Mysorean

The core team [Rajkumar Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Sanjay Dutt, Arshad Warsi, Bomman Irani and Jimmy Shergill] and concept [Hardhitting and throught-provoking messages through sentimental but class comedy!] of “Lage Raho Munnabhai” is the same as its prequel “Munnabhai. M.B.B.S”. But, this sequel stands on its own as another legend in Indian cinema.

Making a classic first-up might be easy a la “DCH” by Farhan Akhtar and following it up with a good but not as classy “Lakshya” is easier and doing a remake of an already established hit “Don” is the easiest. Even RGV is following the same pattern with “Shiva 2006″. It would have been very easy for Hirani and team to follow the same pattern and ensure a box office hit. But they have really done it the right way. “Sachchayi ke raaste pe chale hain”! And the output is really commendable. No not commendable, outstanding.

Munnabhai and Sirkeet (it’s actually circuit, but in mumbaiya you know…) are busy going about their bhaigiri business. No baggage from the prequel of doctors is ever brought in here. In fact you don’t even expect it. You are just so busy cracking up in laughter and stamping the floor with your feet in roaring laughter to the wit of Sirkeet and the put-on innocence of Munnabhai that you are totally into the movie by the time the first act is done. It is adequately known that they work for Lakhbir Singh aka Lucky (Bomman Irani) and help the builder build an infrastructure empire while Munnabhai is head-over-heels in love with a Radio Jockey called “Jhanavi”.

Then, Munnabhai poses as Professor Murali Prasad Sharma and cracks a quiz on Mahatma Gandhi that has “Meet Jhanavi in her studio” as a prize. The cracking of the quiz is as hillarious an act as are the “sambhodit” & “vinambra” ones. Munnabhai is subsequently invited home by Jhanavi to preach the old men in her house on “Gandhiji”. Now, Munnabhai is in yet another predicament. A kind of predicament that is very familiar to the audience by now. And just when you are expectingthe old wine of “Munnabhai. M.B.B.S” to be served from the new bottle, the movie takes you by surprise and throws you into a roller-coaster ride of emotions, mostly funny though. And the tearful moments brought a tear to my eye. And when the movie ended I found the audience doing a move in sync of wiping tears that have settled at the corner of their eyes waiting to slide down their cheeks. I wanted to clap after the movie was over, but I didn’t. Next time, I will. Yes, the movie is worth watching twice!

The hard-hitting messages in the movie is the hero. The humour is the heroine. And the way that they have hit a unique chemistry or chemical locha [lol!] is where the credit goes to the director. Everyone else is just a character unlike typical hindi cinema where stars take over. I still remember Jeh dot Asthana from “Munnabhai. M.B.B.S”. Now, I will remember the love-to-be-photographed model Lucky Singh! The character makes you laugh here, not the stars, and that’s why the emotions are so genuine.

Rajkumar Hirani and Vidhu Vinod Chopra have written a story that’s ‘brave’ in plain words! To weave humour and emotion into it means you have so much of confidence on your dialogue writers [Rajkumar Hirani and Abhijat Joshi] that they will carry it with aplomb. And man, have they succeeded?! I still laugh when I recollect a few scenes like “Please send a get well soon card to Lucky Singh, woh bahut bhimaar hai”. And the scene just before interval when Munnabhai says “Apun sorry hai re”, I cried then and I can feel the goosebumps while typing this!

Rajkumar Hirani is a director I am now going to nominate as the most worthy successor to hrishi da. Well, he is just been nominated. Not yet there. Two movies of his are classics and worthy of buying original DVDs and preserving for a lifetime. If he can come up with another one at this level, then he might be well up there. Great show Sir! Your style of movie-making is brilliant and the messages you sent across in both of them are not miss-able. We get the point. And very well too! Thanks!

