Salaam-e-Ishq (2007)

Who's this guy? We don't know. But we love his expression. And, gosh, we're gonna swim against the tide and say, Anil, you should shave your stache sometimes just to mix it up a bit!

"Timepass" is a word that gets tossed around a lot when reviewing Hindi films. We at the PPCC have never actually used it, as we've never been sure what it's supposed to mean. Is it good that time passed? Or is it time that we want back? And surely, PPCC that we are, we watch movies for more than just to... pass the freakin' time. I mean, that happens already!

But Salaam-E-Ishq (A salute to love) is pretty much that: a timepass. It was a neutral companion to an otherwise sociable night, and we spent most of the evening cheerfully indifferent to what was happening onscreen. Every so often, we would turn our attention back to see yet another couple weeping from this seemingly infinite source of romantic melodrama, and we were left none the wiser about what was going on and not really very interested about what happened to who.

In fact, we at the PPCC don't think that we would have even understood most of the plotlines if we hadn't read the Wikipedia entry before watching. They hardly made an impression. And the only plotlines we did pay any amount of attention to - the memory loss one, the adultery one, the white girl one - ended up seeming facile and superficial. Scene one: man is bored. Scene two: man meets mistress. Scene three: affair. Scene four: man asks for forgiveness. What? That's it?

Very briefly, the plot: There's Memory Loss Couple (John Abraham and Vidya Balan), Adultery Couple (Anil Kapoor and Juhi Chawla), Starlet Couple (Priyanka Chopra and Salman Khan and a little bit o' Tinnu Anand!), Taxi-Wallah Meets White Girl Couple (Govinda and Shannon Esra), Comedy Subplot Suhaag Raat Couple (Sohail Khan and Isha Koppikar) and Commitment Phobic Couple (Akshay Khanna and Ayesha Takia and a little bit o' Prem Chopra!).


Oh, you poor, sweet John Abraham. You go back to your Dostana and have some fun.

Normally we're big fans of these broad canvas emotional epics, and we love ensembles too. In fact, give us an ensemble of roughly sketched stereotypes any day over some meticulously detailed single protagonist. Better Serenity to, say, Pasqualino Settebellezze. Two hours is, after all, a long time to spend in just one person's head (and, in this case, it was almost four hours!). Plus, we like the Baroque Love, Actually "oh, humanity!" web of life vibe, where significant characters brush shoulders on the street and never realize that they're both living their own private melodramas. That's so true, philosophically-speaking, isn't it? We're all the heroes of our private films.

Yet - and we hate to say this - all the other reviews are correct. Salaam-e-Ishq (whose title is taken, incidentally, from one of our favorite Rekha songs) suffers from too much weight. There's just two many plotlines, too many emotions, and too much happening for a simple PPCC to comprehend. It was impossible to emotionally engage on anything but the most superficial level. Despite talented actors, such as Anil and Juhi, putting in their best efforts - Anil even gets a meltdown! YESSS! - they were the merest fleeting glimpses of people. Partly this was the director's fault, too, as only a supremely efficient storyteller could paint a compelling and deep mini-story with literally four or five scenes. That's not to say the director, Nikhil Advani, doesn't do very well in some moments. The monotony of Anil's London life is established quickly and elegantly with some good aesthetic: repetition, muted colors, faceless hordes. Unfortunately, where Advani's storytelling was tight and astute in some moments, it became bloated and dragged in others - as funny as Akshay Khanna's commitment-fearing bachelor was, the jokes quickly went stale with over-use.

Advani gave himself a fairly impossible task - tell six compelling mini-films in under four hours - and succeeded in lumps. This is a shame, since we enjoyed all the performances - from Priyanka's hilarious third-person Kamini, to Akshay's wailing insecurities, to Juhi's restraint, to Anil's meltdowns (sans stache!), to John Abraham's earnest earnestness, to the unexpected and welcome surprises of PPCC house favorites Prem Chopra and Tinnu Anand!


Salman Khan even got the better of us and, when we were paying attention, we had to admit he was kinda cute. Aw, shyucks!

