Film Impressions

REVIEW: Ekk Deewana Tha (2)

ALL NUTS?

It’s just the second month of 2012, and Ekk Deewana Tha already seems like the worst film of the year. An outdated plot, old-style narration and actors so bad, they ought to be arrested for causing trauma.
 
Gautham Menon is a successful director in the South, and Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa, the Tamil original is said to be a big hit. Either something vital got missed out in the remake, or it’s just an inexplicable North-South difference in movie tastes. The Hindi version is long, painful and utterly boring. 

REVIEW: Ekk Deewana Tha

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Ekk Deewana Tha is a baffling love story about clueless young adults in a tearing hurry to fall for the first cute and pretty who walks their way. One has never understood this 'love at first sight' phenomenon so many films nonchalantly employ. But what happens after the meeting of eyes? What do these couples talk about? What do they like about each other beyond their good looks? What is their understanding of relationships and life? What does commitment mean to them? You could watch dozens of these films and still get no answers.

Moreover, EDT suffers from a peculiar '80s hangover of the Southern remake variety. Think Ek Duuje Ke Liye, only much, much worse. When was the last time you had young couples on screen torn apart by differences of religion in a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai and sticking on in the situation for no apparent reason? But then the young lady can't really make up her mind about this boy who pursues her relentlessly in the first place. If this were to be the central conflict of the film -- the girl's inability to understand the boy's obsession with her and to shake him off -- and if the part was performed by a better actress, it might actually have been an interesting film.

REVIEW: Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2)

LOST IN LAS VEGAS

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.

 

REVIEW: Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu

A FEEL-GOOD VALENTINE'S OFFERING

"You are perfectly average," Rihana Breganza (Kareena Kapoor) tells Rahul Kapoor (Imran Khan), her newfound friend in Las Vegas. So is Shakun Batra's debut film Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, another flaky feature from the Karan Johar stable, easy on the nerves and brain alike. At least the lead pair have good chemistry -- Kapoor even manages to get Khan to loosen up, which is no mean feat given his poor track record in the acting department. He seems to have added a few more expressions since Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, which is a relief, since he's unlikely to shine in anything beyond rom-coms in the near future (and no, what he displayed in Delhi Belly wasn't acting prowess, just good make-up).

REVIEW: Golaberij

GRAVE INUSTICE TO A GREAT MAN'S MEMORY

Back in the '80s when there was no alternative to Doordarshan and television was a much nicer place than it is today, there ran a series called Nivadak Pu.La. in which Maharashtra's favourite author, P L Deshpande, would stand before a live audience and read his famous essays and character sketches. This was stand-up comedy before its time; Pu.La. spoke at breakneck speed smoothly switching between characters and voices, the laughter track wasn't inserted in the edit and it was half an hour well spent, once every week. But you could also read Pu.La's portraits in books or listen to audio recordings -- Chitale Master, Sakharam Gatne, Peston kaka and Antu Barva are timeless figures in our collective imagination.

Putting them out on screen was bound to be a dicey proposition, and even more so, trying to weave them into a biopic of the celebrated, multi-faceted writer, composer, actor -- a personality too firmly etched in the hearts of audiences to accept anything but the best. Sadly, Kshitij Zarapkar's Golaberij fails miserably not just in evoking memories of his most loved caricatures, but also in giving us a sense of the man and his life.  

REVIEW: Agneepath (2)

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.

REVIEW: The Descendants (2)

MOONEY CLOONEY

Keeping his sexiest man alive image in mind, it’s hard to imagine George Clooney playing an ordinary man.  That he does it with admirable grace and lack of show-off histrionics, explains all those best actor nominations and wins.

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (based based on Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel) is also a family drama of the kind that is not made too often in Hollywood, which probably also explains the high level praise that it has got from critics in the West. It must be a relief to just see normal people on screen for a change, not people flying around doing heroic things.

REVIEW: Agneepath

THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN LIVES ON

This reviewer must be among the few to have missed Amitabh Bachchan's National Award-winning performance in Mukul Anand's Agneepath two decades ago. They called it iconic, but it was difficult to watch a childhood idol looking haggard, kohl-eyed desperate, camouflaging his naturally imposing voice with a rasp to portray Vijay Dinanath Chauhan, the school master's son who becomes a dreaded don and avenges his father's death. Karan Malhotra's homage to it then, is a new film altogether with no comparison to make. Yet, it bears the stamp of archetype more than any other in recent cinema as it picks up salient aspects of the 'angry young man' persona and mythical tropes to fashion a familiar tale in a glossy package.

REVIEW: Chaalis Chauraasi (2)

FOUR TO TANGLE

Chaalis Chauraasi is the kind of the film that gets made because a film has to be made. Finance has been organised, enough to sign up good actors, not stars. There is an idea—maybe even a script—that looks good on paper. Comedy usually goes down well with audiences. At least three of the four lead actors have enough fans between them to ensure that shows don’t get cancelled on day one, because nobody bought a ticket.

REVIEW: Chaalis Chauraasi

TAKE A BREAK SIR!

Who'd have thought a day would come when serious actors of the highest calibre would be seen doing the slow-mo walk in crisp police attire stylishly putting one foot before the next, evoking a chuckle of approval? A motif straight out of a hardcore commercial film becomes a rare rousing moment in a confused comic caper, barely rescued by the sheer weight of the talent on display. There isn't a better bunch of actors in contemporary Hindi cinema than seen in Hriday Shetty's Chaalis Chauraasi. So much the worse, because Shetty and his script writers can do no justice to the ammunition at hand.

One hadn't much hope to begin with, given that Shetty (whose brother Rohit is now a famous if patchy director of potboilers chiefly starring Ajay Devgan) once got Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia together in a film with a delectable premise and predictably lacklustre treatment called Pyaar Mein Twist. There too, it was up to the star chemistry to elevate the drama above its inherent mediocrity.