Heroes is a jingoistic attempt at a military recruitment campaign. A fatuous, blustering, simple minded melodramatic mess that could be called a Top Gun ripoff were it not so insufferably sentimental and unintentionally hilarious.
It also features one of the most awesomely tasteless fight scenes ever filmed, in which a paraplegic man takes offence at another man pawing his wife while dancing with her and proceeds to decimate the man and his gaggle of no good friends. From a prone position on the floor he smashes, gurns, mugs and CGIs his way through the mob, occasionally pumping his fist straight through the floor tiles for good measure. He swings men around by their ankles and throws them into corners of the room! It is fist-gnawlingly bad. This scene is acted out by Sunny Deol, the fatter of the two Deol brothers, who also wears a sculpted hairstyle like he just stepped out of a salon. In 1952. After asking for 'a Mulligan and O'Hare, please'.
Later in the film, while chasing after two -- possibly imaginary -- fighter aircraft in his wheelchair on a rugged mountain road, he stops, momentarily beaten, and shaking his fist in the air he curses the immortal curse, "Damn these legs!"
God only knows how Preity Zinta ended up in the film, although her effortless professionalism is the only thing stopping anyone walking out after half an hour. She cooks! She drives a tractor! She's 'the man of the house'! Her sympathetic Punjabi war widow is a moment of calm and clarity in a loud and ignorant film.
A pretence is made of a plot: two film students deliver letters from dead servicemen to their families and learn the value of working for their country. The film goes on to repeat ad nauseum the vacuous statement meant to drive the youth into recruitment centres all over the country, "I'm just doing my job. Looking after the country." The fact that the majority of the Indian army are paid above average wages as stark consolation for spending the best years of their lives sitting in freezing cold mountainside Nissen huts is more likely to drive kids to sign up than the amorphous notion of "defending the nation". In India, a country so broad and diverse there exists little shared concept of a integral country anyway.
The bitter reality is alluded to in the final scene, years later when the pair of film school dropouts have grown up. Having failed, twice, to pass the army entrance exams (although this, surely, must be stretching credibility somewhat) the two go on instead, in a finale meant to inspire admiration, to open a school! That's right, having failed to convince the authorities that they have the necessary courage, bravado and intelligence to sit on a crate halfway up the Himalayas counting the visiting tourists in and out of Sikkim, the boys resort instead to molding and shaping the young minds of the future. A truly scary thought.
Whoever made this dross should be ashamed of themselves.
Thursday, 30 October 2008
Monday, 15 September 2008
Nehru Centre in London Celebrates 60 Years of Indian Cinema
The Nehru Centre, the cultural arm of the Indian High Commisison in London, continues it's celebration of six decades of Indian cinema with a showing of Kaagaz Ke Phool on Wednesday 17th September.
The season is screening in association with the Satyajit Ray Foundation. It started on Wednesday 10th September when actor Anupam Kher, star of almost 300 films including Bend It Like Beckham, introduced Andaz, the 1949 classic starring three of the greatest actors from Hindi cinema - Nargis, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor.
Kaagaz Ke Phool was directed by Guru Dutt, and stars Waheeda Rehman, and Dutt. The screening starts at 6.45pm.
Monday, 1 September 2008
Channel 4 Announce Bollywood Season For Autumn 2008
Channel 4 have announced the details of their latest Bollywood season.
Yuva - 11th September
Guru - 14th September
This year the TV broadcaster has split the season into five sections:
- Abhishek Bachchan Season
- Anupam Kher Season
- Bombay On Film Season
- Sharmila Tagore Season
- Gautam Ghose Season
The provisional schedule dates are as follows but are subject to change - check for updates on Channel 4's website. Movies will be shown on Thursday and Sunday nights.
Abhishek Bachchan Season
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna - 7th SeptemberYuva - 11th September
Guru - 14th September
Anupam Kher Season
Khosla Ka Ghosla - 18th September
Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara - 21st September
Saaransh - 25th September
Bombay on Film Season
Seven Islands - 28th September
Black Friday - 2nd October
Life in the Metro - 5th October
Sharmila Tagore Season
Devi - 9th October
Nayak - 12th October
Company Ltd - 16th October
Days and Nights in the Forest - 19th October
Gautam Ghose Season
Paar - 23rd October
Abar Aranye - 26th October
Yatra - 30th October
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Blogging Bollywood: Bachna Ae Haseeno Review
Phew, is it getting warm in here, or is it just me?Bachna Ae Haseeno is wall to wall women. Not wearing many clothes. It's not just my temperature rising, either - so is Ranbir Kapoor's. And the women, as we have established, are already incredibly hot.
The film opens with the title track, a crackly, retro song pinched from a classic old movie, Jum Kisise Kum Naheen. The lead actors, Minissha Lamba, Bipasha Basu, Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor, pull some moves in a gaudy, cramped nightclub.
