REVIEW 292: DESI KATTEY

Release date:	September 26, 2014
Director:	Anand Kumar
Cast: Language:	Jay Bhanushali, Akhil Kapur, Ashutosh Rana, Suneil Shetty, Tia Bajpai, Sasha Agha Hindi

Desi Kattey is the most unwittingly amusing film to emerge from Bollywood this year. Director Anand Kumar – who earlier made Delhii Heights (starring Neha Dhupia and Jimmy Sheirgill) and Zila Ghaziabad (with Sanjay Dutt, Viveik Oberoi and Arshad Warsi) – has come up with a film that’s a mish-mash of various themes explored by Bollywood over the years.

The opening credits suggest that Suneil Shetty and Ashutosh Rana are the film’s leading men. As if the thought of watching approximately two-and-a-half hours of Shetty-anna on screen is not intimidating enough, comes the realisation that the truth is even worse. In reality, Shetty and Rana play supporting characters. Desi Kattey’s actual heroes are TV’s Jay Bhanushali about whom we will speak later, and debutant Akhil Kapur who does the most comical take on “intense” we’ve seen in Bollywood in recent years.

Kapur glares. He glowers. He lowers his head and looks around menacingly. He dips his voice to do a poor imitation of a baritone. He does a drunken rant that’s so bad, it’s good. And when he looks lovingly at his girlfriend/wife, it appears like he’s leering more than Prem Chopra, Sadashiv Amrapurkar and Ranjeet rolled in one. Media reports will tell you he is the nephew of veteran Vinod Khanna. After watching the film I googled him and discovered from an interview that he thinks he was “in Tony Montana mode from Scarface” throughout this film. Umm. I can visualise Al Pacino watching Desi Kattey and voluntarily entering a grave just so that he could turn in it in protest. I, for one, fell off my chair laughing at the reference. Picked myself up off the floor to write this review.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this young actor will be better with better guidance in a better-written film. This one’s too cliched for anyone’s good, even while failing miserably in its attempt to be a Ram Gopal Varma film. At first it seems like it is about inseparable friends who are like brothers, the legendary Hindi film chaddi buddies, orphans who become hoodlums. Oh boy, how many of those have we seen! In this thread, two child actors grow up to be Bhanushali and Kapur playing the characters Gyani and Pali. The boys go to work for the UP gangster-turned-politician Harishankar Tripathi (Rana). At some point it becomes a film about second chances, with the entry of Shetty who plays an ex-Army Major with an air of mystery about him that leads to nothing, and a contrived backstory about corruption allegations that destroyed his career as a champion shooter, I didn’t understand how and why. Of course there’s a romantic element in this sea of triteness: Bhanushali is paired with Sasha Agha, Kapur opposite a perennially mournful-looking Tia Bajpai. And towards the end, Desi Kattey turns into a thriller with a hilarious twist that suggests Pakistan’s involvement in some inexplicable scheme to shame India, by which point I didn’t care enough to make the effort to understand how or why.

It doesn’t feel like a screenplay as much as a desperate attempt at a complex story, with random elements chucked in to spice up the bland proceedings. Hey, it’s too sour, throw in some salt. Too much salt? Add more tomatoes. You get the picture? Good for you, because I watched the entire film and I still haven’t got the picture. Here are some important points to be noted though:

·     * Don’t be misled by the fact that the music is by the usually wonderful Kailash Kher. Except for one nice-though-not-distinctive song that he leads with, the rest are a bore.

·      * Ashutosh Rana is the one bright spark in this disaster. However, he needs to get past his penchant for speaking shuddh, clear, concise Hindi in his trademark fashion, irrespective of what character he’s playing.

·     * Salma Agha’s daughter Sasha Agha in this film is a good example of what indifferent direction and poor written material can do to a promising actor. She was truly interesting when she made her Bollywood debut in a small role in Aurangzeb last year. Here she’s just a sideshow with painted claws that change colour in every scene, that’s all.

·      * On the positive side, Jay Bhanushali, who was laughably lacklustre in his debut Hindi film Hate Story 2 earlier this year, shows some potential here. In that film, he was being paraded about by a director who clearly found him hot. He’s not strutting around in Desi Kattey, which shows him up as a rather attractive guy who is not such a bad actor after all. It’s his good luck that he’s up against Akhil Kapur and Suneil Shetty, who could make boulders look like better performers.

