Kambakht Ishq: Kambakht everything...

There are many cinematic ‘firsts’ that Kambakht Ishq manages to achieve:
1. Last many decades have seen Sylvester Stallone saving the world, US and Afghanistan. Now, finally, see him save a damsel in distress from some goons who, mysteriously, find the lead girl, despite her chronic anemia, worthy of the trouble.
2. Sylvester Stallone also gets to do a Sunny Paaji in the pre-climax. He gets to uproot a lamp-post (a la the legendary handpump-ukhado scene from maha-legendary Gadar) and beat the goons to pulp…it’s a classic east-meets-west moment.
3. Sylvester Stallone finally says something comprehensible (his utterly unforgettable and incomprehensible outburst in Rambo First Blood is still haunting my subconscious)… and it’s Hindi that comes to his rescue.
4. A typical verbal exchange between our hero and heroine borrows from a very realistic vocabulary such as stuck-up bitch, dog, sick bastard, asshole etc. When it comes to progressive and modern cinema, this is right up there.
5. Hindi mainstream cinema gets its first rectal search. Clearly, if it’s funny enough for our director, we must laugh our heads off.
6. It’s a liberating experience to see a stunt man making so much money and leading a lifestyle of a rock star. They must be paid really well in Hollywood. There is hope in this world…er…in America.
7. And finally, it’s not really a first. After Neal ‘n’ Nikki, Censor board has done it again (and hence proved that they are not biased towards YRF). U/A certificate to a movie which decidedly pursues the higher goal of sex awareness among our juveniles and adolescents. When Simrita (that, my friends, is our heroine’s name) tells her sister “Men want only one thing from women” and points towards that area below the abdomen, our little ones would have asked “Momma, what do men want? What is she talking about?”. Great stuff, this. It also surpasses the great cinematic moment in Billu (no-more-Barber) when Om Puri offers to display the eighth wonder and points to his own reproductive organ (ah, evaded that uncomfortable word).
The young boy (with twinkle in his youthful eyes) shrieked with joy when opening credits started rolling. Reason: there were shots from one of those Hollywood award functions. This guy was enjoying watching them all and excitedly naming them. So we (me and my colleague) joined him. Tom Cruise appeared. We shouted “Sylvester Stallone”. He gently, smugly corrected us “Tom Cruise”.
And we realized that this wasn’t a movie meant to work for us.
And since we have walked out long before the end credits could roll, I can assure you reasonably well, it didn’t work for me. To begin with, it’s a crass movie…which in itself is not a bad thing. But the problem is that it tries to be too many things. First half is full of bad-ass language (which gets repetitive after a point) and gross, dirty sex jokes (with not enough wit) and the second half is half-cooked mushy romance. The clash between the two protagonists does not have enough sparks. Akshay Kumar looks tired and is suffering from a perpetual bad hair day (literally). He does manage to bring some liveliness to the proceedings. But he is starting to look old, especially in front of Kareena. Kareena, to her credit, revives her irritating “Poo” act from K3G and is pain in the ass right from the word go. Amrita Arora exposes sufficiently but fails to look hot. Thankfully there is very little of Javed Jaffery’s irrelevant, unfunny character. I remember some songs too but I will not comment on them since I forced myself to think about eradicating poverty during those sublime moments.
I haven’t found the key to eradicate poverty, but I can save you some of your hard earned money in these days of recession. However, if you have made up your charitable mind to donate that money to already rich Mr. Nadiadwala, don’t take your kids along. Or be prepared to squirm in your seat when they ask you “What did that black Aunty do to Akshay while searching for the drugs that he is unable to walk properly”.