We then see a brief scene with the sun setting on our antihero as he stands on an Italian beach, which establishes Ranbir's mixed emotions of melancholy and devious acomplishment.
Then the film proper. Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) is a on holiday in Switzerland with his nerdy friends. We know they are nerdy because one is fat and wears specs, another has a homemade wolly jumper and another gawps and blinks at everything Raj says. They thought Switzerland would be full of babes, but find it instead full of cows. Meanwhile Mahi (Minissha Lamba) and her girlfriends are travelling through Europe by rail. Mahi is lost in a fantasy inspired by the classic romantic Bollywood movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in which Kajol travels through Europe by rail and finds love with Shah Rukh Khan. Here the film gets enticingly self-referential. Mahi expects to find love just like Kajol did, and several events echo those from the earlier film - she misses the train and finds herself stranded, Raj comes back to rescue her and drive them both to Zurich to rejoin the train, and, yes, something special happens between them inbetween. Mahi is even reading the same novel that Kajol reads in DDLJ (Exodus by Leon Uris).
Mahi is played marvellously by Minissha Lamba, who is an intriguing mixture of Preity Zinta, Kareena Kapoor and Teri Hatcher. She manages to be kooky but not annoying, cute but not insipid. They eat chocolates, they sing and dance, but be thankful they don't dress up in milkmaid gear and saunter through a verdant valley. Raj spends all his money on a scooter to get them to Zurich - evidently his budget isn't as impresive as SRK's. Eventually, marking the film out as daring and progressive, they kiss.
In Zurich Mahi is handed back to her parents, where upon she relates the emotional happenings of the last 24 hours to her gasping friends. Raj also discusses events with his friends, inevitably inflating the sex quotient somewhat. But, Mahi appears in the background while he is narrating his highly charged exploits, and tearfully watches him outraging her modesty. Nice guy, huh?
Our antihero moves to Mumbai some time later. Here in his flat he is disturbed by the banging and thumping coming from next door. It's none other than aspiring actress Radhika, played by the outrageously, spectacularly shapely sex bomb Bipasha Basu. Soon they're doing some banging and thumping of their own, as they move in together. Things are going well between the live-in lovers, until one day Raj's employers, Microsoft, transfer him to Sydney, Australia. RK is all too happy to drop everything and go out there but how to break the news to Radhika? Raj's juvenile friend, all dyed hair and flat screens, advises telling her about his witch of a mother. Too late, Radhika and mum have already bonded over the phone. Next he tells her he's got problems down below, "because of the cycle", and can't have children. No problem, she says, their love will overcome any obstacle. Finally he has a tawdry batchelor party and flounces around in tiger print pants wearing a mask. Radhika comes home in the middle of the party, and is about to tearfully move out, when Raj succumbs and tells her he loves her. He doesn't, of course, and he leaves it until the morning of their wedding to hop on a plane to Sydney and leave Radhika crying in the monsoon rain, her henna running down her arms.In Sydney Raj and his friend lead lives of childish fantasy, with cars parked in their bedrooms and bottles of spirits lined up in the lounge. The biggest decision they mus make involves which nightclub to go to after work. Then Raj meets Gayatri (the delicious Deepika Padukone) who is, unfeasibly, driving a taxi. She's feisty and independent of mind, see? Even so, when Raj invites her to a product launch his friend can't help but resurrect the old bigotries from home. "But she's a taxi driver!" he sneers. Padukone is every inch the model, striking exquisite poses everywhere she goes. Tall and photogenic, she is a fantastic clotheshorse as well as a spiky screen presence.
They holiday in Italy, spending several minutes in Venice as the camera pans around St Mark's Square, before hotfooting it to Alberobello much further south in Puglia. A hopelessly romantic place with stone trulli dotting the landscape, the pair pull calendar poses on the beach, in the sea and in the tiny alleys around the town. Kapoor provides as much eye candy as Padukone, here, letting the Italian sun shine down on his bronzed stomach as his shirt flutters around him.
Somewhere in Italy, surrounded by thousands of candles and a fountain, Raj proposes, only to be rebuffed by the feisty, independently minded (remember?) Padukone. She doesn't need to be tied down, she says, she can support herself, do things her way.
Raj is heartbroken, and on a whim decides to fly around world apologising to all the women he has ever hurt. He finds Mahi in Amritsar, married. Her husband kindly explains to him that she has been subconciously obsessed with him since those fateful days in Switzerland. Thoughtfully, he only punches him once to knock him out. Following some business with her sister's wedding, he manages to eventually, and not a little presumptuously, tell Mahi to put out more for her fella. Credulity is stretched at this point. Not only are we expected to suspend disbelief to the point where we will accept Raj legging it on a plane to avoid getting married to atomic sex explosion Bipasha Basu, but that a married man will also accept an ex-boyfriend turning up to lecture his wife about her bedroom habits.
