Patiala House: Akshay Kumar probably thinks he is adored in UK & Canada. How else do you explain this sad excuse for a movie torn between racism and cricket. At first you think this is another one such movie where a bunch of bald white men beat up desis at the drop of a turban. Later you see someone trying to break into the English cricket team.  Cliched lines, anti-gora sentiments, disillusioned NRI’s and amidst all that Aksha Kumar doing a bad Sreesanth impersonation. Nikhil Advani continues to disappoint yet somehow manages to work with some of the biggest names in the industry. Let us forget the ease with which Akshay gets into the English team, wrecks havoc in the international scene, fails badly in the final game owing to depression and then miraculously rips through wickets the moment he spots his father in the stadium. Ignore this & the racism piece, you’ll have a very nice 25min movie!

Thank You: Haha another Akshay Kumar film, would you believe if I told you I actually like him and have watched every movie of his.  Three happily married womanizers are brought on track by a detective hired by their wives. Now where have you heard this before, pretty original ain’t it? How I wish it ended there, instead you have oodles of sentiment throw in the mix with one of the couples breaking up. The guy takes to drinking, the girl is about to get married, more tears, more senti songs and Akshay Kumar gets shot in the last scene. Unfortunately it doesn’t end even there, Akshay has a flashback involving a dead wife who took her own life suspecting her husband having an affair. Even a Malaika Arora item song fails to invoke any interest because the cacophonous music by Pritam kills your senses.

Haunted-3D: India’s first stereoscopic 3D film, hahahahaha whatay joke! Mahakshay Chakraborty as a hero, well we shall try not to laugh for that. Had they made a simple ramsay movie in 3D, it would have still been watchable. Vikram bhatt had other plans however, here we have a rapist who after getting killed, comes back as a ghost to continue the act. There’s more of this drivel when the victim commits suicide, the rapist ghost now goes after the victim ghost! Mimoh travels back in time to 1936 to stop the events and travels back to ensure the mansion is ghost-free. Watching all those wooden expressions in 3D is something I missed, but I bet they’d be worth the price of admission.

Ready: Don’t tell me how many millions the movie made, it is still a piece of shit even if Salman Khan manages to pull a string of pearls from his rear! A somewhat funny Telugu film is remade in Hindi and the parts that were the funniest are replaced with slapstick sequences. The seemingly witty lines are lost in translation and the movie is placed abroad for no reason. I wish there was a hat that zapped anees bazmee with electrical shocks, every  time he came up with a chaddi joke or kids peeing on the faces of adults. I was surprised with how each and every joke made me groan, even school kids can come up with atleast one original joke that can make you smile. If that’s not it you have pritams music to give you a brainfreeze, he is so much better when he steals tunes.

Double Dhamaal: They could have shot the Jalebi Bai portion as a music video, released it in theatres and still would have been able to charge people half the ticket price to see it on the big screen. Instead they yanked javed Jaffery from the sets of boogie woogie and made him mouth some of the most horrible lines of the year. Dhamaal was bad, yet they made a sequel that makes rolling in the sewers a better way to spend 130mins. The template is pretty simple, foreign locales, cheap mimicry, taking potshots at other films, and item song and a gora villain. Whats worse is that, in the last scene the actors break the fourth wall to proclaim there will be a third installment!

Murder 2: I hope the Bhatts sell tickets to get a peek at their DVD collection, for I’ll be fist in line to prostrate at the temple of piracy! It’s come to a point where you no longer care to find out which movie they’ve ripped off this time. You have the standard bhatt set-pieces like steamy scenes, psychopath killers, good music and hotties for emraan hashmi to smooch. In most crime thrillers they atleast keep the identity of the killer hidden till the last reel, here you know that half way into the movie and are just waiting for the climax scene. I watched it for the music and the premise that involved a lot of steamy scenes, but when a killer wears make-up & castrates himself, you know its time to leave the cinema hall!

Aarakshan: How can a prakash jha movie starring Amitabh Bachchan make it to this list? It can if the second half of he movie has no co-relation to the first half and treads on a entirely different premise. While the first half is mildly gripping and briefly explores the caste divides that threaten the education system, the second half is a battle between two coaching classes. Casting Deepika Padukone & Saif Ali Khan in roles that require some degree of acting doesn’t help either. Neither of the two get to shed their clothes and thus taking away their single biggest selling point. The movie just drags with over-the-top acting, cliched lines and you seem to be bound to your seat until the moment hema malini appears and delivers a ‘All your base belong to us’ tirade.

Not a Love Story: It pains to put a RGV movie on this list, I’ve always felt I was one of the few who got his movies and the train of thought behind them. Riding on the popularity of a murder case, the movie was made withing 20 days and shot at the very same building where the heinous crime was committed. With a one-line plot you’d expect the story buildup, tight screen play and some well shot scenes to keep it afloat. Sadly none of that happens and all you have is the camera flirting with the thighs of Mahie Gill & peeking into her inner wear. It is time we pray that RGV keeps away from shaky camera stunts and makes movies that have atleast a one-page plot.

Mausam: Shahid Kapur is an IAF pilot, there that one sentence should be enough to drive you away. You see the movie is set during a time where there are not phonelines or even a postal system. How else do you explain the following. Boy meet girl at a friends wedding, next morning the girl leaves for kashmir & the dejected boy joins the IAF. Years later they again meet in scotland, but before the can exchange any contact info the boy leaves for a mission and the girl is left to cry this time. They finally meet in Ahemadabad during the riots where the boy with a paralyzed arm rescues a boy who they later adopt after getting married! Devoid of any logic whatsoever, this movie is long painful and the scenes where one yearns for the other will make you slit your wrists.

Rascals: David Dhawan has been reduced to a sorry shadow of his glorious days in the 90s. Things don’t look good the moment you name your lead characters Chetan & Bhagat so that you can run a few jokes using the popularity of a so-called author. The comedy was crude & harsh even by my standards and included starving orphans, handicapped people and blind-man jokes. The gags were not only boring, but were were picked from email forwards that stopped circulating since 1999. Taking potshots at Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movies and ample skin show by the ladies still cannot salvage this sinking ship. Someone told me the movie was a desi version of dirty rotten scoundrels, had they stuck to it and made a scene-by-scene remake, it would have been a fun ride. Sadly we have to add bollywood masala and tadka to ruin everything.

Ra.One: The most expensive hindi film ever made backed by a media jamboree that involved some of the worst possible ways to promote a movie, had failure written all over it. SRK speaking weirdly accented hindi at a gaming conference full of foreign speakers, eating spaghetti with yoghurt because that’s what tamilians do! Chinese fighters named iskilee, uskilee & sabkilee are supposed to be funny, so is the scene with a security guard getting excited to see SRK’s pierced nipples. Then you have a widow who flirts with a cyborg that reminds her of her dead husband, in a very decently clad in a transparent red saree. Oh did I mention the whole premise of a movie revolves around a game character coming to life to kill a 12yr old who is unbeatable in the game?

Desi Boyz: Poor Akshay Kumar, I swear I didn’t mean to pick on him but it has been a torrid year for him. He took off his clothes along with John Abraham hoping the audiences would identify their real USP and forget that this is a movie not a calendar photoshoot. They even got Chitrangadha Singh and Deepika Padukone to smoulder on the screen but there is only so much skin you can show before people ask you for a plot and other movie ingredients. Lines laden with double entendre, gay jokes, professors who strip and a court scene where an escort hands over his card to a female judge making her squeal in joy, yes this is the kind of stuff that will land a movie in this list.

Rockstar: The pyaasa of this generation somebody said, no director has ever done justice to AR Rahmans tunes before another squealed. While I don’t hate ARRtards as they are affectionately called, I most certainly have a problem wen people seem to ignore the loose plot and retarded screenplay hiding behind an awesome soundtrack. The plot has more holes than a busy road dug up for metro/flyover work, Ranbir maintains a constipated look throughout the movie and yells in anger at the drop of a hat. Somewhere along the side you also have a dying girl whom the whole movie seems to revolve around.

Feel free to disagree and add your own, but this is my list of stinkers for the year 2011.

(Images Courtesy: glamsham)

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 2
• Review: Singh is Kinng – Better seen on trucks
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 1
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 2
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 1
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2

Unsportive movie of the year

Nominees:
Luck
Victory
Dil Bole Hadippa
Blue
The award goes to: The IPL overkill while forcing us to take a mini-sabbatical, also got our grey cells working. Last year saw quite a few movie titles set against a formulaic backdrop with a remote connection to a sport. We had Luck where they paid a bunch of idiots to cheat death(atleast that’s what they were told) and do crazy ass shit like jumping of a plane, swimming with sharks etc. Since they told us that human betting was a sport, it makes them a default entry to our ceremony. Then comes Blue where apart from getting frisky with sharks, they also get on wave runners and circle around women in bikinis. Now I’ve done both, well not the bikini part and hence can vouch for the sport part of it! Dil Bole Hadippa was probably the worst ever adaptation of a girl-playing-in-a-boys-team movie. If the fake Harbhajan look does get your bile juices churning, then the morality speech at the very end will surely make you throw up! The winner however is Victory, which for starters has loser boy Harman Baweja. In addition to the horrendous batting strike rates, cliched scenes of drugs and booze, you also get to see our famed cricketers exhibit their nonexistent acting chops. Did I mention that Brett Lee gets walloped and Murali is cantered around the park?

Unsupportingly supportive actor – Male

Nominees:
The Forest – Agyaat
Aftab Shivdasani – Kambakht Ishq
Mithunda – Chandni Chowk to China
Nana Patekar – Ek
The award goes to: While the lead actors hog the spotlight, the support cast are always short changed. For they are equally responsible in being the ingredients of a disaster soup. Imagine what we would have done if not for the forest in Agyaat, having a predator-like-thing hiding behind dark alleys and killing people would seem really foolish. Not that the movie would have made any sense in a different setting, but they director atleast seemed to imply that the forest was alive. Aftab Shivdasani was never really known for his acting barring that toothpaste-ad smile of his, but getting mauled by a wife who moonlights as a bikini model is sacrilege! He may have been casted opposite Amrita Arora numerous times, but plying second fiddle to khiladi Kumar guarantees instant entry to this list. Oh Nana Patekar might have done the hideous love rap dance in Krantiveer, but is performances always forgave him. No histrionics can however redeem a sleazy cop who sleeps with molls and servants to gain inside info on the accused, and hence he breaks into this list with Ek. The pride of Bengal, however takes the spot, with his totally unforgettable appearance in Chandni Chowk to China. Mithunda is not only reduced to slicing potatoes, but is made to travel all the way to CHina only to get his ass-whupped before being bumped off.

