At a climactic point of “The Players” where the protagonist and antagonist are engaged in a verbal O.K.Coral shootout, one of them says:
“Mera kaam hai naya twist laana. Tumhara kahani bahoot predictable ho gya hai”
Among the many special elements of “The Players” this was one of its finest, a moment of crystalline cinematic purity where the voice of the creator and the voice of his creation merge as one. It was as if the director-duo Abbas-Mastan, who are to film-making what Bonny and Clyde are to crime and Hobbs and Sutcliffe are to cricket, are trash-talking their contemporaries, those that make straight stories about straight people.
Because for Abbas-Mastan, it’s all about the twist. As a matter of fact so twisted are they, that within the first ten minutes, Abhishek Bachchan discovers a secret CD cut out in a novel, a novel sent to him by dead-criminal Aftab Shivdasani. No, the twist isn’t in the fact that someone gave Aftab Shivdasani 15 seconds of screen-time (which is what he had) or the fact that he would be seen with a book.
No the twist is in the name of the said tome.
“Oliver Twist”.
Continue reading ‘Players–The Review’
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The industry may have been looking forward to “Ra-One” or “Rockstar” or “Ready” but for me, a fan of avant-garde Hindi cinema (the technical term used in this context is avant-gaand-de), “Chitkabrey–Shades of Grey” (to give it it’s full appellation) was the movie of the year.
The way the state of Bollywood is right now, superstar vehicles, provided they are marketed and distributed right, are assured of making money. The number of people who will sing hosannas even if Shahrukh Khan (or Salman Khan for that matter) stands in front of a blank screen and recycles through all his fixed facial expressions (which is what most of SRK’s recent movies have been) is so insanely large, that his producers (in this case himself) know that anything with his presence in every scene and aggressively marketed by him, is guaranteed to be a mega-hit, if not break records at the box-office.
It was a few months ago that I realized that I have totally lost the stomach for today’s mainstream commercial Bollywood. I remember the exact moment when I “turned”—- 25 minutes into the assault on the senses that is “Tees Mar Khan”. “No more” I told myself ” Am too old for this shit.” A line has been crossed and as the tag-line for the Emran Hashmi thriller “The Train” goes “Some lines should not be crossed.” [Yes I have seen that too]. So I stayed off Hindi movies (with some exceptions like “Dhobi Ghat”) using the time saved to revise my next book—”The Mine.” [publisher: Westland]
R