In Mumbai he find Radhika is a big movie star, the arrogant kind who sacks PAs for providing the wrong kind of mineral water. Basu misses a chance here to really ham it up, and one suspects this is how she really is in real life, so deadpan does she play it. The action switches to Italy, where in a psychological game Raj becomes Radhika's butler. She works him into the ground, in an attempt to both humiliate him and let him earn her forgiveness. He brings her drinks, picks up her papers, fetches her dry cleaning. Bips fits right in in the bling, label loving island of Capri. Bronzed, husky, busty and just the right side of brassy, she a gloriously over the top diva. Finally she caves and forgives him, but not before emotionally calling him "the worst kind of human being".
Arriving back in Syndey Raj finds his apartment door is wedged shut with the amount of love letters Gayatri has posted through it. He catches a taxi, and who else in the world is driving it but Miss Padukone. Do they get back together? What do you think.
A terrifically light and funny movie, Bachna Ae Haseeno was a real hit with the crowd in my cinema. Boosted by a trio of awesome, scorching hot female talent and the echoes of matinee idolatry that Kapoor brings to the screen, it's a great, flab free romcom. The soundtrack is tight and funky, with a recurring brass theme from the title track giving the whole a retro, Riviera feel.
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Blogging Bollywood: Kismat Konnection review
Kismat Konnection (also Kismet Konnection) (IMDb / Wikipedia )
Kismat Konnection (named spelled all krazy to satisfy the fortune tellers of Bollywood - more on the mysterious practice of numerology and how it relates to box office success) is a typically lightweight and inoffensive bit of fluff, the kind that Bollywood churns out every week. While not unenjoyable, you won't be pining to spend time with the soppy lovers of the story any more than necessary.
Raj (Shahid Kapoor) was an extremely promising student, and is now an underachieving architect in Toronto. He is also chronically unlucky. His bad luck manifests itself often, ranging from a broken alarm clock to the death of a proposed business partner. Despite this he manages to get his foot in the door of a building firm, and the chance to submit a tender to build a shopping mall. Unfortunately for Raj his erstwhile school classmate Dev also works at the firm. Dev is slick haired, flamboyantly goateed and pure, mischievous evil, hell bent on ruining Raj's chances at getting the contract. Wow, what happened back at school, boys? Did Dev get his head flushed down the toilet (that would account for the hairstyle)?
So in the usual fragilely constructed conflict, the whole deal rests on Raj's being able to perform a spectacular and impossible pool shot for his potential boss. Why? Because he is an architect and, as he says,
Well, Priya seems like a real bitch to start with, as she storms across the bar and whacks Raj's pool cue with the intention of screwing his shot up. But she's unaware of her magical effect on him, and so pulls of the amazing shot with aplomb. Champagne, contracts and pats on the back ensue, as Priya strides out unaware. There follows strangely homoerohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftic scenes of Raj and his mate sawing wood and measuring things (I thought they were architects, not labourers? Shouldn't they be behind a desk with a set square?), flexing their tank topped muscles at each other.
Eventually Raj finds Priya again and know we get to the crux of the story. And it's a very old chestnut - a community centre sits exactly where the tycoon's shopping mall is due to go. Priya volunteers there, and the mad old men and women feel like her family to her. They appear to consist of five patients from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and rather than ensconce them in a public library somewhere so they can stink it up instead, Priya is set on saving their centre for them.
Raj is stuck in a quandary - he needs to build the mall, but he needs Priya near him so he stays lucky - so he comes up with a plan doomed to fail on every single level. He tells Priya he'll save the community centre. He tells the tycoon he'll build his mall. He's a liar.
Shortly after this he discovers that Priya is going to get married and move away to Australia, taking his luck with her. Terror struck, he is desperate to find a way to keep her in Toronto. Conveniently he discovers her irritable husband in a clinch with the blonde bombshell from the office. Threats are made, and coincidences planned, changes of heart occur. Priya spends time sitting by river, next to what appears to be an industrial waste outlet. There's a weird doddery old man who sits opposite her and waves. That's right, nothing goes without being heavily signposted, people.
The film climaxes in a melodramatic boardroom scene where Raj reveals his chosen design - one that features both the shopping mall AND the community centre - in a grandstanding display of altruism. Arise film archetype number 1, Heartless Businessman.
The pairing of Kapoor and Balan is pleasant but insubstantial, and I expected much more of them. Balan's smouldering debut in period piece Parineeta highlighted her strengths, and perhaps she is miscast somewhat here as the bubbly, feisty Priya. Kapoor improves a little on his fey character from Jab We Met, but he needs to loosen up a lttle. He looks constipated. The chemistry grows as the film moves on, but never sparkles.
