Goal....my ass

I know i don't like to watch hindi movies and resist with all my will power any circumstance that would force me to do so, but then exam time is the rarest of rare cases. The pull towards everything but text books,like the PC or a novel or the comfortable looking bed or the adorable kittens in the next building, is almost impossible to fight. I mean dash it i say, its a scandal all right, but i end up watching some infernally ridiculous and stoopid movies during these days.

So I happened to watch 'Goal' the other day. Yea the same film for the premier of which our worldly wise Bipasha Basu wanted to get none other than the godly Christiano Ronaldo himself. Well i am so so glad he could not or did not attend the said premier. I know that escaping shame owing to ignorance of the discerning individual is but small consolation, but consolation it is nevertheless.
And consolation is the first thing that I searched in vain after having seen this movie. That it took me many days of excusing myself, blaming the occurance of the event on all sorts of circumstances however remote they may be, is a different story in itself, and beyond the purview of this essay.

To get down to describing the story itself, I confess i am rather impatient with all supposedly inspirational depictions of the 'country men rising above their mental devils and overcoming the oppressing racists with their own weapons in their own backyards' unless it is our beloved Gandhiji fighting the cause in Africa. I also tend to dismiss rather quickly the whole idea of being obsessed with our individuality, our tradiitons, our culture once in the foreign land. And even if I usually tolerate and understand that, these impositions on 2nd generation immigrants (or those are technically borne and brought up in foreign lands) by their worthy families is taking the matter a bit too far.

What i mean to say is I completely fail to understand the Indian diaspora restricting their accented, westernised wards to Indian brides and Indian festivals and the Indian way of life in general.Well anyways we are digressing from the point.

The movie is not at all about the aforementioned complaint, at least not in any major way.
The Movie is about Racism which is the one thing thoroughly conspicuous by its absence. For a plot that has its roots in racism and more or less tells the story of a bunch of oppressed individuals rising above it, there are precious few instances of the act itself in the movie.

Agreed that the fallen-from-grace to-be-coach of the team does run off in mortal fear of certain soccer hooligans who threaten to destroy not only himself but his family too, but even that incident is played out only in a short flashback without leaving any great impressions about the racist nature of the attack that happens on him.

The Plot revolves around a nondescript club patronised by the South Asian Community of London. The said club having once boasted of achieving the pinnacle of success and glory is now infested by a bunch of sorry, discouraged soccer enthusiasts from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and such like who strive to keep some semblance of soccer alive at the club. The gist of the story is that they are in a fight to review their clubs fortunes and name and more importantly to save it from being taken over by the civic authorities to be used for some commercially fruitful projects. Rather a regular plot, and nothing original or exciting about it except for the change of setting. The story is rather reminiscent of 'Chak De' and is similar in many aspects, including a coach who has been living on the fringes of existence and makes an inspirational return to take his former team to glory. Then the regular see-saw of failures, and betrayals, and long speeches follow finally leading up to sweet victory.

Nothing out of the ordinary except for the phenomenal blunders that this film makes in almost all departments.
The dialogs are the worst insults to our sensibilities . The actors are grossly drab and listless, Boman Irani fails to inspire any respect, Arshad Varsi is permanently under-utilised, Bipasha Basu has the world's most horrible dialogs, and the drool inspiring John Abraham !...., the less said the better, he is excruciatingly boring...that should suffice for him me thinks.

I mean...c'mmon! for the sake of crying out loud... there is acting talent in Arshad Varsi, and there is experience in Boman Irani that could have been put to much better use. While Varsi only almost makes u laugh, when you are so pleading for at least that much respite from a man who was such a Riot in Munnabhai, Boman Irani only has a ranting hopeless character role. Again the horrible dialogs let him down for sure, but the role just doesnt suit him. I mean these Denzel Washington type roles can be done better by only one person in the world and that is ...Denzel Washington himself. Even Sharukh Khan is only a mere sheep before the power of Washington's performances.
Irani is given no persona, he does not have a domineering character, and he does not have a commanding voice. He's almost always a unshaven raving 'almost-hero' with blood-shot eyes and the most humdrum of speeches.
All John Abraham does throughout the film is smile his stupid lop-sided grin so trying to emulate the Harrison Ford that he is not, apart from thundering some powerful volleys into the back of the goal. The one and only scene wherein he ever shows any emotion at all is when he flails his arms in indignant consternation at his father who does not see him being the Indian that he wants him to be. That scene also happens to have the best dialog. Apart from that he is simply the poster boy who is just that, a poster boy, un-exciting and inconsequential. His role is certainly significant but his presence howls mediocrity and boredom.
I had heard a lot about the waves that the busty Bips was making in filmdom but this was my first experience of seeing her in a film. And it is so terrible an experience that i don't want to ever see any film that has even an inch of her person in it. As if to add to her sham of a performance she happens to have landed the most sexist ( like a good friend of mine pointed out) and slutty dialogs.
She hovers around John Abraham in particularly and the team in general trying to act as angelic as possible while her whole bearing cries out just the opposite. I mean she is so wrong in an innocent , girl-next-door kind of character.