Vidhu Vinod Chopra, thanks to you we now have another school of films coming up. The school of sensible and wholesome entertainment. Please keep at it with these genre of movies and I am sure we will not remember you as a great showman but as a superb producer. I also hope you regain your touch of movie-making and give us more movies like “Parinda”.

Shantanu Moitra’s music is another highlight of the movie. After “Hazaron Khwaishen Aisi”, “Parineeta” and “Yahaan”, this is his fourth movie. And he does a classy job yet again. As classy as the movie itself. My pick is the “pal pal” song. Amazing! And this movie creates another niche in music also. The songs are not typical “pallavi-charanam” kind of arrangement. They have conversations embedded in them and that takes the flavour of the movie forward. Shantanu Moitra’s job was more difficult in that aspect and he comes on tops in that too.

The chemistry between Arshad Warsi and Sanjay Dutt is what makes the movie click. It’s astonishing how they continue to find that wavelength and make us laugh and cry at will. Here like a good sequel, the great bonding between Munna and Sirkeet is established. The total acceptance of Munna by Sirkeet is a potrait painted very well. And when they tell you what’s right and what’s not, you are found nodding your head in total agreement!

Jhanavi played by the effervescent Vidya Balan endears you to her. You begin to love the way she says, “Good Moooooooorning Mumbai” as much as Munna loves it. You are in love with her when Munna is and you are watiing to see when she falls out of it just because Munna lied to her on being a professor. She is lovable and cute. Sweet and fresh. Vidya Balan continues from “Parineeta”. My nomination for the successor to Madhuri Dixit’s throne.

Bomman Irani is at his customary best playing the idiosyncratic sardar. Though he plays the bad guy; the comic touch provided to the character through his mannerisms and obsessions are such a great addition to the character that your heart goes out to him at the end. The sound of signing a deal, the poses to take photographs, the conversations with munna and sirkeet are all something that only Bomman Irani can carry off. My nomination for the successor to the long vacant Great Utpal Dutt’s throne.

Jimmy Shergill, Saurabh Shukla, Khulbhushan Kharbanda and Diya Mirza play small roles with significant impact on the movie. Everyone is noticed. Everyone has an impact.

Overall, a movie that’s in the league of eternal, superlative comedy. I would also go ahead and stick my neck out saying it is in the league of “Golmaal” and “Chupke chupke”. Go and watch it on the big screen. If you miss it, I can promise you that you cannot spend those two and a half hours in a better way. And the message that you get from the movie, you will carry it for a lifetime. A promise. “Bole toh mamu mat ban, jaake dekh ke aa aur bata tere dimaag main kya chemical locha hua bhidu!”

My Rating: *****

Legend:
*Stay at home
**If you have the time to kill, go ahead, but not recommended
***Watch if you are a film buff!
****Go watch it on the big screen!
*****Don’t miss watching this one on the big screen! Avoid piracy!

Links:
Official website
Official Blog
IMDB for Lage Raho Munnabhai(2006)

Another one from Blogical Conclusion. Thought of writing one myself. But when your mind has been expressed so beautifully by someone else, you don’t need to waste energy writing the whole thing out. So here it is.

SILLUNU ORU KADHAL
The New Sunday Express – August 13, 2006

IF you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Cole Porter wrote for Tamil movies, here it is – the title track from Sillunu Oru Kadhal, sung by Tanvi. Paravaigal seyyudhe, pattampoochi seyyudhe… kadhal, she goes, and you only have to translate this to get the mood of Birds do it, bees do it, the opening lines of Porter’s Let’s do it (let’s fall in love), which was immortalised by Ella Fitzgerald in her songbook dedicated to the composer. AR Rahman’s arrangements, though, don’t evoke the dreamy languor of that oldie. Instead, he sets these words to spunky, sprightly, bite-sized bebop riffs; the result comes across as a brassier version of his own Vennila (Iruvar) routed through Dizzy Gillespie’s Oh-Sho-Be-Do-Be. How this number will play in Athipatti I do not know, but it’s fantastic to have Rahman back at his playful best – especially in Tamil cinema, especially when it appeared that he was stashing away the good stuff for the biggies of Bollywood.

