Dev-da the bewda

It is rarely the occasion that everything fits well enough in a movie, that one has to actually sit and dig through fuzzed memories to find out what didn't fit. Dev.D does this. Now, it's definitely not a great movie - competition for that apellation requires that one can actually sit through the movie twice - but Dev.D is by far the best movie out of Bollywood so far this year. Given past standards, that makes it likely the best movie that escapes from there this year.


What can you say about a Bollywood movie that begins with the hero asking the heroine if she touches herself? That it is made by one of the most avant-garde directors of the industry, that it stars two leading ladies who are so good one is left wondering if this is one of their first movies, that the movie is psychedelic enough to be compared to our own cinematic equivalent of “The Wall”.


Image Courtesy : businessofcinema.com

There's an interesting story about how censorship in Sweden was changed due to work by Bergman of the Svensk BlondskindustriFilmindustri, who is one of the few non-cricketing impersonalities to have a semipermanent shrine on this blog. Sadly, it turns out this is partially untrue (500-9 might be relevant to some nsfw google-fu here). One can only hope that Dev.D proves to do something similar in this country. Most of the requisite elements are there.


As the jobless readers of this blog would have realized by now we are talking about DevD. Directed by Anurag Kashyap and staring Abhay Deol (who is a personal favorite HTPL notwithstanding) in a role that is tailor made for him (the credits read “Concept – Abhay Deol”), DevD is “loosely” inspired (re-interpreted is probably a better word) by the Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay book. DevD is the story of Dev’s life, his successes and failures in falling in love. It is also the story of Paro Dev’s childhood sweetheart and Chanda rendered brilliantly by Kalki Koechlin. In the inspired version the notable differences occur in why Dev and Paro cannot get married and the reasons Chanda is forced to turn to prostitution (a college going one by day at that). There are also pointers to the BMW case, the DPS MMS leak amongst other real life incidents.


Anurag Kashyap, apparently with help from the eponymous lead actor, came up with the script and direction for this movie. Now, functional illiteracy prevents me from reading SCC's দেবদাস, and a pact of mutual non-aggression between the shreds of common sense and insanity serves as an effective deterrent from watching any of the multiple prior efforts. Under the distinct and unheard-of handicap of judging a movie purely on its own performance, let's see why you may want to watch this movie in a theater.


DevD offers a reflection of the Indian male’s attitude towards female sexuality in our times. Dev is not able to handle the fact that Paro probably slept with someone else, when he is guilty of the same offence. Chanda’s father, who views her MMS clip, comes up with the following pearls of wisdom “She knew what she was doing”. There is also a scene involving the guy who shot the MMS landing up at Chanda’s house with an offer to marry her (Raja Ki Aayegi Baarat anyone), pointedly he talks to Chanda’s mom before talking to her. To cap it all there is a brilliantly shot scene of Dev waking up after passing out the previous night and looking at Chanda with intense scorn and contempt.


Dev.D works well because the rapid-fire succession of memorable scenes forces the suspension of disbelief in order to concentrate better on the creation of hilarity through vulgarity. Add on quite a bit of "inspired" gorgeous camerawork (which inspiration, by the way, we applaud wholeheartedly), unsubtly subtle tongue-in-cheek humour, and if these aren't reasons enough to watch it on the big screen, well, there are other, more effective reasons to do with (lack of) plot and execution.


DevD is a movie where the two leading ladies show excellent character, while all the males are at the other end of the spectrum. When Paro comes to meet Dev the first thing she does is clean his room and wash his clothes while all Dev can do is sit back and allow her to take charge. According to a book we read a long time ago one of the reasons for this is the extremely lavish affection that most Indian guys get as kids. Towards the end of the movie when Dev comes home to attend his father’s funeral, his mother rains slaps and fists on him and you wonder whether she was not twenty years too late in meting out the treatment which might have given him a bit more spine to go through life.



