Since I can’t top Greatbong’s review of Fanaa, let me just offer three thoughts and a comic ghazal.
First, I missed Kajol, and I’m glad she’s back. She sure beats Preity Zinta.
After the exciting snowmobile chase through the mountains of Kashmir (filmed in Poland, of course), I thought Kajol was the best thing in Fanaa. She was certainly more interesting to watch than Aamir Khan, who was just phoning it in most of the time. (He also looked pallid in the close-ups. Everything all right, Aamir? Hope you’re staying off the white stuff; you don’t want to go out like Fardeen)
Second thought: Most big-ticket Hindi films use foreign locations as a visual gimmick. They give you landscapes and cityscapes that simply don’t exist in India, so you aren’t stuck looking at the same old smoggy skylines. (Some popular spots in recent films have been Thailand, Australia, and Mauritius.)
For its part, the special locale in Fanaa is… the city of Delhi! The first half of the movie is largely shot around the Red Fort, Jantar Mantar, Qutub Minar, Purana Qila, and Lodhi Gardens (and yes, I stole that list from Wikipedia). Delhi’s attractions actually looked pretty nice.
The domestic setting means there are no item numbers in Fanaa with scores of scantily clad white women gyrating on a beach. (I hope that means you’re more likely to go see the movie.)
Third thought: our tickets cost $10 each. I hope that goes some of the way to countering the ridiculous ban on the film in Gujurat. (Naachgaana reports that one theater in the state is now showing the film after the Supreme Court ruled the state must provide police protection to the theater.)And finally, an English Ghazal:
How much poetry does a movie need from its leads?
(The classic Urdu form is the Ghazal, which reads:
A rhyme at the end of each couplet except the first,
Which has two rhymes at the front, like seeds.)
The Antakshri scene was short but sweet; the terrorist loves
the blind girl, so she sees again, and my heart (not really) bleeds.
With nuclear war, Kashmiri independence, snowboarding,
and hazaaron melodramas — for the film to end soon he pleads.
As the Popcorn in his heart is over-buttered,
Amardeep says, this film is rubbish, indeed.
(I keed.)
Wah, WAH!
Haha, yeah given the choice I’d prefer Kajol too! Having said that, this isn’t much of a choice… 😉
Amardeep: I agree…this movie was good in some senses, sort of hokey in others….after all It’s a bollywood film…we all love and hate bollywood for the same reasons…
There might be some spoilers in here (emphasis added by admin)…just a warning… But Kajol’s portrayal of a blind girl (in the beginning of the movie) who didn’t let her handicap get in the way of her experiencing and enjoying life, didn’t let it stop her from being a totally modern, charming and liberated girl who made her own choices (esp with her sexuality) and dealt with life without victimizing herself as a person to feel sorry for was not only a realistic portrayal of a woman who is a great and mature role model for women out there, but for people who have various handicaps…be them mental, emotional, a broken arm, a broken leg… to learn to appreciate what you have and never let anything or what anyone says stop you from having what you need and want to experience in the world out there. (plus I thought her portrayal was very natural compared to Rani’s in Black…though Rani is a great actor in some senses…Kajol was a believable normal blind girl…Rani did do her research and all but Black was all about playing on our emotions to make us feel sorry for her lack of sight and feel inspired by her over coming it.) Sometimes Hindi movies are very optimistic…and being an optimist, I sometimes love to indulge in them to escape the fact that people don’t remember how beautiful life can be…and that life is too short to be caught up with what you don’t have.
As my most favorite John Lennon said: Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans….
Its true….Kajol didn’t ruminate on her shortcomings but decided to go off with Rehaan and experience life, love and all things wonderful about life.
Ok..there’s my little philosophical musing for you!
Oh and Amardeep…
I love your english ghazal. you rock 🙂
yes..other than my rave about Kajol and her proper portrayal of a blind begum ( like i said sometimes hindi movies have little gems scattered here and there…) The film was rubbish….what was amir doing with that hair? and the rhyming was tooo much. You should have written the rhyming for the movie for sure…it would have made it a hit. 🙂
Mochalatte, I must say I didn’t care much for the blindness angle either, though I agree with you that it was less irritating than Rani Mukherjee in Black.
