MAN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN
An entirely needless remake supposedly targeted at women respects them the least. Plus, a modestly entertaining noir-thriller.
SEP 5, 2010 – THE ONE LAUGH-OUT-LOUD MOMENT in we are Family – the eccentrically majusculed lettering is perhaps to emphasise the latter aspect of the title – arrives through the bespectacled Ankush (Nominath Ginsberg), the sole son of divorced parents Aman and Maya (Arjun Rampal, Kajol). The scene unfolds at the dinner table, with Ankush’s parents and sisters – the elder Aliya, the younger Anjali (Aanchal Munjal, Diya Sonecha) – and Aman’s girlfriend Shreya (Kareena Kapoor). Females outnumber males two to one. The discussion gets going with little Anjali expressing an interest in her would-be-stepmother’s profession (fashion designing), while Aliya, very much daddy’s little girl rebelling against daddy’s new girlfriend, snaps that she’d rather be a writer-publisher, like her mother. And like a tempestuous heroine in one of her forthcoming books, she storms out, Shreya trailing in her wake, while Maya declares that dinner is over. After all this distaff drama, Ankush leans over to his father and mumbles that he wants to become a cosmonaut but no one asked him. I laughed because I felt his pain, but also because, unintentionally and with crystalline clarity, he underlines the film’s preoccupations. This is a movie about women, and for women. It has no time for men – on screen, or in the audience.
And yet, this remake of Stepmom is hardly a feminist manifesto, given how shabbily it reduces Shreya to a spineless martyr. When Maya is diagnosed with cancer and when Aman improbably says he’s moving back in with her, she extracts from Aman one of those only-in-the-movies promises, that he will not tell Shreya about her condition. Aman, therefore, dumps Shreya, the supposed love of his life, with utmost ignominy – and this, after she has made an effort to establish a relationship with his kids because she knows how important they are to him. Shreya looks on piteously as Aman walks away, and the camera rises to capture her in the centre of a desolate street, underlining her undeserved loneliness. But soon, Maya asks Shreya to move in with them, in order to ease the kids’ transition to this woman who might eventually take her place, and Shreya does just that. Like any self-respecting jilted lover, you expect she’ll unleash her wrath on Aman for not loving and respecting her enough to involve her in the decision to break up, but Shreya simply simpers that she’d have done the same thing had the daintily heeled shoe been on the other foot. She chucks her career and becomes a full-time nursemaid to the children of the man who treated her like garbage. The message is that there’s a mother inside every woman, and it’s every woman’s duty to ensure that pesky career issues don’t come in the way of her true purpose on earth.
Despite the underwhelming original, which dealt with mega-issues like death and divorce with stupefying shallowness, I had minor hopes for this remake, if only because the melodramatic subject is more suited to our style of storytelling. Watch Masoom and Man, Woman and Child – both sprung from Erich Segal’s tear-jerking novel – and you’ll see that the latter, with its WASPy cool, keeps you at an arm’s distance, while Shekhar Kapur whips up an emotional maelstrom and sucks you in. But we are Family is done in by its cast. If Stepmom retained a smidgen of believability, it was thanks to Ed Harris and Susan Sarandon, who looked like they’d graced this earth with a good number of their years, and the arrival of the coltish photographer played by Julia Roberts spiked their story with a frisson of fear – that decades of marital wholesomeness could come undone in the blink of an eye, and your children, already shuttling between homes and suffering for no fault of their own, could end up in the inexperienced hands of a stranger who might have been in high school when you exchanged your till-death-do-us-part vows. Here, between Arjun Rampal, Kajol and Kareena Kapoor, there isn’t a widening gut, a drooping breast, a balding crown, a worry-creased brow. Firm and shiny as waxed fruit, they appear to be advertising parenthood as a cure for aging: Have lots of babies, make those laugh lines vanish! They arouse not empathy but envy.
But that, in itself, isn’t entirely the problem – and this is not a plea for the consideration of Vinay Pathak, Seema Biswas and Neha Dhupia in the lead roles. Karan Johar (who produced this film, and who creditably took the legal route in procuring the remake rights) is nothing if not a throwback to Old Hollywood. Every corner of his frames is floodlit with barely a shadow in sight – all the better to showcase the painstaking décor, the careful costuming and, most of all, the enormously attractive stars. That’s how they did it in the MGM musicals; that’s how Siddharth P. Malhotra, the director, does it here. (The opening credits proudly proclaim: “Makeup for Kajol by Mickey Contractor.” And the finale is staged like the showstopper number from a musical, with Aman literally wheeling Maya into a spotlight.) The problem with we are Family is that it thinks throwing catastrophes at us at regular intervals, accompanied by a ridiculously syrupy score, is good drama. We’ve barely met the characters, and within the first ten minutes, a child is nearly run over by a speeding car. We don’t actually get to know these people, and consequently, we never come around to caring about them. We snort, instead, that a full-family rendition of Jailhouse Rock is all that’s needed to cement splintered relationships. You no longer need shrinks or divorce lawyers, apparently. You just need Elvis.
