THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY AND THE SHAMEFUL OF 2008

A very late list but nonetheless here is what I think of the films released in 2008.

The GOOD ONES:

No. 1. No film qualifies.
2. No film qualifies.

3. Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye!: With a daisy fresh treatment of urban working class people and city wannabes, Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye! tops my year’s list. The film packed with Delhi eccentricities and Punjabi flavour is a tragic-comic take on a conman who would rather use shortcuts to get the goodies that everyone today wants. Indeed the film would have been at no.1 had it sustained its story flow and narrative tautness after the first half. I was left asking more of the Narender Chanchal act (here by Paresh Rawal) and the grating but nostalgic Anup Jalota rendition of Aisi Lagi Lagan Meera Ho Gayi Magain… Abhay Deol’s cool cat act as Lucky Singh and Paresh Rawal in a triple role were the fun-filled mainstay of the film. My favourite scene, however, was the heart-breaking act where Dolly (Richa Chaddha) tries to seduce Lucky, her sister’s boyfriend. The oh-so authentic title song track (TV, Mercedes chaida mainu) mouthed by the film’s subaltern subjects about their ambitions is the best that I heard last year. As Dolly says, “Touch ho gayi main to, by God“. More powers to Dibakar Banerjee.

4. Rock On: Rock On was a film where all key elements that goes into film making fell together in their right places – there was very competent photography by Jason West, design by Shashank Tere, costumes by Niharika Khan, editing by Deepa Bhatia and songs by Javed Akhtar all of which consistently served the story (even if somewhat thin on content) and the characters. Arjun Rampal took a break from bad acts to wonderfully play a tortured artist who stood for his beliefs, while Prachi Desai made a quiet but strong entry playing a well-meaning wife. Sahana Goswami as the feisty companion to the Rampal character too left an impact. Although I did not buy much into Farhan Akhtar’s singing ability he has indeed debuted well as an actor and carried off his character with great honesty. Director Abhishek Kapoor’s film after the dismal Aryan is surely a labour of love and that shines through.

5. Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na: It was difficult to not like this silly sod of a film. Abbas Tyrewala, the debutante director of the film is also an experience writer (Maqbool, Munnabhai, but also Shikhar and De Taali). He had skillfully set the film up with series of silly Bollywood cliché (e.g. the three things one needs to do to become a ‘man’ in life), and as the film moved the pay offs were copiously satisfying. Also the marketing blitz made sure everyone got to see this honest effort that the team had put in. While Imran Khan and Genelia D’Souza made competent debuts, there was late Smita Patil’s son, Prakeik stealing some of the thunder from under the lead pair’s with his irreverent arty act of a concerned brother. The film puzzlingly ended with a placard that said ‘Waiting for Godot’!

UTV TERRORISM MOVIES: It might seem that in 2008 UTV were only most keen on films that tackled terrorism as their subject. Nonetheless they were a major player and turned out several decent films.6. A Wednesday: The film set up a high tech drama where aam aadmi doles out justice to the terrorists and opens the eyes of old fashioned policewallahs, opportunistic journalists and generation Y techies. This is a simplistic even fantastical approach to a grave problem. Nonetheless, to sustain this Bollywood-style justice comes some well-written drama, fine editing and crisp story-telling. Despite a low-budget feel, the debutante director, Neeraj Pandey has done his bit to give us a pan-city feel and a sense on the enormity of the issues. An ensemble of actors drives the story in a fast paced manner and with economy. Naseeruddin Shah was good at playing ‘the common man’ and seems to have jumped out of one of the RK Laxman cartoon pages. Anupam Kher and Jimmy Shergil play cops and they seem to be in form for once.

7. Mumbai Meri Jaan: Nishikant Kamat’s film about terror attack on local trains, Mumbai Meri Jaan left me with mixed emotions. A number of stories unfolded and for nearly three quarter of the film several executions were plain expository and the purpose did not seem to be coming together. In the end, however, many of these stories made sense. Paresh Rawal very ably played a low ranking police official close to retirement and suffering from this anxious dilemma if in his entire career he has been of some use, done some good and made any difference. And Kay Kay Menon side of the story too drove in its point where a band of friends are making well-meaning but misplaced efforts to crack the puzzle of terror attacks (this plot seemingly borrowed from Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam).

