Filmiholic

Mozhi surprised me. 

I don’t know what exactly I was expecting, probably some sort of a love story, eventually the kalyanam at some wedding hall in Madras, women in saris and jasmine, and maybe a fight scene thrown in to keep the mens happy.  And honestly, the cover of the DVD was a little too family-friendly for me.

But I bought it anyway on my last shopping stockpiling expedition to Landmark for two reasons: first, I remembered there had been a lot of favorable buzz when it hit cinema screens last year, and second, it has Prakash Raj in a lead role.  Show me a film where he has more to do than play the older cop/buddy/Dad and I’m there.

So, the film starts with these two friends Karthik (Prithviraj) and Viji (Prakash Raj), and no, the lead actresses don’t have “Raj” in their names.  The guys are in the music side of the Tamil film biz and they get an apartment together.  The crabby building secretary finds out they’re singletons and declares they must move, ‘cos bachelors are too much trouble. (Don’t I know it; they’re almost as bad married men!)

Viji says to Karthik “Why don’t you get married?” and the ever-idealist, ever-romantic Karthik explains he has to first fall for the girl, complete with lightbulbs and bells going off. 

He’s out on the street and happens upon the modern, liberated Archana (Jyothika, wearing trousers and shirt with a messenger bag slung across her body) and sees her beating up a wee twig of a drunk man who’s been abusing his wife. 

Karthik thinks the wife of Surya is damn cool, plus she reminds him of his Mom (er, okay….).  Bulbs and bells go off and he’s in love.  Cue the dream sequence (Jyothika in a frothy purple gown, then as a cop, then a tough girl on a motorbike.)

And lucky Karthik, it turns out Archana lives in the same apartment complex.  He tries to chat her up and gets nowhere.  Finally, after rescuing her ailing grandmother, and still not getting a rise out of Tamil filmdom’s heroine, he says “What is your problem, girl?”  and just then, he learns, as we the viewers do, that she’s deaf and mute.

She’s also traumatized.  Archana’s father split when she was a kid and then her mother died, leaving the little girl in her grandmother’s care.

Archana and her best friend/translator, the widow Sheela, become friends with Karthik and Viji, and love grows as the quartet hang out.  Karthik learns sign language, and wants to marry Archana, who freaks out and tells him to go away.  The rest of the film is what happens afterward.

Now, when I say this film is different, please don’t take that to mean “dark”, because it’s not;  there are some exceedingly sweet moments in this film (I personally found the little soap carving of a violin that Archana gives Karthik rather corny).  But it is part of that current wave of Tamil films that show more of the day-to-day lives of people, without so much dishoom and no item number. 

Viji is that always cheerful guy you’d like to have as a friend, and my favorite scene was the one with Prakash Raj dancing around in only a towel to Hava Nagila Hava, of all things (and you thought all those Kosher dosa places on Curry Hill were the only link between Israel and southern India).  It’s quite funny to hear a man of his years and not insignificant figure refer to Little Prakash Raj as his “shame shame puppy shame.”

While Prithviraj plays him with great reserve, Karthik is written as such a decent hero that you almost expect to see a halo over his head.  And his strength in resisting the repeated pouty advances of the sexy neighbor girl seemed rather super-human to me; I think most men would have been flattered and given in.  But Prithviraj is credible as this guy with a heart of gold, and his lisp is endearing.

For Tamil movie fans, there’s an opening movie-within-a-movie sequence where Karthik and Viji work on the film’s score.  When commenting on the plot of the film, Prakash Raj (who not only acts in Mozhi, but is also the producer) says to his buddy “I pity the landlords’ daughters in Tamil cinema, they only find beggars for husbands.”

The film was shot in and around Madras, so anyone feeling a bit homesick will catch some glimpses of Marina Beach and several shots at MusicWorld and the food court at Spencers Plaza.

