This has been a lukewarm year for Bollywood as far as creative flourish goes, but a great year for memes and Manoj Kumar worthy hand-on-face moments were abundant in releases, one after another. We’ve picked our favourite facepalm moments from 2016, here they are-
Croc-A-Bait: Mohenjo Daro
What Ashutosh Gowariker achieved in his legitimate masterpiece Lagaan, and the average-but-laudable Jodha Akbar, he undid with his 2016 dampener Mohenjo Daro. His attempt at bringing the Indus Valley Civilisation to life got marred by tacky computer trickery, and strange costumes and headgears. But the one to savour for years to come is the opening sequence, where Hrithik Roshan’s Sarman fights a mammoth crocodile. Despite being shot well, the croc appeared to be like a prop from Alif Laila, and it foretold what was to come in the narrative. Rakesh Roshan’s legendary croc scene from Khoon Bhari Maang has got its worthy successor in his son’s heroic scene. Let the memes begin.
Not-So-Mellow: Dangal
Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal sealed 2016 with a thumping victory; its star Aamir Khan and the lovely supporting cast deserve our kudos. What made Dangal different from other recent sports based films is that it was determined to bring the heat and dust of wrestling in Haryana alive with level-headedness, and the actors brought it with immense physicality. All was well till we’re about to hit the climax. Two back-to-back scenes provided a major facepalm all of a sudden.
Firstly, it portrayed the opponent as if she were a villain from the colonial era. Then, when the final bout begins, a stooge of Geet Phogat’s jealous coach locks up Aamir Khan’s Mahavir Phogat. A film that stayed away from melodrama for its entirety got reduced a prime time daily soap in its finale, and this attempt to make the climax grand was nothing short of disconcerting.
80’s Ka Zamana: Fan
Maneesh Sharma’s Fan had the most ingenious idea of 2016, and that was a version of Shah Rukh Khan being chased by another version of Shah Rukh Khan. As meta as it gets, for a film that had all the potential of being terrific psychological thriller, it abandoned all the possibilities that were built up beautifully in the first half. The fan’s resemblance to his idol leads to one preposterous sequence after another, almost begging the question about Aryan’s all-pervasive stardom, considering Gaurav can dupe the world so easily.
But what makes Fan a true 80’s farcical potboiler is its tendency to use those been-there-done-that tropes. In Dubrovnik, Croatia, star Aryan, fearing sabotage, puts an army of volunteers on high alert. But Gaurav manages to get through the scrutiny by using facial hair and a slightly different hairdo. By then, we stopped caring.
Twitter Fan Club: Baar Baar Dekho
Nitya Mehra’s Baar Baar Dekho may have had the dullest storytelling of 2016, but that’s not what raised our collective eyebrows. It was one specific point, when Siddharth Malhotra’s Jai Verma wakes up in the future and meets his grown up son, with a hairstyle straight out of a 90’s pop. At this juncture, a befuddled Jai asks his son about his life, and the son, visibly disinterested, tells his father that if he is actually interested in his life, he can check his Twitter feed.
Twitter? Really? The microblogging site has already invited many RIP pieces for its chances of survival in the next decade, forget 2034! But for a film in which questions like ‘What is the square root of 3,40,000?’, or multiply this number by that number, were asked to prove that Jai Verma is a genius mathematician, we just giggled and let it pass.
Sajid Khan Admirer: Befikre
The return of Aditya Chopra, the maker of the world’s longest running film, to the film fold is newsworthy. When his latest film Befikre, a kissathon plus romance in the glossy land of Paris landed in the theatres, it didn’t really meet the audience’s expectations. But this film revealed one major secret, that the scion of India’s premiere production banner is a secret admirer of Sajid Khan’s comedies.
Befikre, after much daring and bearing, reaches a pre-climax intensity to tell us how the leads have fallen for each other. However, in the climax, instead of the trademark YRF finish, Chopra settles for a toothless gag at a church, where everyone is attacking everyone else, and our hero-heroine manage to come out scot-free, just like a gag Sajid Khan would direct. Like, really?
(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise; he tweets @RanjibMazumder)
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