Image Courtesy : media.movietalkies.com

The movie starts of with a young Dev and Paro having a catfight of sorts over the hygienic nature of canal water on its banks, whereupon young D is sent off to school in the land of the former colonial masters. Naturally, there persists (one of those incidents of suspension of disbelief) a relationship between them over what ought to be an absurdly long time, and the next thing you know, a much older D comes back[1]to the vaterland. Oh, and it turns out that one of the perks of transplanting the movie from the east to more agriculturally rich areas is that Dev and Paro do not expand as expected, while C does.


Anurag Kashyap’s direction is awe-inspiring. For a change we do not have the heroine look as though she has just walked out of a Beauty Parlor while walking through Punjab’s fields or a hero who for a change only drinks rather than sports six packs. The teasing and mocking references to that totally lacking in soul and the endlessly grimace inducing Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie Devdas are well placed. I could count at least three and the one we liked the most was the very off hand way in which Paro and Chanda meet in DevD on a train, after which Chanda boards a bus and the song “Dola re Dola” is playing on the bus. There is a long contrived plot to get Chanda and Paro to meet in SLB’s Devdas and the conversation they have is probably much more boring than the Monday morning 0730 lectures of Physics-II in SN Bose Auditorium. The way the titles come on both at the beginning and the end of the movie is something we liked and if you have not seen to watch out for. The other thing is the way a drunken Dev is handled, instead of the usual Bollywood way of the hero ranting and raving at God for all the injustices doled out to him, we find Dev more often than not yielding to Newton’s forces in a random but all the same natural manner.


Now, there's no point in outlining the plot (well, there might have been, if the movie had anything worth spoiling), so we can skip right on to the interesting parts. There's a nice bit of ambiguity on whether P has a relationship with a third, unnamed person with a head that doubles as a dysfunctional corkscrew. While a cursory view of the movie might reinforce one side of this argument, there remains enough doubt as to what the correct answer is. The script works harder than expected to keep this as an open question, so we leave it that way. (Such small touches - there are a few more - make this movie an enjoyable watch for someone doomed to absorb such questionable pearls of wisdom as might be provided by observing TV quiz shows.)


The cinematography is also of a standard well beyond most Bollywood movies. The first half of the movie has so many uses of mirrors that we are reminded of our personal favorite the incomparable Ingmar Bergman. The second half showcases Delhi in a way that we have never before seen in Hindi cinema. The shots of the Hotels in Paharganj makes one feel like RK Narayan’s books do, you think you are right there
on the same street with the characters and as much part of the action as they are. Watch out for the scene with Hotel Grand in the background when Dev and Chunni meet for the first time. The shots of a drunk and stoned Dev apparently thanks to Danny Boyle’s camera are also the first of their kind in Hindi cinema, the way the whole world around Dev seems to whirr faster and faster. Talking out of personal experience (for obvious reasons we do not remember most of them) this is exactly how one feels when drunk, for stoned we probably need to wait for a certain sheermelody writer to second.


Image Courtesy : media.movietalkies.com


Next, of course, is the inevitable MMS scandal. AK has drawn a lot from once-current events in this part of the world, and this one seems exquisitely appropriate for some reason. Relying on imperfect memory with AWGN, it seems that the original scandal had surreal moments, such as when certain bloggers in the proximity of the original Lenni demonstrating the breathtaking stupidity of posting real names online (an inevitable consequence of an unjustified sense of entitlement meeting a functional internet connection). We ignore (for obvious reasons) other antics from this time entirely. While remembering whether more mainstream news sources handled things any better isn't feasible (and is probably not worth the effort), one lesson the "great opportunity going forward" types ought to have learned is the unusual persistence of anything ever left on the internet. The other lesson, regarding blogs in general, and blogs by people originating from a particular timezone in particular, we leave out owing to our fear of the blogwa.