And a brief word about the DVD I watched, a Moser Baer version.  For Rs. 34, I think it’s a great deal.  The picture quality is good, the English subtitles were there, and there were even extra features!  (A long press conference and the music release.)

See it or skip it

See it!  In spite of being a little too long (did we really need the storyline about the Professor who was stuck back in 1984?), and having one or two snafus on the subtitles (“banquet” instead of “bouquet”), the movie is a lovely change from a lot of what has come before.  The characters are all older than undergrads and so their stories involve more than hanging out and flirting at the local Barista, even if the plot still evolves around the ubiquitous filmi concern: marriage.

And by the way, when was the last time you saw a filmi heroine who wore trousers through all but two or three scenes in a film?

Just missed the release of the DVD in India by a few days, and then once back here just couldn’t get around to it until now, but it was well worth the wait.

Part road movie, all romance, Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met seemed doomed when it released last October.  At the very same instant in the 24/7 news cycle, it emerged that the Chhota Nawab had usurped Shahid Kapoor as the object of Bebo’s affections. 

Who would go see the movie now that the couple were kaput?  My already tepid interest waned at that point.  (Never wild about her, though like photos of airplane accidents, I can’t look away.  And Shahid, well, up until now, he always looked so young on film that I felt as though some police crime unit would burst through the door and arrest me for ogling underage boys.)

But the film surprised a lot of us, found its audience, and a lasting, growing one at that.

We have Aditya, who’s inherited his late father’s business and seems to be faring poorly in the boardroom, only to also see his girlfriend go off and get engaged to someone else.  Shellshocked, he blindly makes his way to the train station and boards the first train he finds.

As it chugs away from the platform – cue the banjo music – (yes, really, banjo music) – along comes the fresh-faced Geet, running to catch up as porters toss her luggage onboard.  The motormouth Sikhni finds mute-by-comparison Aditya seated in her row, so she proceeds to talk at him until he slips off at some back-of-beyond town to be by himself.  Thinking he’s going to miss the departing train, Geet hops off too, to warn him, and the trains goes without either of them.

And they’re off on their adventure.  She insists that he accompanies her to her family’s home in Batinda, and he agrees.  The reticent Aditya slowly opens up, charmed by Geet’s optimism and warmth, and later by her large, boisterous family.  Along the way, they pass through Manali, and Geet reveals a plan to elope with someone other than the munda her family has lined up for her.

And it goes on from there, with some very lovely scenery along the way.  On the road to the abode of Manu, we’re treated to Yeh Ishq Hai, which would be sweet, were it not for the mincing, faux-Chini, dance steps that Kareena repeats throughout the picturization.  (Look here and see what I mean around 1:01.)  Nagada is set on the grounds of the Dhillon family manse in Batinda, and wow, you gotta give Shahid credit for being fleet of foot and energetic.  This is my favorite song of the film. 

Mauja hi mauja is great too, except we have to wait til the very end to see it, and then, the sudden, startling appearance of a bunch of firangi girls, some dressed in stripperish renditions of coolie uniforms, is all very bizarre and out of step with the rest of the movie.

In a stranger-than-fiction moment, as the two talk about a woman who’s walked out on her man so she can be with someone else, Kareena tells Shahid “When somebody’s in love, there’s no right or wrong.”  Ouch!  What’s Hindi for ‘foreshadowing’?

I’ve commented in the past on the occasional gaffes you see with subtitles, and there was funny little bit of that in Jab We Met: during one song, the voice sings “sa-re-ga-ma etc etc” but onscreen we read the English equivalent “do - ti –la – so – fa - fa etc etc” and it’s completely at odds with what we’re hearing, which are not even words.

See it or skip it?

Aww, see it!  It’s a lighthearted, sweet movie, perfect for a Sunday, when you don’t want to watch anything too heavy before the work week begins again.  Kareena is likeable as the bubbly, confident Punjabi kudi, and Shahid, rapidly gaining onscreen presence, was well able to hold his own and not be drowned out by his ex-. 

