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Round Four

The movie to be reviewed by the ten contestants is SUNDAY
The backup movie review, if the main movie did not release in the city of any contestant was Anukokonda Oka Roju. - All contestants were given a 1000 word count limit to write their reviews within.

Here are the submitted reviews for Round Four! Contestants are listed in order of their rankings after Round Three. If two or more contestants share the same ranking, they are listed alphabetically.

1. Praveen Gopal Krishnan (Bangalore, India)

Sunday: Sun-Dazed!

The strongest possible warning about this movie is what it calls itself - ‘Sunday’. You know that when they start naming movies after days of the week - a scheming marketing ploy hoping that you make a mistake at the ticket booking counter (”Yes, I would like a ticket for sunday please… thank you, here’s my credit card…wait a minute …not the movie Sunday… I meant Taare Zameen Par on sunday… whaddya mean no refunds???”), its an unmistakable indication that the rest of the movie is just another racket.

Ayesha Thakia plays Sehar Thapar, who happens to work as an animation dubbing artist. Extraordinarily, and this fact is quite evident - outside of the movie, it’s not Thakia who’s doing the dubbing for characters but the other way around. While the connection between Craig Schwartz’s bizarre profession as a puppeteer and ‘Being John Malkovich’ are self-evident, in Sunday, Sehar Thapar’s character looks frivolous. It’s not that I am a sucker for cliches, it’s just that I do not see the point of using an unconventional plot device when it is clearly counterfeit. Thakia’s character could have been a call-centre worker, a model or even a receptionist and it would not have made the tiniest difference to the screenplay. Why go through the hassle of sketching a dubbing artist when you are going to dub her voice in the first place? Sunday is replete with such pointless exercises - it would have made a lot more sense if they had concentrated on sprucing up the screenplay before embellishing it with trivialities.

Anyway, back to the plot - or what’s left of it that is. After a drink laced with Rophynol at a nightclub, Sehar wakes up a day later with no recollection of the missing Sunday. The rest of the movie revolves around this missing day, with contributions from taxi-driver Ballo played by Arshad Warsi and a struggling actor Kumar (who essays a ten headed Ravana, Himesh and Shah Rukh Khan’s Don with aplomb) played by Irrfan Khan. There are a couple of murders, a whodunit subplot and a ragtag bunch of hoodlums to increase the pace - all under the purview of ACP Rajveer Randhawa (Ajay Devgan).

Traditionally, intense and moody action heroes seem to have a flair for comedy in Bollywood - just look at Sanjay Dutt and Akshay Kumar. As the ice-cream loving Rajveer Randhawa, Ajay Devgan continues the trend. He deadpans, retorts and gives incredulous half-glances with equanimity - its easy to see that Devgan is enjoying himself immensely here. Irrfan Khan, though underutilized, plays a set of diverse characters, (What did you expect from a struggling actor anyway?) managing to remain poker-faced and earnest through it all.

The only thing tougher than making a good comedy-drama is to be stuck watching a bad one. Sunday is one of them - but it could have been much worse in the hands of lesser actors. Luckily, Irrfan Khan, Arshad Warsi and yes, even Ajay Devgan manage to revamp a threadbare screenplay into a just about presentable experience. Rohit Shetty - the director, tries his utmost to sabotage the movie though. Jump cuts, tears, park-our chases and action sequences are littered liberally in ‘Sunday’. You end up wishing he had just stuck to the comedy instead.

As if sabotaging the screenplay wasn’t bad enough, Shetty then proceeds to mangle the characters, driving us to distraction. Like Jerry Macguire, Arshad Warsi had us at hello - so what was the need for the entire kidney operation gimmick? This is Bollywood, hell - we are accustomed to coordinated dancers gyrating around our stars at street corners, airplanes or deserts at the drop of a hat. The incredible is what we accept unblinkingly, so does Rohit Shetty really think we needed a better reason to love Arshad Warsi ? The whodunit sub-plot was ludicrous, at least for the three of us who remained in the theatre after the interval. I suggest you resist the temptation and continue watching the movie after the interval though - since it’s a wonderful feeling to witness a flawed screenplay sprint down a blind alley only to painfully slam against a dead end.

It’s a classic conundrum - how on earth can you make a convincing whodunit when your narrative is dominated by stock characters? I suspect the folks at Hollywood faced this knotty question long back, and their solution was simple and effective - reduce the stereotype driven humour. That’s partly the reason why most of the characters in slasher movies seem, well - normal. Of course, there is the obligatory goofy-black-guy but he’s usually one of the first victims in the movie anyway so, hey - problem solved!

