Cappuccino Musings

The flicks that weren't.

It's the end of another year and as usual we have a plethora of over-hyped Bollywood flicks whose storylines weren't as catchy as their trailers which were bulldozed on the viewers.


When Amitabh Bachchan sang "Khaike Paan Banaraswallah", he brought to life one of the most memorable characters which we all know as "Don". Although the movie had a pretty ordinary storyline, the culmination of a ruthless gangster and a paan-chewing rustic potraization of the Big B made the movie an instant hit. Little did we know that two decades later, the Don would emerge again as Shah Rukh Khan with flashy gadgets to cater to the Gen-X techno-savvy audience. Without a prize-winning storyline, the movie ended up being a direct "who is better?" contest between the two hall of famers SRK and Amitabh Bachchan. We would really not want to mess ourselves with this debate now, but the pertinent point here is the amount of hype the movie received both in India and abroad although it was nothing more than an old story retold with a "twist". Nobody cared about the story or the breathtaking locales or the James Bond style gadgetry in the sequel. Rather, people flocked into the theatres to see if SRK really measured up to Big B or if Kareena wore skimpier than Helen. This is exactly what the producers wanted but little did they know that repackaging an old story with a contemporary superstar and over the top hype cannot sustain a movie for long. I hope the makers of Sholay2 can get a message or two from this.

Anybody who has seen Dhoom Part 1 can be pretty sure that this is not the kind of movie where you can find Vivah-like family drama or the hackneyed Karan Johar style "marriage gone all wrong" story. Dhoom 2 was no different. With some logic defying stunts and a policeman chasing a thief, only to set him free in the end , the only thing "family" about this movie was the presence of Uday Chopra reminding all of us who the producers of the movie were. But given that Bollywood has always catered to all audiences, the saas-bahu soap lovers weren't to be left behind. Hence we had the off-screen mom-in-law waiting Jaya Bachchan and Ash drama over a liplock scene. Apparently, this scene was so offending to a lawyer in Indore that he went to court with a law suit. The scene became so famous and hyped up that people wanted to see it more than the spiderman antics of Hrithik. Scripts are passe. Today films are all about how you market them and how you strategically create controversies that are just enough to arouse curiousity and give the nudge to people to walk to the theatres...