Guru: Good not great...

“Ban-na chahte ho hindustan ki sabse badi company?” claims the protagnist. A defeaning roar assures him that he will indeed realize that dream one day. And Guru is born.
Loosely based on Dhirubhai Ambani’s life, Guru traces a villager’s journey from being a school master’s son in Gujarat to a Shell salesman to a textile company owner to being the head of the biggest congomerate in India. A journey spread over decades beginning in an era where india had gotten its independence from the british but was still ruled by rulers, albiet of different color. In his journey to make it big, Guru uses shortcuts when facing a hurdle and in front of the ambition to grow bigger and larger, everything else takes a backseat.
Mani Ratnam is one of the finest filmmakers in India today. But his track record in Hindi cinema hasn’t been very bright. But a canvass a large as this, and an interesting story to tell, I had huge expectations from the movie. I was expecting a movie that would move me, overwhelm me and I would leave the theatre thinking about the characters who would stay with me long after the movie had ended. Sadly, the movie doesn’t work the way it should.
It begins with three back to back songs in what appears to be a haste in getting over with the songs quota for the movie. Mallika Sherawat might sizzle the screen but you want the song to get over quickly so you can go back to the story. Barso Re Megha is choreographed on a very fresh looking Aish and choreography of this song deserves mention. Among other songs, Ek lo ek muft, in an already flawed second half, is a waste of time for everyone involved. It’s a below average song and its best to go out and answer the nature's call while the song is played. Tere Bina, the best of the lot, is worth a mention since it has a better placement in the story.
I felt the characterisation of Guru could have been better. He clearly comes across as a self-motivated man but the final speech (it did not stir any emotion) when he rants about India and its populace and its advancement and stuff which never seemed to concern him prior to that speech, left me confused. Also, as a viewer I was peeved at finding that he gets away after flouting so many laws by making a shallow speech. The first half reached a cresendo at the interval point (largely due to Mithun Da’s brilliant portrayal of an idealist newspaper owner) and it opened limitless possibilities for the second half. Second half could have been about the conflict between the right and wrong, the moral and immoral. It could have been about the meteoric rise of a man who wants everything at any cost. Strangely and sadly, Mani refrains from delving into those aspects. He chooses to go for the oft-beaten middle path where the protagnist is a one dimensional heroic character, with little flashes of his cunning and brilliance. And you are left with a mediocre second half which, at best, is run-of-the-mill cinema.
Abhishek Bachchan gets it right this time (after Sarkar). It might well turn out to be the movie which will make his career defined in pre-Guru and post-Guru periods. He reminds of his father in many scenes (espeically angry ones) but I am not complaining (he he). He rocks.
Of all the characters, I loved Manikdas Gupta (MithunDa) the most. Mithun excels in this role of a newspaper baron and I loved him, absolutely adored him in this beautifully etched character. For me, he is the true hero of this enterprise. His angst and the fire within is what took the movie to a fabulous cresendo in the first half.
The scenes between Abhishek & Mithun and Abhishek & Madhawan are the best moments in the movie. Vidya Balan and Madhwan’s romantic interludes are lovely if seen in isolation but they bring a jarring halt to the otherwise interesting movie. Aishwarya is pretty good, and I can again believe that she can act. Thank God for restoring my belief in her.
I think the movie works in bits and pieces. It’s definitly good cinema, the kind one doesn’t get to see often today. But coming from the master, I had thought of a defining movie that would become a timeless classic. Sadly, it fails to cross the line where a movie no longer remains a movie, it becomes a part of our consciousness, of our lives. Mani plays safe and delivers a masala potbolier. End of the day, its just another rags-to-riches story. Guru might have made Shakti Corp. the biggest company in India, Mani fails to make Guru the brightest example of exemplary cinema.

Kabul Express: Not an express

Finally, a road movie that sticks to the road without getting into unnecessary romantic angles. A movie that ventures into a terrain hitherto unexplored by the hindi filmmakers. A movie that clearly wasn’t shot in studios and chose to capture the original scenery. And finally, a movie that has an ensemble cast comprising of two indians, an Afghan, a paki and a US national. All this and more, ultimately results in a movie, that can be best termed as a damp squid. Being a movie with so many things, apparently, going for it, Kabul Express sadly doesn’t make the grade.
In the name of storyline, Kabul Express doesn’t have much to offer but we are willing to keep that consideration aside for a moment. After all, the treatment/dialogues of a non-existant storyline made a Dil Chahta Hai a classic. So here we have 2 indian journos out in Afghanistan, on a mission to interview a Taliban. The movie is all about their travels and travails as they are led from one adventure to other by a lovable Afghan Khyber. They get captured, are held hostage by a Paki taliban, help a damsel in distress and tackle a donkey suicide bomber.
Kabir Khan, who happens to be the director of this venture, chooses to give it a light-hearted feel with brief moments of emotional turmoil his characters go through. A nice idea but poor execution results in a shallow movie about the situation in that country. The dialogues try hard to be witty and conversational but something is amiss. Arshad Warsi gets the best of the lot and John Abraham is left looking morose and clueless. Of all the actors of this enterprise, his seems to be the worst written role. The female reporter, however, is equally bad. The dialogues explaining the roles played by Pakistan and USA are half-cooked at best and sometimes tend to be very corny sort of stuff. Also, there are inconsitencies in script. When our journos capture the talib, they don’t interview him. They leave him tied and run away. Weren’t they there for an interview?
On the upside, the movie has breathtaking locales (reminds one of Ladakh) and cinematography is top-notch. Few sequences do give you the glimpse into what the movie could have been had it been a little more consistent. The Afghan actor (don’t remember his name) is very charming and it was a pleausre watching him share the screen with our stars. Arshad Warsi is getting repetitive but he is still lovable.
On the whole, its just a time-pass popcorn fare. Nothing great to write home about. For a movie with no story, the dialogues and the treatment of situations are the backbone. Kabul Express, sadly, has neither that would have raised it from being an ordinary movie to a good movie.

