GHAJINI

10 reasons why Ghajini deserves to be the biggest blockbuster of Hindi cinema:

10) 177 MINUTES: That’s how long it is. So straightaway, you know you’ve got your money’s worth.

9) 200 BEEFY SOUTH INDIAN MEN: I didn’t start counting from the beginning of the film, so that’s just a conservative estimate. All of them are tall, dark, oily and unshaven, with piercing black eyes. Each one gets battered to pulp by Aamir Khan.

8) SHORT TERM MEMORY LOSS: Both the director and the editor have this peculiar ailment. Just when you think the story’s moving ahead, they go back to square one and start all over again. Take it from the top, in slow-motion.

7) THERE WILL BE BLOOD: This truly is a revolutionary film (no pun intended). There’s such breathtaking gratuitous violence, it opens your eyes to the pleasures of killing people for a sport. Never again will I baulk at the sight of blood. Move over 300 and Gladiator, Ghajini is here.

6) THE VILLAIN: That’s Ghajini. Although I still don’t know what the name means. The way Pradeep Rawat plays him, he’s the embodiment of all the B-movie villains of the 1980s and 1990s – gold chains and bracelets, kohled eyes, gnarling teeth, five ugly cronies and of course, a will to kill. But in Ghajini, he’s also the owner of a large pharmaceutical company who gets invited by medical colleges as chief guest for their annual day functions. Go figure.

5) THE MUSIC: To be fair to Oscar award-winning composer A R Rahman, I watched all the songs in fast-forward mode (ah, the pleasures of home viewing). You should try doing this. It might just fool you into thinking the film has a fluid narrative.

4) THE GUY WHO PLAYS COP: Why did they kill him so early in the film? He’s this really handsome man with a Hanuman-like pout, tight jeans that sit nicely on his stomach and stiff, toned muscles bulging out of his blue shirt. Did Aamir Khan feel threatened because he’s a foot taller than him? Or was his death imminent to the plot? Either way, they bumped him off just when I was rolling on the floor watching him chase Mr Khan to his Hiranandani flat.

3) ASIN’S ACCENT: Not since Sridevi disappeared from the screen have I seen such an authentic South Indian accent in a Hindi film. She even tries to imitate Sri’s impish laugh (remember Chandni?). Oh, and did I mention both she and Jiah Khan, the other girl with a funny accent, are half Mr Khan’s age and hence perfectly suited to play his love interest. BTW, this is probably part of the collective memory loss syndrome, but the character Mr Khan plays on screen is apparently born in 1975.

2) AAMIR KHAN’S GROWL: Actually, to give Mr Khan his due, he doesn’t hog all the growls in the film. Everyone gets his/her fair share. But he has the growling glory moment when he first takes his t-shirt off before the mirror, feels up his entire tattoo-littered eight-pack upper torso and growls, grunts and jumps around in a mad rage. I suppose looking at your own reflection can induce such extreme feelings.

1) NO THANKS TO MEMENTO: Most of all, Ghajini deserves a huge round of applause for not acknowledging Christopher Nolan’s Memento as its source material. Generally, we don’t do such things in Bollywood, because when we remake Hollywood films (or remakes of Tamil remakes of Hollywood films), as a rule, we mutilate them beyond recognition. In this case, there really wasn’t a case of copyright infringement, because hey, we merely borrowed the idea of a guy who suffers from short-term memory loss, believes he needs to kill someone to avenge his lover’s death, tattoos notes to himself all over his body and takes pictures of people to remember them.

I mean there could be hundreds of films with such a premise, couldn’t there?

Deepa Deosthalee