Unsupportingly supportive actor – Female

Nominees:
Dia Mirza – Kurbaan
Lara Dutta – Do knot disturb
Prachi Desai – Life partner
Sherlyn Chopra – Dil Bole Hadippa
The award goes to: How can we forget the lovely women who form an integral part of the support cast. Lara Dutta was abysmal in an already jarring movie, but if her career choices are going to be stealing Govinda from Sushmita Sen in Do Knot Disturb, then there definitely is a problem! If you thought that Prachi Desai was a revelation in Rock On, wait till you see Life Partner. If being reduced to a loud nagging bimbette wasn’t enough, she is also cast along side Tusshar Kapoor! Skimpy outfits are nothing new to Sherlyn Chopra, but you do feel bad for her when the only thing she brings to the table is sidelined and loses out to a bearded sardar boy who is seen wearing salwars at night! Well the winner in this category is Dia Mirza for her blink-you-miss role in Kurbaan where she not only has a lame role, but calls up a friend when she finds out a terror plan being plotted in her living room and not alerting the cops!

Unplayable screenplay of the year

Nominees:
Chandni Chowk to China
Radio
What’s your Rashee
London Dreams
The award goes to: What strikes you in a bad movie are the lines that seem to jump out of the screen. Mouthed by actors with utmost ease, they seem to follow you all the way home and repeatedly slap you in the head as you desperately try to sleep. Himesh was the one who gave us lines like ‘Bhagwan ka screenplay bhi ajeeb hain’ and in Radio he does not disappoint with beauties like ‘genetic cocktail’, ‘Karwachauth lamps’. If they tell you that two women battle each other and throw themselves at Himesh, then you definitely have a problem. A guy meeting a girl from each of the zodiac signs seems a novel idea alright, but when you pepper it with songs, long character sketches, and boring lines, it is begging for trouble. What’s your Rashee tries to hit on many issues and ends up being a damp squib, only wish they had shortened it by an hour. A young boy runs away from home only to surface years later with a rock band at the Wembley, what an awesome concept! Now only if the makers of London Dreams sold some dope along with the tickets, it would have been far easier to look beyond this premise. Nothing and I repeat can come close to Chandni Chowk to China, for you have every possible cringe-worthy cliche rolled in. Identical twins separated at birth in different countries and on opposite sides of the law, ancient Chinese warriors being reborn as aaloo-chat-wallahs, oh we could go on. But when Akshay Kumar boasts of iron fists, forearms, Deepika looks below and goes ‘Oh mere iron man’. If you aren’t dead then you may live to watch the Robert Downey Jr version this summer.

Unbearable actor of the year – Female

Nominees:
Asin – London Dreams
Kareena Kapoor – Kambhakt Ishq
Deepika Padukone – Chandni Chowk to China
Rani Mukherjee – Dil Bole Hadippa
The award goes to: The lovely ladies who grace the screens, careen to the shady dance tunes in wet clothing and deliver traumatic scenes in a giggle. A large number of people flock to the cinema screen just to ogle at gods creation and see them being chased by goons. After a debut like Ghajini, London Dreams may not have been the most intelligent choice for Asin. Not sure if being reduced to a groupie and doing aerobics-type dance with back up dancers, can count her in as a lead actress but that’s what the title credits tell us! If they tell you that Kareena Kapoor is a bikini model in a movie, you’d surely go. But if they tell you that she is also a medical student who is modeling to pay for her tuition, you’d buy the popcorn and go home to eat it in peace. Deepika Padukone makes up for her wooden expressions with that killer smile of hers, but playing a Chinese assassin who goes by the name meow-meow is something that even her looks can’t redeem. If you think I’m harsh then her other avatar is a tele-shopping executive selling cheap gadgets imported from China! You may forgive all but Rani Mukherjee, the queen bee of Yashraj studio productions. In addition to the godzilla-like voice you have her dressed as a sardar scoring a double century in under ten overs while fighting of comeptition form bimbos like Sherlyn Chopra and Rakhi Sawant! If you wish to look beyond this then there is the moral science lecture she delivers in the end that is a cocktail about women in sports and indo-pak relations.

Unbearable actor of the year – Male

Nominees:
Akshay Kumar – Blue
Akshay Kumar – Kambakkht Ishq
Akshay Kumar – 8X10 Tasveer
Akshay Kumar – Chandni Chowk to China
The award goes to: Ah the leading man, the darling of the masses, the voice of the oppressed and the lone warrior against the corrupt system. These only make sense on other blogs but here we are looking at the exact opposite of everything previously stated, and you obviously know that! This year sees a marks a historical change with one man picking up all the five nominee slots,and that is none other than Khiladi Kumar. Molesting unsuspecting sharks in Blue, mercilessly slicing potatoes in Chandni Chowk to China, traveling through pictures in 8X10 Tasveer and walking around with a watch in his stomach in Kambakkht Ishq, Oh he’s done it all! He rode waverunners, scuba dived to find lost treasure, played with the props in the universal studios tour list, perfected the iron forearm technique and danced on the great wall of China! Oh he got to play a variety of roles as well like a village bumpkin, stinky rich millionaire with a thirst for lost treasures, misogynist hollywood stuntman, and a time traveling forest officer. With that highly irritating laugh of his, it is only time before we institute a ‘ab bas karo sijee’ award specially for him!

Disgruntled director of the year

Nominees:
Madhur Bhandarkar- Jail
Ashutosh Gowariker – What’s your Rashee
Priyadarshan – De Dana Dhan
Renzil D’Silva – Kurbaan
The award goes to: I once read in an interview that the director is like the captain of a ship, and he can make a bad script work or let a good one go down the drain. Clearly we are interested in the latter and ones that could have been something else which tanked horribly. Ten years from now Madhur Bhandarkar will still be holding the imaginary social mirror to our faces and stretching every cliche to the limits possible in his movies. Patrons who bought tickets to Jail were given a bound copy of the script so that they could smother themselves if they wish to not live beyond the interval break. Priyadarshan may have jump-started the comic genre that was waning after David Dhawan went on the decline, but if his idea of comedy is two grown up guys chasing a dog in a kitchen and getting flour on their heads, then the signs look ominous. Having now moved to potty jokes and flooding an entire floor of a hotel to have the ensemble cast toss and swim against the current is definitely not funny anymore. I was surprised to learn that Renzil D’Silva was involved in the writing of Rang de Basanti and the soon-to-come Raavan. But behind the camera he shot the poster for Kurbaan first and then filmed a whole movie around it as an excuse. Ashutosh Gowariker makes an entry to this list with his god awful excuse of a movie to quietly dispose the black money made from his earlier projects. Even someone from Cambodia will accept the fact that a movie is marked to tank the moment you sign a powerhouse of talent like Harman Baweja. He no only had a jaded script to deal with, but takes a driller into you head with a snoozefest that spans beyond 3hrs!

Ultra bakwas movie of the year

Nominees:
Chandni Chowk to China
Agyaat
Radio
Kambakkht Ishq
The award goes to: Finally the most coveted award and the reason why this blog keeps getting the odd hits a week. It’s not secret that we love bad movies and this final award lets us pick the worst of the worst. Chandni Chowk to China was bad, and there is nothing that can redeem it. All that hype with Warner Bros, shooting on the great wall, martial arts and mega media promotions was all a sham. No amount of gloss can hide the fact that you had a chinese inspector speak hindi and find his identical twin daughters alive in different countries on opposite sides of the law. Oh then there was a Ganesha manifestation on a potato, which eventually helps in a kung-fu panda moment in the end. On the off-chance that all of the above were a deliberate attempt at pulp we shall spare the noose and turn to RGV’s Agyaat. The idea of a forest coming alive or atleast seeming to have a mind of its own, definitely entices me. I totally get the premise of putting a bunch of people in such a situation and letting their minds get the better of them. Then comes the kicker where you add an abomination/predator-type-thing that goes on a killing spree. What would have been an awesome fare to see the territorial instincts in people force them to eliminate each other, ends up with you waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger to jump out of the bushes covered with war paint and brandishing a huge gun. Oh he adds insult to injury by not telling you what was killing all those people, but instead asking you to come back to find out in the sequel! Radio was hated a lot more than it probably deserved, and our heart definitely goes out to it. Frankly there was nothing horrible about the movie, and I mean it. The plot was something that could possibly happen in real life, the songs weren’t jarring, and almost every department was just ok and not bad except for some horrible so-called-cool dialogs. Then why does it make it to this list you may wonder, well because this movie disappointed us more than most. It wasn’t good nor was it bad, there was nothing good or bad worth writing home and hence a colossal waste of 150mins of my life! I don’t mind the dollars spent, but I definitely want that small chunk of my life back, and this is my way of showing it. To the loser go the spoils and Kambakkht Ishq takes them all with a silver spoon. They take an average grossing tamil movie, take away all the funny parts, inflate the budget like a estrogen-fed-chicken, bring in out-of-work American actors, shoot the movie entirely abroad and then try to sell the movie back in the desh. To make matters worse you have a doctor who moonlights as a lingerie supermodel, and a stuntman who lives in a multi-million villa. I shall stop here, lest I shove someone under a guillotine.

PS: We enjoyed bringing you these awards, and promise to do a southern version next year.

(Images courtesy: glamsham)

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 1
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• Review: Kambakkht Ishq – No Mangalam Here
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 2
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2011

Easily forgettable debut of the year – Male

Nominees:
*Jacky Bhagnani – Kal Kissne Dekha
Rannvijay Singh – London Dreams
Abhijeet Sawant – Lottery
Parzan Dastur – Sikandar

The award goes to: We like to start with the newest entrants into filmdom. The leading men of tomorrow for whom  teens will suffer severe bouts of hysteria. The men Archies and Hallmark will make a killing by selling posters of but instead will be seen gracing this space in the years to come. A lot of you may remember the cute little Sardar kid counting stars in KKHH, but unfortunately Parzan Dastur learnt that there is more to acting than just counting stars in Sikandar. Who doesn’t know Indian Idol Abhijeet Sawant, but do you also know that the singing talent was a participant on reality dance show Nach Baliye before going a step further and showing us his non-existent acting chops in Lottery? Rannvijay Singh is a stud on the small screen alright and the only reason that the show MTV Roadies is watchable, but peddling drugs in London Dreams isn’t quite the best way to make a debut. You can’t beat Jacky Bhagnani who can see the future, solve complex physics equations, sniff bombs and still manage time to romance the college hottie!