In between the film is full of the dull new corporate language of modern India - people talk about projects, contracts, boards of directors and deals. Raj is supposed to be desperate for work, yet lives in a glossy apartment with flat screen TV and decor out of an IKEA catalogue. Toronto looks grubby, and all the action takes place in an underpopulated, hermetically sealed world. It feels flat and lifeless, and really needed an injection of energy from the songs that wasn't forthcoming. And only 3 songs!
Kismat Konnection (named spelled all krazy to satisfy the fortune tellers of Bollywood - more on the mysterious practice of numerology and how it relates to box office success) is a typically lightweight and inoffensive bit of fluff, the kind that Bollywood churns out every week. While not unenjoyable, you won't be pining to spend time with the soppy lovers of the story any more than necessary.
Raj (Shahid Kapoor) was an extremely promising student, and is now an underachieving architect in Toronto. He is also chronically unlucky. His bad luck manifests itself often, ranging from a broken alarm clock to the death of a proposed business partner. Despite this he manages to get his foot in the door of a building firm, and the chance to submit a tender to build a shopping mall. Unfortunately for Raj his erstwhile school classmate Dev also works at the firm. Dev is slick haired, flamboyantly goateed and pure, mischievous evil, hell bent on ruining Raj's chances at getting the contract. Wow, what happened back at school, boys? Did Dev get his head flushed down the toilet (that would account for the hairstyle)?
So in the usual fragilely constructed conflict, the whole deal rests on Raj's being able to perform a spectacular and impossible pool shot for his potential boss. Why? Because he is an architect and, as he says,
"I know angles!"Enter Priya (Vidya Balan) who, it turns out, is Raj's antithesis - a lucky charm. And more importantly, HIS lucky charm. We know this because in a confused dream Raj went to a bonkers fortune teller unfortunately underplayed by Juhi Chawla - there was much room for improvement in this freewheeling character) - and she told him so. Whenever Priya's around Raj's bad luck turns good.
Well, Priya seems like a real bitch to start with, as she storms across the bar and whacks Raj's pool cue with the intention of screwing his shot up. But she's unaware of her magical effect on him, and so pulls of the amazing shot with aplomb. Champagne, contracts and pats on the back ensue, as Priya strides out unaware. There follows strangely homoerohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giftic scenes of Raj and his mate sawing wood and measuring things (I thought they were architects, not labourers? Shouldn't they be behind a desk with a set square?), flexing their tank topped muscles at each other.
Eventually Raj finds Priya again and know we get to the crux of the story. And it's a very old chestnut - a community centre sits exactly where the tycoon's shopping mall is due to go. Priya volunteers there, and the mad old men and women feel like her family to her. They appear to consist of five patients from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and rather than ensconce them in a public library somewhere so they can stink it up instead, Priya is set on saving their centre for them.
Raj is stuck in a quandary - he needs to build the mall, but he needs Priya near him so he stays lucky - so he comes up with a plan doomed to fail on every single level. He tells Priya he'll save the community centre. He tells the tycoon he'll build his mall. He's a liar.
Shortly after this he discovers that Priya is going to get married and move away to Australia, taking his luck with her. Terror struck, he is desperate to find a way to keep her in Toronto. Conveniently he discovers her irritable husband in a clinch with the blonde bombshell from the office. Threats are made, and coincidences planned, changes of heart occur. Priya spends time sitting by river, next to what appears to be an industrial waste outlet. There's a weird doddery old man who sits opposite her and waves. That's right, nothing goes without being heavily signposted, people.
The film climaxes in a melodramatic boardroom scene where Raj reveals his chosen design - one that features both the shopping mall AND the community centre - in a grandstanding display of altruism. Arise film archetype number 1, Heartless Businessman.
"We care about profit, nothing else."he declares. Disgraced by Raj's humanity and innovative thinking - how dare he allow the community centre to continue to exist - the tycoon throws him off the project. Evil nemesis Dev sneers from the sidelines. But wait, here comes weirdo Waving Man. It only turns out that he's the co-founder of the building firm, and is a sucker for Raj's public-spirited design. He reinstates him - both the community centre and the mall shall be built!
The pairing of Kapoor and Balan is pleasant but insubstantial, and I expected much more of them. Balan's smouldering debut in period piece Parineeta highlighted her strengths, and perhaps she is miscast somewhat here as the bubbly, feisty Priya. Kapoor improves a little on his fey character from Jab We Met, but he needs to loosen up a lttle. He looks constipated. The chemistry grows as the film moves on, but never sparkles.
In between the film is full of the dull new corporate language of modern India - people talk about projects, contracts, boards of directors and deals. Raj is supposed to be desperate for work, yet lives in a glossy apartment with flat screen TV and decor out of an IKEA catalogue. Toronto looks grubby, and all the action takes place in an underpopulated, hermetically sealed world. It feels flat and lifeless, and really needed an injection of energy from the songs that wasn't forthcoming. And only 3 songs!