8. Aamir: Aamir was ‘different’ in the sense that it seems that after eons one sees the streets of Bombay in a film how one might find them in real life. Aamir is played honorably by the TV actor Rajeev Khadelwal, not an easy feat to pull off when you are held in a close-up for nearly the entire length of the film. Aamir, however, was slow and repetitive. An hour into the film, as Aamir is handed over a red carrier case, one wonders why was this not done within the first fifteen minutes itself. I had some other problems with the film why does the gangster choose Aamir to be his carrier boy? When any of the available local men of the qom will carry out the fidayeen attack for a few thousand bucks, if not for free. Why does he also trust him with millions of rupees and then the bomb? What was the lecture on Qom all about? I might be nitpicking here, but the most important prop of the film, the bright red briefcase that is carrying the bomb looks close to the nuclear case the president of the US carries. All that was missing was an electronic pointer over the case saying, ‘Bomb inside!’ My biggest fight, however, is with how the film ends –– (perhaps here was an attempt to add meaning to the film’s tagline) Aamir blows himself up saving the innocent population, or, in other words, the Muslim Aamir blows himself up saving the target innocent Hindu population. To illustrate my antipathy to the concluding scenes of Aamir, let me give an example. It’s like American film producers making a “topical” and “sensitive” film in Iraq and through it sending out this message to the local population: if you are being recruited for terrorist, fidayeen attacks, please do not harm us, instead blow yourself up! These essential issues could have been redressed at the scripting stage. Nonetheless, this realist, ‘heart-in-its-right-place’, low budget thriller was not a bad start for the film producers, UTV spotboy or its debutante director, Raj Kumar Gupta
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9. Fashion: Our self-claimed realist filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar take on the fashion and modeling industry was short on many counts – for one the film could have done with half an hour and more of editing out of establishing scenes, bad acts, and his own little appearance in the film (which goes, ‘ye director realist film banane ke liye famous hai’). Also Bhandarkar’s worldview (or perhaps a thought out strategy) to approach the ‘high life’ using the most conservative and voyeur yardstick is problematic to say the least. For all its shortcomings & use of cliché, Fashion, however, contained a complex web of characters and events around the modeling industry, where no simple answers to be found to life’s problems. Kangana Ranaut as the supermodel constantly on the edge and Mughda Godse, her opposite, someone who is at peace with the dirt around were two real portrayals that stayed with me after the film was over. However, it would seem that along with UTV’s, 2008 was Priyanka Chopra’s year (her films feature in three categories in my list, and I’ve missed the much publicized but derided Love Story 2050)

10. Sarkar Raj: Sarkar Raj turned out to Ramu’s savior after Aag and other debacles. On surface, the canvass is large as the story tries to take in two important development debates in India – the politics of power generation and the allotment of special economic zones (SEZs) to corporate houses. Ultimately we do not get either any insight on the actual corporate-politicians’ nexus or engagement with real development issues. What works for Sarkar Raj is the high decibel drama and the breathless speed with which a barrage of sub-plots unfold, at least until the first half. First-rate dialogues (Prashant Pandey) and some good supporting performances (Sumeet Nijhawan, Rajesh Shringarpure).

The BAD EGGS:
No. 1. Yuvvraaj: Yuvraaj firmly established how our ol’ showman Subhash Ghai is now past his expiry date as a director. A dated, incoherent piece of mindless drama about fighting brothers coming together in the end, Yuvraaj was made as if to prove this very fact. If I were to recall the film, I remember Salmaan floating around in air in the middle of song, a loony brother (Anil Kapoor) hanging out with kids in his bedroom like a paedophile suspect but turning out to be a musical genius, a bored girlfriend (Katrina), her screechy father (with an Einstein hairdo), mamajis and their wicked schemes from an 1980s film! I am yet to figure why was the film shot in badly done sets when all the actors are seen at locations abroad where the story is based but have mostly been used as establishing shots. Date problems? Saving money? The need to re-shoot all the dramatic scenes? All of above? Also, I suspect this was rare occasion when the music maestro Rahman and our own poet laureate, Gulzar pulled a fast one on Mr. Ghai. A song in Yuvraj sounds like Lekar aaye hum Bogus aur Bunkum, Bheje mein bhoosa hai…Duniye mein naam hai, logon mein badnaam hai and so it goes.