The first glimpse I caught of Anees Bazmi’s marrying-into-the-mafia caper Welcome was an ad on a small TV screen by a bank of elevators in an office park in Bombay, just before the film opened.  I normally wouldn’t rush to a movie like this, with all the promise of madcap slapstick, but there on that little screen I spied Nana Patekar frolicking in a musical number with Mallika Sherawat.  Nana dancing?  Nana in a comedy?  Must see for me!

Nana’s been a baddie on screen for so long that I always get a little thrill seeing him step out and do comedy roles, like Taxi Number 9211.  In Welcome, he plays Uday Shetty, mafia don and wanna-be actor, as well as brother to Majnu (Anil Kapoor) and Sanjana (Katrina Kaif).  All Uday and Majnu want to do, when they’re not doing mafia business, is to get Sanjana married off to a respectable family.  Enter Rajiv (Akshay Kumar), the loveable and goofy nephew of Dr. Ghungroo, who also wants to marry off his young charge to a respectable family.  The rest of the movie is about how Sanjana and Rajiv fall in love and want to marry, with their families and super-don RDX (Feroz Khan) getting the way.

The movie was filmed in UAE and South Africa, but in spite of the jet-setting patina, the two big scenes at the end are sloppy in their denouement and both go on way too long.  Surely I can’t be the only one who gets restless and twitchy during these kind of unending chases?  Ugh. 

There’s a slight diversion as Uday is conned into thinking he’s replacing Suniel Shetty in a movie directed by Vijay Raaz, but aside from a few smirk-inducing moments, the concept just lays there.

The saving grace - for me - was the music, and its song picturizations.  There are a few Roger Rabbit-ish touches in the closing credits song, but the real fun is watching Nana shake a leg, first in the item number Hoth Rasiley with the amazingly luscious Malaika Arora in jeweled bra-top and billowing orange harem pants/skirt, and then in the Kiya Kiya number with Mallika Sherawat.  Nana appears in the first song in a wine-colored velvet jacket and a long pirate headscarf, in the latter, in a Bluffmaster-y red and white floral shirt over jeans, sporting a yellow gerbera daisy over his right ear as he charms Mallika, and later in a tight green t-shirt, knit cap and ripped jeans.  Perhaps not ‘age appropriate’ clothes for your average 57-year-old, but then again, hamara Vishwanath is not average by a long shot, and anyway, isn’t 57 the new 37?

See it or skip it?

Unless you’re a big fan of one of the leads, you could miss this one and not regret it.  Nana’s great fun, but even he can’t carry Welcome alone.

But regardless, the nomination has been significant.  And to judge by the increasing amount of coverage that Deepa Mehta’s Water has gotten on Indian television in the past few weeks, and the mention of it by Karan Johar and Anupama Chopra when interviewing them both in the past six days, it’s clear that this Canadian entry for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards has gotten a second wind with making it to this illustrious shortlist of five. 

Water releases (finally) in India on March 9th.

After having listened to, and loved, a mix version of Kya Mujhe Pyar Hai for ages and ages now, I finally got to watch Woh Lamhe this weekend.

This is latest Mahesh Bhatt movie about his relationship with the beautiful and tragic Parveen Babi.  (There were two or so other Bhatts involved in the film as well.)

Parveen Babi enjoyed great success in the 1970s, in movies like Deewar and Amar, Akbar, Anthony, but as the ’80s got into full swing, her star descended and eventually she left Bombay to live in New York.  In the interim, she began to exhibit increasingly erratic behaviour that seemed to suggest she was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - at one point saying that Amitabh Bachchan was trying to kill her - and following a return to Bombay, she died alone in her apartment in January 2005.

Shiney Ahuja plays Aditya Grewal, the Mahesh Bhatt prototype.  (With names like Shiney and Chunkey in Bollywood, I think people should lay off Demi Moore and Gwenyth Paltrow for their unusual choice of names for their offspring in recent years.)  Parveen, or Sana Azim, as it were, is played by Kangana Ranaut, who already starred with Shiney in Bhatt’s Gangster.

