Desi Train

You feel enthused, pumped up and bow to this first time movie director whose movie just blew you away. You can’t wait to see his next piece of work. His next work comes out, you go in to watch the movie, you come out walking like a zombie…your mind is numb, you are ready to be sent back to kindergarten to re-learn the a,b,c and the only thought knocking inside your skull is “What the fuck happened inside?”.
You see, the second movie of this genius movie maker is similar to the work done by babies who are learning to write. The “A” goes all over and turns into some weird new alphabet…and that’s what happened. But then you give the director the benefit of doubt, maybe it was his twin brother (who is unknown to the outside world) who made this movie because the genius director was sick, or maybe the commercial pressures made the director make some shit instead of the gripping piece of art he made with his first movie.

Sometimes you may turn out to be lucky. The so called geniuses do deliver 1, 2, 3 movies which are good to great but the evaporation of the genius genes which went into the making has begun. You can see it. So by the time the 4rth or the 5th movie is out, the movie is not a movie but a fucking vacuum cleaner designed to take the bucks out of your pocket, get you in the theater, kick your ass for 2 to 3 hours and send you back home. You come home, nurse your back, head, wherever you feel sore, swearing never to see this director’s movie again. Fucking bitch – what the fuck happened to him – you think, but you’ll never know the answer.

But isn’t a genius, the one who possesses that for life. It’s a gift atleast I don’t possess, don’t know about the blog reader. So if they aren’t a genius, what are they and how the fuck could they create such initial brilliant pieces of art. Some friends tell me the reason for this could be not the genius in the directors, but the brilliant snippets of ideas which took form into a brilliant movie. Once those ideas dry out, its an empty empty hole which does nothing but turn audiences into zombies.

Here are 6 geniuses who gave us gems but then something happened and they crashed and burned….badly.

1. Rahul Rawail

One of the greatest mysteries I have always wrestled with is the rise, fall, fall and disappearance of the brilliant director called “Rahul Rawail”, son of the late H.S.Rawail who himself was a big time movie maker. Rahul started with making “Love Story” the launch pad for Kumar Gaurav (though the credit for direction went to someone else cause of …have no idea). Love Story turned out to be the only hit Gaurav had for a decade before “Naam”. Rahul’s next was “Betaab” – the launch pad for Sunny Deol. Betaab turned out to be a massive hit. I didn’t watch either of the movies. But about two, three years after Betaab, I had reached an age where watching movies, to me, was exciting and I was definitely enjoying learning the ins and outs of movie making. That was the time when Rahul came back with a bang.

‘Arjun’ (1985) – the story of an unemployed graduate (Sunny Deol). Things like this had been done before, but the insights and glimpses into an average guy’s life had never been told like this before. The movie hits you, then hits you hard, until your brain’s oozing out “what the fuck is this….I’ve never seen anything like this before”. Kamal Hasan later bought the rights of this movie and made it in Tamil. Don’t know the Tamil movie’s name but it had Kamal in a moustache and beard getup. Some of the memorable moments in the movie –
(1) the amazing shot executions and the camera moving aggressively with the boys all through the streets of Bombay. One of the best song picturisations - with R.D.Burman’s thumping beats…you want to join the boys when they sing “Mamaiyya Kairo Mamma…Goli maro..” the boys in the stadium, running through the B.E.S.T Depot and spraying water, running through the market of Linking road…awesome, stamp of brilliance. And all that is now the template for movie makers to use from even today.
(2) Another lasting impression was created by the shot when a few goons with swords run to kill Sunny Deol’s friend. Its an average Bombay neighborhood, streets are packed with people, but there’s a difference – Bombay rains and the entire streets are covered with black umbrellas which people are holding, the whole screen is covered with black umbrellas with just the gleaming swords of the goons poking out in the air through those blanket of umbrellas – it’s a brilliantly executed shot. Again copied and copied again by others.
(3) The camera focus cutting in and out when Sunny hits the striker on the carom board…how better could you see the frustration building inside him. And ofcourse the repeating of one particular shot to impress the anger about to explode was the first time executed in Indian cinema. Among the many such shots - the politician’s door closing in on Sunny again and again impressed the fact that the politician had turned his back on Sunny sparking the repressed anger in him. That kind of execution is repeated now in virtually every movie these days.

