Life and other weird things

Triple disasters do happen.

The day started off with two disasters, each worse than the last, in the form of two quizzes at college. Within moments of laying eyes on the question papers, I felt my mind drawing blinds on itself and quietly going into a semi hibernation mode.

To try and end the day on a happy note, plans were made to head out of campus to catch the latest Aamir Khan thriller - Ghajini. In retrospect, this was a plan roughly equal in its folly quotient to Mamata Banerjee's "plan" to get political mileage by holding the Nano hostage. In other words, Ghajini was the third disaster of the day.

There are quite a few words to describe Ghajini, and none more appropriate than the old Anglo Saxon adjective - 'Horrible'.

How a person like Aamir Khan with his acting and production prowess could agree to be part of this unadultrated mass of tripe is beyond my understanding.

Cut to the chase. Sanjay Singhania(Khan) is a man who runs an uber-successful telecom company in his spare time. What he during the rest of his waking hours is not clearly shown in the movie, but there are suggestions to indicate that he suffers from a form of mania involving an obsession of carving his body into an incredible mass of muscle, making him look more like a renaissance statue than a human being. A completely random set of coincidences and chocolaty circumstances result in Mr Eight Pack Dollar Millionaire falling in love with a melodramatic twit played by Asin (in her first, and hopefully last, Bollywood role).

The more observant among you will notice that the movie did not really make the impression on me that the producers desired.

Moving on. Another set of random incidents ensure that the aforementioned twit heroine ends up on the wrong end of a knife wielded by a tribe of villains, all of whom seemed to have escaped from The Hospital for the Steroid Enhanced. The leader of this bunch of bulges is a man who speaks in rural snarls, and who has 'badass' written all over him in each scene. This man is of interest to us, since it is he who lends his name to this....err.....film. After dispatching Singhania's girlfriend to the afterlife, the arch villain, Ghajini decides to use Singhania's head for a golf ball. The man had barely begun to get into the mood after teeing off with the Singhania skull using a rather rusted rod, when Singhania decides to take control of the plot and promptly gets 'Short Term Memory Loss', wherein he is unable to remember events for longer than 15 minutes.

Not that any of this matters, for director Murugadoss does not seem to have heard that little thing called 'logic' which helps movie plots along.

To make a molehill out of a veritable mountain, Sanjay goes out to take revenge on the reprehensible Ghajini for paying golf with his fiancees and his own heads.

The flowchart of the movie 'plot' can be summarized as :
Sanjay is beaten up by Ghajini -> Sanjay get short term memory loss-> Sanjay takes revenge on Ghajini despite his condition.
Murugadoss takes upwards of 3 hours to articulate this, what with asinine songs liberally inserted into the screenplay, and hamming heroines whose acting prowess made the hemispheres of my brain clang against each other in frustration.

The thing that completely got my goat in the film was the STML affected hero go into complete pyrotechnic mode at regular intervals, with no identifiable reason. Eek.

I tried hard to think of ONE redeeming feature of Ghajini. Unfortunately, other than the few seconds of joy in realizing that the movie had ended, every moment spent watching this bundle of cinemanure was spent in stress and agony. Stress on realizing how much better the evening could have been, and agony on watching one of my favorite stars walk deeper and deeper into a morass of bad scriptwriting. The music was average, and the camerawork - shoddy at best. Acting was not really noticed in this venture, so comments about it are irrelevant.

Well, that was the long review of Ghajini.

The short review is - 'Watch it at your own peril.'