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Dabbler
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Anna
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reviews
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Ekk Deewana Tha (2012, Hindi)
There’s an old saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Never has this been truer for any other remake, adaptation or copy in th... There’s an old saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Never has this been truer for any other remake, adaptation or copy in the history of Indian cinema. Appallingly bad choice is the kindest one could be to explain Gautam Menon’s fall from grace. He allows a big studio to ruin his very special love story by offering his Hindi audience a mindless, odiously inferior version of the original.
Not that the original version was Roman Holiday, but the music is so memorable, and the subtitles helped endear the not-Ryan Gosling-in-the-looks-department hero to the audiences because he could emote. The heroine Trisha was just brilliant and we have been offered her poor country cousin version in Ekk Deewana Tha. The original Vinaythaandi Varuvaaya worked because the story was written with the two very similar and yet vastly different cultures in mind, and set in a city that seems modern and yet very segregated in its roots anchored by custom and tradition. Everything in the frame created a mood and was there for a reason. The girl who takes a chartered bus to work, her clothes, her need to conform, her father’s religious compulsions, the hero’s need to pen everything down because he knows he needs to tell a story on film some day... Alas, Gautam Menon give this beautiful treasure up for cheap retelling.
So you decide to re-tell the story. Why did you drown your common sense in the backwaters of Kerala? Thankfully, this utter lack of sense creates much room for heckling and inadvertent laughter.
‘Dad did not let me see movies’, She says, and everybody in the audience mutters, ‘Riiiiight!’And some smart aleck heckles, ‘And TV hasn’t been invented either!’
The phone plays a very important part in the heroine’s life. She seems to be talking to phantom friends all the time. In fact the phone is so important to her, we see the phone in her hand when the hero and the heroine embrace. Huge marketing opportunity lost in finding telecom partners...
And yes, the need for showing how serious/studious/professional the heroine is fulfilled when she appears in a song with a laptop bag!
The director brings out the mothering instincts in all the females in the audience by making sure the make up on the heroine is more suitable for Neetu Singh of Dhan Daulat (she owns a car garage) than for someone who sits in an air-conditioned office analysing data on the computer. The grease-engine oil combination adds nothing to the young British actor pretending to be Mallu. Maybe they should have used some of that oil to her frizzed hair which makes her look as though she had been moonlighting in a scary movie.
And the choice of that name for the hero is rather unfortunate. Each time someone in the movie called him by his name, a section of the audience bored out of their wits with the poor dialog delivery and the lack of chemistry between the lead actors, would shout, ‘Saaachin! Saachin!’ as they would at a cricket stadium.
Digitally altering Prateik’s voice to make it sound less like an eleven year old girl did much to encourage hecklers to say ruder things about the posed show of triceps and biceps by holding his head John Abraham style. And the Springboek/ Riverdance like leaps ever so often were more alarming than sweet. In fact sometimes, he leaped so high, he could easily jump up to the first floor to meet her instead of taking the steps.
I know I am being rather unkind here. But the original was so dipped-in-honey delectable and so grounded in spite of the fairy tale idea of love-at-first-sight (see it online here), that this slow-paced, never ending disaster of a movie simply annoys you.
The one and only saving grace is Manu Rishi who plays the mentor, voice of reason to the dumb hero. But even his presence and role cannot save this Titanic, especially when the iceberg is the director himself.
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A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2010, English)
If you find yourself raising eyebrows and wondering if our geriatric Censor Board was caught collectively napping when they allowed this mov... If you find yourself raising eyebrows and wondering if our geriatric Censor Board was caught collectively napping when they allowed this movie to slip through their scissors, wonder no more. There is a revising committee that has brought in people to sweep away needless editing and snipping off the so called ‘objectionable scenes. Whyever did they not want to certify and allow The Girl With The Dragon’s Tattoo to be screened is anyone’s guess.
My bets would be on the pirate movie business someone might have their fingers steeped in...
