Kings & Cabbages

In the Jan 2011 Bollywood Filmfare Awards, Shahrukh Khan and Co. walked the red carpet and were handed glitzy awards in the endless panorama of celebrity self-congratulation, as Stephen Colbert once quipped. Predictably, SRK and Kajol won the Best Actor and Best Actress Awards—apparently, the afterglow of their mega-hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is as tenacious as the half life of plutonium waste. Now, normally I don’t have high expectations for the tastes of Bollywood Awards Committee—or for that matter, of the Academy Awards, where apparently the British monarchy’s lobby has locked into a comfortable cut on for royal-philic movies [Any movie on the stodgiest and most boring British monarch, revealing them to be "real" people with "real" problems beneath the capes and crowns Must. Win. An Oscar. The King's Speech, here's looking at you. And no, don't try to use my Firth-mania against me. It takes all of  Mr. Darcy's charm to rescue the man responsible for unleashing the genetic disaster known as the Windsor family in the world].

But my jaw literally dropped Bollywood gave Dabangg, Salman’s latest love-offering to his sculpted body, the Best Picture Award. This was a new low. Sure, there were some cute items about the movie. The over the top cheesiness, played just right in a few scenes like ’50s style decor channeled in a contemporary diner. Salman Khan’s look, which the intrepid stylists rescue from his usual Charlie Sheen-meets-Arnold Schwarzenegger (i.e. druggie meets steroid beefcake) into a Ray-Bans bedecked macho cop who is able to channel the actor’s real-world bad boy appeal into the Bad Guy Gone Good, thanks to the Woman He Loves.

But seriously. This is a terrible movie. The  plot has more gaps than the dress Rihanna wore to the Grammys. There is next to nothing characterization (surely a crime when you’ve hired legends like Vinod Khanna and Dimple Kapadia), and an endless sequence of action and fighting that have been lifted wholesale out of The Matrix. [Part One, because the CGI demands of Parts II and Parts III would have been above the budget of newly minted director Arbaaz Khan. And if the androgynous Keanu Reeves can actually whiz above sky scrapers, such a feat is impossible to imagine with Salman, as tightly as the man is packed with steroids]. Imitation as parody can be undeniably cool (Lady Gaga has apparently made a career out of out Madonna-ing Madonna), badly executed imitation is not. Its laughable to see him racing with outstretched arms discharging his revolvers even he evades a hail of bullets—in a rural train depot reeking with cow dung.

The directing sucks too, even though Filmfare saw fit to bestow Best Director on Arbaaz Khan. The martyr-mother is a crappy stereotype for Dimple to play—I still have fond memories of her tour-de-force as the alcoholic divorcee in Dil Chahta Hail, who becomes the muse but refuses the advances of the young artist in her building. Dabaang offers other cinematic gems: the final scene, where Salman Khan kills the villain by forcing him to choke on the exhaust pipe of a tractor. But this doesn’t even come close to the scene where he discovers the villain is responsible for the martyrdom of the martyr-mother: his eyes bulge and as the camera rapidly pans around his uber-sculpted form, his chest muscles and biceps expand like frog’s gullet and tear the shirt right off his back. I have no double that Salman Khan was responsible for this cinematic gem, referencing Arbazz Khan’s thanks to his brother’s “creative” inputs in the movie. His thought process, if I may be so bold to presume to enter the no-man’s land of his cranium, was probably like this—the hero’s so cool, he doesn’t even have to rip the shirt off his back for fan service . . . his biceps do it for him!

BUT—the songs are adorable. It’s now possible for Bollywood to turn crappy movies into hits just by commissioning good songs (often with Pakistani singers) and playing them on Zee TV a few months ahead of the release date.

Salman Khan’s gyrations smack of Elvis, the cheesiness rescued by playing it over the top. His annoyingly macho persona is softened the neon colored hearts sparkling in the shade of his sun glasses (literally). The fantasy sequence with Sonakshi Sinha, who comes off as earthy and ethereal all at once, persuades you that she could really reform the corrupt cop obsessed with his masculinity. And then there is the music itself—Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice infusing the delicacy and fervor of Sufi musicality into a very temporal song. Score!