Everyone knows that Bollywood uses location as a gimmick — look, Switzerland! But a lot of recent Bollywood films have used disabilities as a gimmick too — a personality gimmick. The disability is supposed to make you care more for the character, but I wonder if it might not just be a cheap way to make the character and the performance stand out in a sea of predictable sub-mediocrity. I talked a little about how this works with the raft of recent films using mental illness in my review of ’15 Park Avenue’ on my personal blog a few months ago.
Still, I do think it was very smart of Kajol to come back with an unusual role: at least we’ll remember her performance. (Though unfortunately many reviewers have focused more on how much weight she lost than on her skills as an actress.)
Amardeep, Very aptly put. Its rubbish indeed and has innumerable errors in the loose script. I had written about it here in an attempt to showcase all the scripting errors and gaps.
Word. If it was worse I might have enjoyed marveling at how ridiculous it was, but it wasn’t bad enough. Darn close, but not quite there.
Dont waste your 10$ , wait till it arrives at your local video/grocery store. That way , you can FFwd through the movie, and watch only the scenes where Kajol is seen…….
I think I gotta disagree with you, WesternGhaat.
This was one of those movies that is lovely to watch on the big screen, in spite of all its shortcomings (which I’ve blogged about here).
It was great fun to see it on opening night (even having to go to a later show because the earlier ones were sold out) because you could feel the excitement in the theater. People literally gasped when the first shot of Aamir on top of the bus appeared, and again later for the KANK trailer.
But yeah, at $10 a shot, you really do think twice about waiting for the DVD or not. For example, I’ve never really like Kareena Kapoor or her boyfriend, but the trailer of Chup Chup Ke looked entertaining enough that I’m actually considering it…
I had so many expectations from this movie. AAMIR and KAJOL, how can you miss this movie? The last movie i watched in a theatre was Rang de Basanti and Fanaa I saw on first Friday.
This movie took absurdity to a whole another level. First half was brilliant, excellent performance from both aamir and kajol. But in the second half what failed them was the script. After I saw the slick hair Aamir with glasses et al, I got excited for what was to come. But it paled in comparison, BIG TIME. I know i expect a lot from aamir but it all went haywire for him. he was confused as a duck in the second half.
Cons and Stupidity: How can Kajol’s parents didnt help her get eyesight back? Did they want her to depend on them for life? Rishi kapoor dying scene (people in the theatre were actually giggling during this, some even laughed out loud) Aamir’s character’s confusion in the second half TABU and the whole Crime Unit, (NOTE: she tells kajol that “dont worry, and we’ll be there tomorrow morning”) HAHA dumb ducks
PROS AAMIR AND KAJOL
and the ban in Gujarat..these morons need another hobby
First half rocked. Second half was crap. They should sell half tickets.
Amardeep, in many ways Fanna is just like the Da Vinci Code — riding the controversy hype. I mean, the film makes almost no political statement, except for cheesy “saare jahan se accha” chants on the very first scene. And the lines are written by complete dolts, the English subtitles were much more lyrical in most cases. The shayaree was overdone and cloying.
I watched it, rapt with attention, like one gawks at a car wreck.
Jeet, while we are trying to talk about realism: What kind of a 21st century movie has people having babies from pre-martital sex? I mean, even truckwallas buy the man-sheath. Or perhaps our protagonist has mighty potent seed.
Vij:
Speaking of Half ticket (the movie). It was superb. They should screen it.
It is not worth spending $10 (and 2 hrs) on Fanaa. I saw “Kabul Express” trailer during the intermission. looked pretty interesting.
Jeet, while we are trying to talk about realism: What kind of a 21st century movie has people having babies from pre-martital sex? I mean, even truckwallas buy the man-sheath. Or perhaps our protagonist has mighty potent seed.