Apna Sapna Money Money

Why did I choose to watch Apna Sapna Money Money this weekend? Well, for two reasons: Director Sangeeth Sivan’s last outing was unapologetically lewd and funny Kya Kool Hain Hum, and Shreyas Talpade whom I have come to like immensely with his last two movies.

The outcome, however, is hardly worth the exhorbitantly priced Rs. 180 ticket. The movie takes inspirations from numerous Priyadarshan movies and borrows many characters and situations from Hera Feri, Hungama etc. and I think that is where it falters. Mr. Sivan, we already have Priyadarshan, failing repeatedly, to match his unforgettable Hera Feri in his subsequent attempts and there is no need for you to copy his style of filmmaking. And please! those everyone-chasing-everyone-else sequences have been done to death. Spare us.

Kya Kool Hain Hum ventured where hindi filmmakers seldom go and thus received thumbs up from us: the public who felt that it spoke in the language we all speak and understand. But the biggest assets were its funny situations the protagnist found themselves in. ASMM, on the other hand, has situations lifted from umpteen crime comedies witnessed on silver screen in past few months. Is there no one who can see that we have had a overdose of crime+comedy, a trend revived by Hera Feri.

ASMM sadly has no brilliantly sketched character, a la Baburao from Hera Feri. But it barely manages to create one such character in Chote Sarkar Mata Prasad, played brilliantly by Rajpal Yadav. Anupam Kher irritates and so is Jackie Shroff. Sunil Shetty hams but that’s nothing new. Ritesh Deshmukh enjoys the limelight as he is present in almost all the frames. He does well as he has always done well in comedies. It’s the Shreyas Talpade who has been wasted completely in an very boring, unimaginative role. He was delightful in Dor but what a wasted opportunity in this movie. Heroines, well, I have already forgotten who all were present, so well...

All in all, this is a movie which is intermittently funny but marred significantly by the need to have a noble reason for a bad deed. It’s a self conscious attempt which treads a beaten path not a no-holds-barred approach which in the earlier outing from this director tickled our funny bone. Watch it only if you are stuck in a mall and waiting for your friends who have just called you to say that they would be late by two hours.

Satyakam, the movie

Ganapati Puja means different things to different people. For an average commuting Mumbai-ite it only means longer commuting hours on account of the Pandals (thoughtfully put right in the middle of the road) and processions (with complete and utter disregard for other life forms on the road) for the lord. All this gives a good excuse to leave a little early in the evening (to avoid the traffic). Today being the last day of the festival, we left quite early, at about 5 pm and before the longer needle on a watch could complete half the circle, I was home.
A full evening lay in front of me. Generally I would have jumped at this opportunity to go out to some movie or even go to that Gym that I had promised myself today morning but the sound of the crackers from outside reminded me of the trouble I would land in if I were to go out. And I picked up that one movie I had been planning to watch for some time now. Satyakam is a movie I have already seen but I have always felt special for that movie hence the repeat viewing.
Satyakam is an ode to what we would today call Gandhian values. It’s a heartbreaking story of a man who is willing to fight for his ideology. A man who is so real yet so unreal for his conviction and his beliefs. A man who is ready to pay any price to stand by what he believes in. And so he declares “A truthful man not only suffers from it (truth) but he is also prepared to give such sorrow (caused by truth) to his loved ones”.
Satya, played by a surprisingly vulnerable Dharmendra, has high hopes from the dawn of an independent India. Truth is his only dharma. He is so driven by his truth and compassion that he takes little time in deciding to marry Ranjana (a delicate Sharmila Tagore) who is wronged by the society. He dreams of an India which will not be plagued by the problems of unemployment, corruption and poverty. He is looking forward to a free country where free people work towards the upliftment of the country. And is he wrong? Isn’t that what everybody was fighting for? But then why is everyone talking about “a little compromise”. How is it that everybody has to make some minor “adjustments”? Bewildered yet resolute, Satya keeps fighting his battle. He does not even know who he is fighting with; the unseen evil, the society, himself. And his battle ends only when he succumbs to an incurable disease, a disease undoubtedly caused by the evil around him. But he isn’t the one who is defeated.
Satyakam overwhelms me. Some moments stay with me long after I have watched the movie. The charming exchange between Satya and Ranjana as he gives her compliment when she prompts him is one such moment. Another one is Satya’s outburst at Naren’s (in the narrator’s small but powerful role, Sanjeev Kumar) place. That scene is a complete portfolio of Dharmendra’s acting capabilities. And a very powerful climax has always been the strength of all Hrishikesh Mukharjee movies. This movie is no exception. Watch how Satya is ready give up all he stood for by signing a paper, for his family’s sake and watch how Ranjana stands by him.
Satyakam is heartbreakingly real. Though it was released about three decades back, yet it feels its happening today.
But why was I getting irritated with Satya’s obsession with truth and his values? Was I hoping for him to make that ‘little’ adjustment for the betterment of his family, his own self. Was I thinking “what’s the big deal” when Satya said he couldn’t spend his office hours on his personal visits? I guess, I was. And this indicates a lot about what kind of society we are today. About how ends have taken precedence over means. About how callous we have all become to what is going on around us. About how irritated we are if someone decides to stand by what he believes in, for he is “inflexible”.
Do I have hope?
As the movie nears its end, Satya on his deathbed signs the paper that would provide money to his family but Ranjana tears it off. He knew she would do that. His values would not die with him. They would live on.
And I cheered for them. And I felt happy…and light.
I do have hope!