The experimentation, the refusal to stick to a winning (or safe) formula is evident even in the not-so-great numbers. The steamy Maja Maja – sung by the dependably-wonderful Shreya Ghoshal along with SPB Charan (who sounds remarkably like his father) – kicks off with guttural clicks, and as Ghoshal croons the opening stanza, Charan oh-so-casually joins her for a line and takes leave just as offhandedly. The dance-ready Machakari (Shankar Mahadevan, Vasundhara Das) has the strangest interludes, one with ghostly vocal harmonising and another full of poppish, faux-African chanting. And Maaricham (Carolisa, Mohammad Aslam, Krishna) is Chandralekha (Thiruda Thiruda) updated to the techno-trance era, where someone – for some reason – begins chanting the name Gautam to the accompaniment of Enigma-like, new-agey music. After this, it’s almost a relief to listen to Ammi Mithichachu (Sirgazhi Sivachidambaram, Swarnalatha, Naresh Iyer, Theni Kunjaramma, Vignesh), a conventional – but catchy – folk tune that’s handed down like a baton from one singer to the next as it races to an explosive finish.

The eminently rewind-worthy Munbe Vaa (Shreya Ghoshal, Naresh Iyer) is a heady love duet whose prelude sets off bubbles of synth-sounds and strings that float through the number, playing tag with the voices. And New York Nagaram has got to be one of the most stylish, least sentimental boy-misses-girl ballads ever. Vaali’s evocative lyrics – vaan ingey, neelam angey, he writes, likening a lonelyheart to a sky that’s lost its blueness – are so casually tossed off by Rahman, they made me imagine the composer with his hands dug deep into the pockets of his jeans, ambling around a snowed-in Big Apple with a broken heart. And the sadness is contagious. Things come together with such a satisfying click – from the masterful use of the female backup singers to the soulful sax interludes – you can’t help looking back at Rahman’s recent Tamil soundtracks and feel a twinge that it’s been so long since he crafted for us such a beauty.

A very fine review of “KANK”. This is a more balanced one than my playful SMS review bashing up the movie. Thought I should put it up here. Picked this one up from Blogical Conclusions. A blog I regularly follow for reviews.

HEART DIRECTOR
The New Sunday Express – August 13, 2006
Karan Johar’s latest is too long, too weepy, but it’s nonetheless the meatiest romantic melodrama in a while.

KARAN JOHAR’S plots can typically be summed up with a one-liner question: Will Shah Rukh Khan get together with X? Will Shah Rukh Khan get together with Kajol (in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai)? Will Shah Rukh Khan get together with his estranged family (in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham)? And so, as Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna – or KANK, as it’s come to be known – began to unfold, and I saw that its one-line plot is whether Shah Rukh Khan (playing Dev) will get together with Rani Mukerji (as Maya), I thought this was going to be just another milking of the same, old formula. I expected a few surprises, sure, for Johar is nothing if not an expert at spinning fresh variations on familiar clichés – that’s why those who don’t care for clichés don’t care for Johar’s cinema – but what I didn’t expect is Bollywood’s most mature, most messy romance since the younger Sridevi set eyes on father-figure Anil Kapoor in Lamhe.

The messiness is due to the fact that Dev and Maya are both married – to fashion-magazine-editor Ria (Preity Zinta) and PR guy Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan) respectively – and the maturity is because their spouses aren’t Ranjeet and Bindu clones who drink and smoke and sleep around. It’s quite the opposite, really – Ria loves Dev, and Rishi loves Maya. But like in all marriages, problems crop up, and that’s when Dev and Maya begin a tentative friendship, only to realise they may actually be made for each other. And here’s the kicker: they’re made for each other because they’re the losers in their respective marriages. They’re the cowards, the ones with the hang-ups, the ones who’d rather wallow and seethe inside than take a step to set things right outside. Even when they start seeing each other, they do it so bloodlessly, it comes as no surprise when Maya gives Dev a kiss and immediately wipes the traces of lipstick off his cheek. They barely seem capable of acknowledging this relationship to themselves, let alone others.

