Salaam Namaste

04 Oct 2005 · #movies

After the disaster that was Lucky, it took some time before I recovered enough to be able to venture into a theatre to watch a Hindi movie. You see, unlike a VCD, I can’t fast-forward through songs and the boring parts when inside a cinema hall. Nor can I stop the movie if it is bad. So yes, I needed some healing after Lucky and this Sunday, feeling good enough, I went and saw Salaam Namaste.

Some thoughts on the movie:

• I didn’t know that people get into a live-in relationship with someone they’ve known for just three days. Clearly, much to learn, I have.
• Javed Jaffrey had me in splits. Now will someone tell me why was he in the movie?
• Why does Bollywood still insist on inserting songs into movies at the worst possible moments? Didn’t they learn anything from Ramgopal Verma?
• The cameo at the end was great.
• Preity’s first baby was held up during delivery, head sticking half out of mommy for five full minutes. All because that senti ass Saif insisted that Preity agree to marry him before the baby comes out. I am sure the poor kid suffered permanent brain damage.
• Please don’t waste Arshad Warsi.

Now don’t think that I hated the movie. In fact, it’s a quite a decent timepass flick worthy of a 3 on 5. It’s just that I am tired of how even good movie ideas tend to fall flat in the final execution because the director succumbs to adopting some (or several) formulaic elements somewhere.

Yes, Bollywood as we all know, simply loves formula based movies. Or, as I prefer to call it, Bollywood confirms to the Object Oriented Style of Film Making.

Need a plot idea? There are several classes to choose from: TriangularLoveStory, SeparatedAtBirth, OppositesAttract, JingoisticPatriotism, etc. Just instantiate any one class and you have a basic movie outline.

Need a sad mom to cry over her ‘behka hua budhape ka sahaara’ beta? Just create an object of the VidhwaMaa class. Do note that if you don’t pass an appropriate name to the constructor, the default is to use name = Rakhee ;-)

As my programmer brethren would’ve inferred by now, multiple inheritance is permissible. In fact, it’s positively encouraged!

class MyMovie (OppositesAttract, BigStars):
    def __init__(self):
        OppositesAttract.__init__(self, boy="poor", girl="rich")
        BigStars.__init__(self, hero="Sharukh", heroine="Rani")
        release_time = diwali

    def need_comic_element (self, duration=5, comedian=None):
        if not comedian:
            comedian = JohnnyLever(as = "Irritating Fake South Indian")

        comedian.do_your_stuff (for_time = duration)

You get the idea.

At the theatre, before Salaam Namaste started, they played a trailer for some upcoming Amitabh Bachchan movie (I forget the title) which looks to be a variant of OppositesAttract. First we had poor boy loves rich girl. Then we had Hindu boy loves Muslim girl. This movie has gone international: desi boy loves caucasian girl. But don’t be deceived by this ‘novel’ twist! The same old base class methods of sanskaar, parampara, maa-baap ki khushi, ghar chodkar chala jaoonga, etc. are available and executed in this derived class. Of course, some methods are suitably overridden. Like the_climax() method, for example, which is overridden to determine exactly which of the involved parties relents and repents in the (guaranteed to be) mushy finale.

I think I have written enough for this time. Before I stop, there’s something I’d like to share with you all. I’ve sworn not to watch any movie or tv serial featuring a precocious kid for the next one year. Precocious kids mouthing grownup dialogues - few things irritate me like them.