Easily forgettable debut of the year – Female

Nominees:
Vaishali Desai – Kal kissne Dekha
Shruti Haasan – Luck
*Jacqueline Fernandez – Alladin
Giselle Monteiro – Love Aaj Kal

The award goes to: After the boys, it’s time to take a look at the divas who will grace Tollywood for that is where Bollywood discards often head to. The ill-fated have to go north or star in television, commercials and photoshoots. Being related to the great Manmohan Desai isn’t enough and you need more than that if you want to survive the industry, a lesson Vaishali Desai learnt the hard way. Giselle Monteiro might have fooled us all into believing she was a shy punjabi kudi, but then to her credit the role required no talking and just looking coy. Born to extremely talented actors, you’d expect Shruti Haasan to breeze her way through the industry, but this pretty lass doesn’t seem to have the needed luck. There was another import and this one was from the south, but the fate was pretty much the same for Sri Lankan beauty Jacqueline Fernandez and even Aladin’s lamp couldn’t help her cause.

Most painful lyrics of the year

Nominees:
Mangalam Mangalam -  Kambakkht Ishq
*Chiggy Wiggy -  Blue
Love me Love me – Wanted
Mann ka Radio – Radio

The award goes to: If a song becomes a chart buster, it generally has some very well penned lyrics. The converse isn’t always true yet every year the bar is dropped further as you get to hear shockers. If listening to it being played in every wedding scene wasn’t enough, this year we were treated to a hip-hop version of ‘Main to jantar se hi darta hu,  Bas pyaar ka mantar karta hu, om mangalam mangalam’.  Not sure if that was more torturous or telling a girl that her parents have opined she love you in, ‘Your mama says you Love Me Papa says you Love Me, O Love Me baby Love Me’. Well I would still take a pass on that one but when Himesh brings you atrocious stuff like, ‘Station Koyi Naya Tune Kar Le zara, FullTu Attitude De De Tu zara’ you can’t help but notice. The kicker however belongs to Kylie Minogue who wants to ‘I wanna chiggy-wiggy with you boy I wanna chiggy-wiggy with you baby’ and that is interspersed with some punjabi balle balle. In the end you have a horrible cocktail, much like mixing payasam with rum or even worse.

Ear splitting music of the year

Nominees:
*Sajid-Wajid – Wanted
Himesh Reshammiya – Radio
Pritam – De Dhana Dhan
Shankar Ehsan Loy – Shortkut

The award goes to: Whenever you have a blockbuster album ringing the cash counters, it most certainly translates to a huge opening for the movie. You also have albums have make you cringe and ask for a refund from the music store, and this list rounds them up. The nasal crooner may have gone under the knife and sing in dual voices, but that doesn’t mean the couldn’t deliver a bland soundtrack. You could say it was so bland that it made a bowl of cerelac seem like tangy samosa chat. We feel that Pritam saves his best for his favorite filmmakers like the Bhatts, how else do you explain an album like Tum Mile for them and the loud De Dhana Dhan for Priyadarshan? Just because SEL are the top composers in the country, doesn’t always mean that they churn out the best of albums. Shortkut was a hash of all discarded tunes put together and a sorry excuse for an album. When you speak of loud jarring music the team that wins it twice in succession are the terrible duo of Sajid-Wajid. Not sure if it is their choice of singers, gawdy loops or atrocious lyrics but they somehow manage to bring out the worst!

Most bakwas song of the year

Nominees:
*Shukran Allah – Kurbaan
Prem ki Naiyya – Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani
Mann ko ati bhave – London Dreams
Baarish kar doon – De Dhan Dhan
S.I.D.H.U – Chandni Chowk to China

The award goes to: I recently learnt that when a song is stuck in your head, the proper term to use is earworm. When a song is repeatedly played on every radio station and makes your ears bleed owing to an overdose, it makes an appearance here. Ajab Prem ki may have been a grosser but that gave them the freedom to play the Prem ki Naiyya on loop over the air. Neeraj Shridhar has never been more irritating than this except when Kailash Kher crooned to S.I.D.H.U hitting the octaves. Now we don’t like being taught how to spell every now and then, especially when it is the same word. Pritam is at it again because Baarish kar Doon sounded like a greedy baniya seeking alms outside a temple, and all you hear is paisa paisa paisa. Whoever said SEL wasn’t capable of dishing out trash has probably eaten two pairs of shoes by now. Just because Mann ko ati bhave was made for Salman Khan, doesn’t mean it had to have eunuch-like sounding backup vocalists. The one that took the cake was the highly irritating Shukran Allah which had almost everything wrong right form the lyrics, setting, actors and tune. The radio overkill just adds to the fact that a mental image of a size-zero kareena pops up in your head every time you listen to it!

I can see past/present award

Nominees:
Kal Kissne Dekha
Aa Dekhe Zara
*8X10 Tasveer
Agyaat

The award goes to: This year we institute a new award for those movies that push the limits of logic while still staying in the real world and not treading the path of fantasy. If you made a mythological and told us that a particular character could see the future, we’d take it happily. When actors with paranormal abilities are paraded as everyday stories, we definitely have a problem. We however chose not to diss them but commemorate them with a category of their own.  Agyaat told us that there was this huge savage in the forest that lived under the surface, was stronger than a boulder while not being alien or human. Tey then spank you in the face and force you to watch part-2 if you want to find out what or who it really was. Kal Kisse dekha had the young stud who not only was an ace sportsman, top student, physics whiz, good Samaritan but could all see the future, yes even we laughed at that point! Aa dekhe Zara tried using some logic, and made us believe that a camera not human could tell you how a particular person/thing will look like  on a given date. They got past the superhuman abilities, but it was still lame. Akshay Kumar took the inanimate objects telling past/present logic to a higher level in 8X10 Tasveer when he became the polaroid time traveler. Lets just hope you don’t have a knife to your wrists.

Animals in meaningful roles award

Nominees:
Sharks – Blue
Stallions – Kaminey
Moolchandji – De Dhan Dhan
Whatever it was – Agyaat

The award goes to: Over a period of time we have noticed that animals deliver better performances than the main leads. They come in give the shot, take a snack and are out, no hassles, no egos, no fruit juice, no pushy moms and no need for make-up vans! Now Agyaat makes it to this list by default for we aren’t sure if the predator-type-thing was human or alien, hence it shall be counted for the actor category as well. When a dog has a proper name and treated like a member of the family, you are surely in for trouble. SO much that Akshay Kumar kidnaps Moolchandji in De Dhan Dhan for ransom only for the mongrel to create havoc in the kitchen. Splendid performance by the mutt to stay in character despite the ensuing ruckus and Archana Puran Singh screaming her lungs out. We heard rumors that PETA had taken a march against Akshay Kumar who got frisky with a shark in Blue. The poor mammal was cornered in the net and tried its best to escape his lecherous advances, only to have been maathey-pe-kalankofied by the end of the scene. What in Ganesha’s name is with Akshay and animals? The weirdest piece of news comes from the stables of the Bombay Race Course where a few horses were chosen to do a scene with Shahid Kapur in Kaminey. We are told that despite the raw energy exuded by shahid’s bare torso, the stallions resisted his mating tendencies and held character to complete the scene in one shot. To extract such an immaculate performance, Shahid was blinded on the sides thereby reducing the chances of him getting turned on.

PS: Owing to the length of this post and the big awards that follow this post is split into two parts. Let us know if you liked this one, part two is up here!

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 2
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 1
• Vaazhthugal – A crash course in tamizh…….
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2011

ShortKut – The Con is On: There was a neat tamil movie called Vellithirai starring the brilliant Prakash Raj and heartthrob Prithviraj Sukumaran, released in 2008. Bollywood decides to remake it, and just like everyother remake they take away everything that is supposed to work, only to replace them with mind-numbing gags. Despite our fondness for the svelte Amrita Rao, the movie was a groaner and counting the follicles on Akshay Khanna’s receding hairline would have been a lot more engrossing.  Arshad Warsi desperately tries to resuscitate this groaner, but the post-Munnabhai circuit hangover clearly shows. It shows that Bollywood can not only come up with an interesting script, they have issues adapting existing blockbusters.

Victory: Generally there’s not much that can go wrong with movies with a sports theme. They are either underdog stories or inspirational accounts of rags to riches. In either case they ensure an audience connect and box office success. Victory does neither and even a tired looking Amrita Rao fails to evoke any interest. Brett Lee looks like a greek god on screen and may have secured a post-retirement career but you do feel for Stuart Clark who gets cantered for 36 runs in an over by Harman. A small-town boy makes it to the Indian team, only to get sucked up by the glitz, glamour and hide his injury. Dropped following public humiliation, only to return with dedication and bludgeon the likes of Murali et all for 20 runs per over in the world cup. A disappointing movie despite cameos form popular cricketers and a brilliant title sequence, and Harman Baweja makes it to this list two years in a row [Read Review]

Life Partner: Rumi Jaffery made an entry into this list last year with the atrocious ‘God tussi great ho’, and now this! There’s only one funny line in the whole movie and bollywood seems to be setting a record of sorts with contorted climax scenes. Priyadarshan is the only one who can pull of mad climax scenes with tons of actors, and even seems to be losing his flair. Govinda is unconvincing as a chick-magnet in a role tailor made for Salman Khan. Who in the world takes advice on love/marriage from a divorce lawyer who makes a majority of his earning man-whoring for his female clients? Since when did we expect movies with Fardeen Khan to work at the box office? Oh, wait doesn’t this movie also have Tusshar Appam Kapoor as well, ha now you’re wondering why we even watch shit like this!

Kurbaan: Kurbaan, the latest offering in the terrorism genre is another sorry attempt to play to the foreign audiences and milk the sentiments of muslim extremists and justify their acts. The whole movie was canned on the pretext of a money-shot that included a backless beauty and a bullet-ridden chest. Someone got the idea of a great promotional poster, something that has never been tried before and decided toe weave a movie around it. So what happens when you build a movie around an advertising gimmick to get you some eyeballs? A sorry tale of deceit, zombie jihadis, a hot making out scene, weird logic and some pretty ordinary music. Hard to believe that it came from the pen of the person who co-wrote RDB. The tagline suggests that it is a love story, but you hardly see any love, unless you count the making out scene as love. [Read Review]

De dana dan: Having to endure over two hours of Priyadarshan’s latest was pretty tough especially when it has just over 20mins of genuine laughs. A rather drab first half is pretty unbearable for it does nothing to the plot and is horrifyingly slow. The second half has over 30 characters in a hotel with mistaken identities and the ensuing chaos. Flooding an entire hotel might not be the most clever ideas for a big finale. There is also a deluge of actors on screen and you give up counting after a while. In what seems like the royal rumble of characters, there seems to be no clear winner with everyone giving washed up performances. Good performances by Johnny Lever, Paresh Rawal and few others, while the women just wear tight garments, pout and try to look pretty. If not for Katrina bringing back rain songs into fashion, this would have been a total no-show.

