Click to play videoCast: Sushmita Sen, Shiney Ahuja, Kim Sharma, Moushmi Chatterjee
Direction: Tanuja Chandra
Have you ever slammed your head against a wall repeatedly for three hours? I'm guessing you haven't and I wouldn't recommend that you do either.
But if you are curious to know how that might feel, then don't miss this week's new Bollywood release, director Tanuja Chandra's Zindaggi Rocks.
The film's about happy-go-lucky rockstar Sushmita Sen who finds herself falling for brooding doctor Shiney Ahuja.
Floored by Sushmita's zest for life and her eager-to-please personality, the doctor finds himself returning the sentiment although he's got a comatose wife just down the corridor.
Before long the doctor becomes the newest addition to the rockstar's retarded family which includes a bunch of loonies including her grumpy mother, her hideously overdressed aunt, a squeaky-voiced manager, an over-zealous chauffeur and a wise-ass adopted son.
Conflict arises when it's discovered that the little boy needs a heart transplant and they can't find a donor.
Even the most senseless films usually have at least something that's worth appreciating, but with my hand on my heart I can swear there is nothing in this film that deserves any special mention.
The script is the most amateurish piece of writing you're ever likely to come across. Believe me, it ought to be circulated in film schools so that students can learn how not to write scripts.
Practically every single character in the film is a stereotype, and as if that's not bad enough, the director allows her actors full liberty to ham like there's no tomorrow.
On top of all this we get dialogue that is so contrived that I'm willing to offer a cash prize to the first person who can convince me that any normal human beings ever talked remotely like these characters at any time during the last hundred years.
The movie is bad in all the usual ways, and it would be easy enough to simply list them - the overacting, the use of voice-over narration to link completely unrelated scenes, the predictable plot.
But let's take all those things for granted and move on to the truly ridiculous things in this movie. Again, we could easily make a list - the hospital Shiney works at is more like a five-star coffee shop where nurses and doctors sing and dance and watch music videos on giant plasma screens.
Everytime Sushmita strums a guitar you can make out that she never bothered to learn how to make it look convincing.
A doctor repeatedly calls up an aged heart donor to check on his health hoping he passes away urgently so his heart can help the needy boy.
And Shiney doesn't once remember his comatose wife while he's romancing his new girlfriend, but then when that's over, he walks right back, kisses her on the forehead and behaves like nothing's happened.
If you look really close, you'll realize that somewhere inside this mangled mess that is Zindaggi Rocks, there is perhaps an honest idea.
I think writer-director Tanuja Chandra was going for a heart-warming story about a lonely man whose life changes completely when he meets this spirited young woman and her eccentric but endearing family.
A woman who whizzes out of his life just as suddenly as she showed up. And how she touches his life and changes it forever, long after she's gone far, far away.
Now had the director been able to set this tone for the film, she might have ended up delivering a half-way decent film.
But problem is, she sacrifices basic logic every step of the way so scenes that are meant to look spontaneous and natural end up looking too laboured and contrived.
The final nail in the coffin comes in the form of those embarrassing performances by the film's central cast.
Kim Sharma is as dispensable to the plot as an umbrella on a bright, sunny day. She oohs and aahs and simpers and whimpers and in those few moments gives us a glimpse of her entire acting range, which to put it kindly, is nothing much to begin with.
Moushmi Chatterjee in a double role - heaven help us - is so ridiculously over the top that you cringe every time she's on screen.
You know there's a reason some of these actors are called yesteryear's stars - they're best left as memories of another day.
And any effort to change that can only result in a catastrophe as devastating as what Moushmi delivers in this film.
Now Shiney Ahuja, poor chap, looks ill at ease in this film and although he approaches his role with sincerity, he really can't do much with it, grounded as it is in fake realism.
But it's Sushmita Sen who's the film's biggest disappointment as she fails to separate the real her with the character she's meant to play.
You know what they say - the toughest kind of acting isn't the kind that requires you to perform histrionics, it's the kind that requires you to just do and say everyday things as if you're not on camera. And that's where Sushmita stumbles.
She approaches her role with that heightened sense of drama, and makes even a simple telephone conversation look like the event of the season.
As the curtains come down on this exercise in futility, it's the director who must take the fall for everything that's wrong with this enterprise.
Tanuja Chandra has proved in the past with films like Dushman and Sanghursh that she's capable of handling sensitive drama with maturity, but with Zindaggi Rocks she's gone horribly horribly wrong.
Many films are bad. But only a few show themselves up as the work of people deficient in taste, judgment, reason and common sense.
Was there nobody connected with this film who read the script, and realized what rubbish they were setting out to make?
I'm going to go with two thumbs down for Zindaggi Rocks. They couldn't even get Anu Malik to deliver a killer soundtrack for a film about a rockstar. This zindaggi doesn't rock, it shocks!
Rating: 0 / 5
(Such Trash!)
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