Bollywood writers on the other hand, have dug themselves into a hole. Comedy films here, especially of late, rely almost completely on cultural stereotypes - a heavily accented mallu, a slapstick sardar or a bhojpuri bhaiyya. I am not saying that we are incapable of seeing anything funny beyond these characters, I am just saying that flicks like ‘Sunday’ and ‘Bombay to Bangkok’ do not allow us to. Since changing the formula is too laborious, the script takes the easy way out - the perpetrator is usually one of the fringe characters who makes a fleeting appearance. To brutally paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, once you have eliminated all the stock characters, whoever remains, no matter how insignificant, must be the psychopath.

Sunday stretches this novel solution to new limits though. In fact, if Agatha Christie was synonymous with ‘The butler did it’ genre, then Sunday would be ‘The butler’s sweetheart’s grand-nephew’s cousin’s pet frog did it. Croak.’ In case you are wondering if I just gave away a spoiler, I didn’t - but since we are on the subject, I am reasonably convinced that there’s nothing that I could possibly write to spoil a movie like Sunday. Rohit Shetty seems to have done most of that anyway.

 

2. Satish Naidu (Pune, India)

Sunday: Movie Review

Irfaan Khan, one might argue, is India’s best actor and his decision to play the character he does is more a reflection of the growing real estate prices than the phenomenal talent he possesses. Here, he puts it to comedic effect, one that would possibly have been executed, with great degree of energy, by Johnny Lever a decade back. Not that he isn’t good here, for all his talent he can even make staring at a blank screen engaging. He plays Kumar, a wannabe actor who does impersonations of popular Hindi cinema characters, and he is supposedly driven to his auditions by his good friend Ballu (Arshad Warsi), a cab driver. During one of those drives, back from a scary play, dressed in Count Dracula’s traditional attire, his character seems to be quite elated at the audience’s euphoric response. Ballu confirms that, and congratulates him on that wonderful comedy. Kumar is taken aback by surprise, for it was by intention a scary act. Now there’s nothing remotely novel there (the gag best executed in an episode of Jaspal Bhatti’s Flop Show), or for that matter funny, but the way it is done doesn’t render it painful either.

And that is the way this film feels about itself, and ends up as. Look, you wouldn’t exactly have people lining up to use ‘Sunday’ and ‘awards’ in the same sentence, but then you wouldn’t be having them use ‘reimbursement’ either. One way or the other, the film doesn’t give a hoot in hell about what it is supposed to do with its plot, which some might gripe, highbrowed, could have been engineered in a significantly better manner to create a solid whodunit. It just wishes to have fun, it isn’t remotely self-serious, and none of it is done at the cost of us, giving a jolly good time while we’re in there. In that, it feels like a timer-driven old Hindi film, the mood changing with every ring of the bell.

Sehar Thapar (Ayesha Takia) is at the crux of Sunday, an animation dubbing artist who seems to have momentary lapses of forgetfulness. The film, though, seems to be grappling with the option of magnifying it into a full blown case of amnesia. Not that it does anything with that, but it is one strand it hopes you’ll cling on to while it unravels its plot, seemingly revolving around a missing day from Sehar’s memory bank. She walks into a disco along with her roomie Ritu (Anjana Sukhani) on a Saturday evening, she boozes, and a nice little dance item ensues. For all those drooling tongues that have just come out at the mention of the dance item, I don’t think it is what you expected. And that is that. Sehar wakes up the other day, and bang it is Monday. And she doesn’t realize it until much later, when the running time is apt enough for ACP Rajveer Randhava (Ajay Devgan) to drop his comical farce and don the only thing he does best, play it straight and serious.

The performances, most of them, are workmanlike bordering on enjoyable. Ayesha Takia does what she has been doing all her career till now, and that’ll be the wafer-thin combination of boisterous and vulnerable, either of them achieved at the drop of a hat. The character assigned to her isn’t exactly multi-layered, for that matter none of them are. They’re what I usually term remote-control characters. Press of a button, and a new facet appears. But that is hardly a criticism that needs to be delivered to the film, when it doesn’t seem to be interested in it. Look, this is the way the script was written – Anukokunda Oka Roju was viewed, gags were written, and names were written around to deliver them. And that is how the execution looks – interchange either of the actors with and you would arrive at pretty much the same result, net. Arshad Warsi is second on the slapstick index, and it often works. Mukesh Tiwari, as Devgan’s sidekick is quite funny, having a rather hilarious moment or two.