Radio: Himesh yet again dons the hat of an actor and chooses to face the camera only to be met with the same fate. In a somewhat interesting plot broken into chapters, the lines and bad acting pull it into the depths of flopistan. Himesh plays Pied Piper in an imaginary universe where pheromones travel through radio waves. There is no other way you can justify the events in a movie where a police commissioner takes in a guy into his family, who asks his daughter to fake being in a relationship. With a new language being invented where words like ‘Fultoo attitude’ and ‘genetic cocktail’ are used to describe the woman you love, there definitely are some problems here. Their idea of resolving problems and fights of all sorts is strangely to break plates. How we wish the plates were not broken on the floor but on Himes’ head instead! [Read Review]

Aa Dekhen Zara: It’s no secret that we love Bipasha basu and her movies are a must watch irrespective of who else is in it. It always doesn’t turn out fine, like this one for example. There have been dozens of movies where the protagonist either has the ability or finds a gadget that enables him/her to look into the future. A camera that reveals pictures of future events is surely an interesting concept, but then a banal plotline makes it a boring ride. Given the premise, handling the events around it becomes critical for future gazing alone will not sell a movie. This is precisely where the movie sinks while mediocre performances and a forgettable soundtrack don’t help either. If only the sultry Ms.Basu made better career choices, we’d not have to sit through duds like these.

Kal kissne dekha: There haven’t been many debuts that have gone worse especially when two star kids are involved. A college geek who can see the future, ends up outwitting a terror outfit, while romancing the college hottie and teaching the snobs a lesson.  People ought to know that there is more to colleges than what you see inK3G and Mohobattein. Snooty girls chewing gum and humiliating small-town boys with a heart of gold doesn’t really happen anywhere. Also if you’ve had a premonition that there’s going to be a terrorist attack, you would normally alert the authorities. Rishi Kapoor reminds you of the essence of a good wig, more so when you can see the original hair peeking from below. Since when did college professors have enough equipment in their labs to build nuclear weapons and bombs that could take out a city? We just love bad debuts and this one tops the list! [Read Review]

Ek – The power of one: For how long are we supposed to see Bobby Deol go out and do the same thing where he sports dark glasses and shoots people. He probably doesn’t even listen to the story forget the script. It must be quite easy to wear the same jaded expression, glasses to hide the droopy eyes from last nights hangover and just go trigger crazy. They only have to paint a few explosions, songs and some characters around him and viola, you have a movie! While the original in Telugu had some great lines, slick camera work and vibrant colors, the Hindi version adopts everything but the good parts. Nana Patekar as a sleazy yet honest cop, who doesn’t even spare servant maids is a huge let down. Shriya is good but you only get to see her for a total of 20 mins. With so many bullets flying around, you only hope one of them hits Bobby in the heart. That is your only hope because the movies groans for over two hours.

PS: We enjoyed bringing this list, while you may not share the same enthusiasm reading it.  We hope to do the same next year and if things go as wished, we may have loads of groaners!

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2011
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 1
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 2
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 1
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2

Main aur Mrs Khanna: Finally we have a movie that is hit by the recession, or atleast the characters were supposed to be hit. So lets see how this begins, you have a happy couple in Australia when suddenly things go bad in economy. So what does the adarsh pati of bollywood do?, well decides to goto Singapore while packing his wifey away to Delhi.  It might still not seem crazy yet, but then he prefers to tell her only at the airport when their flights departs minutes from each other! She chooses to stay back in Australia, and then enters stage 6 our real hero! You are now treated to two hours of Sohail khan trying to woo a married woman. Yes the poster unfortunately doesn’t tell you that, nor do the promos. Salaman khan once again returns in the climax to create some dharam sankat in this extended guest role. BappiDa as a store owner is the only saving grace in his special appearance. If only the producers were hit by the recession, this movie would have never been made!

London Dreams: It’s hard to keep a straight face when someone tells you that Ajay Devgan and Salman Khan play rockstars in a movie. Actually it is impossible to say that and then not have people in splits. You therefor have a movie that ought to have been made 10 years ago, for the theme of a friend envying another’s talent and fame is done to death and so passe. Add to this Ajay Devgan inflicting torture upon himself, for thinking about a woman and getting distracted from his dream! This self-flagellation may seem to remind you of the opus dei, But that atleast was a bunch of fanatics. Salman Khan yet again sleep walks in the village bumpkin with a heart as pure as glacier water, who put friendship ahead of sarson ka saag. To top it all up their biggest sin was to cast Asin as a traditional south indian girl, who’s idea of freedom is to prance on stage behind the singers.

Agyaat: RGV the eccentric genius never ceases to amaze, at times with brilliant pieces and the rest with duds like this. We guess he was on a picnic as a child when he was spooked by the forest when he went to pee. Guess what happened when he returned to the forest 25yrs later to find his lost corriander chutney sandwich, someone was again spooked by the rustling bushes! Bang, that’s when he decides to put a few discards, a failed hero from teh south and a one-time muse in the same forest and a moving camera behind them. Once you’ve had enough shots of the posterior of a particular someone under a waterfall, you then go on thinking of ways to kill people.  If people ramming their necks into trees or falling onto rocks wasn’t cool enough,  RGV even introduces a non-terrestrial intelligent predator to finish off people. However since it is a low-budget flick, we don’t have enough funds for the special effects and so we film the killing scenes form the eyes of our killer! Just when you think the numb feeling in your head is going to end, they hit you with a ‘Part 2 coming soon’ message just when you expect to uncover the identity of our killer!

Whats Your Rashee?: We have been a fan of both the previous Ashutosh Gowariker movies until this one. Infact they rank really high on our scale with high 8′s out of 10, and hence following the balance of averages that hits Tendulkar every alternate series, we have an abysmal low here. It’s not like that we hate Harman Baweja or make it our mission to diss every movie he is in. It is however hard not to go bonkers over his choice of scripts, given the dearth of talent on our hands. He makes the fact evident, that looks and a good pair of feet ain’t good enough to see you through a movie. The premise isn’t quite bad with a boy choosing from twelve girls, each belonging to a different zodiac sign. Though slightly chauvinistic, it still holds some promise if properly executed. That is when you are subjected to close to four hours of what feels like someone lulling you to sleep with a sledgehammer. There is however no excuse for Priyanka Chopra, the dame makes the same mistake twelve times over!

Chandni Chowk To China: What can you probably say about Nikhil Advani without being visceral? Poor treatment of a wafer thin plot lands Nikhil Advani with yet another dud, this time for the Sippys. The movie is neither simple and carry a message like Kung Fu Panda, not is it funny like a martial arts spoof like the cult Kung Fu Hustle. Instead what you get is a bland concotion of twins separated by birth, lord ganesha appearing as a potato and people in China speaking Hindi. The effervescent Akshay Kumar nor the stunning Deepika Padukone can save this mad caper. Shot in some stunning locales like the great wall of China, CC2C falls flat for being slapstick and boring. Oh it also carries probably the most cringe worthy dialogue of the year, when Akshay learns the iron forearm technique. All body parts iron except one, oh mere iron man! Yes you can never watch the Robert Downey Jr. version ever again!

Jail: Ever wondered what we would do without Madhur Bhandarkar holding a mirror to society? Imagine how horrible a place the world would be if not for him and his thought provoking and award winning movies. Okay who are we trying to kid here, we just hate him to our guts and every piece of horse crap he makes under the pretext of meaningful cinema! First it was bar girls, then office sluts, then the sleaze in the ramp and now finally prison bars. This is how he goes about making his films, he first picks an area worth exploiting. Then he makes a list of every possible cliche he could think of and then extrapolates them beyond levels where even Ekta Kapoor would not dare to go. So you have illegal drug possession,  hostile living conditions, worm infested food, nude humiliation, self pleasuring and if that wasn’t gross enough you have two men going at each other form the rear. With these beautiful images in your mind it is very hard to get a sound sleep fro a couple of nights, but it soon wears of with the promise that Mr.Bhandarkar will be back again next year!

Blue: It’s not often that you have a movie sink without trace despite boasting of a soundtrack composed by A.R.Rahman. Infact we feel really bad for the movie, especially given the fact that it could have been a lot more better. How else do you connect bikers in hongkong/singapore, a has-been Australian popstar, and a yacht in the Caribbean? Now it may seem thaaaat we are going a little cuckoo, but then that is just the tip of the iceberg. Shot in superb locales, breath taking underwater photography, fantastic title sequence and plenty of style to go with the A-class names. Well the only thing missing was a couple of sharks doing chiggy-wiggy with each other underwater and a PLOT! They spent so much on the music, locales, costumes, stars and everything that they forgot that a movie needs a story. Sad Sad Sad!

Kambakkht Ishq: It baffles me why one would remake an average Tamil grosser into Hindi. A straight rip-off would have probably fared better,but then how could bollywood be happy with just that? So to exhibit the weight of our purse-strings, we bring in one-time hollywood wonders, and a couple of forgotten stars. Topping that would be shooting scenes at the universal studios guided tour and weave a story around a stuntman and a aspiring doctor. Well it doesn’t seem weird yet, that is because a doctor is bland and no glamorous, so they just write in the part where she moonlights as a lingerie supermodel! Lets just pepper this with tags of man-hater and woman-hater as the two most brilliant character sketches of the year. The cherry on the icing ends up being a weird watch that chimes a wedding mantra and forgetting it in the stomach of a patient. You can reach for the dispirin on the kitchen table as you read this but for the ones watching, No mangalam whatsoever! [Read Review]

Do Knot Disturb: If David Dhawan were to re-release his gems from the nineties, I’m sure they’d still take a better opening that this load of crap. Who in the world would leave a wife that looks like Sushmita Sen for another, even if that means Lara Dutta! Mistaken identities are definitely funny, but when you are repeatedly hit on the head till you laugh, isn’t quite pleasant. It is getting exceedingly difficult to watch Rajpal Yadav do the same thing again and again till the point he gets beat up like a church bell. The less we speak about the cast, the better it probably is for we have a long list to cover. With a hackneyed plot and forced laughs Do Knot Disturb is tied in its own knots. It hurts when comedies fail to make you laugh even artificially, and we’re lucky that we didn’t have to pay to watch this one!

