Shaurya kya hai ?

Long long ago there was a movie named after some behemoth buses that run in Bangalore. One of the scenes that one remember about this movie is one involving shall we say S**T packaged in a perfumed box. Most new Bollywood movies actually remind me of this scene and it is nowhere more truer than the one that any person of even Forrest Gumps IQ by now would have guessed we watched over the weekend (Hint: Please to read the title).

Shaurya seems at a first glance to be a rip off from that Hollywood Movie which stars the intolerable guy who made shades popular. But there are such basic errors as calling
the same Army regiment Rashtriya Rifles half the time and the other half metamorphosing into the Rajputana Rifles. And for some strange reason the director thought that putting a nose stud on Minnisha Lamba (yeah the same one who played a super girl and in the process almost disproving our hypotheses that no role can be essayed any worse than what Rakhi Sawant can) would somehow give her a rugged tough journalist look, well one-nose-stud-no-the-maketh-a-jodi-foster.



There is Rahul Bose (RB) who is supposed to be defending an army man accused of shooting his senior. Javed Jaffrey (JJ) handles the prosecution, and Kay Kay Menon (horribly over-rated as an actor in our opinion looking at his recent performances)is supposed to be playing a brigadier and to mouth:

"You wanna know the truth you cannot handle the truth!"

That seems to be the story. Now to the other things that go up in making the movie, we must say they are all so uniformly mediocre that we think that the producer is an idiot and if he is still alive be a living proof of the adage that "A fool and his money are soon parted". So we first started by saying that the director has no idea of using long shots, then the person next to me said that he cannot use close ups till about half an hour into the movie we concluded that he handled the camera with as much ease as the way the room-mate of TAM did his march past at the turn of the last millennium. Then we get to the sound track, there are songs that pop up like ghosts in one of those dark room of horrors and leave you feeling the same way, cold and physically afraid of the next one. And the music at some places is as inappropriate as a Sanjay Leela Bhansali shot without any hint of ostentatiousness.

But as Manasi Sinha used to tell us long back, go beyond the obvious look at the deeper meaning. Maybe this was a tribute not to Hollywood but to that great man Francois Truffaut and his movie Jules and Jim. There is definitely gay bonding between RB and JJ, nothing more demonstrates this than when both are drunk all JJ can come up with is that RB looked more handsome than him in some attire. Plus when JJ is posted to a different place, the escapades that RB described that the two of them had together we really have to now think of another Bollywood classic Dharam Veer. Maybe at a later time this movie might be called as the harbinger of love triangles where the love vectors add to zero (a.k.a JJ loves RB who loves Nandini who loves RB, by the way Nandini is supposed to be married to JJ).

We must say that the only whiff of fresh air during this whole process of masochistic indulgence was Amrita Rao who looked oh-so-desirable in a white saree.



Some piece of trivia : The Hollywood movie talked about led to a change in a George Michael video where he wears Ray Bans, whether it made him look any cooler is debatable but for sure you can see the camera in one of the close ups in the video.

Finally to answer the question that is the title of this post, Shaurya for us was to spend 200 bucks and since there were 5 of us close to 1000 bucks on a venture such as Shaurya. (Yeah right we know we are idiots and are hence further living proof of the adage we so cleverly bought into this post)