The fact that pre-marital sex showed up in the movie, without making the woman look like a whore, in itself is encouraging (I have’nt seen the movie yet, but was told it was handled well by sopmeone who did). I saw a Tamil movie recently, that had pre-marital sex and the woman wasn’t painted as having lost her nala thamil ponu (good tamil girl) status either. Hopefully, these movies are reflections of changing attitudes or levers to help change them.
Brown_fob, I agree, Kabul Express did look exciting, if for nothing more than the fact that they actually filmed in Afghanistan.
Now there’s a “making of” segment that I’d like to see!
Wantok, the problem is that a dignified portrayal of pre-marital sex must include contraception. Having babies from incidental pre-marital sex is for the Maury Show.
Wantok – re: #15, which Tamil movie was that?
How many of the viewers predicted that a pregnancy-in-one-copulation was on the cards when it suddenly started raining and they broke out in a song?
amardeep mentioned Bollywood using disability as a gimmick….i mean why should’nt they…its a fictional story and they can play the character the way they want. And isnt disability used in western films??? If any of you has not seen 15 park avenue…i would highly recommend you see this film. It is based on a schizophrenic girl played by konkana sen sharma and she is excellent in the film…not to mention shabana azmi who plays her older sister. Bollywood film bashing has become a style. Inidan films are the same….funny, boring, ridiculous! Well many are made for the general masses and have all the usual masal in it! how different is that from most of th e hollywood films I see…..for eg….wedding crashers a big hit….i thought it was a typical masala film like any other bollywood film. Bollywood also makes many meaningful, artsy type movies which are fabulous!(15 park avenue, mr and mrs. iyyer)
I called it! And the tearful reunion too.
Desidude – I agree with you, a dignified portrayal of pre-marital sex must include contraception. I wasn’t commenting on the baby that resulted from it, just the portrayal of the individuals involved. Honestly, when you said you didn’t think it was realistic that, in this day and age, pre-marital sex didn’t include contraception, I thought you were being sarcastic. Not dignified: I agree, not realistic: I don’t know. If there wasn’t an ounce of realism in it, we wouldn’t have classics like the Maury show.
VSBF : Thavamai Thavamiruntu. I thought it was going to be overly melodramatic but it was’nt bad.
it’s funny how all people here think mainstream bollywood movies are for them. these movies are for the 60% of indian people who want to be entertained and have no other means. it’s for their leisure. over the years, the plots have changed but their audience focus is same.
Hey, the movie was ok. Maybe worth about $5.50. But what’s with finding too much shaayari in the movie? I enjoyed it quite a bit as I’ve pretty much lost hope of seeing/hearing parrying of words lyrically in modern Hindi movies. There used to be a time when movies had awesome qawaalis with lyrics to die for – the movies were soon forgotten but the songs lived forever (A rare recent exception was in Main hoo naa). I’ve been tired of listening to excessively rough bambaiya or desi gangsta, or worse dialogs that seem to be written in Hindi by people with English as their first language (see Gangster and most recent ones from Mahesh Bhatt camp).
At least there were couplets that I felt like saying wah wah to!
In Malika Sherawat’s first movie “Kwaish” (spelling?), there is a scene of her buying condoms from a local market because her husband was embarressed to buy them himself. Even thoguh the couple was already married in the movie, it was nice to see in a Bollywood movie.
Wantok, DesidudeinGotham,
that’s an excellent point…
If i may agree further:
In a population that is one of the largest in the world, and where AIDS and other diseases are prevalent, using the far reaching medium of Bollywood cinema would be the smartest platform to teach the masses safe sex. Hard-at-work ambassadors are attempting to reach women in red-light districts to teach them about safe sex, the youth in India are fast becoming as sexually aware and active as the rest of the world, but they need help for sure …mainstream bollywood films are big events for all in India (going to a show in Calcutta or Delhi, one can see how big of a deal it is…reaching across classes and religions). Salam Namaste for eg. and this film are big steps in showing how comfortable women( more so than men who are always a little comfortable 🙂 ) are becoming with their sexuality and it would be amazing to start showing these health and wellness policies as a normal part of the characters lives. If films can influence fashions, hairstyles etc, they should influence morals, safety and education of people too…Perhaps I’m being too optimistic…but…I mean most people find bollywood films boring without this content already…but throwing in alittle bit of this would be good, no?