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Blogging Bollywood: Krrish review
Krrish (IMBb / Wikipedia)
Krrish stars the musclebound and supremely flexible green-eyed hunk Hrithik Roshan as a feral, mountain dwelling superman. He wears the expression of a gay woodland sprite, startled at every turn by his own special powers. He hangs out with a gang of children and his grandmother, a grey haired, bespectacled old lady played by the regal Rekha. Rekha is one of a handful of Bollywood stars so peerless they are identified by just one name (see also Kajol, Sridevi, Tabu). His world is rocked one day by the parachuted arrival of the delectable Priyanka Chopra, former Miss World and entirely inappropriately nicknamed "Piggy Chops" by one of her previous co-stars. She's meant to be on some sort of camping weekend, but is happy to lark around with Krishna for a bit, especially after he has demonstrated his miraculous powers by curing her sprained ankles with only a touch of his hand. The film thus meanders up to the intermission with Himalayan-backdropped love songs and Hrithik mooning at Priyanka like a 12-year-old who's just discovered masturbation.
At this point the film takes an abrupt and hilarious swerve as granny, explaining to Hrithik why he shouldn't visit Singapore to meet Priyanka's mother and arrange their marriage, describes how the arrival of blue aliens in response to Hrithik's father's intergalactic messaging hobby resulted in his combined mental retardation and mysterious supernatural intelligence. Confused? You won't be. But you will be laughing so much your bowels may fail. The shot of a fully grown Hrithik Snr. seated in a classroom at a tiny school desk surrounded by eight-year-olds, gurning vacantly, will explain everything you need to know.
He was apparently co-opted by a megalomaniac Singaporean businessman, with a God complex to shame every Bond villain that ever tried to rule the world, into creating a computer that could see into the future. But they apparently looked into the very recent past to design the computer, basing it entirely on Minority Report's flashy, floating, 3D draggable windows. Just like that film, searching for the simplest piece of data seems to involve manhandling about twenty windows around the workspace in various permutations, whereas in today's actual, real world, many years prior to that envisaged in these films, all we have to do is ... type a few words into the Google search field at the top of our web browser. Amazing, isn't it?
So, Krishna travels to Singapore, wearing the same disgusting grey plastic mac that his father went in (it's not clear how the mac came to be back up in the mountains with granny, seeing as dad is missing presumed murdered by a crazed technological genius. I doubt he would have taken the time and trouble to ship back to India a coat that even the most perverse of sexual perverts wouldn't be seen dead lurking in the bushes in. Still, there it is, and granny fetches it out of the attic to make some adjustments for Krishna, presumably having a hefty supply of grey plastic coat material to put patches in with).
There's the usual bit of business in Singapore with the Krisha / Priyanka will they / won't they suspense. Of course they will, but various obstacles have to be overcome first.
A key scene occurs when Krishna observes a street entertainer performing kung fu moves, and collecting money for his little sister's operation (we know this because he has a sign saying 'collecting for sister's operation'). During his act he hurts himself. At this point one wonders why Krishna doesn't just perform his miracle of healing on the performer, his sister, or both. But instead he chooses the more impressive option, namely performing the kung fu moves himself, and handing over a fat wad of cash to the grateful little girl at the end. Ahhh.
The money shot in the film is a huge fire at a circus, where Priyanka and Krishna have gone for a night out. Krishna picks up a bit of plastic from the floor, fashions it into a mask and proceeds to save several children from the burning wreckage. Next thing he knows he's all over the news, but luckily his mask has maintained his anonymity. Everyone's asking who's "Krrish". Priyanka suspects it's him, and goes so far as to set up a bunch of actors to "ambush" him, leading him to retaliate, be captured on video, and thus be revealed. But Krishna guesses what she's up to, and takes a beating to protect his secret identity. Unfortunately, by a massive coincidence it turns out the gang of thugs is actually real, and they're giving him a walloping. Priyanka, needless to say, promptly regrets her actions and falls in love with him instead, but doesn't reveal her true feelings, leaving Krrish accusing her of duplicitous exploitation and questionable loyalties and adamant he will return home ASAP.
At this point the boss's sidekick, who has been hovering sinisterly in the background up till now, tells Krrish not to go home alone - his dad is still alive. We see a flashback to the creation of the future-telling computer, with its unique password based on Hrithik Snr's retina and heartbeat. He plugs the computer in, does some Minority Report fannying around with widgets and windows, and promptly sees own death played out on the screen in front of him in a sequence almost certain not to be an homage to Don't Look Now. He destroys the computer, but is caught by his boss before he can escape. In the intervening period they have been rebuilding the computer but, the dolts, they've programmed it to have the same password (Hrithik Snr's heartbeat, remember? Keep up!) as before, necessitating him being kept alive for the next twenty years in a kind of life support machine that looks like something out of Metropolis, only instead of injecting life into a robot it turns a remedial scientist into a gibbering grey-haired Parkinson's sufferer.
