Friday, May 26, 2017

Review: THODI THODI SI MANMAANIYAN


Bahut Zyaadati On Audience   

½ star

Mini Review:

Siddarth Kaul’s mum has big ambitions for her bright son, and is willing to sell ancestral property to send him to architectural college abroad. But the boy wants to be a rockstar and has a band that enters a music contest. One of the band members is a social activist, and Sid learns about his past when he stumbles upon plays written by his father. The film is so hammy, you never want to see a ‘rockstar band contest’ film theme any more.

Main Review:

When your child suddenly wants to join a rock band instead of filling forms for foreign education, what does the mother do?

Go to the female band member and tell her, ‘Stay away from my son.’

But that’s not all that is ‘been-there-done-that’ cliched, we have seen everything we see over the next two hours. With mum selling off the family mansion, it comes to the lad to take the real-estate agent (typically Punjabi caricatured: loud and annoying as real estate agents can be) to recce the old house. The boy discovers an old trunk full of his father’s theater paraphernalia including several plays as well as a child’s shoe. The shoe brings forth a barrage of memories in sepia - father, child and mother going to a mela (fairgrounds), happy slo motion of laughter, child loses shoe, father goes in search of the shoes, father does not come back.

The hero doesn’t remember who is father is, but the one girl in his band (he finds her at a street sit-in, shouting slogans with other protesters, follows her finds her singing bhajans at a devi Jagrata and asks her to be in his pop band) knows the history of the hero’s father. The father was a part of a group that did street plays, which is a method of bringing social change. The father pursues some crooked chemical factory owner heaping atrocities on the poor innocent villagers. Of course the father goes off after the owner, protests and gets killed by the factory owner. Instead of fighting to find out how her husband was murdered, the mother packs her bags and vanishes from the village, to start a new life in the city with the son, our hero.

As you sit there groaning at the mounting cliches, you also have to put up with ‘rock band contest’. There are at least five songs in the film with completely forgettable lyrics, but in the film you see crowds raising their hands and dancing to the songs as if they were watching their favorite band sings. Now think about this: the filmmakers are showing a band contest, and they must show at least bits of music from other bands. That means that the audience has to put up with more music. You are amazed at how the audience in the battle of the bands knows the music so well when it is meant to be fresh and new. You have stopped caring, but the hero begins to visit the girl’s theatre group and be impressed at how she dedicates herself to social work. And yes, there are some goons ready to disrupt everything that she does because the ‘real estate tycoon’ is getting poor people to sign off their homes. Seriously?! This ‘basti khali karva do’ (empty the slums) happened in the cinema of the 70s with young Amrish Puri playing the real estate baddie…

It’s not just the story that is terrible, but the acting that comes with such a tale. Every person in the film is ‘acting’ and it drives you to exhaustion. The girl gets shot by the goons and we wish they had sprayed a few bullets that made it out of the screen to kill you, the audience.




(this review appears on nowrunning dot com) 

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