When was the last time you saw a big, commercial, name-heavy Hindi movie where the hero and the heroine are portrayed as less charismatic, less fun, more whiny and weepy than the supporting characters (in this case, the people they are married to)? I can’t remember – and that’s just one of the ways KANK messes with your expectations of whom to identify with, whom to root for. Maya has a monster chip on her shoulder about being childless, and that’s probably why she treats Rishi like a child – cleaning up after him, chiding him for not being serious, and possibly being more than a little envious about the carefree way he goes through life. Dev too has the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was once a star soccer player, but after an accident, he’s reduced to being a soccer coach for a little league team, and he resents that Ria is more successful than he is. As opposed to these mopey sad-sacks, Rishi and Ria are so full of positive energy, so accepting of life as it comes, you like them far more than you do Dev and Maya. Yes, you feel sorry that the latter have their problems, but you wish they’d get over them and get on with their lives – the way grownups do.

Then again, it’s true that losers deserve love too, even if it’s not the kind of love that’s terribly exciting to watch unfold before your eyes. KANK is a very, very long movie – Johar really needs to get himself a more ruthless editor; he’s never content to let a moment pass without lingering on it after the mood is long gone, nor is he happy with dialogue when he can instead have declarations lasting long after they’ve made their point – and yet the length, after a while, began to feel somewhat right. Dev and Maya aren’t the kind who’d make tough decisions easily; it would seem that they would take a very long time to overcome their insecurities and their doubts and their wishy-washiness and take the positive step (for them) of breaking up their marriages, if they can bring themselves to do that at all. And I must tell you, for something that begins with such broad humour – some of it downright atrocious; some of it cannily reflective of how laughably pathetic Dev and Maya are – KANK so darkens in tone towards the end and becomes so gloomily unpredictable, I wasn’t quite sure if Dev and Maya would ever end up together. This is a mainstream movie, and mainstream movie convention demands that the hero and heroine ride off (or fly off or sail off or take a train) into the sunset. But mainstream movie convention also demands that people don’t walk out of marriages to loving spouses to pursue selfish affairs of the heart, and that our top stars don’t risk audience alienation. Maya is played by our current Heroine No. 1 – the adorable Babli, for crying out loud! – so you wonder if the writers will fiddle around with her image by making her leave Rishi. She may not want to sleep with him anymore, but she still loves him (and, more importantly, he’s besotted with her) – so will we be able to take her side if she decides to hurt him? After all, it isn’t that he’s wrong for her so much as he isn’t right for her.

What’s more startling is what they do with our Hero No. 1. Shah Rukh has always been the hero most in touch with his feminine side – the word for that these days, I think, is metrosexual – but he goes a step further in KANK and gives us a man who is borderline emasculated. Dev is filled with insecurity and resentment and petty jealousy (mostly towards Ria), and there’s nothing he can do about it – at least till he meets Maya. The way I saw it, he’s the classic Indian MCP who can’t handle a hard-nosed career woman like Ria; he needs a soft, sensitive, sari-clad homemaker like Maya to make him feel like a man again. Even Maya’s profession is non-threatening; she teaches little kids at a school. In contrast, Ria doesn’t have the time to attend her own kid’s soccer match; like overworked fathers usually do, she bribes the child with a PlayStation to say she’s sorry. But KANK, remarkably, doesn’t brand her a bitch. We actually sympathise with her when she observes, in one of the film’s many pointed bits of dialogue, “Main Arjun ki maa nahin ban saki kyonki mujhe uska baap banna pada.” (She couldn’t be a mother to her child because she had to become the father.) Yet, under that necessary armour of steel, Ria is a woman. When Dev and Maya finally admit to their spouses that they are in love, Rishi flies into a rage and begins to break things around the house, while Ria remains calm and collected. Rishi wants to know if Maya enjoyed sleeping with Dev, but Ria asks Dev if he’s in love with Maya; the man is more concerned with the sexual aspect of the betrayal while Ria, all woman, tries to come to grips with the emotional implications.