The sound track of the movie is yet another unique aspect. I don’t think that I have ever heard a Hindi movie having such a psychedelic sound track. Almost all the songs are played twice consecutively, once when Dev is drunk and immediately followed by for a lack of a better choice of words the morning after version. If we had to pick personal favorites they would be “Saali Khushi” and of course “Emosanal Attyachar”. And the dance that “The Twilight” folks perform in the bar simply left us gaping with our mouth wide open.


We move on (change, etc.) to Chandramukhi/Lenni, a proficienct juggler who is also fluent in Tamil and French (but apparently not Bengali), and has a tendency to read pandaic literature (did I mention my hate of schmottasses?). She's the (cute, when not all dolled up) third main character, and not so surprisingly the only one we feel any real sympathy for, even if her methods of learning to drive are better called accident zones. As a completely unrelated aside, what's with the designery rooms, Che ashtrays and coffee machines? It certainly incites unrealistic thoughts about recession-proof careers.


The casting director deserves full marks. Abhay Deol is tailor made for the role of Dev. Playing a rich spoilt clueless passive personality should come as natural to him as throwing pitty files out of the lab comes to Electrical Engineering professors. Mahi essays the role of the pragmatic Paro with an ease that is rarely seen in most heroines of Bollywood. In one of the best scenes in the movie Dev tells Paro “Main tum se pyaar karna chahta hoon!!”, Paro replies “Log pyaar karte hain, pyaar karne ki koshish kaun karta hai!!”. Those two lines in a most succinct manner sum up the two characters. But the real star of the movie is Kalki Koechlin playing Chanda. The portion where she talks on the phone in Tamil followed by French and then back in Tamil, end the call, call her boss and inform in the coolest possible tone the time shows us that this is a lady who means business, that it is just a profession for her. The pain her voice as she says “And they call me a slut” makes one want to reach out and comfort her, this goes down at least in our book on cinema as comparable to “I could ‘ave been somebody”.



Image Courtesy : media.movietalkies.com

Old man D remains thoroughly detestable, right from his initial appearance, a tendency to view the world from a Dannyboyle-enabled bottom-of-the-bottle, and finally to the demonstration of why ethanol-powered automotion might not mean what you think it means (with, of course, apologies to I. Montoya.) D's procurer, who apparently has enough clout from the original to be listed in IMDB's cast, has a viciously two-dimensional character, and one wonders why he's in the picture at all, particularly since his second-in-command was competent enough to do his job. P is the central object of affections for D, real or imagined, but apart from the beginning of the movie, and a delightful little detox interlude, doesn't really figure much in the latter half. Not that we're complaining, of course.


Roger Ebert felt that the reason Pulp Fiction is a great movie, is due entirely to the high quality of dialogue in the movie. DevD is right up there in this regard. From “Main aa raha hoon” to “Dilli main billi ko maarna chahiye, khaana chahiye lekin paalna nahin chahiye” it is one roller coaster of a ride. The clincher though is how a migration from east-west-east made a certain man change from a) Whiskey to Vodka, b) Chicken to Fish c) Voluptuous women to size zero men with b****s!!! Be warned though that some of the dialogues being in Punjabi may not be easily comprehended.


The movie is split into three parts, one for each main character, and one not-part that ought to have been for the intermission, which of course was noticed later than it should have been by the projectionist or its modern equivalent in the modern multiplex. Each part has what one assumes are to be subtle events that dovetail them together, and this could have been done using much less film: the movie is just too long, particularly since there are elements that either should have been developed more (like the brother and the sister of the brother) or just been completely removed.


The one complaint we have with this movie is that the ending was too good to be true. But then again we have a thing for dark despairing endings, we would have much preferred an ending where Dev dies on the Tso-Moriri plains and the last shot is of some scavenging birds tearing his innards apart. (Here is when you readers are supposed to go “Thank God, he studied Thoka and does circuit design and not make movies”)


The music deserves firm applause, for firmly sticking to the background where it belongs. It's a decent score, even though its very aptness condemns it to the grey oblivion of forgetfulness. Emosanal atyachar notwithstanding.