2. Halla Bol: Rajkumar Santoshi’s Halla Bol had all the ingredients of a B-film – from the opening scene between the biographer and Sameer Khan (Ajay Devgan), to the dismal item number, to the caricatures of real-life characters (Vijay Mallya?, Sri Ravi Shankar?) in their sad get-ups, to a murder straight from a horror fick, and a z-grade montage of Sameer Khan’s personal and professional exploits, not to forget strange expository set of dialogues between Jackie Shroff and Mukesh Tiwari. Santoshi took on a number of high profile crimes to highlight corruption and public apathy, and then promotes public outcry (Halla Bol) as a panacea for all ills. This problematic premise was further aggravated by several poorly planned and executed scenes. The dialogues have a retro feel to them, with an alliteration that would shame Kader Khan, and are spoken in a theatrically frontal composition. The film has been cut to a false pace and several quick, superficial scenes race through, that either hinges on a fake punch line, or an odd plot twist. All added to Halla Bol’s great-potential-for-straight-to-video debacle had it not been for Pankaj Kapur who tries to a superman act, and, tries single-handedly to bring the film back into the game. One hopes Rajkumar Santoshi comes out with a better film in Ajeeb Prem ki Ghajab Dastan.

3. Drona: I did not find myself very keen to see a somewhat overweight superhero with stubble (Abhishek Bachchan). Well, I did not see this film. Yet I list Drona as part of my list of Bad films, in parts to show my admiration for the most discerning and fiesty film reviewer that we have in print media – Mayank Shekhar. If he said something of a film, it must be correct, so my thoughts have come to run. He said of Drona – “A Gibberish Drone… You do feel like crying out loud for the producers sometimes, when expenses the size of a small-town’s economy, a fairly robust background score, a soothing title track, and 1,500 VFX effects, is brought down to dull gold-dust… Rakesh Roshan’s Krrish, the reason this film was made, was an uncomplicated B-grader. It could well have been called ‘Sheher Ki Ladki’ or ‘Baap Ka Badla’. The stunning super-hero merely goes out there and saves the world. The adults would’ve been tolerant to the super-effects flick; the kids, I suspect, loved it. I wonder who this is for.” (MS) Less powers to our home-bred super heroes. More powers to Mayank Shekhar.

P.S. This list of BAD films is shorter than it ought to as I missed out on a dozen plus odd films that I suspect would have made to this list (Shekhar’s reviews are to be blamed for some of the misses) – one is thinking of Black & White, Race, Hijack, Hello, Jimmy. Also, I am yet to see Dasveydaniya which I am told would have made to the GOOD films list.

The UGLY HEADS:
No. 1. Karzzz: The cheesy but honest to bones, trying-his-best act that Himesh Reshamayiya put up as Monty in the remake of Karz left me thoroughly confused. So much so that I checked what others had to say of the film. It took me a whole while to see the film for what it is (a deeply honest effort but still a bad film = ugly).

2. Rab ne Bana di Jodi, and Dostana: The story of Rab ne Bana di Jodi was hard to digest; that leap of faith that the makers wanted was way too high and beyond me. I just could not suspend my disbelief that the wife (Anushka Sharma) is not able to see that her dance partner is actually her dumb husband (Shahrukh Khan). This remained an unsettling issue throughout the film. Also, it was problematic to me that to be appreciated a decent, hard-working man needs to change himself into someone who gels his hair, talks rubbish, wears trousers that rides up his ass and dances on silly Bollywood tunes. Why can’t the strength of decency and hard-work be brought out for their own merits. (In Hollywood when Spiderman or Supermen take off their regular clothes they become superhero who fight villains and do some major action jobs; here fittingly our super alter-ego had to be someone who sings and dances!).

Dostana troubled me for its lack of honesty. Why not have an honest gay film instead of straight people masquerading as gay couple because the makers had some points to make and this seemed like the safe, commercial route. The premise was thin, the execution confident but choppy and the results dissatisfying.

