Avijit Ghosh, TNN Dec 29, 2010, 02.06am IST
Zor ka jhatka haaye zoron se laga, screamed the footstomping track from Action Replayy, among Bollywood's biggest flops of the year. Ironically, the song also typifies how the Hindi film industry felt and fared in 2010: formulas failed, stars crashed and about 90% movies perished like flies at the box-office. But as it has happened frequently over the last decade, amidst the carcasses of flops, a small bunch of movies shone like pebbles in moonlight. Some raked in the moolah, others made us think. A few managed to do both.
The smart filmmakers moved away from the worn-out feelgood urban, upper middle class tales. Small-town north India, which had vanished from the frame in 1990s after Bollywood got multiplexed and the NRIs became the preferred customers, made a thumping return. Be it Dabangg's Lalganj or Rajneeti's central Indian town, be it Peepli Live's village or Ishqiya's eastern Uttar Pradesh qasbah — Bollywood had a new visual geography on offer. Smart flicks by first-timers like Tere Bin Laden and Phas Gaye Re Obama showed a welcome awareness of global politics. Both movies worked, which showed that occasionally new and bold ideas wrapped in tight narratives clicked with the hard-to-please audience.
So did films offering a fresh, entertaining spin on stories that were hardly original. That's what worked for Dabangg and Rajneeti, two monster hits of the year. Dabangg reclaimed the forgotten world recreating the sights and sounds of mofussil eastern Uttar Pradesh.
Backed by imaginative action sequences, Salman Khan played the cheerfully amoral Chulbul Pandey with élan. That the paying public whistled and clapped at his every transgression, including misbehaving with his father, showed how the movie had adroitly mapped the changing value system of our times. Debutant director Abhinav Kashyap's movie also had Munni badnaam hui, the year's top item number (see article below), making Dabangg simply unstoppable.
The other major hinterland hit, director Prakash Jha's taut political thriller Raajneeti deftly remixed Godfather and Mahabharat in a modern setting. Ajay Devgn (overall, the year's most successful star), Nana Patekar, Manoj Bajpai — all reveled in parts tailored for them. But most importantly, the casting of Ranbir Kapoor as a phoren-returned desi Michael Corleone was the movie's masterstroke. Kapoor lured GenNow into the multiplexes. And as the box-office shows, they liked what they saw.
Peepli Live, a scathing critique of the media masquerading as a farmers' suicide yarn, both wowed the critics and wooed the audience. Backed by intensive marketing Aamir Khan style, the razor-sharp flick grossed Rs 46 crore, (source: film trade website Ibos.com). Everybody noticed the performance of Chhattisgarh actor Omkar Das Manikpuri, who soon found a job as tv reporter during the Bihar elections.
Filmmakers who looked at a topical subject with a dose of humour were rewarded. Tere Bin Laden, a cheeky, rollicking farce with strong political undertones, was the sleeper hit of 2010. The unusual title grabbed the international media's attention but the movie was genuinely zany. It was a unique Bollywood flick too, considering the entire narrative is located in Pakistan, TBL raked in Rs 12.5 crore (source: Ibos.com) in India, rather huge for a shoestring venture.
Even Phas Gaye Re Obama, an under-publicized comedy about a kidnapped NRI, also fared reasonably at the cash counters. So did Ishqiya, an adult love story set in eastern Uttar Pradesh that made clever use of titillating invectives. How many times have you seen two heroes share a girlfriend like a towel? And how many times have you seen a heroine sing Hindustani light classical before she starts hurling abuses like Chutiyam sulphate.
If these films worked due to smart and sharp execution of zara hat ke ideas, innovation was the key word for Dibakar Banerjee's Love, Sex aur Dhokha, among the first Hindi films to be shot digitally. Few Bollywood films have been as experimental in their use of cutting-edge technology and narrative device as LSD. The movie narrated three separate stories using the handheld camera almost like a voyeur. The movement is jerky, the images bleary and the sound scratchy. But the film impacts because it feels like watching real footage of real people. Made on a frugal budget of Rs 1 crore — actually more money was spent on its publicity — the movie posted Rs 8.5 crore (source: Ibos.com).