LIKE MOST POSTMODERN NOIR THRILLERS, the puzzlingly titled The Film Emotional Atyachar is the bastard child of two twentieth-century aphorisms – Jean-Luc Godard’s puckish pronouncement that all films must have a beginning, a middle and an end (just not necessarily in that order), and John Lennon’s more sentimental observation that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. A fractured-timeline narrative and the power of destiny to thwart the best-laid plans – these constitute the narrative spine of Akshay Shere’s self-conscious tale of a bag of loot that passes through numerous ill-intentioned hands before winding up by the bedside of its rightful owner. Along the serpentine way, the storytelling stops to doff a hat to every single genre requirement – creatively gory violence (death by screwdriver), multiple-point-of-view narration, pop-culture nods (Tom and Jerry as an inspiration for murder), plenty of swearing, outrageously colourful characters with equally colourful introductions (“Bosco, a virgin Casanova”) and a cool disregard for formal narrative, which results in an engagingly trippy vibe.
Shere, to his credit, keeps his running time short (a mere hour-and-a-half) by dispensing entirely with character delineation. We learn that Joe (Vinay Pathak, who, along with Ranvir Shorey, headlines a game cast) is a mama’s boy, or that Vikram (Mohit Ahlawat) had a grandfather from Pakistan – but these splashes of colour don’t actually accrue into portraits of these people. And that’s how it should be – for despite the presence of “emotion” in the title, this is not the kind of film that invites identification. This is moviemaking as game-playing, where the director throws the audience the gauntlet and we breathlessly try to keep up. I admit I was a little lost at first, with the numerous storylines and the constant cross-cutting between them. (That, of course, fulfils another genre requirement, that the second time’s the charm. A repeat viewing might tell me, for instance, what those darned scorpions were about.) But once I settled into the film’s rhythms, and despite the frequent scrappiness, I must say I had fun. Just remember not to blink.
Copyright ©2010 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Rakesh
September 4, 2010
Mohit Ahlawat from James is still around??
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Amrita
September 5, 2010
I bet that little girl was named Anjali just so we could watch Kajol say: “I’m not Anjali, Aman.”
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kamil
September 5, 2010
Rangan – Planning to catch Bale Pandiya? Heard its good.
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bran1gan
September 5, 2010
Rakesh: yes, he is. You know, throughout the film, I kept wondering I’d seen this guy somewhere. And then the light dawned 🙂
Amrita: And I bet Arjun was named Aman so that we know that in no Dharma Productions film are Aman and Anjali destined to be together 🙂
kamil: Not especially. Next week looks a little more interesting though, with Drohi and Boss Engira Baskaran.
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Shalini
September 5, 2010
I feel a little hurt and betrayed. What did we ever do to you for you to consign nausea like “We are Family” to the lot of women? 🙂
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rameshram
September 5, 2010
shalini,
gulzar. payback time.
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Madhurima
September 5, 2010
I have seen Step Mom once on TV and the one line I still remember from that movie , five years after having watched the movie is when Susan Sarandon’s little son says , ‘ I will hate her mom , if you want me to ‘ , after sensing his mom’s discomfiture when she perceives the kids beginning to like Julia Roberts . I think her character then is shown as softening her stance toward Julia Roberts . The rest of the movie I thought was hogwash . Don’t intend to see the desi version with possibly loads of unnecessary melodrama .
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Siva
September 6, 2010
Somehow from seeing the trailer, i thought that kajol and kareena were sisters in the movie and was kinda impressed by the boldness of the idea. Seems i totally misread it. Anyway didn’t see the movie and i guess i did the right thing.
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gargim
September 6, 2010
I didn’t like the original at all and the last thing I’d want is to suffer a Karan Johar rendition of the same. The best thing I can say is that they cast Arjun Rampal in Ed Harris’ role, not because he can act but at least we women have someone nice-looking to ogle. While watching Stepmom, I spent most of the film wondering why either Susan Sarandon or Julia Roberts would ever fall for Ed Harris, as much as I admire him as an actor.