Dil Bole Hadippa: It is a fact that we love sport-based movies where the underdog team triumphs against all odds. We don’t hate Rani Mukherjee despite her dinosaur voice, nor do we have a personal agenda against the YashRaj banner. Rani Mukherjee and Shahid Kapur come together for the second cricket-based film of the year and it is pretty disastrous as well. In what was supposed to be a remake/inspired version of ‘She’s the man‘, Rani Mukherjee makes it to a local cricket team disguised as a boy/bhajji impersonator. Not quite a problem, but then she romances the team captain at night while trying to fend off a sultry Sherlyn Chopra. However when you tell us that the last batting pair scores 165 runs in under 10 overs, it get a bit too hard to believe. That’s not all the unbelievable shit that goes on, and you have to watch it to even believe it! [Read Review]

PS: Owing to the length of this post, we’re splitting it into two parts. The mayhem continues in Part-2.

(Images courtesy: glamsham.com)

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 2
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 1
• Review: Avatar – Desi concept videsi effects
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2011
• Aditi…….
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 2

Unsupportingly supporting actor – Male

Nominees:
Boman Irani – Love Story 2050
Anil Kapoor – Race
Amitabh Bachchan – Bhoothnath
Om Puri – Mere Baap Pehle Aap
Halla Bol – Pankaj Kapur
The award goes to: Generally all men other than the male lead are reduced to bufoonery and also-rans, very few step up tot he plate in an author backed role and deliver a stand-out performance. What we really mean is that their performances are so pathetic that you are zonked and the main lead begins to seem a lot less torturous. Boman Irani as a bumbling scientist was so horrifying in his Einstein parody that he managed to draw our attention from hating Hrithik to sign LoveStory 2050, wait a minute wasn’t that Harman? We’re glad Anil Kapoor did SDM, for now he can traumatize American TV audiences or atleast star in a revival of Star Wars as Chewbacca, but playing a horny fruit loving detective is way more traumatizing. The BigB ought to stop doing films for production houses on sentimental values, his undead avtaar was so painful that halfway through the movie we were praying for his son to return so that he could attain moksha and spare us the terror! When a seasoned actor like Pankaj Kapur is reduced to a vigilante-turned-nautanki doing streetplays you begin to cringe, however you realise it was his own doing to sign a film that had Ajay Devgan in it of all the people! The award however goes to Om Puri for his atrocious potrayal of a thargi buddha whose jawani ka candle refuses to go out thereby making him hit upon college girls old enough to be his daughter.

Unsupportingly supporting actor – Female

Nominees:
Sameera Reddy – Race
Juhi Chawla – Kismet Konnection
Jaya Bachchan – Drona
Vidya Malvade – Kidnap
Amisha Patel – Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
The award goes to: Ah the women, often caricatured as sisters, mothers or friends of the female lead. Every now and then you see someone in a stellar performance that leaves you in awe. This essentially translates to a uber raunchy item number or someone shrieking till the glass cracks in a jaw-dropping performance. So we have Sameera Reddy as silly milly where all she does is act dumb with a plunging neckline and juggle a few bananas and apples! Juhi Chawla took her astrologer character as ‘haseena bano jaan‘ in Kismet Konnection a bit to serious and went giggling on a tangent that would make any sane man want to slit his wrists. Jaya Bachchan added another achievement to her kitty by playing a stone statue with tears in Drona. Wait, she was stone only in the second half but then you don’t notice the wooden performance at all. Vidya Malvade gave all the soccer moms of the world a huge complex with her deep cleavage and butt hugging suits in Kidnap. The only problem however was that she looked way hotter than her daughter and many at times you’d be confused as to who was playing whom. The award however goes to Amisha Patel for scorching the screen with her silicon valley look in a yellow bikini in Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic. We aren’t the Ram Sene and we’d love to drool over some lazy lamhe in a pool, just that we didn’t expect that in a kids film!

Unplayable screenplay of the year

Nominees:
Drona
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
Love Story 2050
Yuvraaj
Mission Istanbul
The award goes to: Well etched characters and great lines is what makes the screenplay memorable. In our case we’re looking at poor characterization and amateurish lines and who better than our elite list. For making the worst superhero movie ever, caricaturing the bad buy, a grumpy looking hero and a hackneyed plot Drona is an easy entrant. When you fail to recognize your husband without a moustache and can even see the almighty but them, it is implied that someone is suffering from serious creative writing deficiency. Time travel is always a dicey proposition and when that is coupled with crazy effects, weird hair, gadgets, talking teddy’s and a debutant it’s a disaster waiting to happen. That is precisely what happened as Love Story 2050 sunk without a trace and along with it the fortunes of the Bawejas. The idea of a news network partnering a terrorist outfit sounds interesting but when it is crippled with patchy lines and illogical sub plots, it finds it’s way here just like Mission Istanbul did. Big names often spring a surprise and this year Subhash Ghai takes the award with the obseletest of screenplays in Yuvraaj. If you still have an iota of doubt then kindly sample the following line, ‘Woh beta nahin hardcore anti-family man hain‘.

Non-existent story of the year

Nominees:
Mehbooba
Mere Baap Pehle Aap
Race
Kidnap
Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
The award goes to: We always maintain that the story is the crux of a film though many like to disagree with us. To get on our list though all you need is to come up with the craziest of plots that is light years away from common sense and logic. Mehbooba is a classic example where a woman seeks solace and falls for a man unaware of the fact that it was his brother she was married to, who treated her badly and ditched her. Mere Baap Pehle Aap isn’t far away where two old men cavort after college girls and a son tries to get his father married so that his route gets cleared. What about Kidnap where a young lad takes revenge for a childhood grudge and holds a man’s daughter captive while she rolls in the sand and stabs him. Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic fared no better with an angel being assigned the duty of a few orphaned kids and then falling in love with their guardian. The kicker however and the eventual winner was Race where everyone was allowed to double cross each other, brothers put a price on the others head and one of them even came back from the dead.

Unbearable actor of the year – Female

Nominees:
Priyanka Chopra – Love Story 2050, Drona, Chamku
Katrina Kaif – Yuvraaj
Mallika Sherawat – Ugly aur Pagli, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam
Isha Koppikar – Ek Vivaah Aisi Bhi
Shriya Saran – Mission Istanbul
The award goes to: All eyes are always fixed on the leading lady and they have to look fantabulous even if they just woke up. Such are the gruelling demands of Indian cinema in addition to dancing, crying at the drop of a hat, emoting beyond normal levels and staying fit. We are huge fans of Katrina Kaif but despite our fascination we just couldn’t look beyond her shortcomings in Yuvraaj, blame then on her lines or maybe it’s just her. Mallika Sherawat decided to keep her clothes on just this once and despite acting drunk and psychotic for half the movie and slapping her boy all the while, she still managed to tumble. The Barjatyas love small town cinema, but Isha Koppikar running her fingers over a harmonium and mouthing lines on culture was a bit too much to tolerate. Southern siren Shriya Saran thought she’d scorch the screens as a dynamic reporter taken hostage in Istanbul, but she only managed to scorch the reels of the film and by snogging Zayed khan, she makes a grand entry! The queen bee however would be Priyanka with three disastrous movies, died in one and came back from the future, almost died in another and why are we even bothered bout the third?

Unbearable actor of the year – Male

Nominees:
Himesh Reshammiya – Karzz
Salman Khan – God Tussi Great Ho, Yuvraaj
Rahul Bose – Shaurya
Abhishek Bachchan – Drona
Bobby Deol – Chamku
The award goes to: The Indian cinema hero is the epitome of manhood, the macho image, the savior, the upholder of justice, the voice of the downtrodden and messiah to the helpless. Salman Khan sets the bar really high with some unbelievably horrible acting in both films and look totally distraught and bored. Abhishek Bachchan was close behind him with the grumpiest looking superhero avtaar where he was outperformed by a CGI blue petal. Rahul Bose tried every bit to wipe out memories of Tom Cruise from our minds and ensured that we’d shudder even when someone mentions the movie ‘Few Good Men’. Bobby Deol never disappoints and once again did what he’d done over the years, roar and shoot a few hundred people as an undercover vigilante. The top dog and the undisputed champion in this category shall be Himes Bhai for his constipated expressions, horrible wig and the best line of the year ‘Bolo Kamini, Bolo Bolo Bolo…‘

Most Disgruntled Director of the year

Nominees:
Ajay Devgan – You Me Aur Hum
Subhash Ghai – Yuvraaj
Kunal Kohli – Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
Goldie Behl – Drona
Satish Kaushik – Karzz
The award goes to: The director is the captain of the ship and commands the cast and crew to sail in the right direction. A success is attributed to the team but failure enlists the director as the sole culprit. Ajay Devgan attempted to use his home production as his debut venture and failed miserably. The audience were as clueless as the lizard on the wall that kept drawing Kajol’s attention. The showman pulled out a story form his archives and got ARR to score the audio but that nor a flopless Katrina could revive this crappy plot that had hit its expiry date 20yrs ago. An angel coming to answer the prayers of a few orphans may have seemed promising to Kunal Kohli, but some poor lines, bad acting and a boring storyline ensured that the crowds stayed away. Drona was Goldie Behl’s dream project but this heavy on graphics movie lacked almost everything right form a believable superhero to a decent plot. But for having the gall to remake Karz and that to with Himes bhai beats everyone else to the award. It’s like introducing a diamond in a game of rock-paper-scissors which wins hands down.

Most treacherous film of the year

Nominees:
Hello
Karzzz
Drona
God Tussi Great Ho
Tashan
The award goes to: Here we come to the last award of the day and the biggest of them all. A film encompasses all the above markers and packages them together. We’ve never read Chetan Bhagat’s book but if this movie was even 10% close to the print version then we’d consider ourselves lucky to have missed the book. Silly stereotypes, silly subplots, tacky sets, out of place lines, Hello had every thing go wrong. Karz was a movie that should never have been made in the first place and most certainly not with Himes bhai. They then took the story and set it in South Africa but still maintain a Kali-ka-mandir apart from other mindless things. If Drona is supposed to be setting a trend then we’d pray that superhero movies not be made at all. It’s a bit confusing when your hero is the scary grumpy guy while your villain is the bufoon. Tashan was a movie so silly that some actually began enjoying it. A stylish bhojpuri movie being sold as an A-grade Hindi movie was hard to digest though. The pick of the lot would be God Tussi Great Ho for the worst ever adaption ever possible. Even if they’d made the original frame-to-frame it’d be watchable. Instead they add terrorists, an office rivalry and other subplots.

PS: We hope you enjoyed these awards as much as we did bringing them to you!