Romancing the movies # 1

I watched Guru thrice.
When I tell this to people, they usually react in two ways:

1. Guru? What’s that?
2. Guru? Why for heaven’s sake? More people have responded this way (more than you would want to believe) because, come on admit it, most of us have seen those 1980s inane masala potboilers that were being churned out at an alarming rate.

Answer to first response: You shall never understand. Well, to answer the second response: I loved Mithun da’s dance. Although nature had decided to give me two left feet but that never deterred me from secretly practicing in closed room. My red Sanyo cassette player (a mono at that) was good enough to keep me entertained (it did not suffer from any inferiority complex since it did not know that stereo sound existed).
Those were the times when we used to wait for movie cassettes to come in combo pack (and we used to buy them for Rs.15). But few movies such as Meera Ka Mohan (music: Arun Paudwal), Dil Hai Ki Maanta Nahin were given enough credit to be bought in a single cassette. And cassettes were bought based on the sampling provided by the Chitrahaar every Wednesday and Friday night. One of the favorite games used to be guessing the songs in Chitrahaar. I still remember the delight I felt when “O Priya priya” song from the movie Dil was shown in Chitrahaar. I had placed the bet and won.
Watching movie used to be an occasion. The main attraction of any birthday party used to be what followed after dinner. The latest flick, fresh from the VHS copying lab was arranged and the whole gang would forget everything else in the world. Today how many of us have the capacities (and capability) to watch Vatan Ke Rakhwale (a Mithun Da & Sridevi thriller) and Awaam (a pot bellied Rajesh Khanna) back to back? But I have done that…with countless others.
At one such moment, our family hired the VCR (those black boxes still exist today) and told the guy to play Tarzan (supposedly a kids’ movie with animals…well, animals it had, of a different kind) and by the time interval appeared on TV screen, my grandpa and papa had discreetly moved out of the room.

And once I reqested papa to buy me the audio cassette for a movie called Jungle Love. yeah yeah, its "that" kind of a movie.

To be continued…

The nadir of filmmaking

These are the movies you can watch again and again and never cease to marvel at the timelessness of the absurdity:

1. Clerk: Manoj ‘Bharat’ Kumar had his heart at right place but maybe the camera wasn’t. So you are treated with shots taken from impossible angles though my guess is that cameraman was trying to follow Mr. Kumar’s eyes (he has never looked into the camera). It’s about a clerk Bharat (Mr. Kumar with an ever increasing girth), a poverty stricken former student leader who finds himself in a position he has to save the country from the clutches from some corrupt defense officials. Drenched to the core in a self pitying attitude, this movie has attained eternal glory due to its stupendous ineptitude. This is filmmaking at an extraordinary nadir.
2. Wardaat: You are a secret service agent a la James Bond. Your code name is Gunmaster G9. How to keep this a secret? Simple. Paint your car in large, bold friendly letters “Gunmaster G9”. Obviously the dark sides would simply assume this to be a stupid act of a stupid kid. But unfortunately, the dark sides are also equally stupid. Watch how Gunmaster G9 saves the world from the grave danger of locusts’ attack. And watch it to believe me when I say a secret agent actually shoots at the locust because he needs to collect a sample. A case study in how not to make a thriller. Eminently entertaining, this movie needs to be watched for its lack of attention to details.
3. Mard: Aha. Who could have imagined gems like “Mard ko dard nahin hota”! And it had three heroes. Big B, the horse and Amrita Singh. Populated with really bizarre situations and coincidences, it really works more as a fantasy rather than the intended separation-reunion Desai trademark movie. Not much to say really, except that this movie is probably the most absurd Manmohan Desai creation. If I had not seen the credits myself, I would never believe it was directed by him (I still think it’s a conspiracy by the dark forces).