Kangana has an unconventional beauty, and features, when she’s shot at certain angles, that sometimes actually don’t look all that beautiful.  Two of her strongest physical assets are luxuriously long and curly hair, and a fantastic figure, both which the film use to great advantage.  In the first half hour of the film, when it’s established that Sana is a famous actress and model, we see her in a variety of revealing costumes, accessorized with lots of jewelry, even in her hair, and I don’t mean the usual traditional tikkas and such.

Sana, whose mother is only concerned with her famous daughter’s image and wealth, is in an abusive relationship with fellow actor, Nikhil Rai, when she is insulted and challenged by struggling filmmaker, Aditya, at a Bollywood party one night.  Intrigued, she agrees to work on Grewal’s debut picture, much to the objection of her money-grubbing manager and various male hangers-on leeching off her.  

Soon after Sana dumps her boyfriend.  And yes, of course, next thing up, she falls in love with Aditya while on location in Dubai.  This movie is not as typically discreet as most Bollywood fare is, and so not only do Aditya and Sana lock lips, they also have a fairly explicit (by Hindi film standards) love scene, and it’s plain throughout the rest of the film that they bed down together without the benefit of marriage.  (There’s also a discreetly filmed, but explicit in its own way, rape scene.)

All that said, the main focus of the film is Sana’s mental unraveling while Aditya’s (and his moviemaking partner, Sam’s) career soars.  Alarmed at how her mother and entourage want her treated, he intervenes, thinking he can care for her better, but, this being the Parveen Babi story, it’s a losing battle. 

Woh Lamhe is a little over two hours in length.  As I looked at the counter on the DVD player and saw that the movie was almost over, I jotted down the word “hollow.”  In spite of the supposed great love between Sana and Aditya, I felt nothing.  It was like watching one of the hundreds of MTV India music videos about some boy pursuing some girl.  I wasn’t moved, and I didn’t find anything I saw between the couple as anything more than empty posturing.  Speaking of music videos, I found Chris Isaak and Helena Christansen more involving as they rolled around on that volcanic sand for the picturization of Wicked Game. 

And one other thing.  Can’t someone with an attention to detail get involved in these films for overseeing the subtitles, please?  At one point, after he’s first bedded Sana, just after she utters those three words no guy wants to hear after a fun and meaningless romp, he swings his feet over the side of the bed and says, in English, ”Sh!t!  It’s 4.30!”  The subtitle onscreen, however, read: “Sh*t!  It’s 2.30!”

On a positive note, the film does contain translations of the song lyrics onscreen during the picturizations.

See it or skip it?

This is a tough call.  If you’re happy to look at a very pretty girl in some pretty settings with her handsome love interest, go for it.  If you’re looking for more, and actually want to be moved by the story, you should probably pass on this one.

And whenever Shiney goes to remove his shirt, don your sunglasses.  The man is paler than milk-fed veal and is, I believe, capable of reflecting light.

Director Tanuj Chopra’s touching drama about Elmhurst-based teenager Mameet’s loss of his brother at a robbery in the family’s convenience store will be screened this Friday night (February 2nd) at the Museum of the Moving Image, located just over the 59th street bridge in Astoria.   

The movie starts at 7.30pm and there’ll be a discussion with the director afterward.

If you’re in the NY area, go see it!  In my review here, you’ll see the many reasons why I enjoyed it.

Let’s see, the microphone dipped and appeared onscreen in several shots, the acting was too low key by some actors and too over the top by others, and worst of all, the whole direction the film takes hinges on a misunderstanding that could have easily been cleared up way earlier than it was.

