Dud characters in a stinking plot…

I watched most Singh is Bling recoiling from the screen despite the fact that Akshay Kumar’s comic timing is good and his big boy goofiness adorable. Problem is that he’s not a character. He’s just a cute composite of buffoonery. Akshay Kumar did Singh is Kinng. And he was very good. Give him a script. Challenge him a bit.

Unlike director Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante (2002), which was a rather dingy copy of Reservoir Dogs, Quadri’s film is a homage to that film. It has a story to tell, its own story that’s rooted in the place it is set in — Meerut, a third-tier city, Delhi’s second cousin, twice removed. It’s an interesting story and it belongs to its characters. But the style it chooses to tell this story is borrowed. Intelligently, yes. And fun. But it’s not germane to its story and people.

About 10 minutes into Katti Batti, I started having violent thoughts. These thoughts intensified when I recalled photos of Aamir Khan crying phoot-phoot ke after watching Katti Batti a few days ago. Aamir Khan, Imran Khan’s mama or chacha or whatever, should have at least tweeted that those were tears of deep frustration. That he was howling because he had been impaled for over two hours by this nonsense. He didn’t. And that’s partly why my violent thoughts turned into an urge when the film shamelessly went weepy and sentimental.

Hero rhymes with zero and it’s tempting, for the sake of the headline and because in the first five minutes of the film my hand went lurking about in search of an eject button, to just write off this film as a big, fat zero.

It’s all fake fakery and yet the film and its hero and heroine keep their lips pursed in solemn seriousness, making the whole affair dull rather than fun. Some measure of irony would have helped. But it’s not there only.

Siddiqui is an amazing actor. And he’s in his element as the slightly crazed lover-husband. And though Siddiqui wears the burden of Manjhi Mountain Man lightly, as the stubborn, moody, dogged man who cut his way through a mountain over 22 years, he’s just competent. The film has a strong story, but it lacks soul. Like Mehta’s earlier attempts, this too is a mediocre attempt at telling an important story.

Gour Hari Dastaan: The Freedom File is a very solemn, very onerous, very sanctimonious harangue about many, many things. All things, in fact. But at its core it’s a film about director Anant Mahadevan and writer C.P. Surendran (a senior journalist) desperately wanting to burnish and shove their credentials as people with a conscience, as people who care and worry about important things in our faces.

Oho! But we’ve done this before. Many times. So many times. Family. Bichde bhai… Same-to-same. Ok-ok. Let’s do different. Make them Christian. Boxers. Ya! But how will audience samjho? Tattoos. Many. Very many. And Cross. Everywhere.

Masaan is beautifully written in all its aspects — story, characters, dialogue, songs. And all together give us a pulsating snapshot of life. Shot mostly on location in the small town of Benaras, cinematographer Avinash Arun Dhaware very intelligently uses Gangaji, the film’s protagonist, to lend the film and the people it’s about an expansiveness — of life, and its possibilities.