Sunday, November 25

Goal! (Dhun Dhuna Dhun)

Dear fucking lord. I don't know what possessed me to agree to go for the bloody film, in fact I was forced into it. The tickets were bought and I was informed I was going to be watching. The fact that the sister's boyfriend who on every visit to my house prompts intense flashes of rage, requiring much self control to not injure him, was at my house for dinner did contribute to my desire to not be home. My first movie in a considerably long time, and to sum up my feelings for the complete bullcrap I sat through for over three hours, I came up with a bit of a jingle.

It's the scripting it's the acting and the camerawork is bloody poo
The editing leaves you wondering what the fuck just happened dude
The story's so clee-shay, and the footballers, oh they can't play
and oh my god John Abraham just hug your dad it's not that gay.

Granted my skill with jingles isn't extraordinary, but you get the gist. Let's break it down to some of the key elements. Doctor Bipasha Basu's primary job is to stand around in every shot holding something arbitrary, alternating with extreme close ups of her face looking distressed, or in some cases, constipated. The one time she gets to play doctor, she spends flirting with our man John, and ends his nose reconstruction with hand cream and a piece of surgical tape. Granted that's gotta be one of the best acting jobs anyone's ever had, to just stand around and do nothing, and get paid a whole bunch.
Arshad Warsi, an excellent comedian's mostly dead serious in this movie, and treats his wife like a puppy when he finds her perched on the edge of their tub crying. It turns our that she's pregnant, and has the uncanny ability of making the kid in there alternate between being eight months into development, and four months, all in a span of a week of learning that she's actually pregnant.
There's this brilliant South Indian or Bangladeshi, I can't tell which, fellow, with an amazing 'one-pack', who manages to constantly and continuously break down in tears. Especially when he got the very necessary Bollywood slap, when the only Sardar I've ever seen unable to hold his drink consoles him. This Sardar who spends the majority of the movie flirting with women suddenly acquires a wife when John ditches the team, who spills all manner of state secrets involving sacrifice, which leave the team and John largely unaffected, for that scene at least. Though Arshad bhai manages to remember the sacrifice later in the changing room, before a crucial match that the team inevitably loses..
There was also the fact that they couldn't have any fight scenes in a sporty movie such as this, so at one point, when Arshad Warsi's running after Boman Irani to get him to coach the team, they play fight music anyway, to a very odd long wide shot, largely empty, with Boman Sahib standing in the middle in a position I see most men against walls peeing in. That isn't to say Boman Irani did a bad job. He's a brilliant actor, and the scenes with him were only slightly bearable.
Not to mention the big John-Bips kiss. She gives him a cute and rather endearing peck to his lips and runs, at which point he grabs her, brings her into a stranglehold, and proceeds to indulge in what I can only describe as a devouring of her face. She keeps her eyes tightly shut and her lips puckered, and he goes to town on her lips, which is to say he sucks on them like a freaking popsicle. It was the only time I've ever seen two people kiss and be unsure of whether to turn my head and retch, or else to step in and teach them how to do it right.
Then there were the team itself. The entire team somehow, a depressing bunch at large, went from a joint hatred of the Johnman to intense love and bonding. There was also the scene where John Abraham and Arshad Warsi were on the verge of spooning, when the effects of their alcohol had managed to wear off, even though I couldn't see an IV on either of them. While the scene and dialog was one of the few (read almost only) that inspired any sense of emotional depth to the characters, it was promptly forgotten the next day, when John got picked up by a superior club, with a Porsche dangled in front of him that he only knows how to drive in a straight line, constantly increasing the volume of the radio.
Finally, the technical. This movie was bad enough for the casual movie-goer, hell I've never seen an entire cinema hall in splits from non-tapori jokes. For a media student who's shot and edited a few short films and sequences, this movie was torture. The cameraman had some strange notions, and the editor(s) had me wanting to offer to re-edit the entire film, free of charge.
All shots of someone sitting in a car had the camera locked at some weird angle where the entire front pillar and a large chunk of the windshield were also visible, leading to an under/over/under/over-water effect, there were some strange empty shots with a football in the foreground and two exhausted characters tucked away in a corner far back with a lot of rainy empty space, shaky shots, which I suppose were intended to follow the actor's steps but only yielded a sense of vertigo, and a lot of shots that were completely off focus.
Message to the director: I can even understand trying out new spot boys and focus boys for your movie, thanks for giving the next generation of camera assistants jobs man, I appreciate it already, just please make sure you reshoot the scenes where the lighting's skewered, and where they didn't quite grasp the concept of aperture when it comes to depth of field.
The editor(s) decided the film needed endless quick cuts, and when the training montage came up, they decided to put a few random man-boobs lifting (and pulling) weights in the wrong way. They also seemed to feel that the audio tracks didn't need to match the video, as when Bipasha screamed out Sun-ny, rather than run out and check on him herself, being the team doctor, I could've sworn her lips were saying Dooood-man.

I would be really pissed right now if I had paid for the ticket, and I hadn't been consoled during the interval with three hot dogs and a giant tub of popcorn with extra butter. I'm also getting a butter chicken meal at my beloved Krips tomorrow to make up for this god damn abysmal movie.