Rahul came back two years later with Dacait (1987). This is the only movie on dakoos (besides Bandit Queen) which was well researched, well planned, well executed. Khalid Mohammed of the Time of India called this movie as Technically Terrific. No longer were dakus running around in dhotis and ganjis, but were the average unemployed pant/shirt guys… people squeezed at the hands of the socially powerful in the society, left with no choice but to fight back. The deft research was projected brilliantly onscreen. Again for the first time (which is now oft repeated in movies) you saw how the cops killed dakus in fake encounters, how the dakus sold or hid the loot with the jewelry business people, how a family could be tormented for hours together at the hands of the upper caste morally empty goon families – the scene where they make Rakhee (brilliant performance) dance infront of the scared shit family, will make your hair stand out.

For those who aren’t aware, Rahul was the man who brought forth Paresh Rawal (no relation), who today is one of Bollywood’s top notch actors, along with other theater actors like the late Shafi Inamdar among others. Paresh acted as the politician’s goon in Arjun, while in Dacait he was the corrupt cop from U.P./M.P perfectly playing the role to the hilt right upto the dialect. Shabana Azmi after watching Paresh in Dacait said it was the second “PERFECT Performance” in the history of Indian cinema. (The other according to her is Balraj Sahani in ‘Garam Hawa’)

But Dacait failed. It bombed so bad that it did something to Rahul Rawail. He lost touch with his inner brilliance. What happened after that, what went on inside him, what changes took place in his thought process, we’ll never know. But Dacait was the last movie showing the genius Rahul possessed. He’s made movies after that. You would be happier missing it than going out to see it. I watched one or two of his movies after Dacait, was disappointed and since then have stopped watching his movies. His next upcoming movie is “Bole So Nihaal” – maybe it will be different. Maybe it will show us again his brilliant touch…I’ll keep my fingers crossed over that.

2. J.P.Dutta

If you fell in love with the desert, blame it on J.P. and I’m not talking of his movies one may have seen in the 90s until last year. But the one movie, which captured the desert so beautifully, which told a story in way which ripped your heart out, you had tears in your eyes and were desperate to hold them back so your dad sitting next to you wouldn’t use that to pull your leg for the next six months….I’m talking of JP’s first movie “Ghulami”. Released in 1985, with actors who weren’t successful anymore and a bunch of character actors, using the desert as the backdrop, story about the downtrodden in rural India fighting against the corrupt zamindar’s, the era of pre-Independence – with all this the entire package had the label of a big “Flop” written all over it. But when people saw the movie, they had not seen anything like this before – the ingredients were the same but the chef was different. Ghulami makes your blood boil, and boil hard enough to make you stand up, pick a gun and run after those evil zamindaar’s. A simple shot was given extreme depth to forcefully put forth a point of view. Notice the young kid injuring the eagle (zamindaar’s pet) which drops on a sand dune, and the kid rushing to the bird picking it and smashing it again and again in sand trying to kill it. The entire shot was a mid to long range shot with the beautiful desert and the kid positioned in top middle screen over the sand dune smashing the bird in slow motion. Ofcourse the background score by LP heightens the impact. Another shot where Dharmendra, Mithun and Kulbhushan travelling on camels meet Naseeruddin Shah the chief cop at the request of Smita Patil, who is Dharmendra’s lost love and Shah’s wife. It is a scene so impactful that it has to be seen to be believed.

