Baap Re Baap !!
‘Lendormin’, is one of the most commonly used drug for curing insomnia. Now, the makers of the drug have stiff competition. Our own Priyadarshan has come up with a movie guaranteed to put u to sleep. It’s pace is slower than a paint peeling off a dry wall. A 150 year old snail who’s suffering from Arthritis would walk much faster. It’s called ‘Mere Baap Pehle Aap‘ (the movie’s name, not the snail’s).
Priyadarshan is known for his comedy movies, and he’s equally well known for his remakes (a euphemism
for the term ‘rip-off’). But this time, he has made me cry. He has not only just ripped off a malayalam movie called Ishtam directed by Sibi Malayil, he has also made a royal hash out of it. All the jokes that sounded hilarious in the original are as flat as a bottle of beer left open for a week, in the hindi version. The comical situations in the original comes across as farcical over here. Off course the slowest of the slowest pace makes it even worse.
The story is about a father-son duo (Paresh Rawal and Akshaye Khanna) who are very emotionally dependent on each other. There is also another son(Manoj Joshi), but he pops in and pops out whimsically because they couldn’t get many dates of his. Janardhan Rao’s best friend is Madhav (played by Om Puri) who’s dream of life is to get married at this age and also spout a few idiotic lines at the same time. Gaurav’s sweet-heart is Shikha (Genelia D’souza) who initially plays a lot of pranks on him and when Priyan suddenly remembers that the main story hasn’t started, she abruptly stops her pranks and becomes a ‘close’ friend of Gaurav. The story finally gets going in the second half when Janardhan finds his sweetheart in Anuradha (played by Shobhana, who must be regretting the day she signed up for this thankless role) and the son takes it in his hand to bring the happiness to the couple and thereby happiness to the audience by finally ending the movie.
The movie’s core strength would have been the emotional bonding between the father son duo and the way the reversal of roles happen in the relationship. But the bonding is missing here the and audience doesn’t connect with the protagonists at all. There’s a lot of shouting and screaming between them in the first half and some attempt at emotional scenes in the second half, but sadly it doesn’t work. Most of the bonding is explained by way of dialogues only.
Performance wise Paresh Raval does a decent job and Akshaye Khanna has nothing new to do here. His expressions and mannerisms seem to be an extension of another Priyadarshan movie called Hulchul. Om Puri is in one of his worst roles and has given one of his worst performance. But when I say that the scenes with him were still mildly entertaining, you can fathom the depth of the torture that the movie has to offer.
Genelia D’souza deserves a special mention here. Most of us are aware of the Nava Rasas. But Genelia has given some expressions/emotions that go much beyond them. To top it, her dialogue delivery makes you grimace every time and her never ending giggles make you feel like tearing your hair off . Iam now dreading watching Jaane Tu.. because of her !
It’s a very rare phenomenon, but this time there is nothing good about the movie. The horrendously picturised bad songs take the movie to a new low. Naseeruddin Shah has a cameo role as the father of Shika. Strangely he has the dialogue delivery of The Architect from Matrix Reloaded. And like the architect, he offers the Hero two choices of either getting his girl or of saving Zion (the movie). Akshaye tries his best to save it, but alas, the movie has been destroyed beyond repair by Priyadarshan.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
sudhir..are u a malayali?..i’m guessing cause u have already seen “ishtam” and seen it well..
i wanted to ask.. now that there r so many good movies that get made in malyalam,tamil,telugu,kannada..how does one who doesn’t know these languages get to see and understand them? Please dont tell “subtitles”!!..i’m not comfortable with that ..i’m sure only subtitles wouldn’t have let you understand the subtleties of any emotion..in this case humour.. of a film.. i hope there is some better way to do that..
otherwise unfortunately..everytime you come across a bad hindi movie and get to know how its original regional version was “waaaayy better!!”.. you r helpless to do anything but chew u’r nails..
Sudir…give some credit to Priyadarshan for bringing those malayalam films to hindi audience..As such it is very difficult to better an original..Also Malayalam films in general are at a higher level than Hindi films with audience more film literate than hindi film audience..So u can’t expect to recreate it as it is in malayalam,it will fall flat..
I went with low expectation for yet another mindless comedy. But, honestly at the end I felt that, only if the movies runtime was reduced from 2:40 to 2:00 , it wasn’t a bad movie. I probably am a little biased here as I always thought Akshaye Khanna is a good actor. For me “Mere Baap Pehle Aap” was little above the poor mindless comdies you see these days.
I used to always hold it against Priyan for re-making all such lovely malayalam classics into really bad hindi films, but slowly I have started believing with the view of Ankur.
Again I dont blame Sudhir for hitting Priyan because after watching Dhol and Bhool Bhulaiya, I thought it is better not to watch the hindi remakes. Dhol was not a patch on its original. For that matter I never liked Hera Pheri also. But the success of Priyan was that he could alter the image of Akshay and Paresh who were known to do only hero and villan roles respectively.
I think Pryan would earn more respect from people like me and Sudhir if he actually does compelte justice to the originals. He is in any case taking the plot from another film and in which case he rather stick to the plot and not try and make his additions which sometimes doesnt go well with the plot. But i give it to Priyan for the casting. I hope Priyan makes a comeback in Mallu films someday
Every Priyadarshan film (I mean his Hindi ones) comes with a statutory warning – “Filmed by Priyadarshan”. I ignored that warning, thinking that nothing could get worse than Dhol. But Priyadarshan managed to surprise me with this one – a film more painful and unbearable than Dhol (which itself was quite a torture).
Thanks for the humorous read, Sudhir! It certainly made me smile more than the movie itself.
Sudhirji, sorry but could not agree with you on Genelia, especially after seeing Jaane Tu… The film is a good one, but if anything is to be remembered is Genelia’s acting. The film could have been hit only for Genelia’s acting…her expressions through eyes and face have a depth.
Though I had not seen Mere Baap earlier, after Jaane Tu, I also watched Mere Baap..I found Genelia had nothing to do in the film, nor Akshay. This was the reason why the film failed…the hero and heroine were not projected properly…the comedy was also not good. But I liked Genelia in that film too.The very little she had to do, she did.