Rohit Shetty is serviceable too, and he seems to have a flair for slapstick. There’s honesty in his ways, and there’ll be a day when he might direct a rather funny No Entry. But that is quite far down. He jumbles up the thriller part of the film, quite badly I might add. In a way, it turns out to be good, you know, for the overall tone of the movie for there are numerous ridiculous developments that seem to beg for laughter derived out of unintentional humor. Big moment is the climax, where I laughed out loud and a few faces turned around. I wouldn’t say he is uncomfortable with a thriller; he obviously made a serviceable one in Zameen. But this sure doesn’t look like it. He really needs to get the services of a good editor; the film, especially in its second half feels like running in a marathon, where the comedy serves as the booster.

As I said, this is average cinema. I wouldn’t be bothered too much, either way. Not exactly life-changing, nor hair-tearing. One thing bothered me though, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the film per se. There’s a sequence, which involves Takia’s character dubbing for some animated characters on some environmental issue. It is her introductory scene, if I remember correctly, and she, with great aplomb animatedly dubs the voices. And that scene is a microcosm of why we make such lackluster animations. Takia, voicing what looked like an old lion, coughs as the clichéd old figure would. She continues in the same rhyme, for other characters, each word uttered slower than a snail would take its next step, neatly ticking each checkbox what they assume children would laugh at. Look, children might laugh at it, but children will laugh at anything. When an animation is created, it should be enjoyable to adults too.

 

3. Trasie Stittsworth (Los Angles, USA)

Sunday: More Than One Day Missing Here

After discovering Bollywood, I began searching the Internet for information on the stars and filmmakers that I was falling in love with. I discovered that Indians love to blog about Indian films, and that the Indian film industry remakes many International films. This means that South Asian bloggers spend a lot of time deconstructing remade films, and discussing what film is a remake of which film. Quite often, I think there is too much said about the Indian film industry relying on foreign material for their films as America is just as guilty of the same. And, when Hollywood remakes a foreign film, the results are usually as equally uninspired. The taut and moody French film Nikita becomes the slow and uninteresting La Femme Nikita. Asian thriller and horror films become neither thrilling nor scary in the hands of Hollywood. Remaking foreign films, and hit films from the past is how every major movie industry in the world cheaply finds new material to keep their release schedules full between blockbusters.

Yet, I believe that remakes can be great films. Some stories deserve to be told in different languages. Dombivili Fast, the Marathi language film loosely based on the American film Falling Down and recently remade into the Tamil language film Evano Oravan is an example of a story that deserves to be localized into many languages and cultures. The basic premise of the film is not specific to one place or time, the social alienation of a good person in modern society is a story that translates well into all cultures. Same with the recent Hindi language release Bheja Fry, based on the French film Le Diner de Cons (and currently in production in the United States and Dinner for Schmucks), another story that can fare well as a culturally specific remake in different languages. So, upon seeing the first music video of Sunday, and later that day hearing it was a remake of the Telugu language film Anukokunda Oka Roju (AKU), I was interested as the video seemingly had nothing to do with the original story of a girl who loses one day of her life, awaking to find herself the target of thugs and an unpaid cab driver.

Were I to make a list of my favourite films watched in 2007, AKU is toward the top of the list. Itself based on the dark but sweet Swedish film Hip Hop Hora, AKU is a hilarious thriller. And, unlike what I am used to seeing in Indian cinema, its treatment of drug use and sex was direct, mature, and intelligent. Watching the trailers and videos of Sunday, I could not see any connection between the two films. But, as Sunday director Rohit Shetty stated during the pre-release press interviews that Sunday is a remake changed to accommodate the Hindi language audience, I decided it would be unfair to judge the film based on my love of the original; I would have to look at the story as a new idea based on the original premise.

The opening sequence of Sunday, following the recent worldwide trend of interesting opening credit sequences, quickly devolved into the music video for “Missing Sunday”, and the film continued to deteriorate from that point. It is impossible for me to meet my original intent to be objective and view Sunday as a stand-alone film. An almost scene-for-scene remake of AKU, Sunday should have been at least relatively interesting. But, all of the humour and the mystery of the original are missing. The best scenes, locations and characters replaced by uninteresting ones. The chase scenes, uninspired. The humor is light and at times offensive as it ventures into homo-erotic territory that borders on homophobic. The ending is different than the original, mirroring the filmi sensibility that the guy must get the girl in the end. Yet, Sunday does not fail only because it is a bad remake of a great film.