All in all this is a cult movie. There have been comparisons with this being the Indian equivalent of “English August”, “Catcher in the Rye” or the equivalent of “The Wall” due to its psychedelic music. To add our two penny’s worth to the comparisons, if it did remind us of any book, it was Midnight’s Children. Like the book we hope that the movie ushers in a whole new genre of Indian film making, and like the book which had a quality of sustained brilliance to it, the movie is similar in scene after scene one encounters cinema of a very high quality. And to a movie that I can compare it with, if I may do so without inviting the wrath of anyone, I think it is in a way like “La Dolce Vita”. While LDV is the story of a writer trying to write his great novel, DevD is the story of Dev trying to do possibly the most creative thing possible, live one’s life and try to find meaning in it.


It is the ending where this movie really disappoints. It may not be realistic to expect a commercially unviable ending from a Bollywood movie, the current unsatisfactory ending only leaves us wondering why anyone who demonstrates the catalytic action of alcohol and additives to convert mechanical perfection into a ton or so of instant death actually deserves a happy (for some questionable value of happy) ending. Or even any ending but one at all. What might have been a worthy equivalent of 'Requiem for a Dream' ends up as the Slumdog Love Triangle.


And the greatest incontestable proof that this is a great movie is that The Alternate Moebyus promised to strangle our necks once he was done watching the movie with us. But the fact that we are writing this review and TAM came up with “This is a decent movie” after watching it should educate you on really how good the movie was.




[1] No, he does not, apparently, return.

(Bah. not posting regularly here means that the story of when the Brain watched Pinky confront the molar police is necessarily out of date. Sheer pity.)

Quantum of Entertainment

We interrupt the stalled story of the KF Panda to bring you matters that are even less relevant to reality

It is humbling sensation to realise that, in spite of all the efforts of the best humourists, the funniest things still remain side effects of human (mis)behaviour.

In other, possibly unrelated news, it turns out that you can still discover new fundamental particles even when the LHC is not yet at absolute zero. We refer, of course, to the discovery of the smallest possible particle of entertainment after watching the latest Bond movie.

The movie itself is nothing special (more on that later) but when you consider a remarkable conversation that the cricketer (bunking yet another collapse) and I were privileged to witness on our uncoordinated shamble towards the door (due to a regrettable combination of fairly evident factors, reproduction is, as mentioned in the disclaimer, likely to be faulty but covers the essentials):

"...I tell you man, this movie is only for the illiterates who have not read the originals by Iron Flamingo"

"Agreed - did you know that in the original, Felix Leiter was a white guy in a straw hat?"

Forgive us, O potential vegetable for our transgression. We shall not err. Or not more than the permissible error rate, anyway.

There then followed an unrepeatable discussion of the flaws and nonexistent virtues of the current actor, and a historical comparison to the disadvantage of most of the other actors except that Remington Typewriter guy. As we all know, there is only one real Bond whose first name is Fevi: it therefore seems redundant to comment any more. It might also be that you need to be female to appreciate the comparison, of course, which masterwork of logic seems to have crossed my ears more than once recently.

Quanta of Enjoyment aside, it is fairly obvious that someone at the studio has somehow misspelled Jason Bourne as James Bond, having him drive, of all things, a hybrid SUV? The DBS passes through too, as do some horrendous boxes driven by Holga that we will pass over lightly since any application of weight might lead to the unwelcome discovery that they are made of paper.

(Image stolen from filmschoolrejects.com)

No Bond movie is complete without eyecandy, and we're not referring to Aston Martins or gadgets which are conspicuously low key, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. In fact, I believe the last few movies might end up in giving a whole new meaning to the Bondmobile. Anyway, Holga is the delectable bond girl, and after Hitman, Max Payne and this, she seems well on her way to becoming Ukraine's answer to Milla and Michelle. Gemma plays the quick and the dead, in the process generating perhaps the only picture worth adding to this not-review. The real Bond girl, though is Dame Judi, with whom we even see (if one eye is closed, and the other squints sideways) Bond show a bit of emotion. Next thing you know, Bond is going to act in a good movie with Eric Bana about a senseless terrorist act.