JP brought with him to the fore the extremely talented cinematographer Ishwar Bidri. I’ve yet to see anyone capture images in such a beautiful way as Bidri does, ofcourse besides Binod Pradhan and Manmohan Singh (no, not our PM). I was ready to label JP as the Kurosawa of India. But that was not to be. After Ghulami, JP took you to the desert in each movie, burnt your ass off in the sun/movie and threw you out of the theater. Ofcourse the brilliance of capturing shots still exists in some (not all) of his movies – my all time favourites are the battle between the dakus and the cops on the steps of the mosque in “Yateem” and the shot in ‘Hathyar’ where Sanjay Dutt recognizes the dead man lying inbetween the railway tracks as his father, with Rishi by his side and trains passing all around them – but somewhere, somehow the art of story telling is lost. He did well in Border, but if you see Ghulami and see the genius that went into it, you won’t find anything of that sort in Border. Maybe ‘Hathyar’(Dharmendra, Sanjay Dutt, Rishi Kapoor, 1989) was the closest he got to showing his genius, but he lost his way, midway in the movie. For me Border was a movie where everything fell in place and it turned out to be a good movie. Not a brilliant movie, a good movie.

3. Ramesh Sippy

This man needs no introduction. The creator of the biggest, best and most entertaining commercial movie “Sholay” needs no introduction, nope, none at all. But before Sholay happened Sippy stamped his genius on two movies. The first was ‘Andaaz’ – which had Rajesh Khanna singing on a motorcycle – “Zindagi, ek safar hain suhana…” and his second “Seeta aur Geeta” with Hema Malini playing twins – a story inspired from Dilip Kumar’s “Ram aur Shyam”.
What technical brilliance Sippy brought to the movies, I’m not aware of. The movies were made when I was still looking to grown my milk teeth and trying to walk and talk. But seeing the movies even today you know here was a master craftsman who knew the best way to deliver a hit movie – to tell a good story in the best way possible – as simple as that. The details that went into building those characters and integrating those characters so smoothly in the story line and driving the story in a way that it binds the viewer every minute till the very end – that Sippy knows (or knew) and he used that to make some of the greatest movies in Bollywood. Of course then came Sholay, and as Satyajit Ray put it “Sholay is a perfectly made movie” – yes, Sippy needed no more commendations, no medals after getting the stamp of approval from the greatest of all movie makers. Perhaps Sholay become a curse for Sippy, now he had to find a way to better himself, perhaps too much expectations weighed him down, but he managed to give us Shaan after that, which was a good movie but not brilliant. After that no one knows what happened, but Sippy just slipped down. Besides the brilliant “Shakti” (Dilip Kumar and Amitabh) , or portions of “Saagar”, I never saw Sippy hypnotizing his audience with his work again. Tragically some of his movies in the later nineties, were shocking. How could the maestro make trash like this? For examples try watching Shahrukh Khan’s Zamana Deewana.

4. Punkuj Parasher

Here was a guy who had youth, freshness and the new pumped up Gen X energy written all over him. He comes in and gives us Ab Ayega Mazaa. Nothing new. Just fun fun fun all over it. It’s a good movie and you go – hmm, this is a good director, lets wait and watch. And then Punkuj goes to TV and smashes your tv screen with “Karamchand”, the carrot eating detective sharply played by Pankaj Kapoor (Shahid Kapoor’s father).

So what’s new – it’s just a freaking detective tv series. No its not just an ordinary detective series. The year is 1985, not much has been done on tv so far. It’s the years where the way cameramen shoot movies or tv series - is place the camera on the stand bolt the stand to the ground and have actors jump in and out of the frame of the camera; at the most the camera swings left or right and returns to the center. Enter Punkuj who brings in the brilliant cinematographer Manmohan Singh (who later does many movies with the Yash Chopra camp). Together they unbolt the camera from the floor, drop it on the shoulder, move, swing, jump, see a scene from an angle never seen before, jump, swing, get the freaking energy AND THIS IS ON FREAKING TV. Bollywood has not yet entered the picture of this crazy guy who is doing all this on TV. But it was soon to be.

