From Rohit Shetty to Aanand L Rai: Directors who need to revamp themselves
From Rohit Shetty to Aanand L Rai: Directors who need to revamp themselves
After a prolonged successful innings, several of Hindi cinema’s redoubtable filmmakers have run out of steam. David Dhawan and Rohit Shetty come to mind immediately. Their output in the last two years indicates a distancing monotony. Audiences are done with their brand of laughter. It is time to do something else.
The question is, what? David’s last release Coolie No 1 on Amazon was a disaster. With a score of 1.4, David Dhawan’s shameful remake of his 1995 blockbuster Coolie No 1 became one of the lowest-rated films of all time, beating such classic duds as Sajid Khan’s rightly vilified remake of Himmatwala.
And who remakes bad films, except out-of-touch directors like Sajid Khan and David Dhawan?
Coolie No 1 went wrong on so many counts. It was a remake of his 1995 hit starring Govinda and Karisma Kapoor. The world has moved on since Coolie No 1 first staged its staggering absurdness 25 years ago. The same nonsensical drama staged for today’s audience, especially at a time when the OTT platform has opened the doors to a whole new world of cinematic entertainment, is to be caught in a time warp.
Nothing changed in the remake since Coolie No 1 in 1995 except that Varun Dhawan’s gags were longer and Sarah’s dresses were shorter than Govinda’s and Karisma’s. In fact, so awful was their attempt to fill their predecessor’s shoes that audiences now look back with affection at the old version of the story which was no great shakes either.
I remember once when I asked David Dhawan why he has continued using the same comedy formula for forty years he had said, “Look, if the car is running smoothly on the highway, why open the bonnet?”
Maybe it’s time to finally open that proverbial bonnet to check the engine.
Rohit Shetty too needs to do some serious soul-searching after Cirkus. His close friends say he has no regrets about making Cirkus and he still thinks it is one of the funniest films he has made.
I say, look beyond the cheque for a reality check. Before making the next Gol Maal film Shetty would have to understand that the brand of humour which worked ten or even five years ago, is no longer relevant. The world has moved on.
Indra Kumar who gave hits like Beta, Ishq and Dil in the 1990s realized the hard way in 2022 when Thank God crashed in spite of Ajay Devgn’s presence.
Aanand Rai a veteran of a good fifteen years in the film industry was knocked down in 2022 with Raksha Bandhan, a saga of an overworked brother toiling to get his sisters married, so obsolete we could smell the mothballs.
It’s time for the veterans to revamp themselves completely. Puri Jagannadh’s crude sexism (Liger), Madhur Bhandarkar’s over-pickled melodrama (India Lockdown), Chandrapraksh Dwivedi’s ponderous historical(Samrat Prithviraj) were all shown their place by the ruthless audience.
Veteran moviemaking Moghul J P Dutta who in the past gave us war epics and desert opuses like Ghulami, Border and Batwara says his career is on a long pause.
“Unless I know what today’s audience wants—and I admit, at the moment, I don’t—there is no point making a film. The audience that loved Border is no more.”
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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