Mr White Mr Black

Starring Suniel Shetty, Ashad Warsi
Directed by Deepak Shivdasani
Rating: *

Hours before I saw white-and-all-black I asked a colleague what kind of a review she was going to give the film. “I’m not going waste any space on this one,” she retorted.

Frankly even for a diehard movie buff like yours truly sticking through this piece of risible rap (give or take a ‘c’) was an ordeal akin to a visit to the dentist.

No, I take that back. I any day prefer molar surgery to watching white black and red-faced farces.

First the positive comments.

Suniel Shetty as the boor from Hoshiarpur chasing poor Arshad Warsi all over Goa in the effort to bring him back to the village for a barren stretch of land, safeguarding a spoilt heiress from debauchery is obviously inspired by Akshay Kumar in Sabse Bada Khiladi.

Suniel does the innocent-abroad act with a warmth and compassion that this project doesn’t deserve.

The land of the bland stretches from the first frame to the last. The first-half does have a few funny moments, like Suniel’s dhoti being pulled off by a dour doggie (ha ha) and a roguish Warsi hoodwinking an innocent Goa ki gori (newcomer Rashmi Nigam) into believing his double is doing all the gadbad (Jewel Thief, anyone?).

The second half is based entirely on a series of improvised gags with the Warsi-Shetty duo trying hard to breathe life into a dead script.

Once director Shivdasani takes the characters to Goa he seems to have gone on a holiday. And he seems to have taken the scriptwriter (if he ever existed) with him. What we are left with is an amateurish clumsy parade of skits masquerading as spurts of satire.

But acute exasperation is all this furiously frigid wannbe-funny-film gets out of us. Tediously structured to echo the manipulative manoeuvres of a monstrously mediocre man of mirth who can’t tell the difference between cheers and jeers Mr White… makes you think only black thoughts about the future of comedy.

Arguably Mr White & Mr Black is the worst comedy to have come out of Mumbai’s dream factory in recent times, lower down on the scale of pale laughter than even the horrendous Rama Rama Kya Hai Drama.

It’s not the quality of performances (Shetty good, Warsi very good, and some of the supporting cast more tolerable than the material allows them to be). It isn’t even the fault of the production values (Thomas Xavier’s cinematography gets Goa going on a ’slight’-seeing spree).

Dammit, so who’s to blame for the roya-all mess of, ha ha, a comedy about a lovable charlatan who poses as a diamond robber and hotel owner and gawd-knows-what-else in this you me and ho-hum laugathon which thinks jokes about skin colour (Ashish Vidyarthi is called koyle ki khan) and humour about a dead mother (Shashikala in a guest appearance) being relived through old Hindi movies could keep the spirit of a modernday satire alive.

Sorry, Mr White and Mr Black is as amusing as a dog peeing on a kashmiri carpet.

Who just urinated on our sense of humour? Could it be the makers of this ghastly travesty of a film?

What was the gifted Sandhya Mridul thinking doing Charlie’s Angels with two chinky chicks who think flying through the air in clumsy f-x scenes is akin to touching paradise?

There are a couple debutante leading ladies hoping to become stars after this film.One of them looks like Preity Zinta on a bad-hair day and Bobby Darling on a good-hair day. And that’s a funnier joke than anything you’ll see.

Oh, I forgot. There IS actually a funny joke in this film. And it’s to do with a hugely gifted comic actor called Jameel Khan who was a laugh riot as a music-contest organizer in Manish Acharya’s Loins Of Punjab Presents.

In White Black and Purple Jameel is reduced to a un-funny non-entity. While everyone else is trying hard to be comic the film’s biggest comicd talent stands apart.

What was Jameel thinking? A a good question for everyone involved except the director.

It’s easy to see he wasn’t thinking at all.

Tashan

Starring Anil Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan
Directed by Vijay Krishna Acharya
Rating: ** ½

The threesome on the way to god-knows-where need to escape from the cops. They get into blonde wigs and tight ‘American’ costumes and turn into item dancers for a Hollywood project called Holy Widows.

Holy shit! Tashan is so full of the milk of human zaniness that you feel it may at any moment topple over under the weight of its own cleverness.

If the bizarre brew of the cunning and the cool holds togther it’s mainly because of Akshay Kumar and Kareena Kapoor who a create a kaleidoscopic chemistry of crime and no punishment.

