When Bombay Talkies Makes You Listen

You know one of those hot summer weekends, when all you want to do is stay home with a big bowl of ice cream (ok, a family pack), lie around and watch movies NON-STOP, because you are too lazy to even change the channel!

So this was one of THOSE weekends. What started with Men in Black III in the morning, continued till late night, as I just kept watching and watching and watching. Now, MIB I has been one of my all-time favourite movies, not because I am secretly in love with Will Smith (especially in a black suit), but because of the awesome chemistry between J and K (Tommy Lee Jones) and of course the humour is one of its kind. While MIB II was a big let-down, I quite liked the third part, though it’s nowhere close to the first. This was followed by Madagascar and Madagascar: Escape to Africa. Well, you can just never get enough of “I like to move it, move it”, though move was the last thing I did! Then came Jerry Mcguire. Yes, I am slow. I need to watch some movies fifteen times (ok, seventeen) to appreciate them properly, and this one is one of THOSE movies. You.just.can’t.have.enough.of.it!

And when Dorothy tells Jerry, “Shut up! You had me at Hello”, you just want to rewind the scene and watch it all over again.

But the highlight of the weekend has to be Bombay Talkies. Four directors, four independent stories, strung together by the common theme of Mumbai, Bollywood and the common man. Take a bow, Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar. Especially Karan Johar. For someone who has made a name for wasting crores on mind-numblingly stupid movies, this was just a glimpse into his creative genius, who can weave stories even out of a dirty railway platform in Mumbai and not necessarily snow-clad mountains of Switzerland, who can tap into the complex relationship of an urban couple as opposed to half-baked college romances and who can bring out the talent in a small street urchin with dirt streaking across her face instead of dressing up star kids in designer clothes.

Add to it Rani Mukherjee’s portrayal of the hapless woman trapped in a marriage, blaming herself for everything that is wrong with it; the little girl with a voice of an angel, not shy of peddling her talent; Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s brilliant one-act show without dialogues; the cross-dressing dancing queen king performance of the little boy and of course the single-minded obsession of the UP youth from Allahabad with his signature statement, “Aap Kanpur se hain na. You won’t understand!”

Bombay Talkies lives up to its name: for a change, here is a Hindi movie that does make Bombay talk, while the audience listens, enraptured…