Now this might even be better than Hitman, but one does wonder if Nicky Parsons smiled only because she knew that Jason would surface with yet another loss of memory, and find a pulp fiction paperback in his pocket that miraculously survived the Potomac to give him his name and a back story (which, by the way, is worth reading: the Bond website may be overly reliant on Flash, but the aggravation is worth the new backstory.)

We might, by the way, make an interesting comparison of Bourne and Bond:

• Chase sequences: Bourne excelled, and borrowing a roof or two from him seems to be Bond's way out of (and into) trouble


• Hot girls: We may be devout believers in the Theory of Dyevolution, but Bourne has Franka and Julia, while Bond has Eva and Holga. No contest.


• Conveyance: Both realise the utility of two wheels instead of four while travelling 'other' countries. I should probably not even mention the hybrid SUV again, but it strikes a sore nerve.


• Widespread conspiracy theories: Hell, Ludlum developed his Burnished Brass, while Bond sticks to physics instead of metallurgy.


• Lone psychotic with a gun against the world. No Jimmy, you cannot eat world - it is inedible.


• Both push back the boundaries of scientific discovery: Bond by demonstrating the difficulty of making a Focault pendulum using two people, and Bourne by staying sober in Goa


• Globe-hoppery


• Both treat hotel rooms very badly


• On a less serious note, both are major reinventions of the originals, to 'keep with the times'

In other, perhaps more welcome news, A Most Wanted Man is fairly high on the bestseller list that the city's practitioners of KF do their best to populate. Maybe there is indeed a God, even if it is dyslexic.

300/30

300/30

This was originally going to be a post about an obscure little gem called Pants of Fire (sadly, no, it was "Painted Fire", though I like the UK title better). Fortunately, sanity intervened in the form of a surprisingly good movie by Abbas Kiarostami, whose only other movie we watched had more Epic Fail Guy per frame than a Pshaw rooke ad for the kolkroaches. All right, no more links to E.Dramatica. For a few more sentences, at least. Particularly considering the alternative (just search for India). Mind you, the State names are hilariously funny enough to make me wonder if an Indian wrote it. If so, may we express the opinion that India's search for its very own Dave Barry and Art Buchwald has ended.

Now, on the surface of it, Ten is not precisely the sort of movie that ought to expect rave reviews: it's shot in a car, with cameras aimed at the occupants. For some reason, we see only one of them at a time, though as the movie goes on, we do get to make a catalogue of the rings worn by the driver. It also starts off with the sort of effortlessly irritating spoilt brat that makes you weigh seriously the pros and cons of genocide. As the movie progresses, though, it provides small glimpses of the lives of a certain number of Iranian women, in a way that actually makes you want to watch the rest of the movie. On a highly unrelated aside, why weren't the feminists born to write in sandland? That may have been where they could have done the most good, and it might, just might, have spared us some amount of ghastly reading brought about by an overactive curiosity.^[1]

This sort of a minimalist approach to filmmaking was last panned in the Bleary-eyed Bitch Project. Leaving apart the fact that we consider minimalism essential in only a single subject, the minimalism works - and surprisingly well - for Ten: you actually want to hear the stories being narrated without the usual Amitabh-voiced sanctimonious prig. Starting right from the appropriately named Mania's messy divorce and subsequent remarriage, and her discussions with her bratty son, the sister, the old lady, the prostitute, the heartbroken and the hairless woman (whoever is absent, pleej raije your hand) their stories are presented, with plenty of reading between the lines (or watching between the frames, as you prefer). The net result was that the movie was never boring: a considerable achievement since all you can see is either whiny brat or whiny woman, the rings or other assorted jewellery, the (chaotic) traffic that reminds us of a certain hellhole - all of which are subjects guaranteed to bore us out of our tiny skull within seconds. The fact that it does not do so is both a credit to Kiarostami, and a reason to watch this movie.