Someone in Bollywood saw Beverly Hills Cop, and the grounds for making a Bollywood copy were cleared. Enter Punkuj Parasher and his crazy team and “Jalwa” was born. With Remo Fernandes’ background song “Dekho Dekho..yeh hai Jalwa”, Manmohan Singh’s deft, aggressive, energetic camera, and Punkuj’s crazy never thought of it before style of execution Jalwa was going to be a treat. But before it did, Punkuj’s craziness went and got three ingredients vital for the eventual success of Jalwa. The first – Naseeruddin Shah (until then the super star of art cinema was doing commercial movies occasionally), Punkuj sent Naseer to the gym to pump up his muscles…the second ingredient – Satish Kaushik as Ramu Ghardiyali the cop mesmerized by movies where every incident in real life had links to a movie he has seen and the third was the introduction of Johnny Lever as the masseuse. Some people see Jalwa as a good copy, but for me it was pure brilliance on Punkuj’s part to bring the right ingredients in the right proportion that made ‘Jalwa’ fairly enjoyable, in spite of us having seen Beverly Hills Cop umpteen times.

But Jalwa could have been Punkuj’s first nail in the coffin. Perhaps the brilliance of Jalwa made Bollywood (as usual) think and see Punkuj as a one dimensional (which they usually do) talent. So Bollywood decides that Punkuj is good at making copies of hit movies (his earlier works on film and tv are conveniently scrapped away from memories) and what’s the next film Punkuj lands – ‘Chalbaaz’ a movie unabashedly telling the viewer that it is a copy of “Seeta aur Geeta”, “Ram aur Shyam”. But using Sridevi, Rajnikanth and Sunny Deol and brilliantly adding dozes of intelligent humor (Shakti Kapoor’s famous statement “Nanha sa, chota sa, munna sa…”), Punkuj turns Chalbaaz into a massive hit. And that was the last I enjoyed his movie, the last I saw his brilliance. Actually seeing Chalbaaz and having been familiar with his work, you sort of got the feeling that he was slipping, scenes you wanted to be much more impactful, shots you wanted his crazy executions in, all were below what you wanted and expected them to be. Alas Punkuj’s work has zoomed downhill. Maybe that’s what failure does to people in Bollywood. Makes them lose touch with their inner genius. Who knows? Punkuj’s last movie (Intequaam) was so badly made; I had to literally play the movie in fast forward mode.

5. Mahesh Bhatt

Now here is one guy I don’t actually have a clear idea about. Should I call him a genius, a cranky man, a crazy s.o.b. who just got lucky or something else that I so far haven’t thought about. Bhatt started with making the usual crap which no one cared to see and suddenly one fine day delivered a hit with “Lahu Ke Do Rang” (Vinod Khanna, Danny). Helen, who so far was seen as a great dancer, acted as a mother in this movie and won the best supporting actress award. There are exactly three movies which bring out the genius of Mahesh Bhatt, yes three, no more, no less. He made other movies which turned into hits. They may have been hits or super hits, good ones or bad ones, but there were just three movies which showed Bhatt’s genius. Bhatt wasn’t about camera, technicalities, shot executions. Bhatt brought in the transparency in emotions for the viewer, he brought in a manner of making his actors act that we could see clearly what the characters were thinking or feeling without them having to express it in words, and above all he made us fall in love with the characters and their stories. And the three movies which showed his genius were 1. Arth 2. Saraansh (which also gave us the versatile Anupam Kher) 3. Janam – a telemovie with Kumar Gaurav (it has one of my all time favorite songs “Zindagi Zindagi, kabhi tumko dekha hain, kabhi tumko jaana hain…” – anyone knowing where to get this song please do let me know). I don’t know one single person who didn’t clutch his or her heart or cried out when Anupam Kher in Saraansh barges into the custom officers office complaining about the corruption in the place, which won’t allow him to get his son’s ashes sent from America; or the scene in the tunnel where he is attacked by a couple of goons while he’s begging them to let him go, crying out…”I’m of your father’s age…let me go…” – NO NO NO, no one could touch that raw nerve in every person watching those scenes as efficiently as Bhatt did.

