I didn’t watch too many of these, luckily. I turned Himmatwala off 5 or 10 minutes in, and Mere Dad Ki Maruti, while awful, was just on for background noise.
Deewana Main Deewana
Good god this was terrible. Apparently, Priyanka Chopra signed this movie with Govinda circa 2003 or so, but from the script and the styling, it looks very 90s. The project got shelved, probably because it was terrible, but the director resurrected it, reshot some scenes, and released it in 2013. I really don’t know why. Certainly I didn’t pay money to watch it.
Even as a 2003 film, it’s still really bad. Is Govinda a murderer or just a cowardly brat caught up in a bad situation of his own making? Do we care? There’s an obligatory Johnny Lever comedy subplot which never at any point intersects the primary narrative. I complain about comedy tracks that add nothing to the plot, but they usually involve the main characters, even tangentially!
When you add in the recently shot footage, it becomes even more bizarre. Instead of keeping continuity and just setting the movie in 2003 (or whatever), they throw in references to movies like Dabangg and Enthiran, presumably in an attempt to update the script. This doesn’t work when it’s mixed in with scenes with posters of the Spice Girls on the walls. There are also some hilarious giant cell phones that interchange with normal-sized cell phones throughout the movie. The only redeeming entertainment factor is watching Priyanka’s nose change from scene to scene.
Gori Tere Pyaar Mein
Really Bebo? Did you really turn down Ram-Leela for this? Not that the fault isn’t also mine. It’s not like I enjoyed Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, but I watched this anyway. It’s the story of the relationship between Dia, (Kareena Kapoor Khan) a vegetarian social worker whose passion is trying to improve the lives of the less fortunate, and Sriram, (Imran Khan) who is a bit of a douchecanoe.
The first half of their story is told in flashback, as Sriram narrates the story to his fiance (Shraddha Kapoor). She’d begged him to reject the proposal when the marriage was being arranged so she could marry her Sikh boyfriend, but he accepts anyways because he doesn’t want to piss off his parents any more than she wants to piss off hers. So her Plan B is to get Sriram to recognize how much he misses Dia and get him to run off, thus leaving her both in the right as the jilted bride and conveniently available to marry someone else. This works! Imran Khan really lacks the panache to tie up his lungi and race boldly away from his wedding, but that is what he does, determined to patch things up with Dia.
You can hardly blame him, though, she has an awfully nice butt.
Despite having nothing in common with her, and in fact spending their entire relationship rolling his eyes at her values, he has decided that Dia is in fact his true love and follows her to the remote village in Gujarat where she is now working. She’s still not over the incident that ended their relationship (hint for potential douchecanoes: Perhaps it is true that someone is certain to crush your girlfriend’s dream, but take note, that someone should really not be you.) and isn’t happy to see him. He decides that to win her back, he will build the bridge that her village desperately needs, which becomes the extremely explicit metaphor for their relationship.
The second half has Sriram bumbling around causing problems in local politics, some very 2-dimensional villagers, and there are lots of references to Lagaan, because, I don’t even know. Again, I don’t feel the chemistry between Imran and Kareena, nor could I really get behind the love story. The bridge construction moving in fits and starts to mimic their relationship got really grating, because it wasn’t about them at all. The bridge situation had serious implications for the people of Jhumli, and having it play out the rom-com of a well-off urban couple who won’t be sticking around anyway is just, well, bleh. Sriram’s shenanigans with the local politicians could have had really unpleasant consequences that he’d be completely insulated from and I wasn’t convinced he really matured enough to understand that.
Bottom line: Kareena is far too good for this movie (also, what was with all the jokes about her character being old? We should all wish to be that stunning at 33.) and Imran Khan is really miscast as the immature bad boy learning lessons about love and life (again, bleh).
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