The direction and editing are choppy, including split screens and freeze frames that left me with the feeling that post-production was handled by an 18-year old film student who just discovered digital film technology and Final Cut Express. Great songs are for the most part out of place and weighted down with uninteresting dances, especially the annoying item number with Esha Deol.

The only reason this film is not a complete disaster is the cast seems to have put an effort into making Sunday work, rather than just show up and read their lines. Ajay Devgan (ACP Randhava) does not stretch himself as an actor, and the script never requires him to do so. Ayesha Takia (Sehar Thapar) is cute when she need be, funny when necessary, and delivers the tears on cue, yet she is extremely watchable and creates an appealing character while working with weak material. But it is Irfan Khan and Arshad Warsi who save the film from becoming a complete waste of time. Khan, as the struggling actor Kumar, plays the light, comedic part with a straight face, a character most actors would have played as farce. Warsi, as the taxi driver Ballu, shows once again that he a talented and interesting comedic actor. Both rise above the confines of the script and their characters to keep the film interesting. Mukesh Tiwari must be mentioned, too. A talented comedic actor in his own right, his character Anwar (Randhava’s partner) is more appealing than Randhava, and he is the more watchable of the pair in their scenes together.

Sunday is a film that fails as a remake, and were it an original film it would still be uninteresting. Shetty’s lame attempt to remake a great story with a culturally specific sensibility is just another unfunny and forgettable timepass – more surprising too as film’s producers film have in the past backed films like No Smoking and Omkara.

Sehar is not the only person who lost time in this mess, I too lost hours of a precious Saturday watching this film.

 

4. Sreehari Nair (Trivandrum, India)

Sunday: A thing or two about the plot

We go through life, sometimes with a firm grasp over time and sometimes mechanically. Reconstructing our life from the leftovers of our memory is something we all do within the austerities of our mundane existences. What if you sleepwalk through a phase of your life and wake up suddenly to the realization that a missing segment from your tranquilized past may well decide your fate?
‘Reconstruction of time bygone for one’s basic survival’ is the setting that ‘Sunday’ hinges on. A plot that ought to have involved mapping of basic human emotions within the confines of space and time.

A thing or two about redundant cinematic theories:
Dross meets ‘dainty design’. Dross aims at momentary applause and comfort while design wishes for something more humane and emotionally engaging. They go loggerheads and end up destroying each other.
‘Sunday’ is a great example of an effort that fails to understand its primary responsibilities and instead lurches away lazily into the realms of pre-set, redundant cinematic furnishings.
The ‘Isme Action hai, Romance hai, Comedy hai’ card is played with such indiscretion that you loose track of the plot completely. In fact, somewhere down the line, you are overcome by a feeling of the plot being a mere excuse to incorporate the pre-decided mediocrity. Set the timer on, and once in every 20 minutes you would see a pointless car-chase, a decapitated comic track making its appearance once in every 15 minutes and generous doses of soulless romantic interludes being thrown in casually every now and then. I don’t have a problem with suspending disbelief but why expect that from a viewer in a film that has an interesting track as this to maneuver?

A thing or two about tasteless humour:
There are aspects of high school I cherish deeply. The assembly every morning, the scout camps, the devilish joy we derived out of learning the true meaning of swear-words we often blurted out carelessly, our first lessons in sex, so on and so forth. I miss most aspects of high school but one, the high school humour. High school humour at hindsight was contrived, forced and for most parts tasteless.
And high school humour is exactly what Sunday leans onto. The inability of the makers to find logical connections to counterbalance an interesting plot make them seek refuge under a boisterous Arshad Warsi and a mumbling Irfan Khan. Aided by an army comprising of a stammering and gawky-looking villain, a south-Indian Karate teacher with a nose for a tongue, stale gay jokes and predictable smart-ass repartees the duo try hard to repair a venture devoid of any passion but filled with immense amount of juvenility.
The conversational humour is poorly written and the slapstick parts had to have a method to support the inherent madness and that method it is devoid of.

A thing or two about improper projection of ‘attitude’:
Believe it or not, there is nothing cool about being totally fearless. In vulnerability lies a sensuality that indescribable. And that vulnerability virtually puts to shame the sense of coolness that relies on a pair of sunglasses, slow motion inter-cuts or repetition of the same piece of dialogue for more than one time. All those gimmickry can only lend to a character a caricatured demeanor that hardly exemplifies strength.

