Saturday, November 04, 2006

Umrao...?

As per statistics, my usual rate of watching Hindi movies is two per year. Since this year is coming to a close, I thought I should complete my quota and maintain a healthy track record.
And so today it was decided that the latest flick "Umrao Jaan" shall be the chosen one. After all, there was a lure of the Lucknow setting, perhaps the thought of classic dialogues, or something else...
And though there are umpteen number of reviews of the movie floating around on the net, I still decided to punch the keyboard for one more... Afterall, it's rarely that such a movie arrives which makes you feel that you have lost something valuable.
The valuable thing in this case was 220 Indian Rupees. 160 for the ticket, 30 for the auto, and 30 for what was claimed to be a Russian salad sandwich (just as an aside, whatever little plans I had to ever visit Russia were thwarted by this concoction).
The thing is, it's not very often that I walk out of a moviehall as soon as the screen claims "Intermission". This time, I ran out of the hall and paused only when I was sure that I was a safe distance away.
So what exactly happened during those crawling minutes before the break that caused this? One word - artificial. Too much of Urdu thrust into the movie as if compensating for the otherwise nonsensical dialogues generally strewn about. I come from a place which was frequented by some of the best Urdu writers of all times (Mirza Ghalib, for instance, was born there). And if I had a tough time figuring out half the words spoken, then I can't imagine the plight of those hapless Mumbaikars around me who anyway have their own distorted version of Hindi itself.
And the next thing artificial was the theme itself. An overdrawn love story, which looked too polished, too cloy, too Mills & Boonish almost.
But the clincher was that one 10 minute scene where our dim-wit son of BigB turns up drunk at the doorstep of Miss Saccharine. That was the end of patience. That's when I walked away...

...Mourning my loss of a couple of hours on a lovely Saturday afternoon... and yes, the 220 Rs. as well...

2 comments:

Mihir said...

abe saale .. pagla gaya tha kya jo umrao jaan main pahuch gaya tha ?? aisi movies tabhi dekhi jaati hai jab koi bandi kheech ke jabardasti le jaye

Routing Geek! said...

My rate of watching Hindi movies is a tad better than yours buddy, for reasons that are too obvious to disclose! And Yet .. and yet .. i did not succumb to watching *that* movie! Its a pity that you had to fill your quota with that particular movie ... Try Dhoom 2 .. might be a shade better! :-)