Yuvvraaj: Meet Prince Harming
Genre: Drama
Director: Subhash Ghai
Cast: Anil Kapoor, Salman Khan, Zayed Khan, Katrina Kaif, Boman Irani, Mithun Chakraborty
Storyline: Rain Man set in Austria with paintings and music, minus the best parts.
Bottomline: Ghai lives in the eighties
The best part about Yuvvraaj were the trailers that played during the interval.
Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance seems like an insider’s take on the Hindi film industry starring Farhan Akhtar, Konkana Sen, Rishi Kapoor, Juhi Chawla, Sanjay Kapoor, Isha Shervani, Dimple Kapadia and surprise, surprise… Hrithik Roshan.
The promo of Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky Lucky Oye entertained much more in a minute with its fun vibe than all of Yuvvraaj and Sunny Deol seems to be making a comeback to serious cinema with a courtroom drama ‘Right Yaa Wrong’ opposite Irrfan Khan. Whoa!
The future is bright. Truly time for Ghai to gracefully raise his hat and retire. No self respecting filmmaker would have continued to make films after a film like Kisna. But Ghai is made of thicker stuff.
If you’ve forgotten your moral science lessons from school or the villains from that era, you have to thank Mr.Ghai for taking you back to that time in Hindi cinema when greedy relatives used poison to kill the rightful heir to a huge fortune.
That long forgotten era when dialogues were considered to be subtle as long as the hero didn’t introduce himself as “Main Salman Khan Is Film Ka Main Hero Hoon.” In Yuvvraaj, the vamp never expressly uses the word “gold-digger” to admit that she’s one. She just says she wanted him only as long as he had his money and style.
Subhash Ghai is the master of that kind of subtlety (We suspect he also interned with Sanjay Leela Bhansali during Black and Saawariya).
It’s quite subtle how he quietly sneaks in a huge painting of wolves to form the backdrop of a scene where the villains get together to conspire against the hero.
A few scenes later, he shows us multiple shots of masks to suggest that one of the characters has started to believe that people are not what they are. Just to make sure you got that brilliant metaphor, the showman also shows us two characters literally holding the masks and taking them off. Cue in the music and the melodrama. What a waste of truly epic music. Let’s hope Rahman got paid a bomb for this. It would hurt any creator to see his work used like this, no matter how grand the sets look.
Yuvvraaj, like its title, is so beyond its expiry date and old fashioned, that Ghai probably wrote his script in hieroglyphics. That should explain quite a bit of that visual cues that dominate production design.
After taking half the length of the film to do what Barry Levinson’s ‘Rain Man’ did within its first ten minutes, Ghai tries to set the stage for Anil Kapoor to do a Dustin Hoffman in the second half of the
film. He replaces mathematical prowess with musical genius, trying to recreate the Taal effect.Anil is quite sincere too but what can he do in a role where he comes across like Michael Jackson in a room full of children. But obviously, Ghai has filled his room with children to subtly show you that this mentally ill man may need to constantly dye his hair black but he is like a child too.
Salman Khan is good where he has to fool around and just chill, chill but when it comes to heavy-duty drama, you just can’t take Sallu wearing a shirt, a suit and what not… Obviously he would be suffocated. And what’s with bad hair dye in this movie?
Katrina is quite natural when she has to moon over Salman and honestly, she does not need to act to win us over. Zayed Khan gets plenty of action here in a role that just needs to him act cool and
slap the hell out of Anil Kapoor. From what we see of the vamps, it is obvious that Mr.Ghai knows what the front-benchers want to see. He simply must graduate to porn for he seems to have a natural flair for erotica.
Unfortunately however, Yuvvraaj isn’t amusingly bad as Kisna and features no kinky Tarzan dance. This is the kind of bad film that you can’t even laugh at because when you have been held hostage for over three hours to endure painfully staid moral science lessons, the joke is on you.
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Dostana: When Chuck and Larry became Deewana-Mastana
There’s a thin line between making something outrightly subversive and completely juvenile. Judd Apatow’s brand of filmmaking walks that line. And Tarun Mansukhani’s effort stays shamelessly juvenile and is great fun if that’s all you need from your cinema.
