Thoda Tum Badlo Thoda
Hum Movie Review :
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| Director
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Ishmayeel Shroff
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| Starring
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Arya Babbar, Shriya Saran,
Shoma Anand, Asok Saraf, Kiran Karmarkar,
Nishigandha Wag |
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What's with these south
Indian remakes? After "Tujhe Meri Kasam" and
"Khushi", this is the third remake where boy
and girl seem to hate each other till the eleventh hour.
Till then we suffer
their puerile, juvenile bitching and bickering played
out at an ear-shattering octave.
Like all remakes this
one too suffers from a congenital cultural disorder.
The outwardly hip MTV-inspired
youngsters on the college campus seem to think in Telugu
and speak in a Hindi that looks so outdated as sambar-vada
at McDonalds.
The words like 'ulanghan'
and 'aakarshan' are so Sanskritised you wonder if the
film is trying some inverse snobbery.
But no such luck. The
makers of this curious 'idli-chola' lack the basic street
wisdom to do anything that goes beyond the requirements
of the Tom-Jerry love story.
Raju (Arya Babbar) and
Rani (newcomer Shriya Saran) sneer at each other, show
a metaphorical finger at one another and throw insults
like "I hope you acquire a terminal illness that
would make you incapacitated for life."
Nicely brought up kids,
no? This is the death wish that Raja begs of god during
a visit to the temple.
Much later, he runs
back to ask a saffron-clad man. "Can I reverse
my death wish?"
But who's listening to these juvenile pleas in this
godforsaken land of puerile prayers rendered by infantile
players?
The piercingly staccato
dialogues convey the corny cockiness of youngsters reared
in the backrooms of a bordello.
Though the film largely
steers away from verbal vulgarity it does unleash a
sterile kind of vulgar fun-fest where everyone either
whoops or wails without rhyme or reason.
The item song by Shweta
Menon is so ill-placed you wonder if the editor was
on an extended leave. At the end of it Menon is taken
away to a mental asylum.
In the second-half,
the Tom and Jerry love affair moves to scenic Kodaikanal
where we witness a tragic subplot about a star-crossed
couple Diana and Robert/Roberts - opinion on the guy's
name is divided since he's addressed both ways. The
subplot is so sterile and played out so indifferently
that it makes us think kindly about the lovebirds at
the helm.
At least they look alive.
Arya Babbar brings a
bumbling uncertainty to his reckless character. From
the dusty
campus goon in Mudda
to the well-dressed dude parading around in suspiciously
neat (studio-compound) streets of this film is a long
journey to make.
Newcomer Shriya Saran
reminds us of Genelia d'Souza in "Tujhe Meri Kasam".
But that could be because the ambience and the lovers'
squabbles are near- identical.
Director Ishmayeel Shroff's
sensitive hands from his early films "Thodisi Bewafaai"
and "Ahista Ahista" are nowhere evident in
this stiff mechanical and over-blown remake.
Though parts of the
music score (Amar Mohile) are interesting, the sounds
are too adaptive to register. The same goes for the
'humorous' subplot about a bunch of collegians and their
bizarre pranks on their various landlords.
These 'jokes' occupy
about 30 percent of the playing time. The rest of the
film is an unintended joke that makes you splutter and
choke.
Strangely the
director displays a penchant for spreading smoke gas
in the tranquil mountains of Kodaikanal.
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