Now Showing: Miss Congeniality 2, Phantom of the Opera, Lucky: No Time For Love
Movie-packed weekend. Making the most of a little downtime I had before getting back to another bout of hard writing.
There’s also something happening on the movie front in my own career that I can’t talk about in detail right here and now, but which has kindled the film flame in me again – not that it ever died out, but it sort of smouldered in embers for a while.
More about the personal film thingie when I can – sorry, guys, but I really can’t say much more than that.
All I can say for now is that yes, to answer some of the queries put to me by curious fans and a journalist or two recently, there has been interest in a Ramayana film adaptation, a Vertigo film adaptation, a film related to my Mahabharata – even before it’s published! – and two other film projects that are not based on any book by me.
Well, one’s based on a series of short stories published a few years ago, one of which you read right here on this blog a few days ago, but the film being discussed is a story unto itself, essentially based on an original script.
The script in question is more or less written in rough draft, and it only remains to see whether the producer is serious enough to put his money where his heart is. If it doesn’t work out, as movie thingies often don’t, well, I think the ‘script’ is publishable in itself.
Only time will tell, and so will this blog…
Check back regularly and you’ll be the first to know, when I know.
Coming back to last week’s releases.
Miss Congeniality 2 wasn’t a patch on the first film.
That one, for those of you who saw it, was a pleasant slap in the face. After a series of forgettable films that did nothing for her career – and trust me, however big a star you may be, a few bad films can really trash your rep in Hollywood: look at what happened to Winona Ryder, or Alicia Silverstone, and too many others to count on all your fingers and toes – Sandra Bullock bounced back big-time with that charming character comedy.
Where Miss Congeniality worked was in its irreverence toward beauty pageants, now akin to holy papal massess to some people. I still remember writing a column for Bombay Times (I was their very first columnist, can you believe it?) within a few months of its bewildered birthing, in which I roundly lashed out at beauty contests.
The editorial staff in Times of India was (allegedly) so outraged at my criticism of the beauty biz, there was a one-day pen-down protest strike. They demanded that I rewrite the column, taking back my criticism of the pageant.
I refused to rewrite the column and resigned from it instead. It was one of my prouder moments in an otherwise unremarkable career churning out hackwork with my picture over the byline.
Anyway, so Miss Con2 tries hard to revive the magic of the original, but fails quite miserably. Oh, it has a few nice moments, the cast is wonderfully watchable, the whole thing is enjoyable TP, but at the end you wonder what the heck you were thinking.
I mean, it’s not even a good date film.
I also made the mistake of seeing it at Suburbia, at Shopper’s Stop, Bandra. Which happens to be part of the Movietime chain of theatres in Mumbai. These guys routinely ‘shuffle’ prints.
Now, for those of you who don’t know about the backdoor intricacies of the film exhibition biz, ‘shuffling’ is what used to be done back in the old glory days of Rajesh Khanna megahits, when anything more than a hundred prints was considered enormously risky in the film distribution biz, and even when a film shot through the roof in ticket sales and exhibitors (theatre owners to you) began clamouring for more prints, the film labs couldn’t cope with the demand and deliver prints fast enough.
(There were really only two or three film labs worth their rep back then, Famous at Tardeo, Adlabs at Dadar, and Prasad down in Chennai.)
So, when a film unexpectedly went through the roof in sales, what smart exhibitors did was time the number of shows so that the same film was scheduled to start at, say, 7 a.m. in one theatre (yes, that’s ‘a.m.’, people would come in their lungees, with neem ke daathun clenched between their teeth), and at 7.30 in another nearby theatre.
They would start the film at the first theatre, then, when the first reel got over, a peon on a cycle (or scooter or bike) would rush it to the second theatre. And so on, the whole day long.
I still remember hearing from one CP (Central/UP) territory distributor about how, for one Amitabh Bachchan film, the last reel was delayed when the peon had an accident en route. So the theatre owner actually went up on stage and narrated the last reel, sound effects and all, to the impatient audience!
Movietime group in Mumbai must be especially nostalgic about those halcyon days of Hindi cinema, because they still follow the ‘shuffling’ practise. Except that they don’t shuffle reels one by one, they shuffle the whole print.
Even so, as usually happens sooner or later, there’s a delay, usually because of Mumbai traffic.
That happened on Friday, and so Miss Con2 started half an hour late.
But the amazing thing was that the theatre was almost empty when we went in at showtime, viz. 8.15 p.m.
But by 8.40 when the movie finally started, it had actually got full!
If I hadn’t heard the staff arguing bitterly over a cellphone about the delayed ‘shuffle’ print, I’d have thought they actually planned the delay to sell more tickets.
Phantom of the Opera was a much better outing. And INOX doesn’t shuffle prints, god forbid. The holy grail of movie going in Mumbai – Rs 180 per ticket, guys, what do you expect?! – emphasizes perfection in the movie going experience, and delivers it too.
The movie was sumptuously produced. The score was the old Andrew Lloyd Webber schmaltz, which I’d heard a hundred times before – I went through a Broadway phase during which I could sing any of a hundred Broadway hits and even starred in an amateur production of King & I at Sophia. Got some great reviews too – but the money and artistry thrown on the screen more than made up for the kitschy score and storyline.
It was an entertaining experience if not as good an adaptation (or as good a play to begin with) as Weber’s Evita, which was a true pop masterpiece, in my opinion.
The last lucky movie to get my patronage was the new Salman Khan starrer, Lucky. As you can imagine, I’m not exactly the Salman Khan fan club president, but I don’t dislike the guy either.
At least the film had no pretensions to intellectualism or even to being good cinema. It just set out to entertain, foolishly, ludicruously, incongruously, but entertain it did.
At least in the first half. The second half meandered into utter stupidity, redeemed only by the wonderful Russian locations.
But the surprise package of the movie was Sneha Ullal. Better known to the local media as Miss Aishwarya Rai 2.
Forget the obvious resemblance to Hash Ash.
Ullal is actually a very charming actor. She has an innocence and delicacy that made her turnout as an waiflike schoolgirl believable and endearing.
And she has the whole package. Can dance beautifully, looks good in every kind of outfit (including a tartan schoolgirl mini of course, mercifully with thick leggings, god save us from the Deepal Shaw showshah). Can actually act decently. And pulls off an entire film in which she’s onscreen for every single important scene, barring a few minor asides.
In fact, she actually outshines Salman, despite his die hard efforts to pour on the rafish charm and sly humour in the first half. Which is saying something.
First-time directors Radhika Rao and Vinay Sapru also did a decent job at their pacing. Their dance numbers were marvelously designed, with the production design itself providing more eye candy than a dozen blonde strippers. Lovely looking scenarios. If only they’d spent as much talent and time on their script, they might have had a film that made sense and touched more than just the peripheral rims of our hearts.
As it was, Lucky was an incomplete film. A two-act story that desperately needed a third act, you still came away heaving a sigh of relief. There’s something about Salman at 40 romancing a 17-year sweetie (who looks 17 years old or less) that’s vaguely discomfiting.
Maybe Rao and Sapru knew that, or maybe they forgot that a Hindi film needs to do more than set up a story and have a few thrills – the climax, guys, you need a real climax, about emotional drama and character arcs, not just Dr. Zhivagoish races through the Russian countryside and “I love you’s” at the end.
I enjoyed the film in parts, and then forgot about it the moment I was out of the theatre.
Which is about all you can expect of most Hindi films, sadly.
We can do better, guys. We should.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2005 at 5:05 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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