For the love of God, watch 'Oh My God'

A few days ago, a flummoxed Paresh Rawal rued the inclusion of an item song in his first production. He couldn’t fathom why an otherwise small budget film would need a large chunk spent just on that song. And you know what? He was a 100 percent, resoundingly right. There was nothing wrong with ‘Go Govinda’, but if ruling out that song would have given me five more minutes of Paresh Rawal and Akshay Kumar, by god I would have taken it any day. Having said that, equally true is the fact that the inclusion of the item number lends more mass appeal OMG Oh My God, thus expanding its chances of better box-office returns. It is these returns, which will pave way for more such small but meaningful productions, which are truly god’s gift (no more puns, I promise) in this era of Rs 100-crore tortures.

OMG (we’ll be adopting the abbreviation henceforth) is based on the 2001 Australian comedy The Man Who Sued God and the Gujarati play Kanji Viruddh Kanji. It narrates the story of Kanjilal Mehta, a staunch atheist, who earns his living by selling religious idols. Life is smooth as Kanjilal goes on with his business unabashedly choosing convenience over forced faith, reason over blind belief. But when an earthquake levels his shop to the ground and the insurance company refuses to grant him his claim, citing the quake to be an act of God, Kanjilal goes ahead and sues God.

Such a delicate topic in a god-fearing country like ours needed a treatment equivalent to that meted out to fragile glass. Director Umesh Shukla achieves that, with support from an able cast that understands that.

It’s a Paresh Rawal film through and through, a four-minute item song lasts only that long. And my god, he delivers (Ok, now it was really required). Akshay Kumar as Krishna Vasudeva Yadav aka Lord Krishna in a dapper, tech-savvy, riding a batmobile-like (only its white) avatar is so refreshing. He has also produced the venture along with Rawal. Bless you dear Akshay.

OMG works because it’s teaching without preaching. And it targets everything that’s wrong with religion today, religion not god. 

For too long we’ve lived with the ‘he visits a mandir everyday, he’s a good boy’, ‘she didn’t keep that fast, that’s blasphemy’ thumb rule. 

The film doesn’t question the existence of Jesus, Ram, Allah…it questions the mela that surrounds faith in god around the world, and India, in particular. Never has religion been a bigger multi-crore industry, and yet never have we been a race so dissatisfied.

We floated away from the film feeling closer to the thought of being connected to a power divine, and not stressing about the dos and donts of the almighty.

OMG Oh My God has a lot to say, listen to it with an open heart and mind. After all, isn’t that also a message prescribed especially by God. 

Nothing fame worthy about this 'Heroine'

Madhur Bhandarkar has proved himself as a filmmaker that doesn’t shy away from a matter-of-fact portrayal of life and all its ugliness. But he also last proved that in 2007 (Traffic Signal). Its been downhill since then with films that in its quest of exposing get exposed themselves for their fake storylines, outlandish dialogues, weird caricatures and a lot of overacting.

Heroine was supposed to be Bhandarkar’s take on the big, bad glamorous world of the biggest film industry in the world through the eyes of a female protagonist. A tale of how it really is…the struggles, the triumphs, the workings.

But if you’ve seen Fashion save yourself the trouble, and the money. Shockingly, Heroine is Bhandarkar’s rehash of his own last film, only worse.

This time you land from the modelling world into film star Mahi Arora’s (Kareena Kapoor) world where the designers are still taking funny, the page 3 types are still just dropping honeys and darlings and where scheming women twitch their lips and narrow their eyes in a manner befitting only saas-bahu serials.

 Mahi is a talented, beautiful, successful actor who has everything going for her. There’s just one hitch. Her love life is less than ideal which transforms Mahi into a simpering, painful mess. Such a mess is erratic Mahi that she constantly flies off the hook landing herself from one embarrassing situation to another. Get it? I didn’t.

Mahi then tries to overturn her image, hires superslick PR (Divya Dutta in a saving grace role) and once again treads her way to the top. Another failed love affair, bitter moments, arty film gone wrong, internal politics later she once again loses the plot. Get it? I didn’t again.