Now, at last, the computer is ready! The boss logs in using Hrithik's heartbeat, disposes of him and tunes in to his own forecast channel. What does he see? What else, his own death, of course, at the hands of...Krrish! Krrish then turns up, does some fancy jumping around and lands the boss on his arse with a shard of plastic or something sticking through him.
After that they all fly home to the mountains of India, Krrish, Priyanka and fuddy duddy old cardiganed dad - I bet granny's pleased to see him, thinking about the constant supervision he'll need not to stick forks in his eyes while Hrithik and Priyanka bugger off to look at rainbows for the rest of their airy fairy lives.
I must admit that at this point I came closer to crying than I have ever done before at a film. Ever. But then he goes into his bedroom and plays some intergalactic space music on his Amstrad and communicates with the aliens, who send a sort of space wink to him through the stars, and I let out an odd sort of gurgling noise and nearly fell off my chair. Sigh.
Lacking any particularly memorable songs, one of the reasons this film succeeds, as so often the case with otherwise formulaic movies coming out of Mumbai, is the romantic chemistry between the good looking leads, Hrithik and Priyanka. Add to this some innovative stunts and pretty competent CGI and there is the beginning of a new franchise here. Roll on Krrish 2!
Krrish stars the musclebound and supremely flexible green-eyed hunk Hrithik Roshan as a feral, mountain dwelling superman. He wears the expression of a gay woodland sprite, startled at every turn by his own special powers. He hangs out with a gang of children and his grandmother, a grey haired, bespectacled old lady played by the regal Rekha. Rekha is one of a handful of Bollywood stars so peerless they are identified by just one name (see also Kajol, Sridevi, Tabu). His world is rocked one day by the parachuted arrival of the delectable Priyanka Chopra, former Miss World and entirely inappropriately nicknamed "Piggy Chops" by one of her previous co-stars. She's meant to be on some sort of camping weekend, but is happy to lark around with Krishna for a bit, especially after he has demonstrated his miraculous powers by curing her sprained ankles with only a touch of his hand. The film thus meanders up to the intermission with Himalayan-backdropped love songs and Hrithik mooning at Priyanka like a 12-year-old who's just discovered masturbation.
At this point the film takes an abrupt and hilarious swerve as granny, explaining to Hrithik why he shouldn't visit Singapore to meet Priyanka's mother and arrange their marriage, describes how the arrival of blue aliens in response to Hrithik's father's intergalactic messaging hobby resulted in his combined mental retardation and mysterious supernatural intelligence. Confused? You won't be. But you will be laughing so much your bowels may fail. The shot of a fully grown Hrithik Snr. seated in a classroom at a tiny school desk surrounded by eight-year-olds, gurning vacantly, will explain everything you need to know.
He was apparently co-opted by a megalomaniac Singaporean businessman, with a God complex to shame every Bond villain that ever tried to rule the world, into creating a computer that could see into the future. But they apparently looked into the very recent past to design the computer, basing it entirely on Minority Report's flashy, floating, 3D draggable windows. Just like that film, searching for the simplest piece of data seems to involve manhandling about twenty windows around the workspace in various permutations, whereas in today's actual, real world, many years prior to that envisaged in these films, all we have to do is ... type a few words into the Google search field at the top of our web browser. Amazing, isn't it?
So, Krishna travels to Singapore, wearing the same disgusting grey plastic mac that his father went in (it's not clear how the mac came to be back up in the mountains with granny, seeing as dad is missing presumed murdered by a crazed technological genius. I doubt he would have taken the time and trouble to ship back to India a coat that even the most perverse of sexual perverts wouldn't be seen dead lurking in the bushes in. Still, there it is, and granny fetches it out of the attic to make some adjustments for Krishna, presumably having a hefty supply of grey plastic coat material to put patches in with).
There's the usual bit of business in Singapore with the Krisha / Priyanka will they / won't they suspense. Of course they will, but various obstacles have to be overcome first.
A key scene occurs when Krishna observes a street entertainer performing kung fu moves, and collecting money for his little sister's operation (we know this because he has a sign saying 'collecting for sister's operation'). During his act he hurts himself. At this point one wonders why Krishna doesn't just perform his miracle of healing on the performer, his sister, or both. But instead he chooses the more impressive option, namely performing the kung fu moves himself, and handing over a fat wad of cash to the grateful little girl at the end. Ahhh.