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Gradwolf
September 6, 2010
Did you watch Siva Mansula Sakthi? If you did, my reaction to you saying Boss Engira Bhaskaran(I dont know whats Drohi) is interesting: :O :O!!!!!!!
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Raj Balakrishnan
September 6, 2010
gargim, I have long since realised that looks don’t matter – only the guy’s bank balance.
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gargim
September 6, 2010
Raj Balakrishnan: Or in Ed Harris’ case, his acting skills!
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bran1gan
September 6, 2010
Shalini: Not you. I only meant ordinary women — you know, the ones who don’t really get why Gulzar is great ;-
Gradwolf: Yes, I did. Awful film. Why do you ask?
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Padawan
September 7, 2010
Gradwolf: OMG! OMG! Is Boss Engira Baskaran directed by the same guy who directed Siva Manasula Sakthi? I am outta here, well not exactly, maybe for Nayanthara…
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Gradwolf
September 7, 2010
Generally, “Boss…” is from the same team, right? They even proudly announce, “From the team of SMS”
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bran1gan
September 7, 2010
gradwolf: Oh crap. Then I guess I’m outta there. And I’m not even a fan of Nayantara’s recent avatar.
BTW, search terms that led to this blog today:
“hanna schygulla porn”
“dull fingernails”
“shahid kapoor bare body”
“tabu navel bite”
“chetan bhagat family pics”
“hyderabad sexy marwadi sex patner”
Really? Really?
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Padwan
September 7, 2010
Baradwaj: So, you were a fan of what Nayanthara in Ayya? Chandramukhi? Admitted she did look awful in Aadhavan, but at least from the stills in BeB, she looks good. Assuming that when you say you are not a fan of Nayanthara, you meant her looks and not acting skills (whatever that means!)
Off topic, did you ever review (or write about) Hey Ram? If so, could you point me to the right location.
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Bala
September 7, 2010
@Baradwaj : what’s Nayan’s latest avatar ? And, are these words hidden in your blog posts somewhere (and not in human readable form ?)If not, kindly point to posts for at least search result 4 😛
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Pradyumna M
September 7, 2010
Or maybe Arjun and Kajol were names Aman and Maya respectively because the director is a big fan of KANK and this is his way of paying tribute to KJo,after all every KJo needs to have some self-referencing! 😛
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Pradyumna M
September 7, 2010
1) Named*
2) …Every KJo movie*…
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bran1gan
September 7, 2010
Padawan: That Hey Ram review is somewhere on one of my older comps — I just cannot find it. Have tried.
Bala: Her latest avatar is this anaemic, pencil-eyebrow chick. Definitely not a fan. And do you really think I’d write phrases like that? 🙂
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Bala
September 7, 2010
@Baradwaj:Haven’t seen her in any of her movies after that song in Sivaji…well a bit in Ayan was it ? I thought she looked super hot then.And then she goes and gets hitched to Prabhudeva.Enough to make a man become a sanyasi I say !
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Bala
September 7, 2010
@Baradwaj: ah yes, the hey ram review.Weirdly enough I too was looking for it.It was never online was it ?
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bran1gan
September 7, 2010
Bala: Avanga Prabhu Deva-voda ponaa neenga yen sanyasi aaganum? Something odhachufying 🙂 And no, that review wasn’t online.
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Gradwolf
September 7, 2010
Best thing would be to write a long BR(Between Reviews/Bitty Ruminations, you choose) on Hey Ram. The “People Looking for BR’s Hey Ram Review” list grows exponentially every year.
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Kiruba
September 7, 2010
BR: Drohi looks promising with a a great crew and a decent enough promo, though it made me wonder if this is a straight Tamil or Telugu dubbed film.
BTW, did you bother to catch the other Tamil release this week, about the sexcapades of the daughter in law with her father-in law? (I do sincerely hope this adds to the list of search terms directing to your blog)
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KPV Balaji
September 7, 2010
@Brangan: I second gradwolf..after asking for the hey ram review for more than a year on umpteen different occasions…this seems to be the best solution on hand [ 🙂 ]
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bran1gan
September 8, 2010
gradwolf / kpv balaji: I’m really annoyed I can’t locate it because it was one of my first really long reviews, and I loved the film so much that I did one for Hindi and one for Tamil, with a special coda on Raja’s score. I don’t think I’m going to have the time to do that all over again 🙂
Kiruba: Regarding the sexcapades film, haven’t seen it, but do you think the reports of being threatened are just a publicity stunt? Seems that way to me 🙂 But should I watch it, I wonder. May make for a fun Between Reviews.
