3 Idiots: A young, vibrant film

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Film : 3 Idiots

Cast: Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor, R. Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Boman Irani

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Director: Rajkumar Hirani

By now, Aamir Khan has hit so many sixers in his career that we can only wonder what this maestro of marketing intends to do next. For sure, 3 Idiots is yet another vehicle to showcase Aamir’s sparkling ability to be part of a cinema that creates a colloquial yet classy language of thought provoking punctuation, syntax and exclamation.

3 Idiots is first and foremost a tremendously entertaining piece of cinema. The boys-will-have-fun atmosphere on an engineering campus is shot with the devious humour and warmth of a joke that has not lost its punch even after years of re-telling. Some things never change in a straightjacketed society like ours. And really, when Rajkumar Hirani, with help from his co-writer Abhijat Joshi, sets down to criticise the glaring anomalies in our education system, we are compelled to wonder for a few seconds, if flogging the sacred cows of our institutionalised system of governance in cinema is not just an excuse to pull out all stops and let the young heroes have all the fun that their more disciplined counterparts deny themselves.

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If you want to remove the watermark, please register inspiring situations in the script come from Aamir. And boy, does he play the boy-man with restrained relish! save lives. But cinema sure can make you feel life is worth living. 3 Idiots does just that, and much more.

But it is a vital, inspiring and life-revising work of contemporary art with some heart imbued into every part.

The thought processes underlining the film’s super-vibrant but calm surface are never allowed to seep out and bubble to the exterior of the narrative. If at heart 3 Idiots is a serious indictment of our education system, at the surface it’s a character-driven film played out at an observant and opulent but always-feisty octave.

The sounds of protest against the curbs, checks and downers in our education reach out to us in a cascade of crisply-written lines spoken by characters who have lived out the nightmare that precedes that long journey into the realisation of our dreams.

At times, the narrative is savagely funny. Note the sequence where Rancho (Aamir Khan) and his girl take the critically ill old man to the hospital on a scooter. Hirani has always seen humour of mortality. He has a potent style of storytelling, a mix of street wisdom and cinematic sensitivities that come together in a noiseless tango of social comment and entertainment. The director is strangely shy of displaying emotions. So he counters the melodrama of his third hero Raju Rastongi (Sharma Joshi)’s life with black-and-white 1960s’ self-mocking background music.

Sharman as the poor middle-class boy driven to near-suicide by his parents’ ambitions gets two meaty sequences. He chews on them with careful sensitivity, leaving a lasting impression. Madhavan as the third ‘idiot’ expresses his smothered dreams through a series of half-expressed thoughts and a fear of unhappiness that reach his eyes without transit.

In a country where students are driven to suicide by their impossible curriculum, 3 Idiots provides hope. Maybe cinema can’t

By Subhash K. Jha, IANS

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Kareena as the girl engaged to the tycoon with a penchant for putting a price tag on all his gifts, brings a dollop of sunshine and feminine grace to an otherwise masculine tale. She is so spunky and spontaneous you wish there was room for more of her. There’s even less of Mona Singh who’s again a spirited free soul.

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Ironically, Hirani’s unconventional hero Rancho often goes the other way and sheds manly tears for colleagues, friends and tormented young citizens of modern India who are crippled by a despotic disregard for their natural creativity.

Aamir undertakes his character’s journey through the paradoxical labyrinth of an ambition-driven education system -incidentally the loopholes in our education was also the theme of Aamir’s Taare Zameen Par and Hirani’s Munnabhai

M.B.B.S. -- with a gut-level understanding of what pains today’s average 20-something.

Aamir’s transformation into a 22-yearold collegian is so complete you end up wondering if he has been lying about being 40-plus in real life! Like most Aamir starrers, 3 Idiots too is predominantly his vehicle. Most of the funniest lines and

The two ladies are, fortunately, part of the climax where our three heroes deliver Kareena’s sister (Mona Singh)’s baby on the office table - a clear indication that even an all-boys tale has no qualms about embracing maternal responsibilities if the situation arises.

