Baabul

I’m extremely grateful that I saw this movie. This movie has made me fearless. In the future, if I’m ever being tortured, I can just think of this movie and whatever pain and suffering I’m going through, will surely pale in comparison to what I went through while watching this film !

This is an unmitigated, unadulterated disaster ! Its an impostor of a movie – even movies like Golmaal, Apna Sapna were better as at least they didn’t pretend to be something they are not…at least they gave you a few laughs…This one rides on the coat-tails of Baghbaan (I haven’t seen it but my wife and parents have and they assure me that it’s a ‘beautiful’ movie and not my type), tries to be another tearjerker but falls flat on its face – the only tears you get are due to your own pain / irritation / suffering….

The movie itself suffers from a fractured plot, completely disjointed direction, contrived situations, fake emotions, about 20 (at least they seemed that many) forced songs which had no rhyme nor reason (pun intended), artificial 'hindi movie' dialogues, a Niagara of glycerine, a plethora of characters whom we don’t get to know at all and its all as predictable as the curves of Aishwarya and Bipasha in their bikini’s in D2 (its these visuals that gave me strength during my suffering !)

We already know from the promo’s and interviews that this movie is about widowhood - hardly a new topic and there is nothing new in the treatment / plot either. Amitabh and Hema Malini are the in-laws, Salman is the son (he shares a 'very close' relationship with the father so they call each other 'Buddy' at least 50 times to establish this fact ! Extremely irritating !), Rani is the ‘bahu’….you’ll be effortlessly able to piece the rest of the film together ! This is Rani Mukherjee’s second crack at being a widow – while in ‘Hum Tum’, everything was so natural, the story was so realistic, we understood what Rani felt / what she was going through and why, here we have mannequins and completely unfathomable events / character behaviour…

The only silver lining I could find was a beautiful song (Kehta hai Baabul) sung by the Big B himself (even the music is apparently composed by him - however the audio CD version is sung by Jagjit Singh) – it features through the movie as background music and also along with the credits, which only doubled the reason to reach the end quicker.

Avoid this one like the plague – the most entertainment we got were from the comments of 2 student groups sitting around us….I’ve never seen a full movie hall empty as fast as it did when this one ended. Maybe they could use this for fire drill training !