Amardeep, I have to disagree with you on one thing. I thought Aamir Khan (yes he has crows feet in close ups and he has become middle-aged stocky), was mind blowing. Sexy. He made the plot believable.
In Delhi, I was not able to get tickets for Faana.
So, I haven’t seen Faana yet. Even in RDB, Aamir should have played a little older than he did. However, I did recently saw him on TV on Gujarat. He is quite well spoken and I think a lot of career ahead.
headache…….f***ing headache………especially the second half……i could wring the life out of tabu for her pompous role…..how inane can you get……what a tired copy of jodie foster-ism……..pop-psychology at its bolly-worse….the way she uttered ‘damn him’ during one of the sequences…aaagh….insipid copying must be made a criminal offence!!and rishi kappor,otherwise a tolerable actor,was to overacting what mother teresa was to charity.
as for the shayari,i think it was an awesum concept but the incoherent screenplay absolutely killed it…..some of the shayers were actually decent but the overall impact got diluted by the stop-start way the movie was progressing in the first half…..
the song des rangila’s cinemtaography was the only worthwhile thing in the movie….the rest of the 175 minutes were mostly boring,often irritating and sometimes nauseating .bollywood seems to be progressing from being stupid to being stupid AND pompous.
P.S :-if anyones intersted,the soundtrack has this lounge remix called ‘destroyed in love’….thats actually pretty good.
I wonder what these population feel when the hero and his mate running around and dancing on the streets of a their land singing and making vulgar moves and the moves they dont even know the meaning of… and a crew with camera and lights, and the songs playing loudly so that the couple dancing could lip-sync.
they might be thinking “what the hell is this? dont they have a place in their own land to do these? why is that guy wearing yellow pants and red shirt? what are they singing? Are they expressing their love? then why do they have to dance? ” and finally,
Why do they have the whole panchayat dancing in tune with them at the back with huge purcussion instruments, and water pots?
Govinda et. al, have enough confused many countrymen on their concept of love. [as time went by, trees were replaced by hand-rails, coffee shops’ canopy posts: and parks and swings were replaced by subways, and tour buses] Countries such as Swiz, Australia, Mauritius, etc are ok with these as the film crew is charged with some fees and they have nothing to lose… US of A, apparently, no longer let them do it on the streets and confuse people.. They are already confused. The word is that many low profile crew members of the film wouldnt go back to the des. The crew is mostly asked upon while leaving the ‘location’ about the missing persons and they deny the knowledge of the missing ones.
Once Madhhuri Dixit (was carrying at that time) was spotted [heard from a friend of a friend of a friend..] at U of Florida Hospital waiting for her husband, and couple of desi students went and talked to her. She then realised the make-up was not actually hiding her from revealing her identity..
I like Kajol too.. She never (in the beginning of her career) used to do her eyebrows…But now she does… !!!
Mochalatte Chiquitita,
Two things.
1) Who’s to say they didn’t use a condom, but it wasn’t effective?
2) I think, given the extreme rarity of seeing overt references to pre-marital sex in mainstream Hindi movies, it’ll take quite a while before that (if ever) becomes de rigeur, and so, even more beyond the pale would be the representation of couples parcticing safe sex. Moreover, given the highly romantic and fanstasy-based nature of Bollywood movies, seeing a guy reach for a box of condoms from his nightstand would, I’d hazard to say, be seen as killing the moment. (Think of mainstream Hollywood movies too… like, say, Wedding Crashers, how often do we see references to condom usage there?)
But come to think of it, it could be pretty funny to interject something like this: Imagine if, just as the morning after scene starts where Kajol is dressing in Aamir’s room to head for the train, if you had that needle-scratching-on-the-LP sound, the picture froze, and Kajol & Aamir broke through it, addressing the audience, saying “Hey guys, as you can see, our characters have been sleeping off the effects of a pretty steamy night, and the fact is, they didn’t use any protection, and the result of which you’ll see in the next scene, but more than that, by taking such a risk, one of us could have ended up with an embarassing STD – especially given that Rehan’s such a dog – or, more serious, HIV. What you’re watching is filmi fun, but in real life, don’t forget to wrap it up!”