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Review: Drona – Smile toh karo na
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 2
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 1
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• voh south ke phillum

Easily forgettable debut of the year – Male

Nominees:

Harman Baweja – LoveStory 2050
Mimoh Chakraborty – Jimmy
Sikandar Kher – Woodstock Villa
Adhyayan Suman – Haal-e-Dil
Anurag Sinha – Black and White
The award goes to: We begin the proceedings with the stars of tomorrow. The rising scions who will grace the screens in the coming years with their towering performances. They’ve already started on the wrong foot with a distasteful debut, and the future seems bleak as well. Harman Baweja showed us why he could be the poor-mans Hrithik and this cloning seems to be the best of all the special effects in the movie. The kher heir Sikandar starred in two films last year, both which sank without a trace. A negative debut failed to work for the FTII graduate Anurag Sinha as well when Subhash Ghai’s supposedly heart-warming film was neither black nor white. The award however goes to Mimoh Chakraborty who seems all set to continue the legacy of Mithunda in Jimmy where everything right from the titles was shoddy. We hope Kanti Shah and TLV Prasad are listening, for they may have found the next best thing in c-grade cinema!

Easily forgettable debut of the year – Female

Nominees:

Anoushka Sharma – Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
Sonal Chauhan – Jannat
Shweta Kumar – Karzzz
Adah Sharma – 1920
The award goes to: It’s now time for the screen scorchers of the morrow, long legs and raunchy item numbers. Since we don’t expect any of them to make us swoon to their performances, we can safely assume that we’ll be seeing them perform in stage shows and reality TV contests. Anoushka started her career with the biggest production house but for failing to recognize her husband without a mustache, she makes it to our list. Emran Hashmi’s heroines are mostly reduced to smooch dolls and Sonal Chauhan doesn’t disappoint in that department at all. For essaying the role of a exotic dancer to perfection, she makes the cut and proves that she has loads of item song potential. Not many would even remember a film by the name 1920 and that speaks wonders for Adah Sharma who shrieked and squealed in a ghost ridden mansion. All said and done, the award however goes to Shweta Kumar for garnering the courage the sign a movie opposite the great Himes bhai.

Most painful lyrics of the year

Nominees:

Tandoori Nights – Karzzz
Bang Bang – Hello
Move Your Body – Kismet Konnection
Dil Dance Maare – Tashan
Tha Tha Karke – Golmaal Returns
The award goes to: Lyrics are one thing that we notice the first when we sample the audio of a movie. Call it a quirk but good lyrics tend to make us go soft on a movie. Every year however we come across a set of lyrics that will make one wail in pain. If listening to Himes Bhai was painful enough then compounding that with something like ‘Tak tana na na tandoori nights,tandoori nights, tandoori nights‘ doesn’t help either. It could however become the anthem of a punjabi restaurant is marketed properly, certainly not meant for a CD. With lyrics like ‘Bang bang bang, Bang bang zamana bole, Boom boom boom, Boom boom deewana bole‘ you’re definitely asking for trouble. Our guess was that the song was written during Diwali or close to a firing range. What do you do when the lyricist is so confused that he forges something like ‘Sade Naal Karle Party, Kudi Tu Lagthi Hai Naughty, Freaky Freaky Raat Ho Gayi Come’n Sing Along With Me Now‘ you are assured that the fat lady has sung. When Punjabi meets English in a Hindi film, things indeed get freaky can’t quite comment on the naughty part though. When we first heard ‘Aaja lag Ja Gale Se Mere Tha Kar Ke, tha Tha Kar Ke. Sari Duniya Se Ishq Baiyan Kar Ke, tha Tha Kar Ke‘ we were doubting our own Hindi skills. The air was cleared and we realised that tha tha were just random sounds used to make up for rhyming with the music. The award however goes to ‘White white face dheke dil woh beating fast sasura Jaan se maare re. Very happy in my heart, dil dance maare re‘. If Punjabi meets English wasn’t enough, we got Bhojpuri in the fray as well and some supremely sublime verses like these just take the cake!

Nerve wrecking music of the year

Nominees:

Karzz – Himesh Reshammiya
Hello – Sajid Wajid
Bombay to Bangkok – Salim Suleman
One Two Three – Raghav Silchar
God Tussi Great Ho – Sajid Wajid
The award goes to: Good music always guarantees a good opening, and loud pathetic tracks tend to drive people away. This year featured the legendary nasal crooner in a film where he starred and scored the music as well, which would explain appearances in every category. However Karzzz had a few addictive loops and our love for Himes Bhai denies him the award. The brother duo of Salim-Suleman who’ve been behind the background score for some of the best films, did such a shoddy work with the soundtrack when Nagesh Kuknoor approached them for Bombay to Bangkok that we fail to recollect a single song! Raghav Silchar who impressed with Kabul Express fizzled out with One Two Three and the same song was played thrice. Our guess was that he took the title a tad too serious, and even sang female vocals for a song! The award however goes to Sajid-Wajid for the atrociously horrible Hello whose title song could also be nominated for the most irritating song played on radio. It’s not surprising that they followed it with another shockingly packaged album for God Tussi Great Ho, I guess we’re not even bothered at this stage.

Most Irritating Song of the year

Nominees:

Tandoori Nights – Karzzz
Chane Pe Dance – Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
Hello – Hello
Singh is King – Singh is King
Zara Zara – Race
The award goes to: Ah we again have the dhabha anthem finding its way into yet another list, but when you are dealing with such ineptitude, you just force your way in! As descried in the previous section we aren’t believers that the word hello be uttered in various tones and be passed as an excuse for a song. The bushmen of the Kalahari desert may buy it as a song but nowhere else in the world can you trick us. Not sure if we have anything against title tracks, but the Singh is King track was played on every news channel and radio station to a point where we could take it no more. Here at Dappan Koothu we love Katrina Kaif but imagining her shimmying on the dance floor asking you to touch her every 5 mins was like pushing the limits. There’s no rule that popular hit numbers can’t be irritating and hence the award goes to Chance pe Dance for making getting our left and right feet all tied up. We may not be able to get the steps to become hep but we know to switch channels before we get confused between our left and right feet being aage peeche!

Unspecially Special Appearance in a film

Nominees:

Salman Khan – Hello
Amitabh Bachchan – God Tussi Great Ho
Shah Rukh Khan – Bhoothnath
Sonu Sood – Singh is King
Bobby Deol – Dostana
The award goes to: It has been a year of guest appearances and as a moviestar you career seems incomplete without atleast one special appearance even if it is in your neighbors home video! With a weird accent, half naked music video and talking to a woman who a figment of his imagination Salman Khan is an automatic selection. The BigB was in this list the moment he signed God Tussi Great Ho, we assume he left his glasses at home when he was given the script. Borrowing Morgan Freeman’s clothes didn’t seem to help either and gave him the dubious distinction of joining this elite league. You might wonder what Shar Rukh Khan was doing in Bhoothnath so were we and turns out that even SRK himself is still wondering and hence direct entry! Sonu Sood made a yet another miss-if-blink appearance in Singh is King to follow up on Jodha Akbar. But wait, wasn’t he a principal character in Sing is King? After all he was the title character and the crux of the plot, guess they forgot to tell him that! The award however goes to Bobby Deol for pulling the carpet from underneath when you least expected in Dostana. In a movie where two men pretend to be gay, Bobby infact a gay man pretending to be straight. Suprised? Need proof? Who else would want to see two dudes make out in broad daylight?

Most positive actor in a negative role

Nominees:

Anil Kapoor – Tashan
Urmila Matondkar- Karzzz
Kay Kay – Drona
Entire cast – Race
Imran Khan – Kidnap
The award goes to: There always has to be evil so that it can be vanquished by the good and hence for our heroes to prevail we need all the negative energy we can get. The bad men have always instilled fear and made audiences shudder at their mention but then here we are talking of people who ended up utter mockery. If parodying the iconic temple scene of ‘Deewar’ in bhojpuri-englees wasn’t criminal enough, Anil Kapoor raised the stakes by baring his baal-ki-dukaan chest in Tashan! Kay Kay seemed the least menacing and infact Abhishek seemed much more scarier in Drona. The weird hair, nails, cape and puppets reduced the villain in a so-called superhero film to a silly caricature. With a weird haircut and jumping through a building under construction you may wonder why Imran Khan made it to this list. Well with chocolate boy looks and a silly childhood motive he not only made his character look absurd, he topped it with letting his booty take a dip in the beach and stab him. At this point however we’d like to nominate the whole cast of Race for double crossing each other a million times in a plot so skewed that even Fardeen Khan could explain the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle in simple terms. Without an iota of doubt the award goes to Urmila Matondkar for her treacherous potrayal of kamini in Karzzz. If signing the film wasn’t bad enough she topped it with a gold dress, hat, shoes et all and lines like ‘Haan haan haan haan, maine hi khoon kiya hai, haan‘

Best animal in a meaningful role

Nominees:

The Elephant – Jodha Akbar
The Horse(Devdutt) – Drona
The talking teddy – Love Story 2050
The crow on the tree – Phoonk
The award goes to: Never before have we seen so many non-humans in accomplished roles involving stellar performances. While the credit may be given to the way their character was etched, they still had to brng out the nuances in critical scenes that held the whole plot together. What would Jodha Akbar have been if the elephant had not bowed to Hrithik and allow him to emerge the victor and instead squash him? Would Love Story 2050 have been as silly it was if we did not that talking teddy who always got kicked in it’s boo boo? How else would Priyanka realise that she loves Harman? It’s no secret that the crow took the fattest paycheck in Phoonk along with maximum screen time. Heck it was the only indicator that this was supposed to be a spooky film and hence the morbid sounds! The leader of the pack and our award winner is devdutt the horse in Drona, without whom the plot would never take of. The horse bore the burden of both Priyanka and Abhishek thereby actually carrying the movie on his shoulders!

PS: Owing to the length of this post andd the big awards that follow this post is split into two parts. It’s meaner, dirtier and nastier, let us know if you liked this one, part two is up here!

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Aditi…….
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• The 6-pack saga…….
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 1
• The 2010 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• Review: Singh is Kinng – Better seen on trucks

Money Hai Toh Honey Hai
If any of you has a doubt as to why one would even dare to watch this movie, then the answer is simple. We are a sucker for Govinda’s films and it’s heavily tempting when one releases. Some of you may recognize Ganesh Acharya as an over sized choreographer, but then such people direct movies is obviously inviting troubles. A few gags manage to evoke some laughter but one look at the cast and you know what you are in for. With six boring names, not expecting a disaster is like lighting a candle on the beach and praying that the flame doesn’t go out. Govinda is the only saving grace but it’s a pity he only appears for a total of 45 minutes. It’s sad to see someone like Manoj Bajpai who you would associate with some big names, be out of work and hence have to freelance in the b-grade market.