If i remember correctly there were also a few songs in between, but its taking such an effort to recollect anything worth remembering in that movie that i am going to let that be.... and not tax my memory too much about it. A NOTE however, the Goal anthem is very catchy and nicely made.
The movie is so horrible, and people are being so shamelessly blatant in praising it that I am rather depressed more than anything else.

Its a third rate movie with a lot of side roles and a lot of worthless crap all throughout. Heaven save us if John's wish of making a sequel comes true. He says he had great fun playing football. For God's sake, please save us the torture simply to accomodate his hobby. They play football everyday in the ground besides my house. Just send him here.

Survival of the fittest...or the best endowed-part I

Life has been particularly kind and generous to me. Or so I’ve been thinking, post a recent conversation with my younger sibling, As he narrated the ridiculous stories of his ‘groups’ vandalisms and anti-social operations, quite invariably targeting some poor weakling and making his or her life a string of abject embarrassing events. While such situations can be dismissed as a cruel hand of fate and laughed over 10 years down the line, how does one go about forgetting the trauma when it has been plotted, not by fate directly but by immediate society itself? Perhaps the only part fate ever played in such suffering is to gift the said individual with a improbable name, or a hopelessly incurable constitution, or a downright unfortunate visage.

It has been said often that to be borne in an unfortunate body, family, caste, neighborhood, is a crime that the unaware infant commits before he ever even learns to breathe. It is the ‘Original Sin’. And as heinous as original sins go he/she is to be punished and punished again for it for most of his life. Their is no penance, and there is no retribution, unless the unfortunate soul changes his situation completely, renounces everything he has ever known and settles down again in the world as a total stranger, completely wiping away his past so that no boisterous fellow employee can ever remember at that blasted corporate party that you vet your pants in your kindergarten, or that you had a father who wore transparent bollywoodesque apparel to PTA meets, or exclaims loudly how wonderfully trim you look especially after the grotesquely fat school days, so that you bury those inhuman cat-calls that colorfully described your weird surname, or your not so generous complexion.

Pondering upon the millions of insults that I had myself heaped upon society around me during my childhood days, I can’t help but heave quite a prolonged sigh of relief that, though not having Greek-god looks, or Nobel prise winning brains, or a James Bond like persona, I was still lucky enough to be nondescript enough to escape that torture and yet well endowed enough to throw the same all around me.

I suppose that qualifies me as quite a bully. Though the western representation of a ‘Bully’ will unfairly exaggerate my ‘behavior’, I am sure I was as much a bully as you get in cultured, ol’ India. Recently while watching a random movie called ‘the bench warmers’ basically about these so called oppressed people get back at the bullies that have haunted them since school days, helped by a former bully himself who regrets having spoilt quite a few childhoods during his school days.

So my brother proudly narrates how just last evening they conspired to displace a romancing couple that had had the audacity to occupy their favorite hangout place. They Decide to play the local variant of ‘hide & seek’. The farcical seeker is chosen. And the hiders all dash off to their hiding places, those that inexplicably revolve around the hapless couple. They hide besides the bench and behind it, they crawl around the bench and under it, all 12 rascals of them, abusing each other and catcalling with meaningful gusto. To take on 12 roguish vagabonds obviously being physically impossible and ungentle manly the guy meekly suggests that they go somewhere else. Well the battle is won. They follow the victory with raucous cries off ‘ ha ha bhaag gaye, bhag gaye’, the couple being well within earshot.

What cruel hand of fate twists and warps such young minds into marching into such criminal endeavours? What else but a blatant disregard of any form of manners, culture, respect whatsoever.