy. we have cool animations when you move tabs out of windows, for urls on pages, previews, search etc. we have download managers. we have auto-bookmarking. we have combined features from 3 different browsers which attempt to integrate together. and they do, somewhat decently.

however, i don’t like the philosophy.

‘uuuu, meee aurrr ahhummm’ warbles vishal bharadwaj, as silky white words flash up on the screen.

trying to read them is pointless, there exists a world of wisdom here that requires true genius to initiate; much less understand. as a simple example, ‘doctors bhi toh mobile patient ki stomach mein chod dete hai. lekin uske baad woh kutta unke peeche bhaagta rehta hai.’ (in reference to the iconic hutch ad). and then of course, sequences involving seduction at a time of strife, and naked walks at a time of dance.

a ton-load of reviews exist deriding the cinematic tastes of raja sen and taran adarsh: people who seem to enjoy the raping of perfectly decent hollywood-inspired ideas. granted, the source material here is classic bollywood fare - poor guy, rich girl, war, love, reunion in the rain, and a final twist that can be seen halfway into the movie. the current iteration of this idea somehow manages to take out the semblance of logic maintained in the original, the decent acting, the casting, the focus… and replace it with everything that could possibly grate on you. flashback: check. song in flashback: check. flashback in flashback: check. attempt at non-linearity: check. song nearing finale: check.

i personally believe that the movie was an attempt at a sci-fi movie, which people seem to have mistaken for romance. at some point far, far in future we have a cruise going towards mars. old man and woman meet at table, old man tries to hit on old woman by telling her a poignant story of love lost and found. then of course, we realise that the people they are talking about are real people from earth, but from 50 years previously. in an effort to never lose the love of his life, our hero constructed cyborg clones of himself and the missus who regale in the soppy tale of love everyday… forever and ever. the ship runs on the energy generated by the construct in repeating the story over and over.

indian cinema is going the next step though: we are now buying the rights to the movies we copy. at least we’re learning to be honest about it.

i need to watch one more such movie. the inspiration will overflow.

when you title a movie “shootout at lokhandwala”, and it begins with the grim spectacle of sepia-d bullets and blood, i kinda expect more than songs and melodrama. maybe i shouldn’t, but when a movie like ’satya’ can be made…

S.A.L isn’t a bad movie. it suffers from the same problem as so many hindi movies i’ve seen recently - it had the potential to be so much better. the set up is classy, amitabh grilling the cops about the shootout, and the flashback to how the ATS is set up hits you. brutally.

we are then intro-ed to maya dolas. the gangster due to whom the shootout happened. enter vivek oberoi looking like a cross between captain sparrow and his ‘company’ self. exit believability.

saif in omkara was the despicable langda tyagi. vivek in SAL is the weird looking character reminiscent of.. well.. himself. we then have his eventual right-hand man, buwa, or tusshar kapoor. and for all that he tries to look dangerous, he manages a feeble leo di caprio from titanic - not ‘the departed’. and once your primary villains look a pair of pretty boys, your movie is pretty much going down the wrong end of the tube.

now, there is a possibility they’re going to stick to the down and brutal. make it hard-hitting, even if the characters don’t really convince you. there is a possibility that the pretty boys are convincingly dangerous when need be. apparently, maya and gang danced in bars having sound-stage lighting. they sang ’shake your ass baby, we are the bhais’. they walked around in stylish jeans and sunglasses, shaking their manes just so. a tad too filmy, shall we say. a tad too much style in our still christened “pretty boys”. and did i mention unbelievable ?