The other day, my wife and her parents picked up a film called “Hum Phirr Mileinge” (sic) from our local Indian store, apparently without reading the blurb on the back.
Just to be clear, I have not altered the following in any way. I just ran it through the scanner, compressed it a little so as not to crash the site, and posted it for you:
If you’re having trouble reading it, never fear; the text is plagiarized verbatim from a Oneindia.in web review. And here is a short excerpt in case you’re too lazy to click:
To put it bluntly, Hum Phirr Mileinge is archaic and outdated. You actually pinch yourself while watching this one. Is this real? Perhaps, director Manish Goel is completely clueless about the kind of cinema being made these days. The direction is unbelievably weak and so is the writing. Frankly, nothing works in this film, except for a couple of tuneful songs [Sandesh Shandilya], which, sadly, show up even if there’s no situation.
Remember, they are trying to sell DVDs with this blurb!
My question for you is this: how do you think this happened? A DVD printing/label company operator phoning it in, or intentional subversion?
First off, let me say your wife is very gutsy to pick up that DVD. Everything about the looks of it screams “stay away”. Anyway, I think its someone phoning it in. Internal subversion would be more suited for a heavily marketed crappy movie, a la “Chandni Chowk to China”.
haha and I thought the spelling errors on the back of those pirated dvd covers were bad.
ha! The last paragraph of the blurb was the clincher. It is Taran ‘On the whole’ Adarsh’s review of the movie. http://www.bollywoodhungama.com/movies/review/13912/index.html
Obviously, this is a bootleg version, with some local desi churning out copies in the back room, who decided to have some fun?
After graduating, one of my roommates from college decided to spend a year in china teaching English. To pass time, she and other teachers used to go get cheap pirated DVDs to watch. One time, they saw Halle Berry’s Catwoman in the store and right on the DVD cover it said “Mind Numbingly Boring”!
I agree… someone in the pirating industry decided to have a little fun… this is awesome 🙂 Thanks for sharing :>
My sister got a copy of Chicago from Fortress Stadium, bootleg, that had “Frankly, you won’t be all that jazzed” right on the cover!!
@1 · paradesi on June 28, 2009 11:59 PM
Internal subversion would be more suited for a heavily marketed crappy movie, a la “Chandni Chowk to China”. C’mon Chandini Chowk to China was not so bad. I’ve always wondered what would happen if Bollywood decided to do a Stephen Chow (of Kung Fu Hustle fame). Chandini Chowk was pretty good in some departments. (For one, Deepika Padukone kicks ass… more so than Akshay Kumar.)
Phoned in? Not really! From what I know of the pirating ‘industry’ in the des – the copy-pasting was probably what the boss asked for, in fact! There is a whole cottage industry out there employing (mostly) housewives to do copy-pasting of various kinds. As for the DVD, got to give it to them at least for putting out a 100% filched product – absolutely no contaminating originality guaranteed! 🙂
I think that the people who make these copies generally try to copy any reviews they find on the web since I guess most of them might not have an original DVD cover that can be copied. Must be a routine thing to look up some reviews…and put them on the cover. Guess either the person doing this cover did not bother to actually read the content (just glossed and realized its a review) or left it intentionally since he probably thought he was doing a favor by leaving such a review in terms of ‘viewer beware’.
It was the worst movie I’d seen in last few years. Even Gordon Liu and Deepika Padukone couln’t save it.
No wonder, Khushi’s grandmother TABASSUM chose to give a miss to this film’s premier.
random thoughts
— who the heck names their child kkkhushi? that said, i’ll gladly name my child gabbarsingh.
— is amardeep goign to be hassled by mpaa (or its desi equivalent) for participating in piracy. maybe that’s a good thing. After venkatesh we need another gangsta professa.
— is the movie based in kashmir or himachal? those seem to be chinar leaves (the plane) falling all over the cover.
— the guy has a huge nose.
— the woman is as generic as a manga character. maybe thats a good thing.
Amardeep, having bought some sketchy DVDs on Amazon, I think there’s a trend to printing these critical reviews (typically with many misspellings). Or it may be that one pirate tends to do this in great numbers. I have bad reviews of Lagaan and Farhan Akhtar’s Don on my own crappy copies. They don’t, ahem, make good gifts.
— is amardeep goign to be hassled by mpaa (or its desi equivalent) for participating in piracy. maybe that’s a good thing. After venkatesh we need another gangsta professa.