The money shot in the film is a huge fire at a circus, where Priyanka and Krishna have gone for a night out. Krishna picks up a bit of plastic from the floor, fashions it into a mask and proceeds to save several children from the burning wreckage. Next thing he knows he's all over the news, but luckily his mask has maintained his anonymity. Everyone's asking who's "Krrish". Priyanka suspects it's him, and goes so far as to set up a bunch of actors to "ambush" him, leading him to retaliate, be captured on video, and thus be revealed. But Krishna guesses what she's up to, and takes a beating to protect his secret identity. Unfortunately, by a massive coincidence it turns out the gang of thugs is actually real, and they're giving him a walloping. Priyanka, needless to say, promptly regrets her actions and falls in love with him instead, but doesn't reveal her true feelings, leaving Krrish accusing her of duplicitous exploitation and questionable loyalties and adamant he will return home ASAP.
At this point the boss's sidekick, who has been hovering sinisterly in the background up till now, tells Krrish not to go home alone - his dad is still alive. We see a flashback to the creation of the future-telling computer, with its unique password based on Hrithik Snr's retina and heartbeat. He plugs the computer in, does some Minority Report fannying around with widgets and windows, and promptly sees own death played out on the screen in front of him in a sequence almost certain not to be an homage to Don't Look Now. He destroys the computer, but is caught by his boss before he can escape. In the intervening period they have been rebuilding the computer but, the dolts, they've programmed it to have the same password (Hrithik Snr's heartbeat, remember? Keep up!) as before, necessitating him being kept alive for the next twenty years in a kind of life support machine that looks like something out of Metropolis, only instead of injecting life into a robot it turns a remedial scientist into a gibbering grey-haired Parkinson's sufferer.
Now, at last, the computer is ready! The boss logs in using Hrithik's heartbeat, disposes of him and tunes in to his own forecast channel. What does he see? What else, his own death, of course, at the hands of...Krrish! Krrish then turns up, does some fancy jumping around and lands the boss on his arse with a shard of plastic or something sticking through him.
After that they all fly home to the mountains of India, Krrish, Priyanka and fuddy duddy old cardiganed dad - I bet granny's pleased to see him, thinking about the constant supervision he'll need not to stick forks in his eyes while Hrithik and Priyanka bugger off to look at rainbows for the rest of their airy fairy lives.
I must admit that at this point I came closer to crying than I have ever done before at a film. Ever. But then he goes into his bedroom and plays some intergalactic space music on his Amstrad and communicates with the aliens, who send a sort of space wink to him through the stars, and I let out an odd sort of gurgling noise and nearly fell off my chair. Sigh.
Lacking any particularly memorable songs, one of the reasons this film succeeds, as so often the case with otherwise formulaic movies coming out of Mumbai, is the romantic chemistry between the good looking leads, Hrithik and Priyanka. Add to this some innovative stunts and pretty competent CGI and there is the beginning of a new franchise here. Roll on Krrish 2!
Sunday, 20 July 2008
Blogging Bollywood: Part 3
Your next five Bollywood Rules of Engagement:
6. Actors and actresses are to be judged by different criteria to their Hollywood counterparts. Usual recruits include the ranks of the Miss World competition, or offspring of already famous acting parents. Women are selected for their good looks, especially while being rained on or rolling in the waves of a tumultuous sea. They should be able to dance well, and mime to someone else's singing voice. If they are pretty they will be a star. If they are in any way sexy they will almost certainly become an "item girl" - basically a bit of totty who does a song scantily clad - but never a star. The success of men in the industry seems to be based on ruggedness, flexibility, usefulness in a fight scene and some imaginary, nebulous "cool" factor. In the case of brooding brainless beefcake - and alleged woman-beater - Salman Khan, he seems to have succeeded without holding any of these informal qualifications. Perhaps he just knows some secrets about somebody, in this most sordid of industries.
7. Acting in Bollywood is almost a by-product, a distraction from the real business of singing and dancing and wearing clothes. We must judge Bollywood's acting on a different scale than one we're used to. For example, the biggest star in the universe, Mr Amitabh Bachchan, displays an acting style so stiff you might wonder if he hasn't already kicked the bucket and desperate studio heads are keeping him going with the aid of a broom strategically stuck up his bum. But, he is the recognizably the biggest star in the cosmos, because 30 years ago he made a series of films beloved of Indian's everywhere, wherein he played an angry young man. Films like Sholay mainly consist of him beating people up.
Next to this Shah Rukh Khan, the second biggest star in the universe, looks like a method acting Daniel Day Lewis. He once played a prisoner, in Veer Zara, who aged in prison from age 30 to age 50. His magical rendering of a 50 year old was a vacantly staring grey haired old twit who shook so much he might have had Parkinson's. Exceptions to the rule include the always sensible Aamir Khan, who has his finger on the pulse of Hollywood and has released the English language Lagaan to great success. Of the women Rani Mukherjee stands out for her naturalism and light comedic touch, Kareena Kapoor for her feisty gregariousness and Preity Zinta for her verging-on-screwball comic antics. The biggest letdown you are likely to encounter is the biggest star of them all, and Filmfare's most powerful woman in Bollywood, Aishwarya Rai. Although a very pretty face and undoubtedly a lovely person she invariably gives humourless, snobbish performances in her less than challenging roles.