A thing or two about crime in the movies:
A stark revelation or a glaring twist in the plot towards the closing stages is hardly enough to compensate for all callousness that a director shows through the entire length of a movie. The best crime movies aren’t ones that solely dig deep into who committed the crime or the motive behind it but they are the ones that truly explain how the characters associated with the crime feel about it.

A thing or two about Sundays in general:
I always found Sundays too depressing as a kid. There was an excitement about Saturdays I guess. And that excitement was about waiting for Sunday to arrive. But no sooner did Sunday arrive, than I would be ridden by this fear of it fading away and leading me into a new week replete with hard work and turmoil.
Daddy would be doing his weekend review of the country’s declining social situation, Amma would be noting down recipes from friends over the phone and brother would be humming the title-song of ‘Jungle Book’ in some corner of the room while I sulked away in a depression that was hard to fathom.

Here’s a movie that derives its title from that very day of the week I used to wish would never end. And yet, this ‘Sunday’, I could not wait to get over with.

 

4. Thani (Mumbai, India)

We did not receive a review from the contestant for this round.

 

5. Rajesh R Kallidumbil (Pune, India)

Sunday: This Sundays full of Cornettos

I am unsure of the hows and whys of its genesis, but the concept of
‘Paisa Vasool’ is supposedly soaked deep into the Indian fiber. A
strange idea of getting more for their money makes otherwise perfectly
sane men opt for ‘Table d’hote’ lunches and dinners over ‘a la carte’
and better sense. Fortunately – these would classify as exceptions
rather than the norm. Unfortunately – not many chefs seem to think so.

‘Sunday’ is a massive binge at a weekend “host’s table” dinner served
up by an unsure chef at a questionable joint. And while the gourmand
has cognizance of good and bad along with a sense of self–preservation
and moderation, the average cinema hall visitor despite being in
possession of the former qualities might not be able to exercise the
latter. In my case, despite my tendency to consume and consume
copiously (gluttonously), I am not a fan of sitting gape-jawed while
being forced to gorge on the fare on offer. It is – simply put – a
violation of my senses.

Rant over.

‘Sunday’ starts with an ensemble song and dance routine about ‘the
missing Sunday’ while the credits roll. This is not necessarily bad –
since it means one less interruption in narrative, but can be
horrifying if it was the only half-decent number in the soundtrack.

A straying woman is bumped off and the body disposed off in a jogger’s
park (I really don’t know why anyone would move a body at night and
place it where it is a 1.01 chance of being discovered next morning,
BUT I would agree disposing of bodies IS a problem in Delhi because of
the paucity of good pig farms nearby).

Next on screen is the endearingly corrupt ACP Rajveer Randhawa (Ajay
Devgan accepting bribes from a drug peddler but emptying white power
directly from a rucksack into a pond without a thought for the fishes)
and his Haryanvi speaking sidekick Anwar (Mukesh Tiwari in aviator
sunglasses). The ACP has 3 stars on his shoulder flanked by four
strange letters (wonder where the IPS disappeared) and pulls out
Cornetto’s at the unlikeliest of places.

Seher Thapar (Ayesha Takia is supposed to have practiced for months to
get the correct animal sounds – but all she does is to clamp her nose
and talk) is a dubbing artist suffering some serious memory problems.
She goes out partying with a friend (Anjana Sukhani) and wakes up at
home to find two milk packets outside the door (one of the handful of
good plot devices in the movie).

As a seasoned Delhi resident, Seher seems accustomed to being harried
by a cabbie demanding Rupees 420 (Arshad Warsi essaying Circuit
playing a conman cab driver with a kidney ailment – straight out of
the 80s), an aspiring actor who thinks she is a ghost (Irfan Khan
playing a Vampire, Ravan, SRK in Don and Himesh and saving most of his
scenes) and a disgustingly inept bunch of contract killers (lead by a
Rahul Dev double with a whistle stuck down his throat).

Now rather than asking her friend about what happened after the party,
Seher manages to go around addle headed till she realizes that she has
no idea about a certain Sunday in her life (the title song) and
promptly gets weepy (more to do with explaining scratch marks on her
neck to a prospective husband).

The movie then proceeds to painfully remove the bandages around the
plot and pull off a great wizard act. A medical equivalent of this
would be removing the bandages after an ‘eye – replacement’ (oh, how I
miss them) to find that the subject had no eye sockets to begin with.
(It’s considered pretty poor form among magicians to be sucker punch
audiences – wonder when this will catch up among filmmakers). I will
not even get into plot holes.