This film is the directorial debut of Manish Gupta, and stars Raj Vasudeva as the recently arrived IT engineer Naveen Reddy, and Shweta Malhotra as Megha, the 2nd gen girl of Gujurati origin who meets and falls in love with him.  Along the way, Naveen is treated badly by his exploitative boss, Bobby Patel, who warns him off Indian-American girls as “too much to handle.”  There are assorted friends on both sides, including Rushi, who refers to FOBs not as “Eff-Oh-Bees,” but rather “fobs”, and tells of responding to one who asked her what time it was, only to find the hapless guy instantly smitten with her.  Ugh.

The two lead actors are the only ones who engender any believability for how they handle themselves in their roles.  The rest of the film screams “First time attempt.”  And it succumbs to the worst error that some Hindi movies make, which is dragging out a plot twist. 

In this film, someone lies and leads Megha and her family to believe that Naveen is married already, the wife back in India while he looks for a U.S. girl for a green card.  Had this been real life, I can’t believe that no one would have actually said to Naveen much earlier on “How could you be married and lie about it?”  Instead, after 2 or 3 (I lost count) encounters after the erroneous tip surfaces, all that was said by the actors were frustratingly vague, indirect statements, going nowhere near the actual issue at hand, when you know someone really should have burst out the truth in anger. 

See it or skip it?

Skip it.

Ok, it’s not Bollywood, nor indie, but it does have a lead desi actor - Kal Penn - who we’re seeing more and more of, and with a big release - The Namesake - just around the corner.

I thought this was going to be a total frat boy, asinine joke fest (think American Pie), but, bathroom humor included, there were some genuine laugh-out-loud moments, and the film, part caper, part road movie, part buddy film, has a crisp, well produced look to it.

Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn, or Kalpen Modi) are Cheech and Chong for the 21st century, though younger and not quite as crusty looking.  Both boys love to sit in their Hoboken (of course, Ground Zero for hard partying frat boys) bachelor pad and light up a blunt.

Harold, Korean-American number cruncher working at an investment bank, is the more tightly wound of the duo.  Kumar, pressured by his father (a doctor) to go to med school and follow in his footsteps, is more laid back and unflappable in most scrapes he manages to get into.  One Friday night, Harold comes home, bummed out over work his colleagues have dumped on him for the weekend, and his own fear of talking to the pretty Maria who lives in their building, sits down with Kumar and gets stoned.  The two see an ad for White Castle on TV and, now overcome by munchies, set off on a mission to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, home of a 24-hour branch.

Along the way, many stereotypes are trotted out, toyed with, and blown up.  On a stop at Princeton University, Harold bemoans the fact that a Korean girl pursuing him keeps trying to drag him to her priggish Asian-American club.  Cornered by her and them, he’s forced to do some Q & A with a bunch of (surprise) ambitious kids who are even more buttoned up than he is.

Later, the pair meet Neil Patrick Harris as a very horny, older Doogie Howser, and Law and Order’s Christopher Meloni in an amazing make-up job that renders him abhorrent, as a gun-toting, truck-driving Jesus freak with a smoking hot wife.

The movie trots along briskly from one mix-up on to the next mishap, encountering several buffoonish racist cops along the way who, naturally, get their comeuppance.

Having just seen Kal Penn in The Namesake, I have to remark that he seemed more natural as the rubber-faced stoner Kumar than as Gogol.  John Cho is handsome and compact, and, as the “making of” segment reveals, way more of a wild man than his character Harold would lead us to believe.

See it or skip it?

See it.  It’s a fun 90 or so minutes, if you don’t mind some crude potty humor in between tokes and jokes.

Honestly, I had never heard of this 2003 movie until Michael of Bollywoodblog contacted me about joining in today with nine fellow bloggers in Europe and the U.S. for a group review of the film, and virtual meeting with director Sanjay Jha.

Participating in this exercise are:

• from Austria: Baba aur Bollywood
• from Germany: Paint it Pink, Maria, Michael, Mirie and Oliver
• from Switzerland: Marco
• from the U.S.: Beth Loves Bollywood, Totally Basmatic.

