Review: Shakalaka Boom Boom
SONG AND DUNCE
‘Amadeus for Dummies’ would have been a better title for a musical that can’t even bother to give us a couple of good tunes.
APR 8, 2007 - IMAGINE, just for a minute, that Becket hadn’t been adapted into Hindi, and that Suneel Darshan had laid hands on the property. Here’s how the film would play out: the two heroes hug and launch into a buddy-buddy number, a misunderstanding causes a rift in their friendship, they retire to their respective girlfriends and sing sad songs choreographed in the desert, they come to their senses but it’s too late because one of them dies. I mean, this is what happens on a barebones level, but there’s just so much more to the story than just the skeleton. The tissue and the muscle and the blood come from the psychological underpinnings – not just from what happens, but why. Luckily for us, Hrishikesh Mukherjee understood this, and his affecting Namak Haram reflected this understanding. And if only someone from that generation were still around to adapt Amadeus, we’d have gotten something more than just this badly acted spectacle with lots of what but very little why.
This musical – with the very musical name of Shakalaka Boom Boom – slavishly follows the story of Mozart and Salieri as filtered through the feverish imagination of playwright Peter Shaffer, except that the setting is no longer the Classical period of Western music in Europe; it’s now a New York that boogies to a bunch of utterly generic Himesh Reshammiya numbers. AJ (Bobby Deol) is the Salieri character, a hugely popular – but also mediocre – musician who burns when upstart-genius Reggie (Upen Patel) effortlessly churns out the greatest of melodies. (All this is solely at face value. There’s so little difference between AJ’s music and Reggie’s music, it’s like the creator of What is your mobile number genuflecting to the talents of the man behind You are my chicken fry.) So AJ dedicates his life to destroying Reggie, until – spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph – he gets hit on the head by a glitter ball, during a performance at Madison Square Garden, and goes deaf. I’m not making any of this up, and this outrageously funny moment results in the movie’s sole bit of entertainment. I mean, come on, going deaf thanks to a glitter ball has to rank up there with going blind by surfing for porn. Besides, I don’t see why this counts as a bad end for AJ, because now he won’t have to listen to any more of Reggie’s hits, while we in the audience have no such luck.
Darshan is one of those directors whose work you have to be very careful about panning – for, you never know, he’ll come out with something worse the next time around and make you look back fondly on the lesser atrocity that was the previous film. You thought Barsaat was bad, and he followed it up with Dosti: Friends Forever, which was worse – and, suddenly, Barsaat repositioned itself in your mind as a criminally underrated romance. You trashed Dosti, and he came out with Mere Jeevan Saathi, which made Dosti look like it came from Raj Kapoor. And so, when I say Shakalaka Boom Boom is dreadful, what I really mean is that this rating stands only until Darshan’s next outing – by which time, this would probably have become, oh, the film that at least had Anupam Kher to show us what a decent performer can do in the most ridiculous of bit-parts. Everyone else is horrible – even Kangana Ranaut, who plays one of the girlfriends. After watching her emote her guts out in Gangster and Woh Lamhe, I thought she should do something light next – but in the early romantic scenes here, she’s next to unwatchable. The only time she lets sparks fly is when she’s humiliated by AJ. He asks her to strip and then orders her to leave, as if he changed his mind about sleeping with her after seeing her naked. Her eyes well up with tears as she puts her dress back on – and you sense the hurt and the embarrassment and the effort at trying to exit the situation with a shred of dignity. Is she going to turn out to be one of those actresses who can only do heavy-duty acting?
Every once in a while, there’s a Darshan flourish that deviates from the original – I certainly do not remember a fan commenting about Salieri, “Woh kuch bolta bhi nahin, to mere andar drums bajne lagte hain� – but otherwise, this is a pretty literal copy, right down to Reggie’s illness that saddles him with the kind of consumptive cough not heard in Hindi cinema since Leela Chitnis vacated her deathbed. But by not getting deeper into the conceits of the original, Darshan trivialises AJ’s motivations, making it appear that he was jealous of Reggie’s talent and success, while what was driving him round the bend was actually the profound sense of his own mediocrity. One aspect of this trivialisation, though, does seem oddly insightful about the times we live in. In Amadeus, in the segment where Mozart stages The Marriage of Figaro, we learn that this opera flopped because the short-attention-span audience was unused to such a level of complexity. Indeed, the dilettante emperor had advised Mozart, on an earlier work, that it had “too many notes.� In the parallel sequence in Shakalaka Boom Boom, Reggie’s album bites the dust – but not because it’s too complicated. AJ attributes the failure to the lack of proper publicity, the underlying message being that with enough time on TV channels and with enough billboards on the roadsides, the album would have become a hit – work of genius or not, “too many notes� or not. And if the likes of Shakalaka Boom Boom succeed, that theory would really prove itself, wouldn’t it?
Copyright ©2007 The New Sunday Express
Surely, there ought to be better movies to watch and review than this one?