‘Sunday’ can be effortlessly cleaved into 4 semi feature length
movies, a thriller (with one of the worst imaginable endings), a
comedy (resorting to South Indian stereotypes and homosexuality for
its laughs), a love story with a couple of songs (falls flat because
of zilch chemistry between Ayesha and Ajay) and a chase-action movie
(might make a passable spoof). There would be enough left over to make
3 ad films, for Cornetto ice-cream, Delhi tourism (the movie uses the
cities locales well), and the lovely Ambassador (with emphasis on fuel
efficiency and spaciousness). The ads would work. As for the 4 movies,
each of them would be nothing more than ordinary and the quality of
their sum (’Sunday’) would be , at best, the quality of the worst
among the bunch divided by the number of ingredients (i.e. one fourth
of ordinary).

Ajay Devgan appears bored and distracted by the pressures of turning
director (no, not for this train-wreck). Mukesh Tiwari, Arshad Warsi
and Irfan Khan are actors and do their job well. Ayesha Takia is
wholesome and Anjana Sukhani is well… tasty. Unfortunately, the
movie is ominous and its dark shadow is ever present over the cast.

Rohit Shetty (who should send his name to the Guinness crowd as he
seems to have been assistant director for ‘Phool aur Kante’ at a
precocious 17) seems to have a Woodesque fascination with stock
footage. Other moviemakers could take ‘Sunday’, scissor it up and
churn out different feature length movies (some of them could actually
be half decent).

Kumar Mangat has the ability to laugh at himself and I hope he makes
his money back (that shouldn’t be a problem since ‘Sunday’ is marketed
as a comedy) because he does support the odd oddball film (or
filmmaker).

And yes, we might like ‘Paisa Vasool’ but not at the cost of
heartburn, indigestion and other unmentionable problems. And
especially not if your taking a good regional movie and butchering it
for your buffet.

 

5. Mohammed Rashid (London, UK)

Sunday: Light Brunch

Kumar (Irfan Khan), dressed as a vampire, asks his cabbie friend Ballu (Arshad Warsi) what he thought of his play. Ballu, in all honesty, tells the struggling actor that it was hilarious, and he and the rest of the audience haven’t laughed so much before. Kumar is bewildered – the play was supposed to be a serious horror; to which Ballu reasons that since no one knows that, all would assume its was intended as a comedy, and that Kumar’s career will be made. Perhaps director Rohit Shetty should have taken that scene to heart and not even bothered to publicise that Sunday had elements of a thriller.

Ostensibly, Sunday is about Sehar (Ayesha Takia), who, after an evening of clubbing, wakes in the morning not being able to account for what happened in the intervening hours. She constantly bumps into the hapless cabbie and actor friend, who ask her for a cab fare she can’t remember taking. She is also the target of goons contracted to kill her. It transpires that Sehar actually woke up a whole day after what she had assumed was the morning after the night before. A murder has taken place in the missing Sunday, and ACP Rajvir Randhawa (Ajay Devgan) is on the case, with Sehar being a suspect. A man of dubious morals, he helps piece together the missing Sunday in Sehar’s life.

This plotting, however, really works as a placeholder, framing sequence after sequence of gags, allowing for a few stunt-driven action set-pieces, and the obligatory song and dance items.

More than a thriller, Sunday is another in the genre of the Priyadarshan style comedies that are being made by every other filmmaker in Bollywood in recent years. These movies don’t really have much of a story, but are set up as a serious of gags, which are loosely tied together. Unerringly, they more often than not, have been making box-office gold on the strength of these gags and the ‘A’ list actors gracing them.

In what would have been the Akshay Kumar role, had Priyadarshan actually made this, we have Arshad Warsi who has fast become a master of this style of buffoonery. His role here is more Dhamaal, than the witty Circuit to Munnabhai. Nevertheless, the hi-jinx that will surely ensue with his entrance is keenly anticipated. Unfailingly, his dialogue delivery and timing manage to raise chuckles and guffaws. Aiding and abetting Warsi is Irfan Khan. Miyan Maqbool takes on the Paresh Rawal role, and dons a different getup with every successive entrance. His parody of Himesh Reshammiya had me laughing out aloud. A departure from the more intense movies he is acclaimed for, Khan does well, even though the material here does not allow for the comedic nuances he brought to his story-arc in last years Metro. This may, perhaps, be a waste of huge talent, but I think Irfan proves there is a place for him in the item-based structure of commercial hindi movies.