The songs were also quite fab. Beth already warned us that the title song was great - and it was! It was a glorious anthem to the big canvas idea we were talking about. Just watch it and you'll see. But also try to follow what's happening to all the characters, especially as the tempo picks up towards the end - aargh, it's too much, too fast! This "everyone all the time!" show continues into the melancholy Ya Rabba which similarly attempts to capture everything that's happening to everyone and succeeds only partially. We paid attention to what was happening to our favored story threads - those being Memory Loss, Adultery and White Girl - but the rest of the plots just became clutter. And that pretty much goes for the entire film: pretty shots, compelling stories, nice performances, but just too much clutter! It becomes a big old jumble that (inevitably, as we haven't emotionally invested in anyone really) loses steam and becomes an overlong stretch of soap.

No Entry (2005)

Aarghhhh! AARRGGHHH! My newest pyaar! It's BURRRNIIIING!!!

Why, Anil? WHYYYYY?

No Entry had so much going for it. Recommendations from work friends. Biggest hit in 2005. A spunky, lovable song we had already fallen in love with.


There were a lot of men falling at women's feet in this film.

And, after torturing ourselves for over two hours, we can bewilderedly report that it still has a lot of things going for it: charismatic, pitch-perfect performances from Anil Kapoor, Lara Dutta, Fardeen Khan, Bipasha Basu, Boman Irani and even Salman Khan, nifty camerawork, not-bad songs. Heck, everyone even looked good - lovely eye candy! So how did it go wrong? Well, friends, it went Jab Jab Phool Khile-style wrong. Yes. It was evil. It was misogynistic, vapid trash.

We wanted to laugh. Ostensibly a comedy, the plot centres around three friends: first, there is the meek, henpecked Kishan (Anil Kapoor going "Aw, hyuk!" a lot); next, the married-yet-still-a-playah Prem (meaning love; Salman Khan); and finally the gee-golly-whiz kid Sunny (Fardeen Khan). Prem is always teasing Kishan for being so faithful and submissive to his obsessively jealous wife, Kaajal (Lara Dutta), and, one night after some hard drinking and hard thinking, he decides to pay his good friend, the prostitute Bobby (Bipasha Basu), a bunch of money if she can succesfully bed Kishan. Note also that Prem's wife, Pooja (Esha Deol), is apparently unaware of her husband's ceaseless meandering.

Here the comedy of errors begins to unfold. As Bobby aggressively pursues the indecisive and stuttering Kishan - at one point tackling him - over-jealous wife Kaajal becomes yet more jealous. As shoes, panties and women's jackets are found, Kishan and Sunny begin an elaborate con which involves several fake marriages and one real one, many fake relatives and Hindi-style coincidences.

If the idea of a husband and his friends narrowly avoiding the rage of his over-jealous wife amuses you, then you'll probably think No Entry is pretty funny. Or maybe not - once you've seen that same situation milked OVER A GAJILLION TIMES. Honestly, how was this one-trick pony supposed to maintain our interest? How funny can the same scene be if you just change the context and details? Especially if it wasn't very funny to begin with?!


Salman was really good at acting so... smarmy.

Some say comedy is a difficult thing to translate. So much depends on the nuances of culture and language. We would say that's true sometimes, but not always. There have been several "foreign" comedies that have made us laugh - e.g. Om Shanti Om, or some nice old psychadelic-hangover masala - and there were even some scenes in this dismal film which yoked a chuckle. Even the broad slapstick of Anil and Fardeen's "Kahan Ho Tum" song was pretty funny.

Indeed, comedy's not the problem. Whether it's a comedy or a drama, when the whole modus operandi of the film is about conning women, using women and degrading women... it's never going to be good. And so we found ourselves ready to take a spoon to our eyes and set fire to our Anil Kapoor Fanclub membership card as this film torturously wore on. What's even more irritating was the whole "meek man"/"fiery shrew" dichotomy - bumbling Kishan has never actually done anything wrong. See? That way, he's morally spotless but can still have an "zany adultery comedy" anyway.