Naam, some say was his best. I disagree. It was close to being his top 3 but it isn’t. I give the credit more to the screenplay writer – Salim Khan (of Salim Javed fame). No doubt Naam has Bhatt’s brilliance but it is not in his top 3. Naam was a neatly marketed movie, deftly directed and was one of Bhatt’s major hits. Bhatt’s story here takes a different turn from others after Naam. In the sense he joined hands with his brother Mukesh Bhatt to churn out movies by the hour. Suddenly making a movie with Bhatt’s name was far more important than churning out a quality movie. The net result was seeing trash along with some good – not brilliant – ones (Daddy, Kabza, Thikana, Zakhm). We had lost him after Naam. Bhatt also has the distinction of directing 15 movies at the same time. How did he do that – by passing instructions to his assistants by phone on all 15 movie sets of what to do next?

6. Vidhu Vinod Chopra

This guy was dipped in a pool tank of genius genes and gifted to us. He stood up made three movies and then while making his fourth movie, something happened. He opened his mouth, or the realization that he was a genius went to his head or whatever….Chopra let us down, bad. But its refreshing to see he’s into producing movies with new talented directors (Munnabhai MBBS) while himself directing a forthcoming movie – Move 5 (written by Vikram Chandra)- looks like there is still hope, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

Chopra started with “Sazaye Maut” (1981), with Naseeruddin Shah (wonder why is Shah a common factor with many talented directors). The movie at best was similar to a Homework assignment submitted by a final year movie student. Though some saw flashes of his brilliance in this movie, I failed to notice it or maybe I just didn’t get it. Then came the gripping “Khamosh”, not a commercial success, but one of the best works from a complete newcomer. Right in his second movie, the ever confident Chopra handles an array of brilliant actors Naseer, Shabana, Amol Palekar, Pankaj Kapoor, Sadashiv, Pavan Malhotra, Soni Razdan, Ajit Vachani…among others…a powerhouse of talent. Add to that a sharply executed story – a movie shoot where every new day somebody drops dead – was enough for me to realize that this guy was worth watching. Though Khamosh didn’t do well, and with just a few pennies in his pocket Chopra nevertheless went on to make his next movie, which eventually became his best work and a movie which still teaches me something new about film making every time I watch it…

Parinda…The perfect balance of technical handling, story line, character sketches…Parinda hits you when you least expected it. Parinda brought forth many talents and crafts previously not known to the general audience – to the forefront. Parinda made me realize the beauty of capturing not just the characters and the locations but the emotions via the camera….bringing forth one of the best in this business – cinematographer Binod Pradhan…example – watch a beer bottle completely occupying the wide screen before it is popped up…(what’s great about that? Nothing except that the beer bottle looks like a beautiful piece of art and that no fucking idiot had dared to shoot like that until Parinda); the most brilliantly edited movie in Bollywood – by the late Renu Saluja – if you don’t know what I mean watch carefully how the movie moves from one incident to another; example – from Jackie Shroff running after Anil Kapoor when Kapoor declares he wants to get a job which will get him as much money as Jackie’s job does – cut – with Jackie’s voice still crying out for Kapoor, the camera follows Kapoor’s back – cut – Nana Patekar’s office. Realization dawns on the viewer of what Kapoor’s next job is. Editing could never get any better than this; Next was the brilliant extraction of making Jackie Shroff act as the sensitive but street smart elder brother; and of course the punch you in your face performance by Nana Patekar as Anna the selfish don who cared for no one but himself.

Parinda was the work of a genius, no doubt. Tragically, Chopra’s next 3 movies (1942, Kareeb, Mission Kashmir)…well the less said the better. Now working on “Move 5” written by the famous Vikram Chandra (I think I read somewhere that Vikram and Chopra are related) – should definitely bring back the genius we saw in Parinda. Whether it does or not, only time will tell….

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2005 at 10:07 am
Filed under Bollywood, Superhit Posts
Tags : .

Views : 2,063 views
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.