But the tragedy about Dostana is that with a little more intelligence, it could’ve been a subversive masterstroke.
Yes, it is politically incorrect, irreverent and replete with gay stereotypes but if you forgive the trappings that come with being a mainstream Bollywood mass-based film, here’s a film that, even if half-heartedly or unintentionally, not just celebrates male bonding and but also converts its homophobic protagonists into guys who soon become comfortable in roles they pretend to assume and finally become people who don’t mind being officially recorded as ‘gay’ even (when they are not) simply because it makes lives easier for them.
Spoiler Alert till end of paragraph (Highlight to read): Towards the end, they are even made to kiss as ‘punishment’ for making homosexuality seem like a joke and that would’ve redeemed these juvenile characters a great deal, even if not wholly, had Bobby Deol not commented in disbelief that he would’ve never ever done anything like that (like kiss a man). Bobby saying that defeats the purpose of the exercise of teaching the homophobes a lesson because his reaction still makes the idea of two men kissing seem like the “unthinkable”. The ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’-ish ending doesn’t help things either.
If the intention was to at least fake a semblance of political correctness, Dostana fails miserably. At no point does it come across as a film you would take seriously. It does make fun of gay people with its unpardonable stereotypes at one level but then, it’s also the kind of film that is likely to make the homophobe think again about what exactly is he/she afraid of about gay people?
At this stage of transition in outlook towards homosexuality, Dostana may just do the trick in making more people warm up to the idea of same sex couples simply because they’ve seen known straight icons like John Abraham and Abhishek share a sparkling chemistry pretending to be gay to a greater extent than Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan did in Kal Ho Na Ho. Even if it is just for a dream sequence or a scenes of make-believe, visuals of two male icons dancing and romancing each other are likely to be strongly ingrained in the subconscious of the society. And two men having fun pretending is a great start because the first step towards an inclusive society is starting a dialogue.
Unless we joke about it, we won’t talk about it. And unless we talk about it, we are never going to understand another perspective.
Dostana, though set in Miami, largely reflects a society in transition and begins to address the issues of acceptance within the Indian framework of marriage and saas-bahu dynamics. The screenplay largely derived out of Hollywood romantic comedies and a few episodes of Friends does have its share of problems as characters walk in and disappear forever after much build-up. But there are a few nice touches that are essentially Indian. Like the bit when Abhishek swears that Gabbar Singh was gay. Or when he wonders aloud about Munnabhai’s affection for Circuit. But then again, you can’t help but remember that conversation in ‘Sleep With Me’ about Top Gun being the story of a man’s struggle with homosexuality.
Abhishek Bachchan, John Abraham and Boman Irani make even stereotypes delightful and Priyanka hasn’t looked better or dumber ever before as you are left wondering why would anyone in the right mind ever fall for/cast Bobby Deol? Haven’t they seen him shirtless in Apne? What would’ve been a cool twist is if Dharmendra Da Puttar was cast against the type and it turned out that he was gay. This would’ve also fixed the stereotype overdose.
Political incorrectness aside, Dostana is great mass entertainment manipulating the inherent homophobia of a country in the threshold of change, as it gets parents and children to share laughs over alternative sexuality and related issues that will no longer remain in the closet.
Vaaranam Aayiram: Gautham’s Autograph
Though similar to Cheran’s autograph, this has Gautham’s signature all over it in big block letters.
Vaaranam Aayiram is an uncompromising film that’s all heart, indulgent and personal and that’s why you would be tempted to overlook the length, the pace and the overdose of voiceover that expressly overstates the obvious… It is somewhat strange when so much of it is spelt out in English and it does get to you when every sentence in the voiceover ends with “Daddy” but soon, you forget all about it and get sucked into another great moment.