With all this, it’s no surprise that Preity (looking quite spectacular) and Abhishek come off far better – even in their abbreviated parts – than Shah Rukh and Rani, who really aren’t asked to do anything here that they haven’t done earlier (and better). Bachchan Jr., in particular, is the great jolt of energy the movie sorely needs every once in a while. (Bachchan Sr. is there too, in a charming little role as a naughty old man who’s the film’s conscience.) Abhishek brings the house down in a couple of song sequences that are dazzlingly put together – especially the sixties’-themed Rock N Roll Soniye, where he boogies with women costumed in billowing Marilyn Monroe skirts (you know, like in The Seven Year Itch) and figure-hugging Mumtaz saris (you know, like in Brahmchari’s Aaj kal tere mere pyar ke charche). Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s best number – Mitwa – is also nicely used to underline the growing friendship between Dev and Maya, but the title track is somewhat wasted. When it begins, everything around Maya and Dev turns blue, which we’ve just learnt is her favourite colour. It’s as if, having finally accepted her love for Dev, the world around her has become more to her liking – and then Johar kills the conceit by colour-coding the rest of the segments of the song in red and green and so on.

That overkill may be the undoing of Karan Johar, and I really wish he’d stop self-referencing. (K3G’s Bole choodiyan is played by a brass band for a wedding baraat, and a hospital sequence is straight out of Kal Ho Naa Ho, right down to the various visitors dropping in one by one to have farewell conversations with the patient.) But you can’t deny that he’s one of the very few young directors who’s interested in – and who knows his way around – old-fashioned, Bollywood storytelling, where the emphasis is on emotion rather than reason, where the point of a scene isn’t in drawing out truth or detailing reality but in the sensual experience of the moment: foreplay, climax, afterplay (or, if you will, buildup, detonation, cool-down). He knows that he has a dark story to tell, so he loads his first half with corny comedy, making us like his characters before we have reason to dislike them. He values the power of precisely-shaped words conveying the beating heart of an emotion with sledgehammer impact. He realises that part of the reason we’re here is to see five-star stars getting the five-star treatment, so there’s not a scene, not a shot that shows his actors as anyone remotely resembling us. Yet, the way Johar tells his story isn’t old-fashioned at all; he uses spruced-up movie trickery as well as anyone else. When Rishi calls Maya to apologise for yelling at her, she’s on the phone with her lover Dev, so Rishi leaves a voice message; Johar uses a split screen to simultaneously show both of them making their respective calls, and we simultaneously see one who’s in the process of mending this marriage, the other in the process of breaking it. Who’d have guessed that our prime purveyor of candy-coloured entertainment had it in him to process these shades of grey!

[Semantics adjusted to blog language]

A1 and B1 are married and so are A2 and B2. A1 sleeps with B2 and they tell A2 and B1. The marriages are over. A1 and B2 marry.

Direction
Karan Johar trying to make a ‘Silsila’. He is no Yash Chopra. He better stick to his stupid movie making style and leave the substance stream alone.

Music
‘Mitwa’ and the title song apart, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy fail to impress. Background music restricted to stretching sitar strings and crying violins.

Editing
Movie length 3 hours 20 mins!

Acting
Big B is the best

Rating
*

Legend:
*Stay at home
**If you have the time to kill, go ahead, but not recommended
***Watch if you are a film buff!
****Go watch it on the big screen!
*****Don’t miss watching this one on the big screen! Avoid piracy!