Once I finish writing this, I’m off to see what they all had to say.

PJPSNJ is set in a Bombay chawl that is threatened with destruction so the property owner can erect several high-rise luxury apartment buildings in its place.  The movie opens with classic Bombay views: a sunset over the water with highrises in the background, tetrapods at the shore, and, of course, VT.

Just at the same time as the news is delivered to the colorful residents that they have a few months to go until they are evicted, an educated young man, Aman (Aman Verma, who got his start in the Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi soap opera and was one of the bad sons in Baghban) moves in to the chawl, claiming that he wants to study the residents for a thesis he’s writing (though we learn later that’s not the case).

The convention of setting the film in a densely packed location like this allows the director to examine the lives of more characters than most movies (think of Altman’s dizzying and delightful Gosford Park for a similar arrangement), but it certainly is an ambitious choice for someone making their first film.  That’s an awful lot of storylines for the director and scriptwriter - Mahesh Manjrekhar, who also does a turn as the ineffective thug Munnabhai - to keep straight (and resolve).

In the exposition during the first half of the movie, we meet Ganpat (Vijay Raaz), a wizened and wise-cracking sutradhar of sorts, narrating everyones’ lives to Aman, then there’s the small part actress/hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Mona (Namrata Shirodkar), the scheming Mama’s boy who dreams of making a lot of money selling blockbuster movie tix on the black market, a couple of drunk, abusive husbands and their too-beautiful-for-them, long-suffering wives, Raveena Tandon in a very shaadi shuda role as the barren Laxmi who needs an operation to be able to conceive, Diya Mirza as Saundarya, a supposedly ugly girl (because she wears specs??), a Greek chorus of guys (and one lesbian friend?) who do little more than loaf around and live off their parents, and many others.  

Aman wins the trust of the chawl residents, and then their admiration when he floats a loan to the family of a boy who’s fall and visit to a municipal hospital almost killed him, until Aman stepped in and insisted they go to a private one.  Suddenly everyone is tapping him for a loan, and he complies.  To the horror of the chawlwallahs, it turns out Aman’s been setting them up so they will be in debt to his friend, Pravinseth, the chawl-owner.  Unless they return double the amount in 60 days, bulldozers will arrive to demolish their homes.

The crisis forces the residents to band together and come up with a solution, including a trick that Tevye used in Fiddler on the Roof: pretending to have a dream and instructions from the Great Beyond.  Laxmi claims that the Goddess Sati has informed her in a dream that her husband Mahendra will die in 30 days time and if Laxmi commits sati on his pyre, she will be redeemed.  This touches off a carnivaleque month in the main courtyard of the chawl that allows all sorts of money to be earned to pay off the debt: darshans of not just Laxmi, but also of her chappal, a pau bhaji stand, a merry-go-round to keep the kids busy, a cow to be honored by feeding grass (available for a price), etc etc etc. 

Sanjay Jha seizes this opportunity to skewer various political and religious groups who take advantage of these type of situations to increase the numbers of their followers, both the saffron brigade and the women’s libbers, no one escapes.

Along the way, Jha displays an affection for, and playful leg-pulling of, Hindi movies.  The opening scene about the chawlwallahs waiting for water turns into Lagaan’s Ghanana Ghanana, characters make references to well known films by name, snippets or even just a few bars of movie music have been dropped in, and even chunks of dialogue mirror classics like Namak Haram and Deewar.  Here’s my list of all the films referred to in one way or another:

1. Lagaan
2. Gupt
3. Bombay
4. DDLJ
5. Namak Haram
6. Deewar
7. Monsoon Wedding
8. Sholay
9. Company

Fine, but does the movie work? 

Well, I would say that Sanjay Jha should get full marks for having either the cojones or the folly to take on such a sprawling story for his debut. 