4. Sorry Bhai: Onir’s latest outing was something I was looking forward to. The tagline of the film ‘Come fall in Love with your Brother’s Bride’ was, however, as uninviting as another film, Dharma’s ‘Come Question your Faith’. No thank you would be the instinctive answer. Nevertheless, I felt there must be interesting shades in the film. However, the tagline turned out to be the film. An adaptation of the old Hollywood classic, Sabrina (minus its layers), this film turned ugly when the bride (Chitrangda Singh, looking ravishing but very conscious on propriety) for no good reason leaves a good-looking and doting fiancé (Sanjay Suri) for his dolt and absent-minded brother (Sharman Joshi). The story could have supplied her with reasons, such as commitment phobia or an odd discovery (her fiancé is discovered bankrupt or even gay) as the marriage day drew near or just plain madness on her behalf but her reasons to dupe her fiancé were just not explained by the makers, at least not one that convinced me. The mother (Shabana Azmi) of these two brothers is the only person perturbed at this incestuous situation but that too is taken care of – the younger one and the bride start a live-in relationship, wait for the mother to die off in a few years and then marry! Real ugly solution, I thought!

5. Chamku: One went with expectation to see another well-composed film by a director who had made the off-beat, Seher based on the criminal-police nexus in Uttar Pradesh. Kabeer Kaushik’s second film was then clearly a disappointment. A forced script about state intelligence agency choosing a member of a naxal group to be their sharp shooter does not move easy or with any clear logic beyond this set up. For a film to be named “Chamku” (reminded me of the detergent that was being sold in Sai Paranjape’s Chasme Baddoor), I waited for a solid rationale. So I was disappointed when you realize the protagonist (Bobby Deol) is named Chamku because as a child he was found in unconscious condition by a naxal leader (Danny Denzongpa). The boy could not remember his name, so the leader goes, ‘aaj se hum tumhe Chamku bulayenge’. Not much the poor, bed-ridden, injured, semi-conscious can do to argue against it. Could he? Nor could we but endure this film.

6. Bombay to Bangkok: With Iqbal and Dor it indeed looked like Nagesh Kukunoor was finally in form with medium-budget, script-based, performance-oriented cinema. The film tries superficially build on the one-line idea of a Mumbai lad falling in love with a Thai masseuse. Kukunoor tries to put in a la-Hrishikesh Mukherjee touch for rom-coms but fails to show strength in working out enough plots to build up this romantic comedy and keeping the film apace. In Bombay to Bangkok, romance and comedy are like oil and water, they just refuse to mix well. There is a clear dearth of comic elements and its romantic side is, urm, is not very romantic. 2008 was to be Kukunoor’s annus mirabilis – two of his other films were lined up for release that year. It seems they will roll out this year. My best wishes.

7. The Last Lear: The able and prolific director, Rituparno Ghosh, got it wrong with this one. Not the whole film though. I feel the casting was terrific and there were scenes, early on where the men – Amitabh Bachchan and Arjun Rampal – bond, and later in the film when the women share their stories and their shared plight. Also Arjun Rampal and Preity Zinta deliver the best performances of their respective careers. And yet, and yet, as the story unfolded the turning of the director into a selfish maniac lacked logic and credibility. Also, I may be an exception but the over-the-top act by Amitabh Bachchan lacks shades that should come out of a thespian that has performed Shakespeare all his life.

8. Tashan: To me Vijay Kumar Acharya’s Tashan got more flak that it deserved. If one could remove the chaff in Tashan, you might still get a hollow grain, but then go ahead and peel the grain off and there you will find that meaningful kernel that the writer/ director had in mind. A Tarantino-esque touch was attempted to the established Bollywood masala elements in an effort to make a “post-modern” masala film, often by heightening their effects. The formulae and masala that have gone in Bombay films for decades are naturally up for dissection, analysis and reinvention and new directors must attempt them. Hence my admiration. However, I found one editing decision particularly distasteful, we see Kareena Kapoor paying shradhanjali to her late father in one scene and bang next is a seduction item number where she flits around in zero-sized bikini (a critic compared her to the retired porn-films’ artist Dani Woodward!). I also regretted how they mauled my favourite song in the film Dil Dance Mare…. Anil Kapoor was cool with his bhaiya act, only he was wholly incomprehensible, his Hindi diction could have done with Hindi subtitles.

9. Welcome To Sajjanpur: Shyam Benegal’s worked out this film from a dated concept – I could not buy that in today’s mobile phone era we had a letter writer protagonist (Shreyas Talpade) who was in the thick of village politics. The film had several normative agenda – it espoused the power of democracy and value of literacy. It championed the rights of women and transgender community and supported widow remarriage. Despite their relevance and good intentions, these messages and also the in-your-face-manner they were filmed seemed more for the immediate post-Independence era than for today’s more complex society and its needs.