(an aside: did you know that Bheja Fry was never a dish of exotic ganglia cooked in oil and served in a neatly trepanned cranium of the enemy? And here we were, having such pleasant dreams. For the record, 300 is reviewed in a highly better way by Ruthless - go and read it there.)

[1] For the record: we have no quarrel with the aims of the femi knists (apart from considering them irrelevant in an ideal world) but do have quite a few objections to their methods. Was it Holmes who had madness in his method, and method in his madness?

Edit: 10+4? 10+4!!

The Loaves of Others

Sometimes, a batsman hits a century in 24 balls. Sometimes, a director makes a movie so poignantly beautiful that my stock phrasebook of negative statements (most of which are machine translated from the original Dot) seems woefully inadequate to pan the movie. The Lives of Others is one such movie.

That paragraph above ought to be enough to encourage you to go and watch this movie, particularly since it's been rerereleased in Das Vaterland by the Bulla and Ch- sorry, wrong movie, that would be BharatBulla, er, BharatBala Productions, who were also apparently running an online fillum contest related to this movie.

A recent weekend back, yours truly, the cricket mad fiend, and another anonymous person goose-stepped our way to the local, highly expensive tent house to watch this movie. We interrupt the proceedings to remind you that local tent houses in the Pensioners Hellhole charge enough for the privilege of sitting in inflexible chairs with wobbly backs that it tends to attract our favourite breed of two-legged ape originating from the north of our favourite Carcinogenic line across the globe.

For no good reason, we will ignore the differently volumed people who tend to somehow get the seats to the edge of the rows in which the cricketer's good efforts to book tickets well in advance place us. After all, personal attacks ought to be made only on people who can help being what they are. And the bloggers, and the banjo players. And the old lady in (but you get the idea.)

For some reason, I actually had the foresight to take the seat between the two other unfortunates who accompanied me to this movie, which means that instead of having to actually listen to the thought processes of alien movie watchers, I was surrounded by popcorn, which is the sort of auspicious happening that makes me immediately suspect that the movie has a special appearance by Corrino K to balance things out. As it turned out, however, the cricketer had to spend an hour each time listening to edifying statements before he could run to the safety of the rather large and low-ceilinged restroom, while I could enjoy the movie more or less undisturbed. For my own amusement, and to test your patience, the usual nebulous statements about the movie will be interspersed with pearls of wisdom from the couple next to us (conveniently named H and S, for He and She.)

The movie opened auspiciously enough, with "Captain" HGW (no, not that Captain, who shall not be linked to in an effort to keep PageRank from dropping even more) teaching a class of aspiring Staatssicherheit officers how a person is to be interrogated (O Wilt, Wilt, wherefore art thou, Wilt?)

Naturally enough, once this successful demonstration commenced, we (for once, not the Royal we) were apparently treated to the following statement:


H: "Oye, is movie me sub taaitul hain"


We refrain from further comment, and merely observe that it is clear that the language of one Vaterland has inspired an official language of a Vaat-er land to do away with the Neuter gender, leading to much aggravation when we actually had to pass exams for such things.

Soon enough, HGW accompanies his facial-hair endowed superior officer to a play by "Laszlo"^[1], where we meet our heroine (or is it heroin? No matter) of the drama. One thing leads to another, and HGW is put in charge of investigating "Laszlo" for whatever form of thoughtcrime it is that Type 4 artists are supposed to indulge in. Aided in this noble endeavour by the great minister Schlumppf (no, Hempf), a listening post is soon established over "Laszlo"'s residence, and HGW and Sarge Udo settle down to listen in to our officer.

In what ought to be a characteristic of such situations, Schlumppf is apparently in lust with our very own Christa (who is, of course, the previously unnamed heroine of this movie), which is why the HGW's sharp instincts that suspect "Laszlo" of, shall we say, unwanted tendencies to put pen to paper, are allowed free play.