I liked that the movie had a playful, winking sense of fun and parody, especially the endearing Vijay Raaz who addresses us, speaking directly to the camera.  After Monsoon Wedding, I think this is his best role, and I think he was the strongest player of this ensemble, hitting just the right notes at all times, whether making savvy asides to Aman, or relaying the story of his wife and child’s death, or talking to us like we’re bhai-bhai. 

I loved that Jha championed women in the face of their lazy, randy husbands, and overbearing mothers-in-laws and leering men, and that the women unapolegetically took action to deal with their situations, rather than just do the expected and suffer silently.

I also loved that the movie brought together Raveena Tandon, Namrata Shirodkar, Rinke Khanna and Sushmita Sen and got such good performances from them, though I found the snippets with Sush to be somewhat forced and jarring.  And don’t get me wrong, I adore Sush; her mujra was the only saving grace of Kisna, even though she was only on screen for a few minutes.  I find her a much more compelling, earthy and beautiful alternative to Aishwarya Rai, who, sure, is lovely and graceful but seems to have no depth and be a flash-frozen automaton.

All that said, I think that the intent of the film over-reached, compared to what it was able to achieve.  With so, so many characters (what, something like 20?) to portray, a movie can go one of two ways: either portrayals become shorthand for types that we are all-too-familiar with, or they are artfully rendered by a strong script with the masterful touch of just a few lines of dialogue.  I think PJPSNJ falls somewhere in between, tilting a bit more toward the former than the latter, and the fault for that I would rest more at the feet of the Manjrekhar than Jha.  To go back to the Gosford Park example, it was Julian Fellowes’ dialogue that told us so clearly in very few (and often overlapping) words, what each character was about.

On the subject of dialogue, I liked Jha’s tribute - spoken by Gandhiji’s ghost R.K. Laxman’s The Common Man - to the hardworking people like those chawlwallahs who slog through life and still manage to laugh and love and care for each other.  Yes, it was a bit hokey and didn’t really say anything new about that populace, but still, it’s endearing to see a filmi story once in a while that isn’t all about the bling and the pierced bellybutton.

See it or skip it?

See it.  It’s wonderful to see Raveena doing more than just being her pretty self and playing some lead actor’s girlfriend, Vijay Raaz is terrific, and if you love Hindi movies, you may get a kick out of the in-jokes.

And, as I was just reminded at Paint it Pink, there was a funny ad for Old Monk rum.  Ugh, how do people drink that stuff?  It’s like cough medicine, but worse!  Bleahhhh.

I finally found the missing link. 

While almost all of AB 2.0’s recent work is pretty solid (other than his sleepwalk in last year’s Sarkar), after having seen Refugee and Kuch Naa Kaho I didn’t really want to see more of the early movies from his filmography, though I had wondered how he got from the somewhat stiff and gangly boyish figure he was then to the smouldering, fleshy man he has become since playing Lallan in Yuva.

And then I watched Ram Gopal Varma’s Naach, released in 2004, the same year as Mani Ratnam’s opus.  You can almost see Abhi shedding the skin to reveal Lallan. 

Naach tells the story of Reva (Antra Mali), an impoverished - yet principled - dancer and choreographer, living in a beautifully decorated Bombay apartment with a rooftop open-air dance studio all to herself.  We meet her as she struggles to get work, being passed over by directors who admit to her that they have to go with other, better known and uninspired choreographers who have connections and the faith of the investors.  Reva meets Abhinav after they’ve both come from the same office and their respective tryouts.  He needs to learn to dance to make it as an actor and asks her to teach him.

Now, I’m better with a pen or a keyboard than on the floorboards, but I couldn’t help but wonder, why does a guy trying to break into Bollywood movies go to a modern dancer for lessons?  Wouldn’t he better served going to someone who teaches the balle balle here-I-am-at-the-engagement-party kind of dance instead?

