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This has been a lukewarm year for Bollywood as far as creative flourish goes, but a great year for memes and Manoj Kumar worthy hand-on-face moments were abundant in releases, one after another. We’ve picked our favourite facepalm moments from 2016, here they are-
What Ashutosh Gowariker achieved in his legitimate masterpiece Lagaan, and the average-but-laudable Jodha Akbar, he undid with his 2016 dampener Mohenjo Daro. His attempt at bringing the Indus Valley Civilisation to life got marred by tacky computer trickery, and strange costumes and headgears. But the one to savour for years to come is the opening sequence, where Hrithik Roshan’s Sarman fights a mammoth crocodile. Despite being shot well, the croc appeared to be like a prop from Alif Laila, and it foretold what was to come in the narrative. Rakesh Roshan’s legendary croc scene from Khoon Bhari Maang has got its worthy successor in his son’s heroic scene. Let the memes begin.
Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal sealed 2016 with a thumping victory; its star Aamir Khan and the lovely supporting cast deserve our kudos. What made Dangal different from other recent sports based films is that it was determined to bring the heat and dust of wrestling in Haryana alive with level-headedness, and the actors brought it with immense physicality. All was well till we’re about to hit the climax. Two back-to-back scenes provided a major facepalm all of a sudden.
Maneesh Sharma’s Fan had the most ingenious idea of 2016, and that was a version of Shah Rukh Khan being chased by another version of Shah Rukh Khan. As meta as it gets, for a film that had all the potential of being terrific psychological thriller, it abandoned all the possibilities that were built up beautifully in the first half. The fan’s resemblance to his idol leads to one preposterous sequence after another, almost begging the question about Aryan’s all-pervasive stardom, considering Gaurav can dupe the world so easily.
Nitya Mehra’s Baar Baar Dekho may have had the dullest storytelling of 2016, but that’s not what raised our collective eyebrows. It was one specific point, when Siddharth Malhotra’s Jai Verma wakes up in the future and meets his grown up son, with a hairstyle straight out of a 90’s pop. At this juncture, a befuddled Jai asks his son about his life, and the son, visibly disinterested, tells his father that if he is actually interested in his life, he can check his Twitter feed.
The return of Aditya Chopra, the maker of the world’s longest running film, to the film fold is newsworthy. When his latest film Befikre, a kissathon plus romance in the glossy land of Paris landed in the theatres, it didn’t really meet the audience’s expectations. But this film revealed one major secret, that the scion of India’s premiere production banner is a secret admirer of Sajid Khan’s comedies.
(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise; he tweets @RanjibMazumder)
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