These two actors share nearly all their scenes, and it is those scenes, these running gags which serve to make this movie palatable.

The Sunil Shetty role, and one which I would have urged Akshay Kumar to have cut to at most a quarter of what it is here, goes to Ajay Devgan. Playing the over smart tough guy is just not Devgan’s forte. I would have thought he should have learned from his lessons in the recent-ish Golmaal (again Rohit Shetty) and Aag. When the simmering angst is just below the surface of his arresting eyes, Devgan brings a certain intensity to those characters that very few leading commercial actors can. But when it comes to buffoonery, Devgan comes across as just that, a buffoon. And this is even without the gay gags he is given in this movie.

Opposite him, the dough-faced Ayesha Takia of the sartorial non-sense, does what any other heroine would. Look innocent, shed a few tears, make a few irritating voices.

Technically proficient, apart from some patchy lighting in places, and some amateurish wire-work in the action sequences, this movie is really analysis proof, simply by virtue of not having any pretensions of being anything apart from some mindless fun. Much like the ‘comedies’ coming out from Bollywood of late, so long as they manage to raise a few chuckles, they are fulfilling their objective.

With an item based narrative structure, if most of the ‘items’ find their mark, the comedy as a whole, perhaps without logic and refinement, drive the movie home. Rohit Shetty could have rid this sundae of a couple of layers, especially in the latter half of the movie (a couple of songs at least wouldn’t have been missed) to make the lean movie even tighter.

And he shouldn’t have mentioned anything about a thriller.

 

5. Shantesh Sunil Row (Dubai, UAE)

SUNDAY: APUN YAANA PAHILAT KA?

Ah, so here we are.

With a 1,000 word review needed for a film script that
was probably written on:

1) a toilet paper or
2) on a newspaper used to wrap channa-sengh or
3) on the back of a microscopic postage stamp.

Shit happens.

Ok, so where do I begin?

Let’s see.

Ayesha Takia is missing a Sunday in her life.

But before that, a list of all other things that are
missing from Sunday.

a) Munnabhai is missing Circuit.

Which explains why Arshad Warsi is reduced to yet
another third-rate side-kick impersonation.

b) Warsi himself is missing his kidneys.

Which is why seconds after trying to make us laugh
with an inane joke, he cries that he needs 4 lakhs for
a kidney operation. I kid(ney) you not.

c) Irrfan Khan is missing a hefty credit card payment.

Reason enough to accept a good pay check and subject
himself to being chased by a cocker spaniel down
Delhi’s roads, play the nth imitation of Himesh
Reshammiya on celluloid and even try his luck at Don
Part Trois. Or is this some doppelganger ‘namesake’ of
his?

d) Murli Sharma is missing a film set.

Which is why he looks as if he’s sleepwalked from the
sets of ‘Dhol’ and/or ‘Dhamaal’ and been teleported
into this film for no apparent sense of logic.

e) Deepak Qazir and Ali Asgar are missing Kahaani Ghar
Ghar Ki.

Which explains why they play a ‘look ma I’m hassled’
MP father and ‘look pa I’m hassled’ son duo, so that
they can rekindle the bond they shared over 1,500
(give or take a few hundred) episodes of their ’sarson
da saga’.

f) Vrajesh Hirjee is missing Bruce Lee.

No wonder after his mad monkey kung fu act in Golmaal,
he is now reduced to playing a Tamilian karate
teacher. Id-lee do, anyone? What next one for you Mr
Hirjee - a sardar with taekwondo skills named Kar Tar
Singh?

g) Mukesh Tewari is missing his parents.

Indeed, all his father did was pray for a boy, when
his mother prayed for a girl. Man proposed, God
disposed and poor Mukesh is now being chased by all
things homo erectus.

(Yeah, and the Censor Board is missing Ashok Row Kavi,
what with all the tasteless jokes on an already
marginalized section of our society.)

h) Ajay Devgan is missing…
Ajay Devgan is missing…
Ajay Devgan is missing…
uh, err, ahem….
ok, got it…
AJAY DEVGAN IS MISSING.
Phew!

Which brings us back to Ayesha Takia.

Poor thing.

She’s missing a Sunday in her life.