Tashan: Or how I survived the movie and lived to tell the tale

The fact that I am writing this is testimony to the fact that movies can’t kill. But they can come very close to crushing your desire to live. Tashan did exactly that. The only reason I refrain from calling it the worst movie of our times is because I haven’t seen Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, which well-wishers assure me (with a haunted look), is in a class of its own.
I don’t have the courage to go through the storyline because none exists. What does exist is some convoluted reason for two guys to fight over some moolah and a starved bebo, sorry, babe. Add an excuse of a ‘Bhai’ who is behind all this, and you have it. And who do we get for this Bhaiya don? Our very own tapori Anil Kapoor who graduates to play a don who can’t speak English but speak in English he must. One: He is not Sanjay Dutt. Two: Only his dialogue writer could understand his dialogues. They should have given sub-titles for his dialogues or should have supplied babel fish with each ticket…nice mythical creatues, these fish… But then that would have meant giving a thought about the audience, which is, as the circumstantial evidence points out, unlikely!
Saif Ali Khan, after a string of successful movies, goes back to his pre-DCH days and plays the second fiddle to our cool-dude superstar Akshay. It’s a role worse than what he has already done in Tu Chor Main Sipahi movies. Akshay is the only saving grace. Aint he always :o). He comes in from UP, idolizing the BhaiyyaJi, plays the role of a recovery agent to recover the money from Bebo, only to discover his long lost lady love. Amidst all this, he also runs through millions of bullets unscathed, does spiderman-ish stunts and must have killed the villain by the time credits rolled. I wouldn’t know, for I must have fallen asleep.
There were times when I wondered why people populating the screen were doing what they were indeed doing. Truth be told, I also know that movie making is not always about logic. However, it is when your hands unconsciously grab your head, in a weak moment of exasperation; you know that you are onto something special. It happened with me twice in the movie.
To cut the non-existent story short: STAY AWAY for this Tashan. Instead try to decipher what your doctor wrote last time you visited her, read your company’s quality manuals or study the mutual fund offer document carefully. That’s far more fulfilling.

New York. Really?

NEW YORK
(*ing: Neil Nitin Mukesh, John Abraham, Katrina Kaif, Irrfan Khan and a bunch of smirking, scowling firang extras)
DISCLAIMER: If you haven’t seen the movie and determined to watch it, then please don’t go any further because I don’t want to deprive the film industry of your hard earned money. Also, I may give away whatever little twist this movie has to offer.
I am desperately trying to like the movie. It’s been more than two and a half months since a half-decent movie got released (well, there was one delightful ‘99’). But my best efforts to get involved in the movie, to feel for the protagonists are in vain. In summary, I find ‘New York’ to be a superficial, shallow movie.
At the outset, the story has been set in post-9/11 New York but as I settled down in my rattling seat (in a post-apocalypse single screen in Surat), I realized that I had seen this story elsewhere. At a superficial level the movie is indeed about the way Muslims have been treated in the USA post 9/11 but at a more basic level the movie is just about a mole being planted in a criminal organization. Now, where have we seen that? Vikram Bhatt’s Footpath, Hansal Mehta’s Chhal and numerous other equally forgettable movies. Kabir Khan believes that by merely setting the story in the post-9/11 scenario, he would be able to make a profound statement on the society.
New York does not engage me emotionally. And the three lead non-actors are NOT the only reasons. For a topical movie to work, dialogues have to be top grade. Here, the dialogues are cringe-worthy. There are justifications abound for everyone’s non-American accent in the movie. I could have overlooked it but in one scene it’s almost like the director is apologizing for Irrfan Khan’s hinterland-desi accent (Irrfan, incidentally turns an indifferent, bored performance). Movie also suffers from a jarring background score. The composer seems to be giving the score for a MTV music video. Script also does not answer many obvious questions any sane mind would raise. Abbas Mastan’s Race seems to be more logical in comparison. Katrina Kaif goes around cheerfully, knowing fully well that her husband is planning a terror attack…and HOPING that he will give up his wrong ways. FBI, fully aware about the plot being hatched, waits for ‘something’. Nobody knows what they were waiting for. Well, on my part I was waiting for the end credits.
Kabir Khan disappoints big time. His last outing, Kabul Express, was at least a road movie, if nothing else. That movie also failed to make any profound statement on Afghanistan, yet it entertained. And it was original. This time around Kabir chooses to lift two sequences from two brilliant movies. John’s introduction scene is lifted frame by frame from Chariots of Fire (the race in the college building) and later he lifts the tense cop-fondling-the-black-lady scene from Crash. The latter scene has no bearing on the main story but it looked like Kabir Khan was impressed by the possibilities that one scene offered and chose to shoot it. It must have been retained because this is probably the only poignant scene even if it is a straight lift. It kills me to see that even these new-age directors are not above cheap plagiarism.
In nutshell, I guess Kabir Khan has taken his nascent reputation of ‘issue-based’ filmmaker too seriously (he seems to be going the Madhur Bhandarkar way) and trying too hard to live up to this image. It will do him good if he takes it easy next time and spare any such serious issue. For YRF, all I can say is that it is embarrassing to admit that our most prestigious production house is behind a movie which turns the whole issue into an unintentional joke.
Skip it.