Ram Gopal Varma ka private joke

After the rage comes laughter. I sat through Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag with growing disbelief and distaste, and when I finally reeled out of the hall, I was angry. Angry. Few films make you angry. You watch an incompetent film, you hate it, you move on. This film makes you angry. Because this — this remake or whatever of Sholay — is a monumentally idiotic insult to one of the most iconic films made in India, an insult to everyone who saw it and loved it, and to their memories. What crime can be higher than a boot stamping on your memories?

But I am not going to vent my spleen any more on this disgusting piece of film-making that, in its best moments, plays like a private joke told by a talentless drunk scratching his crotch. Because I need to move on. And the only way I can is to laugh. After the rage...

Remakes are hot in the Hindi film industry now, the camouflage facepaint that tries to hide the reality that the guys who run the business are running out of ideas. I had the good fortune to switch on the TV one night when both the Dons were on, on separate channels. I kept switching between them, and it was quite educational. The most important thing I learnt was that Kareena Kapoor is no Helen, and two hip wiggles from a fully-clothed Zeenat Aman are far sexier than Priyanka Chopra prancing in next to nothing. The rest of what went on and how the two films compared with each other is mere detail, to do with advances in cinema technology over 30 years.

No, I am not going to talk about this joke of a film. Even though just one viewing tells you that Varma understood nothing about why Sholay grabbed that special place in people’s hearts, understood nothing even though he, as he claims, saw it 35 times or more. When you replace that magnificent mountainous terrain with the seedy bylanes of a Mumbai suburb, you scale an epic down to a grimy pirated copy of a self-help book being sold by beggars at traffic lights. And when you have Jai (Raj in this film) beaten and shot dead at point blank range by the Gabbar character, you violate the memory of his mythic death in the original, while fighting off dozens of dacoits and blowing up a bridge to make sure that Veeru and Basanti escape safely. You just haven’t got it, boy, and you won’t, even if you put Sholay on a chip and implant it under your skin.

... contd.

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