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madhu
September 8, 2010
“Shalini: Not you. I only meant ordinary women — you know, the ones who don’t really get why Gulzar is great ;-”
Excuse me? not only is the original statement quite offending, you go ahead and follow it up with this zinger? and hey, that mandatory little smiley you use.. completely lost its meaning ….
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vikram
September 8, 2010
Hi BR,I think you need to create a separate discussion thread to discuss topics not directly related to the review or bitty ruminations piece…also not all of us understand tamil sentences or follow all tamil releases…there I said it 🙂
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raj
September 8, 2010
“gradwolf / kpv balaji: I’m really annoyed I can’t locate it because it was one of my first really long reviews, and I loved the film so much that I did one for Hindi and one for Tamil, with a special coda on Raja’s score. I don’t think I’m going to have the time to do that all over again”
Cant you take a couple of weeks off from reviewing Johar and Atchaiya Kumar movies? Heck, Drohi, Bale PandiyalAm avasiyam pArkaNumA? Indian Express Editor E-mail id kudunga.
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bran1gan
September 8, 2010
vikram: Isn’t it easier to just skip the comments you’re not interested in or cannot follow? 🙂 I think it would be very boring if there were no random digressions.
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Vivek
September 8, 2010
Hey what’s with all the supremely bad press directed at Rahman, any dope on who is orchestrating the press releases or is it just general “Look what’s wrong with CWG today” funda.
But after Raavan and Robot, guess we are officially in one of Rahman’s troughs. Now to wait for a RDB or a Delhi 6.
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Shankar
September 8, 2010
Just heard that Murali passed away…it’s always sad when someone passes away relatively young. I recall him saying in one interview that he was an actor (among this generation) who had acted in over 100 films before he had his first foreign outdoor shoot!! He mostly got slotted into rural subjects…I also had the opportunity to meet him once, seemed like a nice guy.
As for his acting, he was no great shakes (though poo malaye thol serava keeps playing in my mind right now, for some reason!!)…he did resusticate his career by slotting himself into “thambi” roles and mellow characters.
May he rest in peace…
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bran1gan
September 8, 2010
Vivek: Robot wasn’t all that bad, dude. Three really nice songs, I thought.
Shankar: Yeah, I heard too. I’m remembering ‘Pottene poovilangu,’ though, from his first film. Exquisite song. I wasn’t a fan of his, but as you say, he represents a generation that hummed along with ‘Aathadi paavada kaathaada’ and ‘Thulli ezhundhadhu paattu,’ and it’s sad to hear of his passing. Quite young too. I guess he wasn’t even 50.
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rameshram
September 8, 2010
“Robot wasn’t all that bad, dude. Three really nice songs, I thought.”
branigannukku completea kayandu poidutthu.
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VJ
September 8, 2010
While we are waiting for BR to find his Hey Ram review ,
here is T.G.Vaidyanathan on Hey Ram ,
Thanks to someone called “Gaatu” who has typed it up in the comments section of a PFC blog entry ,(http://passionforcinema.com/role-of-critics/)
so here it goes
“Kamal Haasan’s Masterpiece
(Review of ‘Hey Ram’ by T. G. Vaidyanathan in the April 2000 issue of the Gentleman magazine)
Almost incredibly, the 46-year-old Kamal Haasan’s film career spans a period over four decades! Since his 1960 debut as a child artiste in Bhimsingh’s Kalathur Kannamma, Kamal has always intrigued his fans. Chameleon-like, he has appeared in a variety of guises, as a mafia don in Nayakan (1987), a dwarf in Appu Raja (1989) and more recently, as a middle-aged Brahmin woman in Chachi 420 (1997). And, in these days of ‘talkative’ movies, he has even appeared in a silent movie, Puspak Vimana (1989)! All these were commercial bonanzas but artistically vapid and so it is indeed ironic that his latest film Hey Ram – undoubtedly his chef-d’oevre –has been so coldly received by our critics.
Kamal’s canvas here is nothing less than the whole gamut of Indian civilisation. The eponymous hero of the film, Saket Ram, is seen at the beginning assisting the legendary Sir Mortimer Wheeler, former Director of the Archeological Survey of India, who discovered the ruins of Mohenjo Daro and Harrapa in the 1920s. And, at the end, the death of the octogenarian, Saket Ram (b. 1910) on December 6 and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 are virtually telescoped and presented as one monolithic occurrence. The film traces the gradual evolution of the apolitical Saket to the gun-wielding firebrand activist who is only pipped at the post by his real life alter ego – Nathuram Godse.