This movie, as the title suggests, has an adult content. It rightfully has an adult certification. Thankfully, the movie has been made with a huge dollop of humor which saves it from being smut.
As the synopsis suggests, the movie is about friends celebrating the last of their wild parties at the home of the hero before it is sold. The idea is so outrageous, that they are compelled to see it through. We suspect the disasters that could happen in such situations and they do. The obvious characterisation of the friends means that people sitting in the audience find themselves at least one person to empathise with.That, together with funny one-liners that Hollywood is good with make for a funny movie that you could see with friends. Especially when you are drunk enough to ignore the mistakes, but not so drunk that you miss the funny moments.
Unfortunately, the movie is not so hilarious that you would want to leave your sitcoms and drive through traffic to make it to the multiplex.
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Safe House (2012, English)
Don’t be fooled by the star cast. Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington in a CIA thriller of betrayal and double-cross and murder and car ch... Don’t be fooled by the star cast. Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington in a CIA thriller of betrayal and double-cross and murder and car chases across continents. Bah! Ryan Reynolds can try and try to get out of his charming romantic hero mould but doesn’t. Not with this story. And Denzel Washington is perhaps going the Shah Rukh Khan way when he hams through really ridiculous 94 minutes of this silly drama.
Silly because you hope one of them dies so the movie can end. I could not believe I was waiting for Ryan Reynolds to take his shirt off just to break the stupid ‘action’ mode of this movie. Chase sequences that are so boring you begin to root for the bad guys chasing Denzel Washington in the street (we liked it when the hero vanishes in the Irish parade in The Fugitive, 1993, here a parade was just too random). We don’t care for the parkour like jumping from roof to roof in the poor district. We think the gun fight where all the CIA folk die is annoying. We don’t even flinch when the obviously rotten egg in the CIA turns out to be the rotten egg and shoots the good gal dead. We don’t care for the setting. It could have been Bombay for all the connect they make with the audience or Timbuctoo. And the end could not more welcome.
Why would you want to play with your money when they don’t care to offer you a good story? Keep your money in the safehouse. And wait for something better to come along.
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The Woman in Black (2012, English)
I love horror movies. I like the alarm, the sudden falling of the heart into the lap of my stomach. I love, yes indeed, I love the furious c... I love horror movies. I like the alarm, the sudden falling of the heart into the lap of my stomach. I love, yes indeed, I love the furious churning of the contents of my stomach when alien creatures out to eat people spew green phlegm, the bile welling up even when the movie is not a horror film but manages to evince a visceral reaction from you (prime example, is when human fat in the ziploc bag drips after the bag is snagged in the barbed wire between Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in Fight Club)
There’s nothing wrong with the scarefest in Woman In Black. There are enough moments where you realise that your back is stuck to the seat, where you realise that you are holding your breath in sheer anticipation. The biggest problem for me was watching Harry ... Erm... Play grown up. And that too a widower with kids. Daniel Radcliffe is too much of boy wizard and I am not sorry when I say his expressions are not exactly far away from those we have seen in seven movies where he comes face to face with Voldemort. In fact, he is now so typecast that you expect Voldemort to come hissing at the lad from the next dark corner. Being typecast is not bad because it hides the flaws in the plot.
This movie is set in England, but it fails to rise beyond the mists and the marshes and silly Victorian dolls and the mysteriously rocking horse. Puhleeees! Get rid of the flickering candles and the predictable hostility of the weird looking locals and you have only shadows that pass you by and ghosts who creep up from behind you. What Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch Project and Saw achieved with their easy access to the inside of your head, movies such as Woman In Black fall under the same category as the very Bollywood scream fare that is loud and mostly silly, eg. Haunted and Ragini MMS. There are moments that alarm you, but none worth the price of the multiplex ticket.
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activities on filmOrbit
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Manisha Lakhe
reviewed Ekk Deewana Tha
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Manisha Lakhe
reviewed A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
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Manisha Lakhe
reviewed Safe House