For reasons of his own that have no doubt to do with the listening to advanced classical muzique over telephone wire, a precursor of the modern and holy system of being put on hold by customer disservice, HGW lets "Laszlo" get away with quite a bit of stuff that he might have, with profit, shown to his boss.


S: "ooh he has started liking them"


We also discover that Christa has this annoyingly stupid habit of popping pills:


H: "What medications is she taking?"
S: "For depression" [Prozac in the eighties, of course. Very advanced,
these germans]


Which naturally leads in to a good reason as to why she would be unreasonably susceptible to blackmail. When the inevitable blackmail happens, we get:


H: "Bitchhhhh"


Ah well, the rest of the story need not be told, and while it ought to be worth the watch, you might perhaps choose a more congenial theater. Or, in normal countries, to buy the DVD. It's rare to see a movie that does not exactly go overboard with mawkish sentimentality when speaking about the triumph of humanity uber alles (if such a triumph does happen, you might be entitled to string together a coherent thought or two of suicide.) Instead, this movie sets the right note, and even though it could have profitably have ended about five minutes earlier, does not follow in the footsteps of the Melodious Monkeykar to screw it all up with a sermon at the end. In case you haven't realised already (and have actually had the patience to sit through disjointed ramblings to reach this point, I consider this the best movie of 2008 (er, no, 2006) so far. Which might actually be amusing, were it not for the fact that we watched Anthony Con Hai some time before watching this. And while watching Minissha Lamba might be distracting, we'd rather encourage the cricketer to put a large picture of Amrita Rao in the previous post.)

Of course, there only remains one unanswered question at the end of all this: What would H and S say if they watched something by E I Bergman?

[1] sz z? Zzz!!

Mit Mithya, jäh?

(yes, making multilingual puns in languages we don't understand proves that we suck.)

The Academy Awards were announced today, and as might have been expected, Pixar's Magnum Opus on the rendering of multiple hairy animals did win something. This is not about that movie, unfortunately, since the idea of a rat cooking up anything other than Plague a la mode is endlessly entertaining.

Mithya is, at its simplest, a remake of Don. Lest this bring to mind that insipid overhyped Pshaw Rooke starrer, we hasten to remind you of movies like these, which lend their inspiration well (don't you love euphemisms? No? Oh well.)

Mithya starts off well, with a bridge that might have served Guy Ritchie well being turned into the scene of a shootout, and Ranvir Shorey(VK) hiding, terrified, under it as two people who we shall know by the names of Inspectors Ram and Sham do their utmost to adjust the pH of the waters below (It is suggested that any subliminal imagery you might see of curvy horns and con men might be replaced by this. It does not make much difference to the eventual outcome.)

Earlier, our hero plays his part by playing the part of an extra at a film, wherein we first get to see Neha Dhupia(forget her name, at least till the end of this review) playing her part (now, and throughout the movie) as a Cicinnurus regius impersonator. More generally, she does try to cover all the Paradiseae, sometimes with incongrous results (but we are getting ahead - or behind) the story here. Sadly, she's no Zeenat Aman, but then, who could be? She still does provide a restful, if lush, backdrop to the increasingly grim stuff put on screen in the name of realism, though of course, we wonder about the rocky docky imagery.

Somewhen (it is rather confusing) during, before, or after the process of pH readjustment, the inspectors inspect the visage of VK, and find it (as you might have expected) a rare match with the Don, and a reaction of substitution is initiated. There follows a rare comedy sequence reminiscent of the reactions of someone presented with their first digital camera, ending in a barber shop where the shot is taken. Sadly, we never see this theme develop any further, remarks about brains and backsides notwithstanding.

Naseeruddin Shah and That Other Guy Whose Name I Do Not Know play the competition to Don, though in a rather effective way, which provides for a certain amount of restful tranquility as we wait for the inevitable ending to this movie.