In maybe the film's most misguided scene (as we think this scene was supposed to show us just how "spotless" Kishan was), his nagging wife finds him coming out of a home after exchanging loving cuddles with a random woman and her daughter. Admittedly, anyone would be a little suspicious in those circumstances - but Kaajal is a caricature, and so she's fuming. When she confronts him, Kishan immediately explodes - he punches her in the face and rages about the horrible family situation that said woman is involved in (her husband, Kishan's ex-colleague, lost his legs in freak accident, now scraping to get by, Kishan's merely providing financial help on the sly, they're a proud family, blah blah blah).


What the hell is going on?! ARGHH!

"You have crossed all the limits of suspicion, Kaajal!" Kishan roars. "I regret having married a woman like you and ruining my life!" Yes, of course, because Kaajal knows she's in a frickin' Hindi movie where these sorts of coincidences and tangential melodramas are commonplace. WTF, Kishan character? And WTF, Anil Kapoor, for being in this scene?! And Boney Kapoor, Anil's brother, for putting money in this project?!

Anyway, Kishan then feels terribly upset about losing it - and OMG, thank you, Anil, for salvaging some relate-able sympathy from this mess of a scene - and hesitates about cheating on Kaajal... before trying to anyway! SIGH. EARTH-SHATTERING SIGH OF SIGHNESS.

What's even worse: we didn't even have fun tearing this apart like we did with that other very well-made-and-yet-evil film, Jab Jab Phool Khile. PPCC readers should be well-aware of how much we love Shashi, and how we've just recently signed up for the Anil Kapoor Fanclub. Today we feel more betrayed by Anil's carelessly vapid comedy than Shashi's preachy backwards melodrama. This was so much worse because every scene is infused with a supposedly "light-hearted zany comedy" vibe. At least Jab Jab was earnest in its stupid ideas - it was seriously trying to argue a point, a bad point, but, well, a point nonetheless - this film just assumes we're already on-board with the whole "Hee hee, lying to your wife is so hilarious! Women are so stupid!" mentality. Ugh, but it's not. It was like the worst of those masala subplots blown up into something protracted and painful. We are becoming even more concerned recently, after seeing that Anil teamed up with Ram Gopal Varma, Bollywood's Misogyny King, to produce and star in a film called My Wife's Murder about a meek husband driven to kill his nagging wife. Dare we place all our hopes in the flawed feminist Lajja? Rum, you're the president, help us!

"But surely, PPCC," you say, "there must be something salvageable from this experience?"

AUughh. Well, maybe. Apart from being surprised by Salman Khan's comedy - he was actually quite funny as the smarmy Prem - we also greatly enjoyed Lara Dutta. And her jodi with Anil - at least, in that one moment when they were dancing so excitedly in Mauritius - was awfully cute. If they team up again - and insha'Allah, never again in something like this - we'd be happy.


Maybe if we close our eyes and ears and brain and pretend this was the whole movie, everything will be OK.

Edited to add: Oh yeah. After looking at our notes, we found one of the worst howlers of them all: a scene where Anil and Fardeen are stuck in the comedy of errors' web, and they begin spinning a yarn that Anil's wife went insane... after watching 9/11 on television. And - even worse - this isn't the only 9/11 joke in the film!!

*speechless*

ARRGH!!

Yuvvraaj (2008)

It's a little disconcerting how often we've tagged films with both the "trash" and "transcendental aesthetics" labels. But just like Arun Krishnan astutely remarked, Bollywood movies have that strange ability to swing from ridiculous to sublime at the drop of the hat.


Following on our trend of being super timely!

Now, don't get too excited. The sublime moments in Subhash Ghai's latest film, Yuvvraaj, come few and far between. In fact, we can count them all on two fingers. And they both involve Anil Kapoor, who was SO FREAKING AMAZING OUR DIL PRACTICALLY EXPLODED WITH LOVE. But more on that later.