On a totally separate note, it was interesting to see an ad in the June issue of one of the movie mags for the morning-after pill. Not just in cell phone technology, but also in this, India’s way ahead of the US.
Filmiholic
You really are a filmiholic to defend your films as such! Yes Bollywood films are highly fantasized stories… Yes, they could have probably used a condom and it could have broken….however…I stick to my point (unless I am highly unaware on how Indian society is nowadays…even though I do visit there often and keep in close contact with my family and friends there) that safe sex is not necessarily understood and common practice enough for us to be able to assume that they might have used a condom.
Even if they didn’t show safe sex practice in mainstream hollywood films, in Canada and US, it is always taught somewhere or another…be it in schools, in some cheesy episodes of sitcoms…etc etc. I do not think safe sex is taught anywhere in a child’s life in India.
I mean I’m not saying PLEASE let’s enter in tonnes of wierdo dialogue on STD awareness and all because we didn’t use a condom this, this and this could happen…just a subtle move of maybe showing a condom wrapper, or the insertion of a line…oh my! the condom must have broke, or “i’m so worried I might be pregnant, Rehaan and I didn’t use protection” could have been enough to pique the consciousness of viewers on to the topic without taking away from the love scene in the movie.
All I mean to say is that Indians are smart people, and sometimes we like to watch brainless highly fantasized movies to give our brains a rest( and being a bollywood fan, i’m not saying all filmi movies are terrible…there are some good ones out there)…and since these movies are far reaching and watched by the ginormous and still growing population of desis…throwing in a couple of really important signs or signals to reinforce education on safe sex, health and all could only add merit to these large budget, filmi endeavours.
After all, stories like Kalyug, Salam Namaste…are bringing sexuality and sexual awareness like never before. ( remember how when actors used to kiss and it would immediately pan to a shot of two birds or flowers before their lips touched) Some films expose the plight of the woman, or tensions between Muslims and Hindus, or some topics that have been taboo for a while…so why not be even more progressive and use a very successful medium for portraying some helpful messages as well. That’s all I’m saying…
Mochalatte Chiquitita:
It is taught in most of the schools (in urban India). When I was in 10th grade (1995), we had a couple of sessions where some counselors talked on issues like drugs/safe-sex etc. Since it is (was) such a taboo, they made sure that boys and girls were sent to different classrooms during this one-off session! One could see quite a few embarrassed faces when we returned back to our classrooms….I still cannot figure out the reason.
MC – I should have said, but didn’t, that I do agree with you on the importance of getting the word out about such a life-and-death matter.
Interestingly enough, last week’s New Yorker had an article on soap operas around the world that are used to entertain but also inform the audience about various social issues.
@Mochalatte Rani in Black… dunno where she did her research, but she played an apoplectic retar d(sorry if that was insensitive… but honestly that was what she did) not a deaf-mute-blind woman…
For me the reedeeming factors in fanaa were 1)Dilli looked really nice 2)kajol looked really nice 3)yes, as someone pointed out, there was no fuss about the premarital sex and the woman didnt end up looking like a whore…
But honestly speaking, it was a crappy story, random sentimentality… and a waste of my money
I liked the movie till intermission, the 7 years later threw me off… guess we as audiences have a hard time reacting when the first hour and a half is focused on 2 days in the characters lives, and the story suddenly leaps forward by years. That is always a mistake…
I want to know the exact meaning of ” FAANA “.
Please let me know.
Thanking you.
I agree with your findings but was abit disturbed why a wiki for Fanna – why should a commercial venture have a wiki – they should use their web site – unless they can state in the wiki that they have made certain donation towards the cause of wiki as an encyclopaedia.
I absolutely dislike actors promoting softdrinks as well – does Aamir give his kids Coka Cola in place of milk – perhaps – who knows.
I love Kajol!! She’s the best actress there is. But I wish Shahrukh did the film with her. Oh well. Aamir looked pretty bad.