The film is decidedly not anti-Muslim although unthinking mobs initially vandalised theatres in Calcutta (which, more recently, gave Kamal a rousing reception) and even indolent and verdant Bangalore (where I saw a truncated version in a theatre, bang opposite a large Muslim slum, with atrocious acoustics) where cricket is clearly the flavour of the month. It is true that Altaf (the tailor) and his cohorts are responsible for the rape and murder of Saket’s Bengali wife, Aparna – a perfect cameo by Rani Mukherjee who beautifully enunciates Jibananda Das’s poem, Rupashi Bangla, which eulogises undivided Bengal in a tranquil conjugal felicity just before her own gruesome end. But the political fulcrum of the film is the abiding friendship between the Brahmin Saket and that Gandhi-loving Pathan, Amjad – played flawlessly and not in the least “as a star prop” by Shah Rukh Khan. Even on his death bed, Amjad will not betray his friend, Bharat (Saket) to the police and this alone serves to turn Saket away from the path of political vendetta to souvenir-seeking Gandhian at the end. So why are the Muslims cribbing about the film’s partisan politics?
The aesthetic objections, too, stem not from the film itself as from not watching it closely enough. A distinguished Mumbai film critic has found (The Sunday Times, February 20, 2000 p.20) the film “mammothly self-indulgent” with Kamal Haasan hogging all the scenes (but you could say the same of Shakespeare’s Hamlet!). Finding Saket’s “boudoir frolics” with second wife Mythili, “a kinky cross between a Michael Jackson Video and a Salvador Daliesque surreal nightmare” the same critic proceeds to indict the film which “wavers fatally… in its distracted story-telling, mysterious add-ons like a ghostly blind kid, and in its failure to set up strong supporting characters”.
But let us begin by briefly revisiting the “boudoir frolics” with Mythili that our finds “a kinky cross between a Michael Jackson Video and a Salvador Daliesque surreal nightmare”. Of course, it is nothing of the sort! A rather inebriated Saket (of the twirling moustache!) abruptly “takes” wholly unprepared Mythili after witnessing a routine Maharashtrian tamasha. But if we have been watching carefully we will have noted that the “trigger” of Saket’s sexual explosion is provided by the moment when the tamasha dancer is transformed into the dead Aparna who herself had appeared in the previous scene when the conspiracy was hatched as an evening Durga! Mythili’s ravishment, itself, disguised reprise of Aparna’s earlier rape by the Muslim insurgents led by Altaf and Mythili herself in an earlier transformation, preludial to the conspiracy, becomes the blind Muslim girl for her slain father. These imagistic linkages are vital to our understanding of the film’s inner logic. It is the unexpected reawakening of these hitherto dormant Aparna-rape-memories that leads to Saket’s sexual explosion with a wholly bewildered Mythili.
A Kaleidoscopic cluster of images thematically and rationally linking the film’s overlapping themes (religious, political and sexual) aided and abetted by the wonderful dialogue written by Manohar Shyam Joshi – not in the least like the “Daliesque surreal nightmare” of Un Clean Andalou or L’Age d’or which the highly eccentric Dali had designed in Paris with Luis Bunnel in the late 1920s – bind the film’s polysemous structure way beyond the intellectual radar of our Bombay editor who ruefully confesses to being “neither shaken or stirred”.
Almost certainly, Kamal’s multi-layered Hey Ram – quite unlike the sentimental pieties of Attenborough’s schmaltzy Gandhi – should garner a clutch of swords at this year’ National Awards.
“
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TD
September 9, 2010
Expertly written piece as it could only be from its source, TGV, one in earnest & puts into consideration the stupid assumptions (mostly prickly judgments) about this actor-writer-director. Khalid Mohammad and other Bachchan propagandists took the cue (mammoth self-indulgence) to bring Kamal down (when he was in ascendancy in Hindi cinema that likes of SRK, Om Puri, N’Shah, Rani, Hema Malini et all wanted to act for him. And we know who was in descent then)
I’m also wondering whether BR grew up reading TGV as I did.
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raj
September 9, 2010
Incidentally, everyone’s favourite brainless comic director today – Sajid Khan – fought a lone battle in his then-TV show for Hey Ram.
That was a thoroughly enjoyable review by TGV. Reading him for the first time. And TD, you tell me a generation might have grown up with him? Ah! What ignorance I have lived through!
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raj
September 9, 2010
“engaging” instead of “enjoyable”, please.
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Tambi Dude
September 11, 2010
And I remember you telling me that Hey Ram was about ten yrs ahead of tamil cinema at that time and after its crushing blow at box office, Kamal decided to never again make such a movie 🙂
Quite easily one of the best hindi/tam main stream movie.
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