But ok, it’s a plot twist central to the story, so I’ll play along.  Abhi convinces Reva to teach him and soon he’s up on the roof with her doing similar contortions and poses to the ones that she does (except he only wears an anklet at one point, while the sexy and daring Antra - later to become Antara - has a small Om tatoo on her right shoulder and a pierced navel).  Even to my amateur eyes, I have to remark that every time we see Reva dancing, there is no flow to what she does at all, rather she’ll crouch down, lift one limb this way or that, arc her arms and hands around her face and pose.  That said, I was impressed by Antra Mali’s incredible physical condition, and according to an old Rediff article, she has a history of dance dating back to way before taking on this role.

After some lessons, the two start to become friends.  After a day and night hanging out together, as they shelter from a rainstorm, Abhi declares “I love you” and catalogues a list of what he loves about Reva.  Had it been better written, the dialogue could have been touching or funny or realistic or all of the above, but in this film it just sounds hollow and stilted.  The thing is though, it seems unbelievable that the two have feelings for each other.  Antra always looks distant and slightly miffed, and AB 2.0 looks like my ex- used to when he’d pose in front of the mirror, just someone pretending to be doing a modeling shoot, as opposed to inhabiting the skin of a character.  In spite of the gorgeous bodies of both actors, there is also not even a frisson of excitement when the two are together.  It’s as if they were both in their own invisible, hermetically sealed compartments.

Abhinav’s career takes off and soon he’s rolling in money and fame, both which he’s told Reva more than once he wants very much.  Next up, the predictable difficulties between the two as a result.  After a huge fight where Abhi tells Reva to get off her high, condescending horse, they break up. 

Reva meets Diwarkar (Ritesh Deshmukh), who produces music videos, and who wants her to choreograph his next.  She agrees and he is soon smitten with Reva, though she’s oblivious.  Her persuades her to be the lead dancer in the video and soon both of them are garnering raves and are all over TV.

After Bluffmaster was released Abhishek often commented, jokingly, that Ritesh was a fool to appear in the Ek Main Aur Ek Tu music video with that Don King hairdo that he sported, but I must say that while his hair is ok in Naach, Ritesh’s facial hair, or rather, the patchiness thereof, is awful.  He has a moustache, a soul patch (thank God they’re on their way out!), and this archipelago of tufts of fluff that are supposed to comprise a beard.  Then, the costume people stick him in some  silly headgear (including a knitted wool cap, ugh, in Bombay??).

Diwarkar next wants to do a musical and both he and Reva realize that the best person for the male lead is (guess who?), Abhi!  He agrees, though it seems like his main purpose in this endeavor is to lift or hold Reva.

Diwarkar wears proto-Daniel Liebeskind specs (so we know he’s a serious artiste like Reva), and he gets his actors to wear a variety of questionable outfits in his musical. 

Abhishek may not have shaved his head for Yuva, but he did wear this headwrap in Naach, forever memorialized on celluloid:

Antra doesn’t get off entirely scot free either.  The costume people thought that the one knee-high look for the outfit she wore while dancing on the beach was good enough to repeat:

In some of the many musical numbers filmed on the beach, Antra looks stunning, and vaguely reminiscent of JLo, though every so often, some of the clothes call to mind old Duran Duran videos:

One thing that is quite remarkable is that for a film about dance, the music is largely clumsy and unremarkable.  The only two songs that had any life to them at all are Ishq da Tadka and Berang Zindagi. 

As I watched this film I thought to myself “They’re trying to do something here, but what?”  Fair play to RGV, there are some creative and different shots and the sets and lighting feel more real than some Hindi movies, but he’s more in his element when portraying the underworld environment of Company and Sarkar.  And I had to laugh when one of the producers, viewing his own schloky work says that famous line right out of Company: “It’s bad, but it’s business.”  How many directors quote their own lines?

See it or skip it?

Pass on this one.  I give it points for trying something different, but with disappointing, bloodless results.  This movie is really only for people who are diehard fans of RGV or any of the three actors in this movie.