Ra-One

We Desis don't do subtlety. It does not come naturally to us. Melodrama has always been, and will continue to be a big seller when it comes to entertaining us. Hence 'jatra'. Hence, also our enormous love for bling, be it in our clothes or our houses. Hence, also the Punjabi word 'shosha' - the meaning of which I leave you to find. Not that I am against any of the above. Oh wait, I am. That is why I feel compelled to to take some time away from sleep to write this review of Ra-One straight after returning from the late night show.

The one sentence summary - this movie sucks giant, hairy balls. Avoid. At all costs.

However, since I have subjected myself to this ordeal, I will tell you about what you should miss. This movie is about a viddy game archvillain jumping the barrier from the digital world to the real one, and the superhero doing the same to save the day. The superhero is, of course woodenly acted out by our beloved Sharook Khan. SRK delivers his best post ki-ki-ki-ki-Kiran acting here - straight from the HART - by which I mean the viddy game's Hertz Analog something Transmitter. Yes, the movie is full of such technobabble. Of course the nice thing is that it references EVERYTHING. Yeah, really everything. If, for some reason you have been completely oblivious to the movie and pop culture milieu of the last twenty or so years, fear not. Messrs. SRK and company have taken it all, shoved it into a giant blender and served you a cocktail which has the same aftereffect as a New York mugging.

The whole thing about the HART being part of the villain (Ra-One) and the hero (G-One) and has to be integral to the bloke in orde for him to be vanquished smacks of different flavours of the "shaitan ki jaan us pinjre mein band tote mein hai". Apparently the budget was 150 crore Rs. That is what - 30 million $? A lot of money. And you can tell where it has gone. A liberal application of bullet-time Matrix style shows up. As do shades of Terminator, and of course Iron Man. But the actual philosophical underpinnings - well they might have well been derived from the David Cronenberg sleeper eXistenZ, and also from the rather awful Virtuosity - where a cyber villain Russel Crowe battles Denzel Mr. Eternally Righteous Washington. All of that has been updated here, and very slickly done, all the way down to a Tron style lightcycle.

The masses have not been forgotten. The great Rajni makes a surprise appearance, and what I really liked - Munnabhai comes in - but not to peddle 'Gandhigiri'. Kareena is her usual ravishing self - and there is a song and dance routine which is almost worth sitting through. Seriously, there are very few wimmen who can look like that one in a sari. My 'watch this!' scene was when Kareena was powersliding a bloody huge Volkswagen Panzer, um.. sorry, Touareg for what seemed like 6 or 7 turns. Speaking of which, this was the first movie in which I have seen a veedub Phaeton. Methinks that most underrated of overachieving German exec saloons will now be sold in the Des.

But then again - what is completely lacking in this movie is a marginally competent storyline and good dialogue. The emoshuns are ladelled on nice and thick. And the music changes gear like a suburban mom suddenly placed in a racecar. This is supposed to cue you into the current emoshun. Bang, bang, dishum, dishum! And then, suddenly a wailing mandolin informs you that it might be time to turn on the the tears. The screen-changes and lines have all the finesse of a sledgehammer. Typical Bollywood blockbuster.

Bottom line, avoid this. Bollywood has a long way to go and shelling out money for tripe like this will only encourage them to produce more movies where everyone gets a paycheque except for the scriptwriter.

PS - the best acting, by far in this movie, and I mean by miles is by the obviously gay transit security bloke at Heathrow who almost wants to see all of Sharook's piercings. Bemused? Don't be - I am sure someone has put this scene on the web. Me-also-thinks that this is a not-so tongue in cheek reference to when the SRK was strip searched at Newark Liberty Airport. Go Jersey!

PPS - ladies, Arjum Rampal takes his shirt off. You might like that.

Battleship New Jersey

This day is propitious. Or it was, almost six hundred years ago, for the British. For on the 25th of October, 1415, in a recently ploughed, rain muddied field in an entirely undistinguished place in France called Agincourt, the English won a battle. The English monarch, Henry V's inspired leadership and exhortations aside, this battle was won by the English commoner, in the form of the most effective European artillery of the time - the longbowman. And in turn, this battle was lost by the nobility of France, their knights in armour - the very flower of French society and the natural leaders of their state. The event lives in memory through the words of the bard himself. This is where the 'Band of Brothers' speech on St. Crispin's Day comes from. But that is not why we are here. The reason for this extremely complicated start to this discussion is because this battle heralded the end of the age of chivalry and the beginning of a process which I can only describe as the democratization of war itself. Armor would not show itself to be superior on almost any European battleground for more than 500 years, when these two former enemies would join hands at a place called the Somme. But for the moment, Agincourt had shown that heavily armoured knights were easy targets against the massed firepower of poorly paid common archers.

The naval parallel is almost too easy to make. Battleships are as the armoured nobility of the high seas. When these capital ships engage, the engage as did the knights of yore. They move in close and slug it out like heavyweight boxers magnified a billionfold and encased in unbelievably thick armour. Smaller ships, like minnows, get out of the way of these orcas. The art and science of battleship warfare came to its stunning climax off the coast of Jutland in midsummer 1916 where the two greatest fleets in modern history, the British Grand Fleet and the Imperial German High Seas Fleet met, and sought to annihilate each other.

With this engagement, the day of the battleship was over. Unfortunately, no one had mentioned this to many of the naval strategists of the world powers. What few doubts remained about the obsolescence of battleships were put to rest on a Sunday in December 1941 by the Japanese. The future belonged to carriers and now, as we know it to submarines. But battleships continued to be built, if only for the remaining years of WWII. And they continued to be marginally useful as giant gun platforms, but as smaller vessels increased their firepower, even this role was usurped from them. Still, the very word "battleship" evokes a very special feeling - that of awe. With that immense scale, that terrifying firepower, battleships were the last titans of the ocean - when they fought, the heavens stood still and watched.

In the days following the debacle at Pearl, the US Navy scrambled to replace the losses it had suffered. The Iowa class of capital ships formed part of that plan. The USS New Jersey was commissioned in 1943 and saw service throughout WWII in the Pacific. Later it was decommissioned, then recommissioned in time for Vietnam, the mothballed again, then brought back - well you get the picture. Suffce to say that this was one of the longest serving battleships ever and was probably the last such vessel to sail the seas. Today it lies moored quietly off a pier on the Camden waterfront, just across the river from Philly. This was where I spent my Sunday midday with my friend Rudra - and I have a few pictures to show for it. Here goes.