This provides a rather nice spot to bring up our main complaint with this movie? Didn't someone say that switching genre mid-movie is bad? After all, there are only a finite number of ways to end a movie like Don properly (or worse, improperly), and the darkly (or otherwise) humourous first half offered so much more potential; particularly when a sane viewer would have been enormously tempted to bail out during the first 45s of the movie, given certain a priori assumptions.

The humour works extremely well, but once we start getting to the unfunny parts (which tend to be as gripping as a bald radial tyre on a bicycle being driven through yet another Himalayan avalanche), the predominant thinking is a wish that whoever did the scissorwork had had the good sense to borrow from this movie. It would have enlivened the proceedings, and probably would not have caused lasting harm to its eventual success at the bocks ofis. After all, if you can inspire a fan site (or a great citizen of the east) into speculating about what the movie really means, you have a classic some decades down the line.

Eh, what's up, doc?

Ultraviolence is a difficult concept to pull off in a movie, and apart from a few Arnie movies dating from the great eighties, there have not been too many good efforts in this direction by hollywood. QT did do an exemplary job in a two-part movie, but by and large, the best movies of this kind have always been made in India.

From Rojni saar's stunts that manage to violate both general and special relativity (usually at the same time), to Sunny paaji's attempts to imitate Bond, we have had an abundance of movies that make use of violence to distract the viewer from seeing the 747 that's looping the loop through a gap in the plot. Of course, this assumes that a plot exists: take, for example, consider yet another Pshaw Rooke starrer that (regardless of our opinion of both Sush and Amrita Rao) should never have been made.

It is therefore appropriate to consider Shoot 'em up as Hollywood's reply, complete with: fresh produce producing fresh corpses, bullet physics that overshadow Rojni saar's two-gun makeshift howitzer shooting bad guys behind a wall[1], and the particularly unique brand of humour that results from trying to do things seriously, much like a Michael Moorcock novel. In fact, when people set out to tell a story like this, they start by combining together chopped bits of 35mm reel stolen from the celluloid graveyard, stitch by painful stitch. When eldritch lightning finally powers up unknown devices made to give such a creature life, the creators end up running screaming from it, only to be pursued and caught, since the poor thing is lonely, and wants a sequel (or perhaps two or five, but that is beside the point.)

The movie opens innocently enough, with drunk Agent Smith sitting at a bus stop trying to drown his sorrows in lukewarm coffee. Er, no, make that Mr. Smith, and it's difficult to say if he's in Washington. A much-pregnant woman hobbles past him, pursued by a carload of trash driven by a lone thug, and Schmidt decides to pursue his duties to ze vaterland, by promptly dispatching the thug and all its clones, while simultaneously attempting to discover whether the mail-order degree that he received in midwifery was worth it.

To cut much of a long (non)story short, Mr Sch err, Smith ends up with a baby in his hands, and marches off to meet "DQ", played by the Bellucci herself.

Midway through this, Mr Smith suffers an identity crisis brought about by the consumption of fresh produce, and thinks he's the wabbit himself. Naturally enough, this means that Sam turns up, played ably by Paul Giamatti, an ex-FBI-profiler turned into hirer of clone armies for ze greater good of ze greater number. Much hilarity ensues.

Unfortunately, beyond this point, the story is really a tattered transparent cloak over the container lorryful of gunfights, which makes it rather difficult to describe much more, but certain items do stand out: the one rat-power Leonardo-made lock, the critical-velocity-defying vertical gunfight ending upon a helicopter and body-strewn rails, and of course la Bellucci. Doesn't leave much out, does it? An IMDB reviewer recommends watching the last part of the first trilogy of Bourne instead, but I'd suggest watching both: it's a quick way of propping up a few economies. And remember, for those people who cannot yet watch the whole of Kill Bill in one sitting, this is useful training.

[1] I've never actually seen this. Youtube links, anyone?