Sep 13, 2003 09:09 AM
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(Updated Sep 13, 2003 09:13 AM)
Found Someone (an appropriate translation of the title, and a good one at that) as we found out later after the movie proved to be only good translated words of the movie. I didn’t see the English Version (?), but we saw a kind of pirated DVD, with English Subtitles, mostly done by the madcap of the movie himself, and stays in line with movie. As we would discover later, all we ‘found’ was a splitting head-ache amongst two of us, myself included, and another in dazed wonder, wondering, why in the first place the movie was made.
Now watching a Sci-Fi can be complete fun, when you are actually watching it with bunch of Sci-Fi fans, and more so, a bunch of so called geeks and the accepted geeks – In short, our Indian Student Association decided to inaugurate the Fall session with this movie, and this Indian Student Association mostly contains (nearly 90%) people in computer science domain – Which justifies why each one of us howled whenever Preity Zinta makes a startling discovery of pressing ‘A’, then ‘B’, then ‘C’ and so on when she sees a antique computer, probably discovered much earlier than Charles Babbage even thought of it. What follows below is with due respects, our version of the understanding of the movie.
A weird scientist tries convincing his theories of alien life and more so his understanding that OM would be the word the aliens would also know. Surprisingly, his first encounter with an alien kills him, and leaves his unborn child mentally retarded, and his wife un-interested in any kind of alien interaction thereafter. As the mentally retarded madcap grows up in size, his brain refuses to grow – Only later did we realize that it was a partial-mental-retard-ness that the madcap suffers – for the madcap not only can dance well, but can sing well, write poetry, be a romanticist, a painter, and most of all be a kid at the same time. Very few directors handle children well in the movie, and sadly, the director of this movie is not amongst the few. Like in any other movie, the madcap is surrounded by a couple of over smart kids and couple of kids going over the top in their acting – not their fault – when the madcap is capable of so many things, shouldn’t the kids be capable too?
After a laborious first hour in which we had to endure literally three huge songs, each one worse than the other, we are given a first look to the alien. A fellow geek shrieked that it looked more like a pig with donkey’s ears rather than an alien, and I couldn’t help smirking and agreeing at the clever observation. However all this was far away – before that we had to endure some brilliantly scripted melodramatic predictable scenes, few of them being
A mentally retarded kid being admitted to school, a sham of a scene copied from Forrest Gump.
A melodramatic over emotional mom declaring at least twice that her laadla is nothing but a ‘masoom’, ‘bhola bhala’, ‘doosron ka bhala chahnewala’ kid.
A classic blend of predictable elements including heroine first taking a dislike to the hero, hero getting beaten, and heroine changing her mind.
A classic all time mother’s favorite scene of she coming over to the antagonists, and shouting at the top of her voice as to how good her son is and how stupid others are, complete with a ‘if normal people are abnormal, then abnormal are normal blah blah’ dialogue and finishing touch of throwing away a symbolic letter.
A scene from the Jurassic ages showing two friends who meet after a long time, standing 5 feet away, mouthing words to each other before declaring ‘arre, gale nahi lagoge!’– and then the very next scene establishing the fact solidly the son and daughter of respective friends are ‘best friends’.
Anyhow after much mush-mush, and pretty preity going ga ga over madcap, and in trying to teach him how to operate a computer which looked far easier to operate than an abacus, accidentally invokes messages from the other world. After the whole town sees the spectacle of the alien spaceship which looked more like a Grasshopper with its wings chopped, flying away, rumors spread of a alien left behind, which as explained above had to meet the madcap from the sane ones. What follows is another set of well defined formula scenes, which only the director could think of. At times bizarre, at times senseless, and at times totally incoherent, the second half makes up for whatever headache you might have best avoided in the first half. Expectedly, the expected series of scenes follow –
The alien trying curing the hero gradually
The hero now reversing all the scenes of the first half so that now he looks powerful
The heroine convincing her best friend that they are friends only, and warn him not get any premonitions
The psyched policeman making the final deluge to a family already inundated in tears by declaring - ‘Aisa pyaar maine pehle kabhi nahi dekha’ and ‘aaj bhi insaniyat aur pyaar zinda hain’ muck.
The overmelodramatichypersensitive mother finally showering her ‘maa ki mamta’ on the alien and the cliché ‘tum ne jo kiya…’ stuff
The nutcase policemen who seem to be behind the alien as if they were on the heels of Bin laden, even going to the extent of firing an entire squad at the hero, plus, blowing away a bridge for that added effect!
And the final fight between the good and evil and the eventual goodbye of the pig-faced donkey back to sky.
If this were not enough for us to handle or endure, we as always looking for alternatives to enjoy ourselves, couldn’t help enjoying the translations too. So ‘Tum kaha jaa rahe ho’ was aptly translated as ‘Where you go?’ and other wonderful sentence translations like ‘I keep this’, ‘He made me go mad’, and all. However one particular one had the whole auditorium in splits for an entire minute and its quite appropriate that it be mentioned here- ‘Haila, Haila, Chuha Jo Tune to Mar gaya mein’ was perfectly translated as ‘My God, My God, the moment you touched I passed away…’
Its pretty apparent that the movie was an desperate attempt to launch Hrithik’s career back – and papa Roshan wanted to showcase an reprise of KNPH that Hrithik can sing, dance, jump, bulge his muscles, fight, and also play a character. Sadly enough, ensuring that his son does everything, he fails to add any kind of depth to the mentally retarded character, thereby making Hrithik look a mere caricature of the character – no fault of Hrithik here, its just that his character lacked the depth. The directory tries to showcase his son’s talent so much that all the other characters either add to the scene or just stay away from drama – even the alien to the point. Sad, this movie could have been a real zinger if only a much mature script was written. Music evokes not only anger, but also a feeling of insufferable desire to tear down reels of the movie. Rekha and Preity are the best parts of the movie, for they are bearable.
In the end, is the movie watch able? Yes it is! Just make sure that you are in a huge group and remember, even with the most technological advances in earth, heaven or elsewhere, Maa Ki Mamta and Insaniyat aur Pyaar will always remain in Bollywood.