There’s an ingrained energy in the proceedings, a ravishing rush of adrenaline and a whoosh of wunder-winks as though the man at the helm has a secret chuckle and a closet giggle underscoring every exaggerated swagger and every italicized moment in this story of four seemingly unscrupulous gold-diggers.

Three of them redeem themselves by the end of the film. As for the fourth, the villain played with feverish flatulent flamboyance by Anil Kapoor, you can’t win ‘em all.

Tashan is a winner in unexpected ways. First-time director Vijay Krishna Acharya spears the content to a dashboard that dashes all over the place.

Most of Tashan is a zany kookie ribald and riveting road movie about a naïve wannabe criminal Bachchan Pandey (Akshay Kumar), an English tutor named…er, Jimmy Cliff (Saif) trapped into a heist by a crimelord who wants to learn angrezi in haste, and an amoral pouty super-sculpted seductress Pooja (Kareena) who plays up the two men against one another and often breaks into steamy songs and provocative dances that suggest no link between the tale of the UP bhayya, angrezi masterji and the kanpuri coquette and the world that cultivates such freaked-out misfits.

Crime capers and road movies about characters who often get into outlandish costumes and foreign wigs at laconic locales have become a favourite at Yashraj.

Stories of small towners dreaming big have come and grown. Bunty Aur Babli worked. Jhoom Barabaar Jhoom did not. Tashan surreptitiously slips into the workable stratosphere, thanks to its super-motorized manoeuvres that take the plot into an area of utter originality.

Love or loath it, you’ve never seen a Hindi film like Tashan before.

Outrageous, over-the-top, opulent and audacious the debutant director turns formulistic conventions inside-out upside-down.

He pummels and tramples on the age-old material and emerges with images imprints and insignia that remind us that the global cinematic journey from Manmohan Desai and David Dhawan to Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone has come a full circle.

Tashan constructs a fool’s paradise of caper- wanderers in search of that pot of gold at the end of the studio-generated rainbow.

The splash of colours (art director Sukant Panigrahy and DOP Anaynanka Bose have as much fun with the art décor and locations as two kids doing water colour in kindergarten) and the swirl of delightfully and daring caper-adventures as the greasy characters travel across Greece and Hindustan in search of anything but peace, is quite a gravity-challenging achievement.

The actors seem to be having loads of fun. Whether we share it or not, is entirely our look-out. If the truth be told the only one who seems to catch hold of the director’s sur in totality is Akshay Kumar.

I’m not very sure why Kareena needed to re-sculpt her body to play the small-time schemer (was she playing Babli in search of a Bunty?) or the relevance of Saif Ali Khan’s dropping moustache (is he a secret member of Ming dynasty?).

In fact Saif’s relevance to the film escapes me. He rushes in as though to work over-time after Race.

He seems to have no idea of the rhythm and sur required for this extravagant take-off on Big Bad Bollywood’s meanest conventions, and his set-expressions are more annoying than illuminating.

Anil Kapoor’s Bhaiyyaji with his craving to master English is a monstrous aberration from the past. A mogambo from the stylized den in Mr India let loose in the city of the prowl to create a free-funded havoc.

Akshay steals the show in almost every frame.

Watch him in that tricky boat sequence with Kareena in Allahabad (yes we’re taken from Uttar Pradesh to Greece to Rajasthan to Leh in this jerky joyride from hear to eternity-gritty) where he gets to know she’s is his teenaged sweetheart from the town that was as frozen as the lakes of Leh and Greece.

Akshay takes this potentially trite and dangerously co-incidental sequence from level to level with a fluency that speaks volumes for his growth as an actor and his reverence for cinematic conventions.

You wish the director Vijay Krishna Acharya had shown some restrain in the action scenes.

The trouble is Tashan doesn’t know where to stop. The situations get out of hand and dialogues like chadhi-sukhana and aurat ki ganji make you wince with their wonky witticism.

You can’t blame Acharya for losing control. After a few reels of non-stop amorality the narration acquires its own volition.

It’s the madness of the moment capturing the awkward avarice of a generation that believes money makes the world go round….or is it wrong?…. that echoes the perverse passion-play of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.

Expertly assembled and skilfully knitted together the episodes hold together mainly because the warm sunshine of the outdoors complements the bronzed and over-baked ambitions of the characters.

Sometimes the stench of immorality gets overbearing. That’s when Kareena’s overpowering beauty comes in. She’s partly Meryl Streep, partly Juliette Binoche.

What the film is, becomes harder to pinpoint. Just go with the four.