Friday July 29, 2011

Ready- This is the first Bollywood film I have ever actually seen, if you don't count 'Slumdog Millionaire' (which I don't), so I'm gonna get real deep into this one. From one angle, I loved how stylized and fast paced some sequences are filmed with fast cuts and odd sound effects. Another thing I enjoyed was the romantic aspects, since famed actor Salman Khan and chickita, Asin have great interactions with one another. It tells a simple story of a man who doesn't want to get tied down, but then gets forced in the middle of a mob-like situation to save the girl he comes to love. The first half of the film tells of how the two (Prem and Sanjana) come to fall for one another, and the second half is about Khan being a badass and using his family to trick the mob feuding families into being better "peoples" and allowing him to marry Sanjana. I loved that it had two acts to it because it was like getting two films in one. Granted, both were comedies with over the top humor, but the first one is a love film, and the second was an action-con film. One problem with it was its jokes, which mostly relied on a fart joke, a crab on my butt joke, and people getting hit in places joke. Although there were some clever bits like the accountant who is tricked into thinking he has the ability of creating people by inventing them in his mind. Another problem I had was the fact that it built Salman Khan's character as the coolest man on earth at just about every moment in the film. There are no real feeling stakes in this movie. The entire movie is built around how great Salman Khan is. He can hold onto a tree branch over a cliff with one hand and carry the chick with his other, he can knock men around 20 feet away, and he can manipulate just about anyone into trusting him. This guy can do it all, and because of that, it kind of seems weird that all of a sudden in the first act, between a song, the guy falls for the chick while he used to be the not settle down type 3 minutes before. There really are no three dimensional characters in the film, so there is no real heart to the film. But it's all in good fun, so I enjoyed it. Especially the musical numbers, specifically one titled "Dhinka Chika". Overall, good, certainly not bad, but I hope for better next time I watch a Bollywood film.



- Jeff Bassin