Maine kal ko dekha!

Finally the strike is over and the Bollywood summer has begun. Technically ‘99‘ was the first film after the truce, but ‘Kal Kissne Dekha‘ truly heralds the commencement of the bollywood summer. With almost seven movies lined up back-to-back, it truly promises to out do the competition from the west. It also reunites us with our fetish for horrible cinema and what a way to begin. Big budgets and mega hyped debuts are always a candidate for disaster and this time their dream launch vehicle does the needful. How many times have we seen this happen, where star kids in the midst of all the fanfare have seen their dreams squashed by the box office. This Friday consumed two more star kids, as they failed to clear the acid test of the box office. One would assume that the strike would give our writers some much needed rest to re-charge their imagination, which actually translates to restocking their video library with more foreign DVDs.

When your male star is horrifyingly named Jackky, you tend to sympathize with him. Imagine all the hazing he’d have faced in school, and if he ever did goto college his seniors would have a whale of a time. Well atleast in my college with a name like that, you’d have your
face
in a
pile of dog poophave your face in a pile of dog poop. Oh wait I’ve got another one, if he had an extra ‘K’ in his name, he’d be behind bars in another country. I think I can slip in another one, Jackky could give Harman Baweja serious competition for president of the #failedstarkidsdebut club! Share a glass of single malt whiskey on the rocks and crib about whose debut was more disastrous! He actually reminds me of a cross between Uday Chopra and Shakti Kapoor. Well now that I think about it, Uday Chopra looks like George Clooney while compared to Jackky boy! Then however this movie isn’t about a story, or any of the elements that go into movie making. It’s all about showing off the scion of the Bhagnani clan as a pedigree stud to us poor souls. So they show us how he can sing, dance, fight, lift weights, fly in the air, run around trees and sing songs on the college quad. Fine, I promise I’ll stop but wait we haven’t even got the the female lead, ok that demands another paragraph.

Vaishali, for those who don’t know shares her last name with the swashbuckling late Manmohan Desai. Not very frequently do we see two star kids debuting in the same movie and quite ironically most of them have turned out to be duds. So Ms.Desai will soon join the elite list of female debut starlets who fade away into oblivion a few months after their disastrous debuts. Let’s see Rinkie and Twinkle Khanna, Pooja Bhatt and her namesake Bedi oh we could go on! But I fail to understand as to why people still use the age old contrived formula of snooty rich girl falling for middle class guy with a heart of gold. So here is our snobbish heroine with her high society friends and parties who apart from being the queen bee of the college, loves to insult and treat every one else like Egyptian slaves. The moment our ever smiling hero drops her home after she passes out and saves her from a bomb scare the following day she turns a new leaf. Remember the 90s where heroines would be all modern ‘aaj-ki ladki‘ in the first half wearing tank tops, mini skirts, halter necks, and slapping boys while chewing gum. Post intermission you get to see a ‘bharatiya-naari‘ look in either a salwar or a saree with the pallu/dupatta over the head attending some family puja. We have pretty much the same happening here, only difference being that someone forgot to remind them that it’s no longer 1992!

Now that we’ve got it out of our system let’s look at the other cast as well. Let’s see you have Ritesh Deshmukh playing a comic baddie. I see it’s hard to find work when your father is no longer a Chief Ministeryour father is no longer a Chief Minister. Then you have Juhi Chawla who is in and out even before they could decide which wire to cut on the bomb. It’s only when you see her name on the credits, you’re assured that it wasn’t a mimic artiste. Then you also have Rajpal Yadav, who tries to remind you of the Asrani act from Sholay as he reprises the role of a jailer. Well you forget him the minute the scene is over, and you’re making a note on your PDA to remind you to check the credits again! Rahul Dev must have probably got tired of doing the same role again and again, and sometimes he has to mouth the same lines as well! Only if either he or the viewer knew what his real motives were for unleashing terror in the city. What boggles us the most is how long it will take for writers to get even remotely close to reality while writing a script. I mean what was somebody thinking when the decided to weave a story around a physics professor turning rogue and making circuitry for bombs. Also which Prof gives his students a project to help him figure out current flows in bomb circuits? Not discounting jammers made from video game consoles and cars rigged with explosives jumping out of a hotel parking lot onto a yatch! When Rishi Kapoor says that he is sorry in the very last scene, I think he meant it to himself for singing on the dotted line!

And. by the way if you haven’t figured it out from the title, the guy in the movie can foresee the future!

(Images courtesy: nowrunning.com)