Ek Vivaah Aisa Bhi
Ah how can we leave out the Barjatyas? The sole defenders of Indian culture in a time when Indian cinema is infested by western influences. Every movie they make reeks of parampara, prathishta, anushasan and reminds us of how low our morals have fallen these days. In short they are movies caught in a time lag, not that we have a problem against large weddings and falling at the feet of our elders. However if someone tells us that the purest form of love is wherein you wait 11 years, then we have a problem digesting that. You have the customary tragedy where some one has to die and throw the family in complete disarray and Alok Nath obliges here. Turns out he is in every Rajshri production, our guess being that they cast him even before they write the story. Following the death of her father Esha Koppikar cancels her wedding, raises her siblings, gets them married and then agrees to marry Sonu Sood 12 yrs later! It’s a soap drama that has been pixelated to fit the big screen on a 1280X800 resolution. With plenty of close-ups, weeping brides and tear-resistant make-up it sends people from small cities 20yrs back in time.

Tashan
Have you ever come across a movie so stupid that you actually begin to like it? Tashan falls into that category for it’s absolute stupidity. The entry sequence of Akshay Kumar is probably among the best of the year but that’s where the pleasantries end. Shot in air-brushed locations and stylish camerawork, it’s a c-grade bhojpuri mule paraded of as a Yashraj stallion. After a mind boggling fight sequence in a palace setting you are quite sure that it’s the worst anyone could do. The director surpasses his abilities when he goes in for an even horrible fight scene in the climax that we had to see twice to believe! If you thought that Anil Kapoor was a hairy beast then wait till you see his Chewbacca avtaar in the climax. The sequence where he murders Deewar’s ever famous temple scene was actually supposed to evoke some laughs. It would have helped if the word ‘laugh’ had blinked on the screen or they had a laugh track so that we atleast knew when to laugh. Our sources tell us that ‘Tashan’ loosely translates to style/panache/pizzazz, and quite frankly the film never even remotely came close to one of the three.  It’s actually more pathetic than its seems from what you just read.

Kidnap
What can you expect from a movie that is so engrossed in the skin show that it refuses to acknowledge the need for a plot. You have a mother-daughter pair whose chemistry is so bad that you are confused as to who is who unless one calls the other by name. Barring one awesomely choreographed chase sequence that may seem inspired from a Bond flick the movie has nothing but skin to talk about.  One of the silliest kidnap-ransom movies where the kidnapper lets his hostage shed her clothes and sing a raunchy song in the water and later stab him! Good thing for Imran Khan as this movie works as ‘nazar utharo‘ after his super hit dream debut. Sanjay Dutt looked old and haggard and totally disinterested by the fact that his daughter was kidnapped. Minissha Lamba saved the producers a lot of money by wearing the clothes she wore in 5th Std and teaching us that it’s always better to carry a swimming costume in the trunk of your car so that you can take a dip in the middle of nowhere and get kidnapped! The dialogue ‘Hell is here Raina‘ was understood by crowds only when they saw the movie, too late unfortunately. Read what we felt about this colossal waste of time, money and effort.

Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
Frankly we have never understood the deal behind Kunal Kohli and this films nor does it explain his love for Rani Mukerji that he casts her always. Just when you thought that YashRaj was about clean family entertainers comes the second film in a year where the talking point was the bikini wore by one of it’s women! As men we’d love to see more of it, but it pains to see that it’s the fulcrum of your movies. Our guess is that the Chopras met a roadside aphrodisiac ‘swami‘ who gave them a ‘taveez‘ and the ‘mantra‘ to hit movies. Turns out that both were as fake as the swami and the Chopras rang up yet another dud for the year. Someone forgot to tell them that it was actually supposed to be a children’s movie with an angel and some magic. Not sure if today’s kids like to see a bare chested Saif enjoying some ‘lazy lamhe‘ with a very-developed-in-the-right-places Amisha in a yellow bikini! We however unearthed the reason for YashRaj still making money of it, they sold their movies to Lufthansa’s in-flight service! Only we know the pain of watching this twice!

God Tussi Great Ho
It’s amazing to watch Priyanka Chopra’s script selection process and almost seems like she just flips a coin. We’d like to give the long legged beauty the benefit of the doubt and assume that she thought she’d do a better job that Jen Aniston. While we still figure out what the Big B was doing in this film, it may be a good idea to seat the director on the ‘Sachai ki Kursi‘ that was used in the movie. Then we’d like to see if he had the balls to still claim that the movie wasn’t inspired. Oh wait this isn’t a remake for the original was mighty good and even TLV Prasad(Mani Ratnam of B-grade cinema) could stick to the stolen script and dish out something decent. Priyanka’s looked tired and bored in her 6th film of the year and doesn’t Salman always look bored and disinterested? If the concept of intercepting text-messages in mid-air and altering their content isn’t insipid enough then do watch it to find out what happens when the prayers of all the goons are answered. If only our prayers were heard and such movies never made!

Hello
We found the promos featuring a shirtless wonder groove ‘hello(pause) hello(pause) hello-hello-hello‘ so enticing that we volunteered to sit through this disaster waiting to be. We were also upset by the looks that we get from the opposite sex on failing to recognize Chetan Bhagat. It’s as good as telling someone you are impotent or even worse, Gay! Our strong resolve to earn brownie points by at least watching the movie adaptation was washed away as it turned out to be one of the most harrowing experiences in recent times. We even tried asking some people if some events really did happen in the book only to conclude that most women are either stupid or just claim to love Chetan Bhagat’s books to show that they are smart. Ladeej you know we love you, whether you can read or not we will continue to wag our tails after you! As for the movie, it was a horrible concoction of all the possible stereotypes of the west and even the smelliest and most distasteful ‘kashayams‘ may seem better.

Race
There was a time when directors made movies out of random DVDs under the blanket of inspired cinema. Gone are those days, for now the trend is to flick plot points from a collection of movies from the same genre. Race is a product of such a catastrophe and a front runner fro the most bizarre movies of the year. Inspired by almost five thrillers, this movie has all their twists that you dare no blink else you may miss a twist! But they didn’t realize that too many twists may negate each other and just like having too many Kamal Haasans on-screen, the movie fails to make any sense. In short everybody is immoral and keep telling each other that they were just acting. In this mela of double-crossing you only wish if at least any one of them did act in the movie in addition to against each other. Who cares as long as there are steamy scenes, hot women, crass attempts at suggestive humor and some pretty good dinchak music!

Special Mentions
We didn’t want to cram too many in this list, but for the lack of space and time here’s a special mention to some that didn’t make it. Bobby Deol did the same thing for the 367th time in Chamku and surprisingly it still tanked. He would have been a more appropriate choice as Ghajini! Krazzy 4 cost Rakesh Roshan 4 crores in an out of court settlement even before it released and three guest/item songs couldn’t revive the lackluster plot. Shaurya was a sorry remake of a great film and Rahul Bose is nowhere near Tom Cruise, peppering the plot with some communal tension further sank its chances. When Nagesh Kukunoor makes a movie, you go watch it without any further questions asked. Let’s safely assume that he made Bombay to Bangkok after drinking the mint-wala Pepsi, or even better pretend that it was never made! We strangely never subscribe to the Madhur Bhandarkar in-your-face reality cinema genre. We were willing to make an exception for Fashion but after having witnessed wardrobe malfunctions, gay designers, meth-head models and intoxicated love, we safely go back to our initial premonition.

(Images Courtesy: glamsham.com)

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Review: Bachna Ae Haseeno – Tribute to YashRaj
• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 1
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 2
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 1
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• jimmy mi jimmy moh

Love story 2050
In what was touted to be a clash of debutantes on the 4th of July ended in a damp squib. While Jaane Tu broke records with a mammoth opening, Love Story was taken of screens following the opening weekend. If you felt that the first half itself was cringe worthy then wait till you hear how the second half came to be. Our sources tell us that apart from the script, toddler’s coloring books were also used while writing the screenplay. It is however interesting to note that despite all this, I clearly remember Priyanka Chopra stating in an interview that it was a great film and would be counted amongst the most memorable movies of the year. Well she managed to get the second part of it right as this movie will be remembered for the years to come, for the wrong reasons of course. For all the hype that was generated behind the movie they could have well landed an alien ship in Mumbai for all you know. Almost everyone waited with bated breath to see what this so-called breakthrough in the field of special effects and sci-fi had to offer. What we got in return was a movie that made many cry in pain. We are not referring to a red haired Priyanka Chopra nor as we talking about her talking teddy. The only sci-fi in this dud turned out to be Harman Baweja himself. We are still reeling from the fact that they managed to clone Hrithik Roshan and got away with it without being caught. He looked as lost as a toddler in a bikini bar while the tacky sets, cartoonish special effects and disastrous plot didn’t help either.

Drona
A grumpy looking Abhishek Bachchan with a stubble, a kohl eyed martial arts expert bodyguard Priyanka Chopra, a horse and loads of cash! That was all that director Goldie Behl made sure he had before he made the movie. This can be a spot-the-missing type of question in any children’s quiz, but even they will get the answer in 10 seconds flat. Its surprising how one could forget the plot while making such an extravaganza considered to be one of the most expensive movies of the year. Another tacky adventure film that failed to please even three year olds which was slightly better than Ajooba but not better than Hatim Tai. Though Drona was bigger than Jeetendra’s Hatim Tai in terms of budget and the effects were much better, the latter had a proper storyline and some comic relief by Satish Shah. Kay Kay was hardly convincing as the evil sorcerer and failed to instill any fear when compared to the thunderous presence of Amrish Puri. The clothes and styling were a fashion disaster and the best moments of the movie were in the trailer and nothing beyond that. As everyone rushed out of the multiplexes to thrash it, read what we had to say about it here.

Karzzz
Along came Himesh, now I apologize if it sounds like a famous movie but I couldn’t resist. A lot of questions could be asked like what were people like Urmila Matondkar, Satish Kaushik thinking when they decided to be part of this venture. It is also baffling to notice how Gulshan Grover agreed to play dumb with a robotic arm or how Danny Denzongpa accepted the cliched role of mouthing movie names for dialogs. We generally never have any high regards for remakes but in this case no matter how hard we try to be soft we still can’t refrain from being caustic. If you try to overlook the atrocious lyrics and the hair extensions you are caught by the loud jarring music that fails miserably. We are not trying to look for logic but hte movie is a monumental insult to intelligence and patience. Sincere request to Himesh, stick to doing whatever you do best for a living and in this case it’s judging reality shows! Dialogs like  ‘Bolo Kamini bolo bolo bolo‘ don’t really help, if you know what we mean! Read our experiences here.