Yuvvraaj follows the trials and tribulations of three alienated brothers as they fall out of and back into brotherly love. Eldest is the autistic Gyanesh (Anil Kapoor), a musical mastermind described as suffering from "genius disorder" (AKA Williams syndrome?). OK, we'll buy that for a dollar - but only because Anil is so good. Next in line is the proud, turbulent-with-a-heart-of-gold Deven (Salman Khan) - he is ostensibly our hero. Third and last is the spoiled, cruel Danny (Zayed Khan). When the three brothers' ultra-billionaire father passes away, there is a scrambling within the family to see who has inherited all the wealth. Unsurprisingly, the father has left everything to Gyanesh, and filled his will with caveats that it's basically Gyanesh's or charity's. To ensure that no foul play occurs, the will entrusts Gyanesh's safety to two men whom we will call Evil Uncle (argh, we don't know his name, but he was Meena's uncle in Mississippi Masala and SRK's dad in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa and he was fabulous) and Good Uncle (Mithun Chakraborty).

At first, there is indeed a lot of foul play. Danny, motivated by pure evil, tries various methods of getting the money out of Gyanesh - manipulating, harassing, slapping. Deven is likewise trying to pry that cash free, though his motives are marginally more acceptable: he's in love with the serene cellist, Anushka (Katrina Kaif), but he can't marry her until he proves to her father (Boman Irani) that he has the means to support her rich-girl lifestyle. Deven hatches a great scheme: get close to Gyanesh, butter him up with affection and convince him to hand over the cash willingly. Predictably, the three brothers are on the road for some masala-style dil-squishing reconciliations. We get the usual satisfyingly juicy melodrama and sweeping shots of European country roads (this time, near Prague!) on our road to a very Aa Gale Lag Jaa-esque ending.


The sets were totally stolen from Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black.

So our thoughts? Well: it is a horrible, poorly-made film with wonderful music. The finale was terrible, yaar, and we cried a little too. Hence the trash/transcendental problem. It was bad. Terrible. And yet, for a few brief moments, it all came together perfectly and moved us tremendously. But no! No! Our intellect couldn't handle the badness. And Subhash Ghai is supposed to be one of the best?

Because the problem, as far as we could tell, was really the direction. The pacing was all wrong. The emotional tone of many scenes was mishandled or jumbled up. It felt Sanjay Leela Bhansali-esque: ridiculous and falsely over-the-top emotionalness, bordering on the farcical. (Indeed, we spent most of the first act thinking this film suffered from the SLB Devdas effect: that is, a series of amazing and poignant song picturizations linked by cringe-worthy scenes.)

And yet, some things were so well-done that they lifted us momentarily out of the trash: in particular, A.R. Rahman's divine music and Anil Kapoor's performance. Just earlier today, we were speculating with optimistic curiosity about Anil's role over at Filmi Girl's. Well, Filmi Girl, get thee to the cinema! And Rum, you too - tum bhi jao! Because Anil delivers, and how. Where do we sign up for the fan club?

Indeed, it's the combination of Rahman's music with Anil's performance which brings us to sublime moment #1: the picturization of the song, Manmohini Morey. As soon as this gets up on YouTube, we're adding this to our Moments of Transcendental Aesthetics series. Because this scene was so good it made our guts churn (as Suketu Mehta described good Bollywood... or was it Anupama Chopra?). We're not kidding. We haven't felt so moved, in such a raw way, in a very long time. And it was the memory of this scene which made us cry when poor, poor Anil suffered all that emotional violence later in the film. And what's even crazier - this same scene is played for laughs in the trailer we saw last week! Ah, but it was so freaking good. We won't tell you much, since that'll spoil things, but suffice to say that it was perfect - the awe of Prague's music scene, his piercing joy which visibly frightens him, his growing crush on Anushka.


OMG, Anil, don't cry, we'll protect you forever.

Yeah. He did it. Anil Kapoor delivered the equivalent of a Raj Kapoor in Awaara type of performance. The type of performance which not only forgives past sins but all future ones too. And he did it in a terrible film, too! While everyone else floundered amid the crazy direction and odd cuts - Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, Boman Irani, even Mississippi Masala Uncle! - Anil knocked it out of the park. Just amazing.