The entire film is a collection of some truly great moments packaging nostalgia. And it’s the Suriya Show all the way as he turns in a career best performance as a father and the young man from 17 to 35. After Vaaranam, we can say for sure that he’s the best of the lot today. Here’s a guy who is content feeding the actor than the star in him and he revels in this role knowing pretty well that it could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to do an ‘Aarulirundhu Aruvadhu Varai.’
The filmmaker seems to have a natural flair for romance and Vaaranam in many ways plays out as the Best of Gautham. So yes, this is a nostalgia film that is bound to give you a sense of deja vu. There are times when we are hit with a little ‘Minnale,’ and times when we get the feel of ‘Kaakha Kaakha’ or ‘Vettaiyaadu.’ Maybe because they were born out of his personal experiences at some level – be it the loverboy who pursues and woos the girl he met once against all odds (Minnale) or the dignified officer who’s being wooed (Kaakha Kaakha) or when he’s showing us grown up romance (like Vettaiyaadu). But it also reminds you of your own days back in college, your first love and your relationship with your Dad.
While most of the individual chapters work well, the problem areas in Vaaranam are those sequences that try to connect the different phases in the young man’s life – whether it’s the period when he buys a house overnight for his father when he’s yet to clear his arrears in college or the phase during his addiction, these are bits that are conveniently and quickly resolved within a couple of scenes each.
But then, this is also one of those few films that freaks the hell out of you about the consequences of smoking without trying to be a full blown message film about deaddiction and rehabilitation.
For a film about a father-son relationship, there is no serious conflict between the two ever (except for a brief exchange during his addiction) and the lack of conflict results in the film becoming an assortment of episodes rather than one seamless narrative. Though each episode keeps you adequately engrossed, the voiceover that ties it together is a little weak making you wonder how long is that damn chopper ride?
But then, just around the time you are getting a little restless, there’s a Harris Jeyaraj number around the corner all set to haunt and play in your head in a loop, till the next one comes along.
Simran is the best of the women – it’s a great comeback vehicle for one of the best Tamil actresses ever. Sameera should seriously stick to sarees, she’s never looked better (except maybe in that Pankaj Udhas video Aahista Aahista) and Divya Spandana is a natural. It is quite a task to make a film without a comedy track or a serious villain or a filmy conflict and Gautham has made a fairly engaging film that strikes a chord despite its imperfections.
Fashion & Golmaal Returns: Belated Views
Fashion:
Bhandarkar’s definition of realism is making dramatically depressing films. Time and again, he’s passed off his brand of depression as realism simply because the world he sets his characters in seem real and are peopled with stereotypes that you would identify with that universe. He slaps his middle-class morality into every territory he’s ever explored and has branded himself as a hard-hitting filmmaker known to expose truths.
Fashion is among his better formula films because it has a few interesting characters but Bhandarkar lets them down in not fleshing out the key parts of what’s interesting about them most. Why would a girl (Priyanka) who has reservations about sharing a house with a guy she trusts not even discuss or think about having an affair with a married man? What exactly is going through Mughda’s head when she agrees to marry her gay best friend and are there no complications that arise out of an unnatural marriage between a straight woman and a gay man? Kangana’s is one of the most interesting characters but then we hardly get to know much of her other than the fact that she keeps going back to her abusive boyfriend, does drugs and punctuates every sentence screaming Bastard. And does wardrobe malfunction have to be treated with so much melodrama – it’s something most model experience and Carol Gracias got an applause for the way she carried herself. The world of Fashion is much more understanding than as seen from Bhandarkar’s blinders.
Golmaal Returns:
Irreverence and self-deprecation is in, thanks to Om Shanti Om. Like the first installment, Golmaal Returns is equally forgettable but entertaining nonetheless. But seriously, imagine the audacity of the filmmaker to repeat his gags all over again just because the title promises that the franchise has returned.
This is strictly for fans of the first installment simply because there’s more of the same old. Devgan is less smarter this time around, Sharman has been substituted with Shreyas, Arshad has been reassigned a cop’s role and Tusshar reprises his role of playing the animated mute who talks through noises. Apart from Shreyas who rocks this part, the rest are barely passable and Arshad is worst hit with hardly any lines to keep himself afloat.