Jimmy
Seems like a year for disastrous debuts and this time Mimoh Chakraborty, the heir of all prabhuji’s c-grade movies. They say that he danced well but then that’s like saying that the sugar was just right in a burnt apple pie. Spurned by a terrible plot, poor acting and so badly made that you have to see to believe it. It’s a movie that everyone would wish that it wasn’t ever made and you would wish that you hadn’t seen! Mimoh very shamelessly exhibits his lack of talent and yet again proves that talent isn’t hereditary. We were so badly expecting a special guest appearance by the great Mithunda, only to be disappointed and remain content with the appalling screen presence of his son. Anand Raj Anand was the guy who scored the music for ‘Kaante‘ and these days other than judging reality shows he composes music for such films as well. Talk about being out of work and out of touch! Read what we felt when we had the privilege to watch it.

Yuvvraaj
If our memory serves us right, then a lot of Subhash Ghai’s films have featured evil extended family members while the protagonist possesses a heart of gold and ties to bind the family towards the end. Yuvraaj is yet another moral science lesson where the ‘bhola‘ big brother makes his siblings realize that blood runs thicker and the collectively fight their evil uncle’s stake to claim the family wealth. This film will be remembered for ending Katrina Kaif’s successful streak at the box office and last heard she was trying to track Mr.Ghai down. when you have dialogs like ‘Woh hardcore anti-family man hai‘ and ‘Kyun, bhloe aadmiyoon ki shaadi nahi hoti kya?‘ you know that the film is heading only one way, and that’s downward. A musical farce where a couple of A.R.Rahmans fantastic tunes were wasted should be enough reason for the Showman to retire.

Mehbooba
We’d be damned if this one wasn’t picked up by our radar and this is one movie you have to see to believe. On paper it claims to have Ajay Devgan, Sanjay Dutt and Manisha Koirala on board, but we doubt if even one of them read the script before confirming participation in this horrible mess. The plot is a mangled mess that could take one hours to decipher after you’ve finished watching and you’d wake up the next morning without knowing what hit you. We shall dare not venture into the dialogs for it could cause riots. How else would you explain a movie where a woman seeks solace and falls for a man unaware of the fact that it was his brother she was married to, who treated her badly and ditched her. We were under the impression that Ms.Koirala had been deported back to Nepal, guess we were wrong. If it’s tough to read this then imagine the plight of those who watched it.

Mission Istanbul
A title that would remind you of a Tom Cruise trilogy, but the exciting part ends there. When you have Vivek Oberoi as a Turkish Commando, Shriya Saran and Zayed Khan as journalists, you’re pretty much expecting that at least you don’t fall asleep. Not so fast, you have the Bollywood version of Tomorrow Never Dies featuring Al Johara a news agency that reports terror stories. Just likes gelling up the mane of a mule doesn’t make it a horse, shooting a b-grade movie in Istanbul doesn’t make it an a-grade flick. With pathetic direction, cringe worthy performances and a lousy screenplay you are left with a magnifying glass to look for positives. It is however not sure if even the director could relate to what was going on screen with some over the top brand endorsements. Our thoughts on the movie.

Mere Baap Pehle Aap
Another of Priyadarshan’s mindless fares that were passed of under the pretext of comedies. There would have been a fatwa issued against his name if it hadn’t been for the brilliant ‘Kancheevaram‘. A huge disappointment with some big names being wasted and lampooned in a desperate effort of tickle some laughs. It was sad to see seasoned actors like Om Puri and Paresh Rawal pathetically try to look young and chase young women. Repeating old hackneyed gags fail to evoke any laughter and the three hour ordeal is best described as an uninspiring skull crusher. The plot is silly, wafer thin and the movie is technically weak while the actors look bored and uninterested.

PS: Owing to the length of this post, I’m splitting it into two parts. Part-2 is up here.

(Images courtesy: glamsham.com)

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Supremely sublime movies of 2008 – Part 2
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 1
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 1
• Anand (telugu)
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2011
• Supremely Sublime Movies of 2009 – Part 2

I’d even stick out my neck and claim that the railways comes a close second to this “Industry” in being the single largest employer. The railways may have more bihari-babus on their payroll but in terms of working hands the “Industry” is way ahead. Such selfless service to mankind inspite of repeated box-office failures is truly praise worthy and shall not go unnoticed. Ladeej and Juntalmen, It’s my honour to present the first ever ‘Dandanakka Awards’ for the year 2008, celebrating ineptitude in cinema.

Below are the various categories and winners.

• Most forgettable debut of the year: This without an iota of doubt has to goto the multi-talented-self-proclaimed-genius Himmes bhai or ‘aech-aar’ as he is fondly called for portraying 258 constipated expressions in a single frame. Amongst the females, the award goes to ‘Bottomless Khan‘ for bringing white shirts into vogue. Don’t be surprised if your boyfriend buys you one of those and sets up a sprinkler system in the garden.
• Most painful lyrics of the year: This award had to goto the title song of the movie ‘Shakalaka boom’. Those who want to contest this award will have to explain the meaning of the phrase shaka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka laka, Shaka laka boom boom. It first appeared to be a cheap take on the Thalaivar’s laka laka laka from Chandramukhi, However I realised it was a product of Himessing.
• Cochlea damaging music of the year: Well the lejund of b-grade moosik was back with a bang this year after having sung some surprisingly good songs for V&S in Taxi 9211 and ARR in Guru. It’s a pleasure to announce this years award to the person who instated this category in the first place. Ladeej and Juntalmen it is none other than the great Bappida for making our ears bleed to his tunes for the movie ‘Gadha Mar Gaya‘.
• Unsupporting actors award: Jayaji makes a rather surprising entry into the world of horrible cinema, but for sewing rags every time she wants to cry(which was always!) and kicking her elder daughter out of the younger ones wedding, we give the award to her so-called stellar performance in ‘Lag gaya sar mein dard‘. The Deols have always been patrons of bad cinema and Bobby continues the legacy with his painful performances in ‘Shakalaka Boom’ and ‘Jhoom Barabar Jhoom‘. Sadly both movies were about dancing, a virtue that is alien to the men of the Deol household. If any of you wish to contest my choice then don’t forget there was ‘Kaun hain Jaisalmer‘, ‘Naqaab‘ and ‘Apne‘ as well.
• Forgetful comeback of the year: This is my favorite for it goes to an actor who himself forgot it was his comeback appearance. In a year of comebacks right from Govinda to Madhuri, also claimed to have seen Jugal Hansraj making a brief appearance in ‘Naaja Bachle‘. Somebody please tell him that he was in the movie.
• Unbearable actor of the year: It’s been a wonderful year for bad cinema with some good actors also making handsome contributions. For his role of a sleepy eyed writer called ‘Doc’ in ‘Kaash‘ and the most unbearable portrayal of ‘Heeru’ in ‘RGV ki Bhaag‘, the years most prestigeous award goes to national award recipient Ajay Devgan. Amongst the women Rani Mukherjee takes the cake for completing a hattrick of tawaif roles with ‘Lag gaya sar mein dard‘ and ‘Saava variya‘, ‘Uncle Gaandey‘ being the first.
• Most treacherous film of the year: This was the easiest and a unanimous choice, setting the trend for bad movies. It’s become a cult movie of sorts drawing parallels to movies like Gunda and Loha. Bhaiyon aur unke Beheno put your hands together for RGV and his Bhaag, as this year’s winner for the award of the most treacherous film of the year.
• Most Disgruntled Director of the year: After making a movie like ‘Black Friday‘ that earned its place amongst the best of the year, Anurag Kashyap doesn’t satisfy the connoisseurs of bad cinema by dishing out a movie like never before and never again. Probably 10 years from now, audiences may understand the movie after watching it 20-30 times but it went over my head after a dual encore. Without an iota of doubt the award for this year goes to Anurag Kashyap for ‘No Smoking‘.
• Out-of-sync Singer of the year: There are singers and then there is Himes Bhai. But then there is a man who is a level higher than everyone, he is none other than the pappi-chor Mika Singh. For parading poetry recitation and synchronized dialogs as singing, the award goes to Mika for ‘Aye Ganpat‘ from ‘Shootout at Lokhandwala‘.
• Unplayable screenplay of the year: For the most construed series of events unfolding in the name of cinema with cliched indo-brit sentiments and an underdog story that defies logic with potbellied men running across a football field, the award goes to the team of ‘Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal‘.
• Horrendous actor in a negative performance: This category had many promising nominees, but then the youth in me is biased towards the shockingly endowed and allergic to apparel, Mona/Sherlyn Chopra. Here I wish to clarify that it’s not for the reasons mentioned above but for her role as a psychotic, mentally ill and serial killing whore in the film ‘Red Swastika‘. You might be thinking “who is he trying to fool”, lekin sach keh raha hoon…. lol!
• Non-Existent story of the year: It has been a fantastic year for bad cinema with great names doing the needful, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali has condescended to give us a story that begun and ended without any change. It takes sheer talent and great dedication to write a story that spans three hours and yet leaves everything like it was, untouched. We need to encourage such manuscripts and they shall serve as inspiration to the millions of small time writers. Please join me in applauding SLB for his commendable contribution to bad cinema and giving us India’s first blue film.
• Intolerable actor in a comic role: There were plenty of hopefuls for this award, cheap and crude humor being the forte of bad cinema. Please don’t accuse me for being a bhakta of sleaze, but I am tempted to give the award to Rakhi Sawant for exposing the casting couch that exists in the industry. When someone fornicates with not one but four corpses under the pretext of struggling in ‘Gadha mar gaya‘, it sure is funny and worthy of praise.
• Lifetime under-achievement award: There have been many wannabes but then there is the lejund. For selectively picking bad roles and essaying them with utmost imperfection, this year’s award goes to Anupam Kher. What did he do this year? you may ask. Well for acting dead in a lifeless movie and being brave enough to fornicate with Rakhi Sawant, for playing the role of a cliched small town bollywood father and coughing so much that his germs spread onto the screen and infected the movie, ‘Gadha mar gaya’, and ‘Lag gaya chunari main bhang’

Well these were the Dandanakka awards for this year and I hope to do the same next year as well. Some of you may not approve of my choices, but are free to go ahead and voice your opinion. After having watched exactly 50 movies across Hindi, Tamizh, Telugu and enduring the most painful experience known to mankind, I broke the penance with this much needed and refreshing movie. With ‘Krazzy 4′ and ‘U me aur Hum’ releasing over the weekend, the dark side is tempting me again and I might set my eyes on the three figure mark!

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Allo Allo dis is Nighthawk…….
• The 6-pack saga…….
• Jai Mata Di Lets Rawk
• Kahani sitcoms ki
• Oppari with Oprah
• CNN-IBN Indian of the year…….
• No singles left to mingle