Gandhiji ko hi dekho… (Look at Gandhiji, for instance…)
Zari zindagi ahinsa he peeche bhaagtey rahe… (He ran behind non violence all his life)
aur un hi ka foto aisi jagah chaap daala (and then you put his photo in that place…)
jo duniye ke saare hinsa ka jadd hai… (which is the root of all violence in the world)
PAISA!! (MONEY!)
*Whistle whistle*
Sanju Baba ne kya line maare hai boss… Ekdum solid… The movie rests on him totally, though he’s just done something like a guest role… Move over Mogambo, Dr.Dong, Gabbar, the coolest and most stylish villain in Hindi cinema… Billa! (That’s big time exaggeration but what the hell, let’s celebrate a villain when he’s around for a change!)
What I liked about Sanjay Dutt’s villain role here is that this villain does what every hero usually gets to do… He gets the best lines in the house, gets the best cars, bikes, babes, clothes and jewellery, he gets to dance for at least two item tracks and sleep with one heroine (while the hero Anil gets only one pathos track), he also gets to kick the hero’s butt from the first scene to last, and finally ride away into the sunset…
Super cool Billa… Billkool!
But for him, the rest of the movie has a huge Oliver Stone-Quentin Tarantino hangover, with Sanjay Gupta trying to create Hindi cinema’s first slick stylish film noir… But for the iota of originality that Billa and Milap Zaveri’s lines have to offer, everything else in the movie is a rehash, painstakingly recreated to suit Indian taste buds… incest is toned down to child abuse, an otherwise dark film is lit up by a few laughs, promiscous behaviour replaced by chotta-motta kissing and swimming pool scenes…
Talking of which, we come to the next most significant part of the movie after Billa… Sam.
Sameera Reddy is hawt and her curious twins from Cleveland provide the much needed support to her screen presence! ha ha! (For the record, I’ve met Sameera Reddy and I know her as well and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind that comment. She knows she has a great bod and she’s mighty proud of it!)
Anil kapoor is so-so, he cuts a sorry figure (but that’s the character… A man who is Lucky by name but far from it otherwise) He doesn’t have much to do but to look like he hasn’t had a bath in years and a shave in days (but guess what, this time around his trademark chest bush which can give Austin Powers a complex has been deforested, so much for logic…) and sound like he hasn’t brushed his teeth…
By the way, he totally sucks in kissing… i mean he does not suck… in fact he just does not know what to do when she presses her lips against his… cartoon saala! But her kiss is good, the scene when she kisses him… man, I always wonder why Indian heroes can’t kiss convincingly. Oh, I forgot Kamal Hasan, but again he’s aggressive and overdoes it. The Fardeen-Kareena kiss in ‘Dev‘ was a decent one, I thought.
Anyway, back to the movie… Mahesh manjrekar is 100 per cent sidey and 200 per cent convincing as the perverted ‘husband’ who just has to lech, abuse Sam and say “Kholo… Blouse kholo” at the drop of a camera angle aimed at Sam’s twins! By the way, that it happens throughout the movie is a different story. Okay, so is it a good movie or a bad movie?
Depends on whether you are man or woman… If you’re man, you have Sanjay Dutt and Sameera Reddy who totally make the movie paisa-vasool… If you’re woman, you don’t have anything more than Sanjay Dutt to look forward to from what you are likely to describe as “a crude, crass, over-the-top, style-over-substance, wannabe Stone-Tarantino-ish, slick flick without a soul.”
Ha ha!
Let me tell warn all those reading this blog that I also liked ‘Boom,’ for six obvious reasons pertaining to the three heroines. And of course, Amitabh Bachchan! Boom Shankar (Javed Jaffrey) was a bonus.
Hmmm! High time Kaizad Gustad and Sanjay Gupta get out of their ‘Main Bhi Quentin’ mode and do something that’s original… again, not that I don’t like their movies. Just that, I think these guys do have potential which they seem to waste in these remakes. They have similar ideas and styles because their inspiration seems to come from the same masters!
In fact, I asked Sanjay Gupta during a press conference in Singapore during the IIFA awards if Musafir was “U-Turn with a twist.” He turned so red, that he nearly killed me with that look.
He just says: No.
Me: “You mean it’s just a co-incidence that you have similar characters.”
“What co-incidence?” he asks.
“Well, traveller loses money and is on the run, gets stuck in a town with no where to go, gets an offer from a man to kill his wife,” I explain before he cuts me short.
“There are plenty of movies like that,” says he.
“So it’s not U-Turn?” I ask again.
“You heard it right the first time,” he says.
I soon realise that his ‘Kaante‘ ran into trouble in the US with copyright issues after he publicised the movie to be a tribute to ‘Reservoir Dogs.’ The last thing he now wanted was another suit slapped on him. I looked around at the press conference. Yeah, there were a plenty of journalists from the international media. I’m sure he hates me for irritating him with that question.
He he!
Bonus: More Billa lines:
1. Tujhe dekh ke hi main jaan gaya … Jahan dekhi laundiya, naachne laga dandiya!
2. Saara Hindustan main do national pass time hote hai … Gaana aur bajaana … Agar tu ne kahin bajaane ke liye roka, tho main tumhe bajaoonga!
3. Agar jhaad ke peeche ladki ke saath naachne ki khujli nahin hoti, tho tu bhi villain ban sakta tha… Billa ban sakta tha!
MADRAS INK. 