8. Be forgiving. Although the Indian film industry churns out more films per year than Hollywood, the vast majority of them lack any serious production values, budgets or, indeed, qualified directors or actors. Here I'll be focusing on mainstream masala movies from the big studios. Even if you don't like them there's no denying they're professionally and glossily made.
9. DVDs you buy or rent in this country will be subtitled, and the subtitles will almost always make sense. VCDs you can buy anywhere in India and in the more salubrious places in the UK may also be subtitled, but the subtitles will have been provided by the unscrupulous, well meaning but illiterate pirate you have purchased the hooky copy from. They may not make an sense at all. Keep an eye out for odd moments where the script turns Hinglish and you hear what's going on for a heavily accented line or two.
10. One more thing to look out for is Westerners appearing in Bollywood films, usually in a tiny bitpart as "man in street" or similar. These people are hilarious. Presumably rejected by televisions channels everywhere in Europe, they have gone to India to make their fame and fortune. And act badly. They usually appear to be German or Dutch, unaware of the camera, and deliver their lines bruskly and entirely without emotion, as if at a read-through. Watch out in Kabhie Kushie Kabhie Gham for "man outside sweetshop" saying "Listen mate, I don't want any jaggery. Just tell me which way the Red Fort is".
6. Actors and actresses are to be judged by different criteria to their Hollywood counterparts. Usual recruits include the ranks of the Miss World competition, or offspring of already famous acting parents. Women are selected for their good looks, especially while being rained on or rolling in the waves of a tumultuous sea. They should be able to dance well, and mime to someone else's singing voice. If they are pretty they will be a star. If they are in any way sexy they will almost certainly become an "item girl" - basically a bit of totty who does a song scantily clad - but never a star. The success of men in the industry seems to be based on ruggedness, flexibility, usefulness in a fight scene and some imaginary, nebulous "cool" factor. In the case of brooding brainless beefcake - and alleged woman-beater - Salman Khan, he seems to have succeeded without holding any of these informal qualifications. Perhaps he just knows some secrets about somebody, in this most sordid of industries.
7. Acting in Bollywood is almost a by-product, a distraction from the real business of singing and dancing and wearing clothes. We must judge Bollywood's acting on a different scale than one we're used to. For example, the biggest star in the universe, Mr Amitabh Bachchan, displays an acting style so stiff you might wonder if he hasn't already kicked the bucket and desperate studio heads are keeping him going with the aid of a broom strategically stuck up his bum. But, he is the recognizably the biggest star in the cosmos, because 30 years ago he made a series of films beloved of Indian's everywhere, wherein he played an angry young man. Films like Sholay mainly consist of him beating people up.
Next to this Shah Rukh Khan, the second biggest star in the universe, looks like a method acting Daniel Day Lewis. He once played a prisoner, in Veer Zara, who aged in prison from age 30 to age 50. His magical rendering of a 50 year old was a vacantly staring grey haired old twit who shook so much he might have had Parkinson's. Exceptions to the rule include the always sensible Aamir Khan, who has his finger on the pulse of Hollywood and has released the English language Lagaan to great success. Of the women Rani Mukherjee stands out for her naturalism and light comedic touch, Kareena Kapoor for her feisty gregariousness and Preity Zinta for her verging-on-screwball comic antics. The biggest letdown you are likely to encounter is the biggest star of them all, and Filmfare's most powerful woman in Bollywood, Aishwarya Rai. Although a very pretty face and undoubtedly a lovely person she invariably gives humourless, snobbish performances in her less than challenging roles.
8. Be forgiving. Although the Indian film industry churns out more films per year than Hollywood, the vast majority of them lack any serious production values, budgets or, indeed, qualified directors or actors. Here I'll be focusing on mainstream masala movies from the big studios. Even if you don't like them there's no denying they're professionally and glossily made.
9. DVDs you buy or rent in this country will be subtitled, and the subtitles will almost always make sense. VCDs you can buy anywhere in India and in the more salubrious places in the UK may also be subtitled, but the subtitles will have been provided by the unscrupulous, well meaning but illiterate pirate you have purchased the hooky copy from. They may not make an sense at all. Keep an eye out for odd moments where the script turns Hinglish and you hear what's going on for a heavily accented line or two.
10. One more thing to look out for is Westerners appearing in Bollywood films, usually in a tiny bitpart as "man in street" or similar. These people are hilarious. Presumably rejected by televisions channels everywhere in Europe, they have gone to India to make their fame and fortune. And act badly. They usually appear to be German or Dutch, unaware of the camera, and deliver their lines bruskly and entirely without emotion, as if at a read-through. Watch out in Kabhie Kushie Kabhie Gham for "man outside sweetshop" saying "Listen mate, I don't want any jaggery. Just tell me which way the Red Fort is".
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