|
Release date:
|
January 20, 2017
|
|
Director:
|
Vishal Mishra
|
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Sunil Grover, Zakir Hussain, Rajesh Sharma,
Pankaj Tripathi, Dipannita Sharma Atwal, Anjana Sukhani
Hindi
|
If you make a lousy
film and call it Coffee With D, you
do not deserve better than a lazy review playing on “D” and other letters of
the alphabet. Director Vishal Mishra’s tale of an Arnab
Goswami clone trying to land a television interview with India’s most wanted
underworld don is not B-, C- or D-grade. Z is too high a rating for it.
Radio and
television star Sunil Grover – best known for playing Gutthi on Comedy Nights With Kapil and now
multiple characters on The Kapil Sharma
Show – takes on the role of a chap called Arnab Ghosh, whose obnoxiously aggressive
journalistic style prompts his boss to shift him from a nightly prime-time slot
to an early evening space reserved for a cookery show. The only way he can save
his job is to do something sensational that will turn the channel around.
Never mind what the
rest of the story is. The acting in Coffee
With D is awkward, the sets are tacky, the production quality is amateurish,
the editing is haphazard and the writer’s understanding of the functioning of
the media is non-existent. This film is an insult to the word cinema, and to
spend too much time reviewing it would be an insult to my profession, so let me
give Coffee With D the cliched
critique it deserves by scanning the thesaurus for adjectives starting with D
that can be applied to it. Here goes:
D for Disastrous.
D for Dismal.
D for Doomed.
D for Dreadful.
And oh yes:
D for Dammit, why
did I waste 2 hours and 3 minutes of my precious time watching this nonsense?
Coffee With D clearly thinks it is funny, gutsy and insightful.
What it is instead is unfunny and of poorer quality than what a smart
kindergarten kid might write. Why am I stopping at D alone? There are other
letters that throw up words suited to the emotions this film incites:
A for Abhorrent.
A for Appalling.
A for Atrocious.
A for Awful.
G for Ghastly.
H for Harrowing.
H for Heartbreak
because three of my favourite character actors from Bollywood agreed to star in
it: Zakir Hussain as the gangster the film refers to simply as D, Pankaj Tripathi
as his sidekick-in-chief Girdhari and Rajesh Sharma as
Arnab’s boss Roy. Why, doston, why?
There’s more:
H for Hideous.
H for Horrendous.
H for Horrid.
H for How weird
that “Bombay” is one of the words muted in the film!
R for Revolting
when it makes unthinking remarks about rape and bomb blasts.
R for Ridiculously
bad.
D for Dawood, the
name the film does not have the guts to use.
E for Etcetera
etcetera.
Seriously, I am not
being clever here to elicit some laughs. The fact is there are thousands of
extremely talented people out there who do not get good breaks in films and
theatre because they do not have the right contacts, or fortune has not
favoured them, or they could not find the money to fund a potentially solid
project. Knowing this reality, it is infuriating to learn that a producer
actually backed this bag of garbage in its entirety. Coffee With D made me angry because it has managed to come to
theatres and get good time slots in prime halls despite being a zero, while
some excellent small films never manage a theatrical release.
D for Damn you
cosmos, for allowing this injustice.
This is not a film.
It is a waste of time.
Rating
(out of five stars): -25 stars
|
CBFC Rating (India):
|
A
|
|
Running time:
|
123 minutes
|
A
version of this review has been published on Firstpost:
No comments:
Post a Comment