Desi Train

It’s difficult to find a central location in SoCal (Southern California). An apartment/house which is in walking proximity to the mall, blockbuster video, Walmart, Grocery stores, Desi stores, 24 hour Fitness and hot blondes floating in the community swimming pool. It’s next to impossible.

But Farhan Akhtar has it all. Cinematic genes, films injected in his blood, a father who once was the sultan of screenplays and now is the king of lyrics, an army of craftsmen waiting at his beck and call to carve out his latest ideas into movies, a mom who literally grew up in Bollywood, a first movie which dared to defy the conventional dhishum-dhishum Bollywood story telling, a second movie which may have had good intentions, every Raja, runk, skunk ready to drop everything and run to work for him, a producer who’s a buddy and backs all his movies up…

So what does Farhan Akhtar do?

He messes it all up… Royally… In such a way which begs us to ask him question…

Is he sleeping with Karan Johar and such silk smoothie drinking cocooned brats living in a world of their own far away from reality and making movies with such unrealistic conviction that has you scratching your head and asking yourself … “If that is the real world, what fucking world am I living in?”

Today is a sad day. I had much expectations from Akhtar Jr. Even though there were none for Don. Today Farhan has shattered those expectations. No. There is still a lot to live, learn and experience before you’ll ever call Akhtar a “good” story teller again.

You have the screenplay of a runaway hit from the seventies. You have the co-writer of the original screenplay sitting in your living room. You go ahead and “REMAKE” it. Hence it’s important to ask this question….

HOW THE FUCK COULD YOU BOTCH THIS UP?

The problem is not in the new ideas – the two twists in the plot. The problem lies in the flow. The art of telling the story. Time and again we have seen this. The plot concepts may be good. It’s during telling the story that film makers pickup a huge pole and fuck themselves up with it. Farhan Akhtar with Don is now no exception to this group of “we fuck ourselves up” filmmakers.

What’s mind boggling is the entire team of technicians and actors of Don too agreed on the screenplay to spend time, energy and money on it which goes haywire right within 15 minutes of the titles rolling in.

For those who still haven’t seen the original or the ugh remake, it’s about a mafia don who is “killed” in an encounter and the cop responsible for this keeps it a secret and sends into the don’s gang a look alike of the Don.

Here Farhan offers two twists. One before the interval and the other in the climax. I was caught unawares by the twist at interval. The climax, was predicted right when the seeds of the twist were sowed an hour into the movie.

The problem: The flow. The twists to some may have been unpredictable, but to others it was right there to see. Yet forgetting about the curve ball thrown at us, it was the manner in the way they are placed in the movie that destroys the whole tightness of Don.

On one hand Farhan wants to be true to the original, yet on the other hand he wants to create his own recipe. The flow was the key. How to reveal what where and how to subsequently modify the plot line because of the two twists is where Farhan gets beaten at his own game.

Needless to say the attitude of many Bollywood movie makers is to create films for the lowest common denominator. Farhan is no exception. Logic is thrown to the winds when you start adding up the various sequences which finally lead to the suspense.

Frankly, like Karan Johar, Farhan Akhtar has no qualms in insulting the intelligence of the audience.

The bizarre thing is all this, is that he is the son of Javed Akhtar who at one time wrote air tight scripts. Javed himself has assisted Farhan on this remake. And seeing the outcome, it just doesn’t make sense.

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The camera works good most of the times. Using it for looking at characters and objects from ground up with sharp focus, closely shot from medium to long range – seems to be the mantra in here.

And there is this whole new aspect of a John Woo / Ang Lee hangover. Watch Ang Lee’s execution of multiple shots plugged into the frame (as in Hulk). Farhan experiments here in the chase sequence, successfully to some extent. And just like other things experimented in the movie, he drops it and forgets about it. Too many candies in the shop? Lick and trash?

How you wish the camera would move back to given a large expanse wider shot of the cops chasing Don. This was a neat opportunity to orchestrate a good car chase done in a long time in Bollywood. But no, you have to resort to the traditional, fire a gun and an auto-rickshaw blows up in the air.

That in turn also impacts the story. Farhan still had good ideas for this Don remake. But that’s what they end up being all through out. Just good ideas.

A set of good ideas have to be woven into a gripping story. The architecture of the story already exists there on paper, and has proven to be successful in the past. How the hell could you mess this up?

Which brings me back to the one thing which I’ve kept repeating since watching this Don. Flow. There is no sense of a forward story flow. The story keeps moving from one idea (scene, camera, song) to the next. And tragically it ends up looking like watching MTV where one song ends and another one starts.

It’s difficult to believe that this is the same guy who told us a beautiful (in spite of all its flaws) story called Dil Chahta Hai.

There is no one in the cast that deserves space and time to talk about. Boman to some extent tries his level best. And he does a good job. Nothing bad.

One of the biggest tragedies is how they hacked the character of Jasjit, to death. Pran, in spite of his over the top dialogue delivery was the ideal Jasjit, cause Jasjit in the original was an over the top character who did everything large, be it rope balancing at heights or breaking into a commissioner’s house. Arjun Rampal isn’t given anything here. Nothing. He is brought in, and sent crashing out. Was there was any need for Jasjit in Farhan’s Don?

And all those in the media who blindly copied Don’s marketing material to shout, scream and dance that Isha Koppikar, Kareena Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra had larger, meatier roles in the movie, should get out of their houses, come down on the street, take their pants off, so they can be spanked by the public. Really, the media has become the mouthpiece of Bollywood producers now. Where and when the fuck did they drop their brains before becoming such screwed up asses that Bollywood’s producers load their false statements on.

But Farhan’s Don wouldn’t have been as bad if Amitabh Bachchan had NOT played the original Don. The supreme – devil – may – care – attitude of the alpha male who gave a shit about anything was there for everyone to see. In his personality. The way he walked or carried himself or the way he spoke even the simplest dialogues that knocked you off your seat – eg. Mujhe iske joote pasand nahin hain (Hinglish: I don’t like his shoes)

- And that is a tall order to live upto. Sadly Shah Rukh Khan may have felt this is the last frontier that was left to conquer and in all silliness jumped in to battle it out and truly become the king of the world. And just like what happened to the Germans in Russia, SRK ends up beaten, bruised, bloodied and fucking himself up to the degree of infinity.

Impossible. It is impossible to watch a Don who is not Amitabh Bachchan. And therein Farhan and SRK may have very unknowingly awakened that sense of understanding and clarity in every moviegoer. Just like the team of James Bond had a tough time finding a new actor to play Bond after Sean Connery, Farhan and SRK should have realized the folly they were about to commit at the start of this project.

If there cannot be another King Khan, as SRK mentions it time and again on TV and events, I beg to remind him and lift the veil off his stupid blindedness that, there Sir, cannot be another Amitabh Bachchan. No King Khan can match the aura the Big B once had on the screens of Indian Cinema.

This purely seemed to be an exercise on SRK’s part to get that final stamp of approval – Sadly the world may see him as great but he’s no Amitabh Bachchan. Don was that exercise. It ends up having SRK falling flat on his face. No questions asked. If you thought SRK was the king of hacking and hamming… then with Don, he proves, that you - Oh Movie lover, have seen nothing. Watching SRK in Don, shatters your understanding that he is the great hammer. Sorry. With Don, the one who can ham and mis-act better than SRK is… SRK himself.

C Minus. Watch this darn Don if you need to crush your buttock muscles for 3 hours.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 2:34 pm
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