21 comments:

Unknown said...

I watched it too! Agree it isn't great but somehow all movies seem more impressive when watched in a cinema hall!

-PeAcE
--WiTh
---GuNs

wiseling said...

[It was the only time I've ever seen two people kiss and be unsure of whether to turn my head and retch, or else to step in and teach them how to do it right.] HAHAHAHA

I have to say I'm quite glad I managed to get out of this one... I played the whole "But I have a thirty hour transit in two days and who wants to sit that long" card. hahaha..

so.. how about that scrabble, champ?

AakASH!!! said...

Goal should be remarkably bad to make you update in here.

Utopia said...

okie i really wanted to watch it but now i have second thoughts i guess heheh! :)
isn't it anything like the hollywood movie "goal"? i saw the first two of the trilogy and can't wait for the third one.

Mystique said...

ish......that bad??
and i thought it was supposed to be good.....

but after all u are a media student who'll find a problem in every nuance of the movie......

hmm....the kiss. i'll have to see the movie n figure out how bad it was.....

i would comment on each part of ur post, but u don have those pop up comment forms, n i have bad short-term memory.....

but anyway, you got the popcorn, so ur ok.......

Chrisann said...

erm you should have just gone to watch beowulf like the rest of us

Anonymous said...

Wow, sounds like cinematic hell. Hope your next movie isn't so lame. :P
I agree that you should have gone to see Beowulf! :)

Keshi said...

**Dear fucking lord

LOL love the opening lines!


u reckon ur a great kisser? hmmm...I think so too. After ur kiss description is my kiss post
;-)


Keshi.

Anonymous said...

I definitely won't go anywhere near this movie now, thanks for the warning.

Anonymous said...

I haven't watched it yet but after reading this i don't think i will. Which may be a lil difficult to avoid because a friend of mine is the asst director on the film, then again watching and ripping it apart in front of her doesn't seem like an option either....
I'm going underground!

That Armchair Philosopher said...

lololol.

SO glad I didn't watch that movie; should watch beowulf sometime, as other commenters have subtly been reminding you :)

speaking of butter chicken - whats "Krips"?

That Armchair Philosopher said...

and bloody hell man, small fonts in white on black - trauma for the eyes, i tell you!!

interestingly - your blog word verification captchas are the *longest* I see on blogger :)

sample: dnuhvmmo, trudjffi

Renovatio said...

@guns
I don't know man, it was torture. If I had downloaded it and watched it, I had the option of actually closing it. Walking out of the theater was not an option. I was with a friend who had begged me to come along, and had brought two of her cousins along too.

@wiselet
You pick the time, I'll be there.

@ol' excitable
Oh come on, you update less than I do.

@utopia
Take the hollywood Goal, throw in some Bend it like Bekham, a little Chak De, some Sholay, Karan Arjun and any hindi movie you've ever seen that involved Indians living abroad, and script it very badly. You have this POS.

@mystique
Nuh-uh, the popcorn didn't make it okay. It was soggy popcorn.

@chrisann
I wasn't given the option. I would've rather just gone to Kylin or Sartoria just a few steps away, I was pretty damn hungry.

@anty
That's why I don't go to theaters to watch movies.

@keshi
I never implied I was any great shakes myself, but there's a certain decorum to be followed, such as the fact that you don't eat the other person's face on the first kiss.

@yet another
Then my work here is done.

@doppelganger
Go anyway! Pass on my offer to re-edit the whole film.

@tap
Krips is the be all and end all of butter chicken. It's tucked away in Priya, and the owner is this extremely sweet old lady who gives you the nicest smile when you walk in, and you get the feeling you're eating at your grandma's place.
Except for the fact that my living grandma's a strict vegetarian, and the other one never cooked.

I love Lucy said...

That good huh the movie is?!
And I could not stop guffawing after reading your description of the smooch scene!!! :-))

Keshi said...

hahahahaha!

My first swt-hrt almost surgically removed my lips.


Keshi.

Mihir Pathare said...

This movie was profound... profound in pretty much the same way Vastu Shastra was profound.

*Sigh... the things I go for pretty girls*

The most profound shot in the entire movie, has to be when that 8 year old girl in the pink dress breaks that coconut on the steps of the stadium when Arshad Warsi and John Abraham did the entire I love you coz we're on the same team hug.

>_<

Renovatio said...

@lucy-lover
Guffaw all you want, just don't dare to see the scene, or you'll be puking.

@keshi
At least he was careful about it... surgically...

@taurius
Shit, that coconut... damn I forgot all about it... and then the pepsi in her hand later... hahahhaha.

I love Lucy said...

Errr..watched the damn excuse of a movie today...with the husband...and got an earful from him for my "excellent" choice...
But DVD piracy man did us a favour though...smooch scene was chopped off to a mere 2 seconds!He read your review maybe :P

Renovatio said...

@lucy-lover
Don't say I didn't warn you woman.

Occasional Brilliance said...

i love the jingle u came up wid... they shd hv put tat in smwhr in d movie... wd hv made d money spent wrthwhile neway :D

freudian slip said...

thank you , the rhyme, sheer genius.