Movie Preview: Cheeni Kum & Jhoom Barabar Jhoom

Over the past couple of years, I've kind of slowly withdrawn my name from the Amitabh Bachchan fan club. AB version 2.0 is an interesting phenomenon no doubt, but there's only so much of the Angry Distinguished Old Gentleman that a body can take before the fidgets set in.

The problem with AB as a "character actor" (I usually disagree with that term but in the present instance, it serves to distinguish him from the main lead) is that the man has an image that towers above just about every single actor with whom he shares screen space. It's not just that he can act; it's also the fact that our image of him will forever be that of "hero". Thus every time he steps on screen, he's working two jobs: actor and idol.

So when he cornered the market for older characters after that disastrous pre-KBC stretch of bad, bad, bad movies (what was that thing with Manisha Koirala?), the reinvention was interesting to say the least, given that mainstream Bollywood, like mainstream cinema everywhere, is all about youth culture. In our movies, old folks are primarily authority figures who require flouting, reverence or, occasionally, killing. But here's AB, the biggest anti-authority figure ever in the history of Indian cinema, the good guy, our pal - you've got him in your movie; now what are you going to do with him?

For the most part, directors pumped his eyes full of glycerine and told him to cry. The point of the entire exercise was to get his name on the marquee. Period. Even in that limited space, they couldn't help but make his role a bit more meaty than would have been the case if, say, they'd roped in Anupam Kher for the same part. A few people tried to do something different: there was Aks, crushed under its expectations; Aankhen, which was pretty decent; and of course, Black.

In fact, he was about the only thing apart from the set design that I liked in Black. He was occasionally over the top in the first half but I think that was an artistic decision on the part of the director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, whose almost unhealthy obsession with melodrama is fairly evident in his previous work.

Then came the Ram Gopal Verma stretch and frankly I wasn't impressed. Sarkar was a good thought that never completed itself. Nishabd collapsed under the AB image. And this Sholay remake that's in the works sounds so extremely gimmicky that a mere look at its poster has put me off.

For a while there he was in every single movie made by Bollywood. Maybe that's not factually correct but it definitely felt like that to me. He played father, cop, mentor... anything and everything a man his age could play, he played.

You couldn't even get away from him off-screen: I recognize the media's role in the whole over-exposure debate but that doesn't make me look at him any more fondly. The wedding of his son and its attendant brouhaha was only the latest example. And seriously, after that ill-fated brush with the Congress party in the 1980s which haunts him to this day, you'd think he'd learned enough to keep out of politics. But no, here comes the Samajwadi Party. Weren't the Gandhis just like family too?

In spite of all this, here are two of his forthcoming movies that I plan to watch:

Cheeni Kum costars my favorite underused actor, Tabu. Zohra Sehgal plays chef Big B's mom and Paresh Rawal is Tabu's dad. The story is a June-December romance and unlike other efforts I can think of (Guddi and Lucky for example) the trailer suggests something different (in other words "hatke ke"? Heh!). The woman here is not an ingénue struck by the glamor of an older, more experienced man - they're two adults who're attracted to each other but need to negotiate a gap of 30 years to make it work. Best of all? Music by Ilayaraja!

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, on the other hand, is a movie that could be about anything at all. I sincerely hope it isn't. Yashraj has already tried that out with Ta Ra Rum Pum and just watching that trailer pissed me off. This, however, is a movie by Shaad Ali, whose last movie, Saathiya, was a remake of a Mani Ratnam film. If he sticks to that sensibility then this should be great! Starring son Abhishek, Priety Zinta, Bobby Deol and the immensely likable yet consistently miscast Lara Dutta, it seems to be some sort of Indo-Pak immigrant/class mishmash of a comedy that might have something to do with a dance competition. Bachchan dresses up like a pirate crossed with Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson at a Renaissance Fair and actually pulls it off. Coolness. I love a masala movie that isn't apologetic about its masalapan.