Cant help but wonder why you get delegated (or personally choose) to watch such substandard Hindi ones, when being all Tamil and all,there easily must be less painful Tamil movies to critique ?
[...] Review: Shakalaka Boom Boom [...]
I’m not making any of this up, and this outrageously funny moment results in the movie’s sole bit of entertainment.
Surely your joking! Aren’t you? It surely can’t be that worse.
Ah! Reviewing tamizh movies has started to crop up again. Probably with this “Chiththirai maasam” start reviwing tamizh movies.
Open a poll in some site and we will all vote for you and you can show that to your Ed and lure him into giving you that payable proposition…Okay?
i second padawan! we want more tamil movie reviews!
Can you please turn the full post on?
[...] reviews Shakalaka Boom Boom, an adaptation of Amadeus. AJ (Bobby Deol) is the Salieri character, a hugely popular – but also [...]
A critic’s job isn’t to just review the good movies, its also to tell us which movies to avoid. So we should be THANKING him for spending his time on such films
Also, it’s not as if I have a say in what gets released on a Friday. If it’s there, I have to review it…
Worse than BARSAAT, MJS and DOSTI?OUCH!!
[...] LINKÂ [...]
Very late at night here in New York, I thank you for such a fine and funny piece of writing. I enjoy good writing about bad movies, and I’m glad you’re here doing it while we wait for a good one.
Hi
I have to share this. I was on my way out after having watched The Namesake (second time), here in UK, and I saw this huge line and lots of people (all of them asians on observing closely). I thought, it must be for the next show of Namesake, and guess what, I see the display showing Shakalaka Boom Boom, and I looked back at the people, thinking ‘Guys, what is it that did not tell you, that you shouldnt be watching this movie? Sunil Darshan, Bobby Deol, Upen Patel and Celina Jaitley….Isnt that sufficient?’
I just dont get it…
Oh man. How did you sit through a Himesh Reshammiya movie?
Why is Cape Town masquerading as NYC in the movie!
> (All this is solely at face value.
> There’s so little difference between
> AJ’s music and Reggie’s music, it’s like
> the creator of What is your mobile
> number genuflecting to the talents of
> the man behind You are my chicken fry.)
but he must genuflect; our man Bappi manages a better fit between the gourmet metaphors and the melody than the murder by numbers executed by our man Malik
> So AJ dedicates his life to destroying
> Reggie, until – spoiler alert for the
> rest of this paragraph – he gets hit on
> the head by a glitter ball, during a
> performance at Madison Square Garden,
> and goes deaf. I’m not making any of
> this up, and this outrageously funny
> moment results in the movie’s sole bit
> of entertainment.
this may be evidence that our man Darshan had “Disco Dancer” lined up along with “Amadeus” in his aging Sumeet mixer grinder…
Himesh. Suneel Darshan. Bobby Deol.
Unending Terror.
S
“I’m not making any of this up, and this outrageously funny moment results in the movie’s sole bit of entertainment.”
too good….your reviews of Bwood are better than any movies out of Bwood.
That is one hilarious review -I am tempted to watch this just to experience the glitter ball of vengeance!
Thanks for a good laugh!
hehe..Hilarious review Barad
Going deaf with the glitter ball.. gonna watch that piece on Youtube!
So I gather you did not like the movie….LOL…Anyway, that crack at poor Leela Chitnis was totally uncalled for HAHHA Grrrrreat review..wonder if any of the geniuses behind the POS will get to read it
Namastey London, Delhii Heights, shakalaka-boom-boom - Have your employers decided to put you on a torture chamber? Something tells me you might have started dreading fridays.
But yes, the reviews are hilarious and we do look forward to these fridays.
AKshay Shah - Ouch is right. Though these films are invaluable for their point-and-make-fun aspect.
NeeliAankhen - surely nighttime NY offers better alternatives to reading a review of SLBB
VC - the theatre was crowded here too. Go figure!
Vishal - Himesh Reshammiya is possibly the least offensive aspect of SLBB.
Abzee - it was Cape Town? Actually, though, with the other things, location-truth is hardly a crime.
george - please, please do not take the name of a bonafide classic like Disco Dancer in the same breath as SLBB
Ouwa Ouwa is all I’ll say…
Suyog - add Upen and Celina to your terror list. After Red and SLBB, I think Celina has become the empress of bad cinema.
anon, Vikas, Srinivas - thanks.
Sachita - In a way, yes, Fridays have become scary, what with this one promising a Sunny Deol flick
At this rate, I think I’ll end up giving Tara Rum Pum a rave, considering the long line of duds it comes after…
[...] AJ attributes the failure [of his album] to the lack of proper publicity… with enough time on TV channels and with enough billboards on the roadsides, the album would have become a hit… And if the likes of Shakalaka Boom Boom succeed, that theory would really prove itself, wouldn’t it? [Link] [...]
The previous poster did not get the link in? Here’s Anurag Kashyap flogging himself.
http://passionforcinema.com/looking-for-excuses-for-shakalaka-fuck-fuck/.