Mahi begins again because the love life improves and so renews her initiative for a successful career. A vaguely promised role by boyfriend doen’t materialise and she goes cuckoo. Ok, now I really didn’t get it at all.

Bhandarkar sets no base for Mahi’s madness (except for a broken home and extreme lack of self-confidence) So by the end of it you feel bad for everyone Mahi comes in contact with, including yourself. Sigh.

Insecurity in Heroine is shown as something that only female actors feel, go through, and endure. Forgive me, but I really don’t know when this unisex emotion became restricted to one sex.

Everything that Bhandarkar tries to show bad about the filmi world are topics not really worth touching upon, issues that really exist everywhere. There is competition everywhere Mr Bhandarkar coupled with nasty gossip and extreme bitching, even in our mundane lives. So important topics like why its only the heroine in our industry that has a shelf life, why a 40-something actor can romance a 20-something actress and not the other way round, why a 100-crore project is never launched on just a heroine’s shoulder, why marriage changes the game only for female actors is not even touched upon. Those are the real tribulations of big, bad Bollywood.

Of course Kareena Kapoor will be convincing as an actor (she is one herself), bringing to her larger than life role the right myriad of emotions. She looks spectacular but is mostly reduced to a heap of crying mess. The other actors have limited parts with idiotic dialogues, the only saving grace is Arjun Rampal. As Mahi’s boyfriend, superstar Aryaan Khanna, you genuinely feel bad for him all the time. And it helps that he looks smoking hot.

To pay tribute to Bhandarkar’s bad to worst clichés we’d like to end with a cliche ourselves: Somewhere a green-eyed beauty enjoying the bliss of motherhood must be heaving a sigh of relief, thanking god she wasn’t the heroine of Heroine.

Note: A copy of this review appeared in the 22 September edition of The Financial World

A movie so bad, the joke's on you!

From the whirring of the machine that churns out tickets, to the popping sound and wafting buttery fragrance of the popcorn maker, to the dimming of the lights once you’re seated, and the build-up of seeing some new trailers…there’s nothing about experiencing cinema that doesn’t delight and excite! So it was surprising to go in to watch Joker dragging our feet, armed only with the best wishes from friends and dear ones. You see, we’ve all seen Tees Maar Khan. Enough said.

Could the writer of that film and the director of this film, Shirish Kunder, have improved on that torturous script masquerading as a film? In a way he does. So we’re out of the torture but we’re in for the ridiculous.

Everything: the acting, the story, the special effects, the costumes, the humour…it’s like one big catastrophe of that which should never have existed. (Maybe if we keep taking its name, more such films will come our way, aka the Voldemort theory)

In 1947, when borders were being drawn, one little village Paglapur (named so for it onced housed a mental asylum) lay forgotten and became a no-man’s land decades later. Akshay Kumar, a resident of Paglapur, escapes his village stagnating for want of water and electricity and migrates to America, to become a successful scientist and start chasing aliens. Forced to come home one day, he hatches a plan to put Paglapur firmly onto the map of interest. So they carve crop circles and the villagers dress up as aliens with the aid of capsicums and karelas, while the whole world (including the FBI, the CIA, US president) shows up there thus putting Paglapur into the spotlight.

How Kunder convinced an entire star cast that includes sane people like Akshay Kumar, Sonakshi Sinha, Shreyas Talpade, Vinddo Dara Singh to act in such a film is nothing short of amazing. Now that’s something that a movie should be made on.

Akshay Kumar has been a notably missing from the promotion of this film, that incidentally has been produced by his own banner Hari Om International. And while Kunder and Farah Khan may cry themselves hoarse denying that anything is amiss, we don’t really blame Akki. It could not have been easy being part of potentially the worst film of 2012. The joke’s on the Joker.

Note: Image courtesy Wikipedia. This review first appeared in the 1 September edition of FW