With DVDs like this one, it’s not always clear what’s pirated and what’s “asli.” The packaging in other respects looks fine, and the DVD is printed, not burned. You have to look carefully for the Eros hologram to know whether something is real or not when it’s distributed in the U.S., and most people don’t do that, or even know to look for that.
Anyway, BitTorrent and other internet downloading/streaming mechanisms are rapidly destroying both the legit DVD industry as well as the commercial pirating business.
What???!!! That is hilarious. Seriously, that made my Monday. I love it! I’ve always groaned at the copywriting on the backs of those desi DVDs, but this is priceless. I would enshrine this copy.
The person who copied and pasted it does not know good English and thought it was a positive review. Duh. That’s all.
I think the printing was given to some wallah who speaks only Hindi. They were on deadline and someone said just get a blurb off the Internet. So they hit “search”, this came up and it looked good enough to a guy (or girl) whose English is not good.
Hey, there’s a whole crowd that likes to watch really bad movies…the groan patrol. “Oh Maaan, that’s terrible...I love it!” I happen to own a domain http://www.FlickFlops.com Now I know what to do with it!
or this may be too high tech that it is all done by machines – identifying good review vs bad review, especially when sarcasm is involved, is still a challenge for knowledge processing systems.
Amazing. Thanks for that bit of funny after a long hard day.
I got some dvds from Vietnam before that had even worse blips on the back than this.. I think they used some sort of computerized translator.. so you would get a blip like this:
“Big horse friend of man down in small city with hot people. Gone happy sad with the cow in house of boy. When cow boy sad big house man smells rose and all is good.”
That’s made up, but I remember I had the City of Lost Children, and every time I read the back I would laugh so hard tears would come out of my eyes. It was the best.
I found the real one. Pretty sure I bought this in Vietnam, though it could have been China as well.. can’t remember.. anyways
the City of Lost Children:
“Crazy scientist’s prematurely senile, all b ecause not air dream, hence kidnap small of inside, steal its beautiful dream, who the small of frighten, dream too big of side evil-for eboding dream, circus troupe city film festival fo r heart for story for guy disappearing, orpha party leader tog ether look foring the dream to gether look foring disappeain f the small… very doing ghost horse actuality it can matter, aly darkly, adding ordering the direcotor, have the honr of acquiringing the 1995 big prize.”
Man oh man. I’d love to get my hands on that ‘big prize”. For those of you that have seen the movie.. you can see it DOES kind of follows the storyline, in smashingly nonsensical phrases and descriptive words. 😉
Is this for real? Is she really wearing suspenders with a belt?
playboy bunny suspenders at that. bollywood doesnt just coopt, they transmogrify. vat goes in as an egg-whisk comes out as a mandoline.
FTW – The actress playing Kkhushi’s aunt is Loud
Also, Riya Sen is hot, I prolly would’ve picked the DVD up too. But I dont buy DVDs/CDs. Usenet FTW.
Linzi’s post with the review, hilarious, I can picture somebody dictating that review with a pipe in his mouth, wearing a burgundy smoking jacket.
khoofi, I think it’s payback for all the badmashups the westerners have done to Indian garb.
hopefully some of these links will work
Maybe they were thinking that people would buy it because the blurb mentions Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejayenge etc. That or it was a mistake. it is ridiculous shizz.
LinZi #21: make sure you ditch that flick b/f reentering the country. could get you 10-15, or at least some protests from peta.
peta? why do they have a problem with ghost horses?
OH MY GOD. That was the worst outfit I ever saw in my life! Bess, who IS that??? And why? Just, why???
Hilarious.
Reminds me of my own personal bootleg VCD collection, back in Sydney:
Moonsoon Weeding East is Wash Bend it like Beakham
21 is funny; much funnier than 22.
Goodone Amardeep!
Lately Bollywood is going downhill, lot of movies are plagiarizing Hollywood plots, dying to see some original plots.
Lost in this thread is the point that Amardeep’s wife and family rented this DVD without even looking at the blurb. Which suggests that the writers spent about the right amount of time thinking about it.
As an ad guy, I am all for truth in advertising. How are you doing, Rahul?
TABASSUM? as in TABASSUM HASHMI? as in TABU? SHE HAS A GRANDAUGHTER???
Thanks for asking, Floridian. I’ve just been spending the last few days reeling from the finality of the loss of one of the Americans who truly meant a lot to me. I really hope there is peace in the afterlife for Norm Coleman.
P.S to Sepia web designers: Would it be possible for you to try and get the different buttons for quoting, hyperlinking etc. working on Chrome? Thanks!