The Tragedy That Is “New York”

I have never before seen a more mental massacre of a perfectly brilliant concept until I saw the new Bollywood film “New York”. The storyline, the message and concept was strong and arguably genius. Yes, Katrina Kaif is hot and that’s always a positive, but the script was super, super pathetic. The acting wasn’t any better – the best bit was played by the random-est of characters, whose name I have forgotten and which can surprisingly, not be found on the internet with ease. The “slow motion” technique was used way too often and slowed the movie down. Kaif’s Hindi was laughable and she smiled out of context way too much, but she sizzling-ly scwow, so she’s forgiven. That Nitin fellow, who played the lead role, is a really really lousy actor. I don’t know how he has made it big. John Abe showed glimpses of decency but was average overall.

The beauty of all this annoyance is that it’s friggin’ hilarious. Every time something dramatic happened, firstly the damn slow motion thing kicked in and secondly, the most dramatic music imaginable erupted. The expressions were hilarious and drama was often predictable. The script was “deep” at times, or tried to be deep, but most of the friggin’ actors couldn’t pull it off – Irfann was expectantly decent. There were no song/dance sequences in this film. Thankfully, right? Wrong. The film started creating excuses to play songs and the extremely “filmy” montages were way too long. And they kept bringing the same damn song back during moments of drama, much to yes, our annoyance. So anyway, I, along with my great sister, laughed a lot in this film, and admittedly, we were loud and obnoxious. But hey, we were looking of ways to derive pleasure from this movie, and there weren’t many options. My Dad, who is considerably easier to please when it comes to Bollywood, was getting annoyed by our obnoxiousness. He glared at me like he had never before, crunching his teeth until the grinding could be heard. How utterly shameless and childish behavior was this! But, we “grown ups” laughed even louder. It didn’t help our cause and thus began a weird fight – sis and I couldn’t stop laughing, and Mum and Dad couldn’t stop getting angrier. They told us that we should have walked out of the “damn theatre” if we hated it so much. But we were enjoying the annoyance way too much to leave. Parents, I tell you :).

Fine, I am not a Bollywood fan. If a Hindi movie is bad, I will kill it. But if it’s good, I will and have in the past, shown pride and honor. (Want proof? Here.) Most Bollywood-lovers enjoyed this movie, especially since it had almost been two months since the Indian Film Industry had come out with anything. It was better than the worst but lousy none the less. A waste of money? No not entirely – it was a weirdly memorable family day. Anyway here’s to more stories like this, but less scripts, acting and direction like this. Here’s to more Taare Zameen Pars and Dil Chahta Hais. Rock On – metaphorically, literally, and relational-ly.

P.S. Just for the record, I know this “review” is a couple of weeks too late. But opinion is opinion.