The SHAMEFUL LIST:
No. 1. GHAJINI: The shame of Ghajini comes foremost from blatantly lifting the idea from Christopher Nolan’s Mememto (2001), not acknowledging it and then plastering it with an existing B-slapstick romantic comedy to explain the background of the angst-ridden protagonist (puzzling how some reviewers went out of their way to state that the film was not a copy of Mememto). The shame also comes from the fact that the lead in the film is by the very best and admirable of our star actors, Aamir Khan (who also promoted the film vigorously). The shame because despite lifting one of the most novel cinematic ideas – interplay of real memory (that of audience) and reel memory (that of protagonist who suffers from a short term memory loss) – the execution came straight out of 1980 B-masala action film. The method that laid underneath the madness in Nolan’s Memento was lost on the makers of Ghajini – having borrowed the idea and props they were just not able to make any coherent sense or use of either of them, reducing the film to a revenge drama full of so many loopholes it will bring an flour sieve to shame. Amir Khan’s six (or were they 8?) “mini”-ab packs and occasional magenta-coloured lips did not all make up for this overly long film running on humorless crap.

2. MISSION ISTAANBUL: After Shootout at Lokhandwala, Apoorva Lakhiya doled out this no-brainer, heavily indulgent film where he decided to set the world right by taking on global terrorism, nab Osama bin Laden, destroy al Qaida network and even take the media to task for spreading bogus rumours. I realized something was amiss even before the film was released. As I had watched the film’s theatrical trailer and the VO announced how the world is in great danger & peril and it will be saved by our ‘hero’, to which Zayed Khan with his back to camera until now turns to face us, I remember hearing lot of instant titters and laughters from the audience. But then to endure such films you gradually learn to make an entry from an all together different level and then voila! there was a laugh every minute of this film. My favourite scene – Zayed downloading an entire TV station’s video & audio programmes on an USB of the size of a thumb. We kept discussing if the USB should have bursted into smithereens or was the macho bike he is riding in the next scene is actually the USB he downloaded all that data into.

3. KIDNAP: Kidnap is another film gone horribly wrong, and it would appear right from the scripting phase and only getting worse on execution. Our hero (Imran Khan) kidnaps a businessman’s (Sanjay Dutt) daughter (Minisha Lamba) to teach the man a lesson and avenge some wrong meted out to him. It turns out that as a boy he had stolen the businessman’s car that nearly resulted in his daughter’s death in an accident. To me this actually called for some punishment and thus took away much of the sympathy for the motive that Imran character had for “moral” revenge undermining the premise of the film. But this weak premise is only the tip of the gargantuan iceberg of a blunder that Kidnap actually is. The victim of Kidnap Minissha Lamba plays an 18-year old but looks far older, Malavade plays Minissha Lamba’s mother but looks her sister. Sanjay Dutt is the businessman father who looks the least bit interested in the fate of his daughter. Imran Khan the kidnapper looks like a boy lost and repenting a decision he has taken (repenting either the decision his character took to kidnap or he who agreed to act in the film). Lamba climbs from one skimpy outfit to another, and looks ludicrous given the situation her character is in. When she tries to seduce it looks she is courting her kid brother. So like Mission Istambul, you make an alternative reading and then reap some laugh benefits. Here my favourite was the ‘jail escape’ scene, where in the dead of the night a sexily clad mom (Malvade) comes at the prison gates and declares how urgently she needs to get into jail premises and check their Human Rights record! A team of drunk jailors let this woman in and actually go ahead and show their skills in book-keeping (while Mr Dutt attempts to get a prisoner out)!

As the year ended, one came to know of this film, Wafaa. It would seem Rajesh Khanna has tried to make a comeback with this ill-advised soft-porn film (or a film that has soft-porn scenes). Rajesh Khanna himself is nonchalant about the whole affair! He says, “Those scenes were placed in the film because the subject demanded it. After watching a film it will be justified why I had done the film. The romantic scenes are not Bollywood, but Hollywood”. One doesn’t know who then to feel sorry for but for what, one knows. He was the superlative actor in at least two of my favourite films, Anand and Aaviskar. As I have not seen Wafaa, I have an excuse to not number it and put it on this list.