Raja Sen in Mumbai
Lady Gaga has nothing on good old Bollywood.
When we make a bad romance, we make it so bad the trauma lasts us a fair while. If we wept, it wasn’t for the intended reasons.
Featuring one of last Friday’s releases, here’s a list of very weak tragedies that left us cold, bored, exhausted.
Issaq
One of the most amateurish versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Manish Tiwary’s Issaq never once lets us feel for the characters -- who are, in turn, each acting like they belong in different films.
The immortal text of the Bard is squandered most by hero Prateik Babbar, who provides a sickeningly bad performance.
Raanjhanaa
There’s some fine acting and impressive craft on display in Aanand L Rai’s recent hit but that doesn’t excuse its huge fundamental flaws.
Even if you look past the glorification of the stalker-as-hero, nothing can forgive that awful end of the film where the girl endangers a crowd of people in her quest to get the boy killed. Groan.
Ishaqzaade
Habib Faisal’s second film, again, is an impressively crafted film with good lines and fine performances from the leads -- it’s just that the director, who also wrote the film, messed up big-time with this regressive, maliciously sexist take on Romeo And Juliet.
Perhaps we should just leave The Bard to the masters.
Saat Khoon Maaf
And, in the same breath, perhaps the masters ought stick to The Bard?
Vishal Bhardwaj went tremendously awry in this film where several men fall fatally for an increasingly weird Priyanka Chopra. Just because it’s macabre doesn’t mean it’s not also a mess.
Guzaarish
Two words sum up how bad the climax of this film is, people: Suhel Seth.
As in the self-proclaimed expert of the world who, in this film’s finale, clambers into bed with a dying Hrithik Roshan.
He isn’t alone, everyone’s spooning the corpse-to-be. Now that’d be a good starting scene for an Almodovar film...
Veer
Before Salman Khan became invincible at the box office and discovered the power of Bhai-hood, he wrote this utter disaster.
The film, which also launched so-called Katrina-lookalike Zarine Khan, featured Salman in long hair and leather chaps, trying to pass off as young.
Not fun, no.
Kites
Apparently, the producers of this multi-crore superflop -- which came in two flavours, Hindi and English, the former directed by Anurag Basu, the latter re-cut by Brett Ratner -- were upset that newspaper reports played spoiler and revealed the film’s sad ending before it had released.
Well, I’d say the true tragedy was in this film being made, in the first place.
Delhi 6
There was lots of surreality in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s drama about monkeymen and wannabe Indian Idols and mirrors and mythology, all set in Chandni Chowk, to a truly killer soundtrack.
But it couldn’t justify an end where a guy dies, goes to heaven and has a jalebi with his granddad, and comes back to life. Ugh.
Saawariya
Sanjay Leela Bhansali took a wonderful, achingly tragic Fyodor Dostoevsky short story and immersed in a big-budget, starkid-filled pile of ink. The result -- instead of a symphony in cobalt -- was more just blue bilge.
So much so that it drove me to make a film just to better it.
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna
Karan Johar’s most deeply flawed film, this one was trying to be a sincere, searing take on infidelity while also trying to be a glossy and breezy bit of fluff.
It resulted in a monstrous film with strange protagonists cancelling each other out and cardboard characters pretending to be adults. Awful, truly.
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