·    * In a weird quirk that harks back to Bollywood of the 1990s and before, in all this film’s romantic scenes, for some reason lovers’ lips always stop short of meeting.

·      * Desi Kattey should be played at medical schools for that one killer scene in which a doc with a brain monitoring contraption of some sort gravely points to graphs showing what we are told was Gyani’s “state of mind” while he achieved various shooting scores.  

Okay, my apologies, but I can’t continue this review. I just fell off my chair again, and I’m finding it hard to type from the floor.

Rating (out of five stars): ½ star

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	143 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DesiKattey

REVIEW 92: LOOT

Release date:	November 4, 2011
Director:	Raj Thakur
Cast:	Govinda, Suneil Shetty, Jaaved Jaaferi, Mahaakshay Chakraborty, Prem Chopra, Dalip Tahil, Ravi Kissen, Mahesh Manjrekar, Mika, Kim Sharma

To fully fathom the bankruptcy of thought & the surfeit of cash in Bollywood these days, watch Loot! The film is about four crooks – Pandit (Govinda), Builder (Suneil Shetty), Akbar (Jaaved Jaaferi) and Wilson (Mahaakshay Chakraborty) – who are sent off to Pattaya to rob a house filled with valuables, but discover when they get there that they are in the home of the dreaded gangster Lala (Mahesh Manjrekar) who, as it turns out, is out to kill the don of Pattaya (Prem Chopra) and is being investigated by an unscrupulous cop (Ravi Kissen) who intends to use the evidence to blackmail Lala. That’s it – the story does not deserve more than one sentence!

Nor does this film deserve a cogent review. But I do have some questions for the team of Loot:

1.     Why did anyone bother to make this film?

2.     Why is Govinda (the only bright spark in this film) ruining our happy memories of the high points of his career by acting in such utter rubbish? If the industry no longer offers you halfway decent films, isn’t it better to retire or bide your time till something better comes along?

3.     Why did this talented actor destroy his own career with his tardiness, his weight gain and what we’re told was extreme unprofessional behaviour although he’s said to be a nice guy? Will we ever again get to see Govinda – one of the funniest guys Hindi filmdom has ever known – in a worthwhile film?

4.     Why doesn’t the industry have better films for Jaaved Jaaferi who too can be funny given a good, well-written role?

5.     Does Suneil Shetty still think he can act?

6.     Does The Artist Formerly Known As Mimoh believe that a change of name to Mahaakshay is more important than voice training?

7.     Could someone tell the writer of this film to forget asinine language stereotypes of the sort that assume that Hindus say dhanyavad, Muslims say shukriya and Christians say thank you?

8.     Could the director please tell me why his quartet of goons crawled down the railings of a multi-storeyed building’s fire escape instead of running down the steps during one scene?

9.     Has anyone on the team of Loot heard of not-so-minor issues such as continuity? Wasn’t any production assistant monitoring the shooting of that scene in which Ravi Kissen is shown wearing one earring but in close-ups that were clearly shot later, he’s wearing two earrings and his hair is shorter?

10. Was there some significance to the scenes involving a doddering old man in a restaurant? Is old age meant to be funny?

11.  (This  one’s for the reader) Do you know Kim Sharma still acts in films?

12.  Rakhi Sawant features in an item song right at the end. Why is her face frozen stiff?

13.  And (apologies for repeating myself but I can’t help it) why did anyone bother to make this film?

Rating (out of five): 1/2 star (only for Govinda)

CBFC Rating:                       U/A with cuts (The Censor Board banned Mika’s song Mere iss pe and got the words “choos le” beeped out from Rakhi Sawant’s item number Bank loot le)

Running time:                        120 Minutes

Language:                              Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_(2011_film)  

REVIEW 30: THANK YOU

Release date:	April 8, 2011
Director:	Anees Bazmee
Cast:	Akshay Kumar, Sonam Kapoor, Bobby Deol, Irrfan Khan, Rimi Sen, Suneil Shetty, Celina Jaitley

Raj, Yogi and Vikram are married men whose life’s mantra is infidelity. Raj deceives his gullible wife with promises of undying love. Vikram tramples upon his lady at every opportunity he gets. And Yogi has been tossed around by his spouse ever since she discovered him with a lover. The three men are buddies, so are the three women. When Raj’s wife Sanjana suspects him of fooling around, she hires a detective to pin him down. The sleuth Kishen (Akshay Kumar) complicates matters further by falling for the beatific and beautiful Sanjana.