And I’m missing 140 minutes from my Friday
+ 30 dirhams from my pocket for tickets
+ 20 dirhams for cola and popcorn
+ A few (no, make that quite a few) brain cells
+ My sleep patterns which have been affected ever
since I saw this flick.

Rohit Shetty, apun mala pahilat ka?*

(* for a suitable translation, please watch Door
Darshan’s longest running no one watching someone’s
missing program.)

P.S.: Oh yes, Feroz Khan is also missing something. A
long haired, short brained son from Welcome, who seems
to have been commissioned for two films for the price
of one. Here, he plays a long haired, short
brained….aah, forget it….what all one needs to do
to fill in a thousand words… :-)

 

6. Shaayon Bhattacharya (Mumbai, India)

Sunday: Sunday Not Working

An Assistant Commissioner of Police who personally collects “hafta” from a dhaba owner and interacts with his love interest only in places of archeological interest. His sidekick whose name is Anwar but speaks with a Haryanvi accent. A cabbie of seemingly robust health who is suffering from renal problems and undergoes bi-monthly dialysis, drives an implausible red Ambassador with a VIP number plate, wears “cool” clothing and complains of a cash crunch at the same time ! A struggling actor who can afford to charter his cab for long hours on a regular basis and is apparently trying to get a break in the wrong city ! A karate instructor whose ignorance of the martial art is only exceeded by his ignorance of the South Indian accent….the list is endless.

Like all that it constitutes, Sunday, the film, is,…well, …phony.

But what else can one expect from “patchwork film making” intended towards the sole objective of box-office glory ? “Inspired” by “the concept” of a darker Telugu film from where it borrows “minor details” like the key characters and the plot, this one assumes that just about anything can be tasty fare if it is rolled in dollops of Bollywood masala. Is that so ?

The “nautanki” tradition has held a vice like grip on our society for time immemorial. The common man is a slave to a formula churned out over and over again by unscrupulous merchants of media. Shackled by his bovine existence, our plebian escapes to fantasies of the romance he will never experience, the power and pelf that perpetually allude him and the exotic locales he will never visit. Quite simply, a society which allows itself to be exploited on its deprivation !

And the resultant ? A cinema which is reduced to documenting a slightly evolved form of “nautanki”. A cinema which doesnt drive to,…but drives away from any intellectual exercise, …pandering to a multitude who have hardly read a good book, understood good music or have any sensitivity to the arts in general ! So maybe we are talking cultural deprivation too !

Alarming ! A nation deprived of everything but the fundamental necessities of existence and hedonistic tools and luxuries. Modern day cavemen who guffaw at the slapstick and blink at the sublime !

It is to such long standing tradition that I ascribe Sunday.

Our film community mindlessly copies its apparel from “phoren magazines” and its stories, shots, effects and transitions from “phoren DVDs”. Consequently it has become an industry full of “good looking” stars and “good looking” films, both hollow, devoid of any substance or integrity.

Sunday is reduced to forced slapstick situations, contrived coincidences, cliched stereotypes and amateur direction, …all of which makes a mockery of audience intelligence. Instead of exploring a potentially rich premise or simply following the original the director seems to have expended his efforts in attaining the “golden box-office formula”. Shouldnt such an obsession with selling ones wares find its rightful place in the retail industry ? …Or is that what mainstream cinema has come to mean here ?

So, Stanislavski is traded for steroid induced six packs, aesthetics is traded for semi-naked dancers, style is traded for copied gimmicks and music is traded for linear progressive beats. Make New Age Neanderthal happy ! The Early Man gets the worm.

The “whodunnit” gets lost amidst all the farce and loose narrative that makes up Sunday and I was yawning by the middle of the second half, least interested in knowing who the “murderer” was. One wonders why an entire team from Mumbai had to go to Delhi to shoot this film when Mumbai itself would have been a more valid setting.

Irfan Khan and Arshad Warsi salvage the film in parts with their comic timing. The rest of the cast struggles with sketchy characterization and lack of talent.

Aseem Bajaj’s cinematography seems to revel in illogical lighting schemes keeping with the spirit of the film but his tonal consistency is admirable.

Go for your regular dosage of the usual time-pass fare.

 

Contestant Kavita K Meegama did not submit a review for the second time and is out of the contest.

F.Y.I.

Movies for Round 5 will be announced on January 30th by 10pm PST (Jan 31st, 1130am India)
Contestants should submit Round 5 reviews by February 3rd 10pm PST
Reviews of Round 5 will be published on February 4th along with the latest rankings after Round 4.