But did 3 Idiots really need a manufactured child-delivered-in-crisis climax? Did it need those endless toilet-andbum jokes? Couldn’t Boman Irani and the new actor Omi Vaidya have been delineated less hammily?

It’s not that 3 Idiots is a flawless work of art.

Film : Pyaar Impossible

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Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Uday Chopra, Dino Morea

Director: Jugal Hansraj today’s working women, their effort to balance home with work.

Sushmita shimmers, but the movie is a mess

Pair impossible? You bet! Uday Chopra as the geek in love and Priyanka Chopra as the unattainable self-declared 10-on-10 beauty, is a bit of a long shot.

But in films about the romance of the impossible, anything is possible. In the first 15 minutes of the narrative, Uday gawks, sighs and grins goofily every time Priyanka passes by on the college campus. She’s so hot she could scald the film’s frames if only the basic treatment was not so thanda

We see Priyanka on roller-skates, on stage pounding a guitar, at the cafe gabbing with the boys... everywhere except in the classroom.

So who said anything about studies?

Soon Alisha (yup, that’s Priyanka’s name) is back in India with a little daughter named Tanya who is the most annoying child actor in recent times. When Uday masquerades as her nanny, Tanya threatens, “I’ll call the cops and tell them you’re doing bad things to me.” them all on television.

Most of the narrative unfolds in Alisha and her daughter’s home where the geek, still smitten after seven years, becomes the monstrously illbehaved daughter’s nanny.

Her world in Pyaar Impossible seems strangely bereft of harassment. Her greatest stress is to find a nanny for her insufferable daughter. When that is in place, she needs to treat her suave but evil suitor, played with a likeable glint by Dino Morea, to dinner at home.

That too is taken care of by her allpurpose nanny. The dinner sequence has the potential of being a laugh riot. Instead it just stretches on like acres of unkempt grass in need of a mower.

Most of the film replicates the overstudied rhythm of a sitcom about a smart working-class babe who can’t see love staring down at her right inside her home.

Film: Dulha Mil Gaya

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Cast: Sushmita Sen, Shah Rukh Khan, Fardeen Khan, Ishita Sharma

Director: Mudassar Aziz

There is only one reason why this hideous satire gone awry can be tolerated for a bit. Sushmita Sen playing the broadly satirical and hugely selfimportant Shimmer just simmers on screen!

The world outside this quaint and over-cute domestic scenario is inhabited by corporate types pounding away millions worth of deals on their sleek computers. The geek can only be sleek when he wants. But he’s content in his placid cocoon. Who needs style when you have spectacles and braces?

Priyanka in a stunning new hair cut looks every inch her part. But would someone please explain why she needs to show her legs 24x7? Is there some kind of a hidden statement in her leggy presence?

Dazzling despite her fluctuating weight, in-sync with her character in spite of a script that doesn’t seem to know its mind, and utterly oblivious of the bustling mess that first-time director Mudassar Aziz has created, Sushmita just has so much fun with her character.

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Sadly no component in the plot supports Sushmita’s unique ability to create a woman who is simultaneously sexy and cerebral. How did Aziz think he could pass off this exotic but idiotic echo of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1969 Pyar Ka Sapna as a contemporary take on commitment-phobia?

The daughter’s lines are written to sound cool. And the seven-year-old girl mouths them as though she heard

Film: Chance Pe Dance

Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Genelia

D’Souza

Director: Ken Ghosh

At one point in this heartwarming journey into the life of a Bollywood struggler, one of the kids in the school where our hero teaches dance wonders how he manages to wear such trendy T-shirts when he lives in a car and has no money for food.

“Arrey, those are duplicates of branded T-shirts, you can get them at Rs.150 on the pavement,” retorts a know-all kid. That one fleeting moment sums up what Chance Pe Dance strives to squeeze into two hours of fluid playing-time.

It’s a ‘jingle’ out there. The soundtrack is suffused with sounds that you want to squeeze down the toilet. The single-mother as played by the excessively self-confident Priyanka seems well-equipped to cope with the quirks of the concrete jungle.