Thank You is good for some laughs if you can forget that it’s offensive to women or that Bollywood has made several multi-star-cast comedies on the theme of adultery this past decade. Director Anees Bazmee’s No Entry was far funnier than his latest offering. It too featured three cheating husbands + three unhappy wives, one of them as credulous as Sanjana. Perhaps since critics are bound to point out the similarities between the two films, Bazmee has inserted a scene in Thank You in which a character is watching No Entry. Technically then, am I supposed to call this the director’s ode to his previous megahit or just a lack of fresh ideas? You decide the answer to that one. What I will tell you is that other Hindi films on the same subject are flooding my memory as I write: Shaadi No. 1, again with a triumvirate of married couples and Sanjay Dutt in a role similar to the one played by Akshay in Thank You; David Dhawan’s disturbingly bad Govinda-starrer Do Knot Disturb; Masti which too was about a trio of duos … feel free to add to the list ...

But as I said, despite the feeling of having been there and seen all that before, I did find parts of Thank You funny. The actors all acquit themselves reasonably well, Suneil Shetty is particularly hilarious, and Irrfan is so good that I’d love to see him in other, hopefully more original comedies. I say all this despite the fact that the film slows down in patches, is too long and has a dull soundtrack; the repeated references to the flute-playing Lord Krishna are too meaningless to even be called pretentious; Celina Jaitley disappears for a large part of the film in such an inexplicable fashion that it almost seems like the actress fell out with the film maker or didn’t give him sufficient dates; Mallika Sherawat’s much-hyped item number is completely impactless; there is no particular reason for the film to be set in Canada and not India; Akshay’s character’s sexually promiscuous ways are forgotten completely by the scriptwriter in the end; his interest in Sanjana too is entirely – and inexplicably – axed from the climax.

Lazy scripting apart, what is completely unfunny about Thank You is its attitude towards fornicating husbands, so similar to the other films I just listed in its league. Little has changed in Hindi cinema since the 1981 film Ek Hi Bhool in which Jeetendra played an adulterer who demands to be forgiven for his “ek hi bhool” (just one mistake) by his wife (Rekha). That film regressively painted the wronged woman as an unforgiving, stubborn creature who had the audacity to be offended by her pati parmeshwar’s sins … oops, just one sin. Thirty years later in Thank You, tokenism towards political correctness comes in the form of a long lecture about suffering wives that Kishen / Akshay delivers to the deceitful husbands. But just to be sure that the film doesn’t offend the sensibilities of its primary target audience, Kishen also describes the men’s penchant for bed-hopping as “ek chhoti si aadat”.

When I entered the hall to watch Thank You first day first show, I was taken aback to see a virtually all-male audience. As the film rolled on, I began to understand the gender imbalance in the crowd … The men in that theatre laughed their guts out every time the sadistic Vikram was mean to his wife, ordered her around and treated her like hired household help. They burst into peals of raucous thigh-slapping laughter whenever one of those celluloid husbands was unfaithful to his wife and successfully covered up his treachery. They then fell silent when Akshay lectured the womanising boys about the price of faithlessness. But the energy in the theatre returned when Akshay uttered those reassuring words “ek chhoti si aadat” and Vikram described his need to be with his wife, not in terms of his affection for her, but thus: “jabse yeh aurat meri zindagi mein aayee hai, meri kismet badal gayee hai.” Ah, that whole ghar ki Lakshmi phenomenon. My fellow viewers in the hall could understand that! The order of nature had been restored! All was well with the world! Thank you!

Now tell me Mr Bazmee, would you have the courage to make a comedy about man-ising wives in which female philanderers too are absolved this easily? I suspect not. Do prove me wrong.

Rating (out of five): **1/4

Post-script: My dear gentlemen readers, I DID NOT say the hall in which I watched Thank You was filled with gentle folk like you J

CBFC Rating (India):	U / A without cuts
Running time:	134 Minutes
Language:	Hindi

Photograph courtesy: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=154612521259601&set=a.154612517926268.36806.154356421285211&theater