An Unlikely Thing

A most unlikely thing for this place here in the sun that I have with my name on it is, yes, you guessed it right, a movie review. Of sorts. Laments about my life you have heard ad-nauseam. Lists of things and revelations you have seen countless times. But except for brief exceptions made for Chak De & Sivaji, movie stuff is unlikely here. You will rightly guess that I am not a big fat huge movie buff despite the fact that I moved all the way from Massachusetts to Mumbai hoping that living in Mumbai would enable me to meet and hang out with Salman Khan (of all the Khans!).

Bombay to Bangkok, I subsequently realised, is a Nagesh Kukunoor effort. I was on a flight to Delhi. A nice two hour stretch. The Air Premiere was announced in splashy ads everywhere. The Zee channels were south of the AP channel. My last exposure to a movie was also on a long flight, and that being Bhool Bhulaiya, you would think I would have been scarred for life. But somehow I plugged in (can never seem to work the head phones properly, my ears are way too small) and, seeing Shreyas Talpade running around, decided to give it a shot.

I returned the same day, and since the flight is just a tad shorter than the movie itself, again missed the very last five minutes. Yes, I watched it AGAIN on my way back. Seriously, I liked it.

Story-shory we will not worry about. Its obvious in the title. Bombay are there. Bangkok are there. People go from here to there. Some romance occurs. Some intrigue. One song-dance thing. The gangster dude is just immensely cute & hilarious, I mean, chest hair notwithstanding. His rap segments are quite interesting. The whole falling-in-love business of his is totally endearing. Shreyas Talpade (a cook-cum-hero-cum-pretend-doc) is not playing cricket or wearing loud-collared coats in this one, but he is still a spontaneous actor, too bad he has a dark Rajnikanth-ish look about him (I am assuming that that look will not work for anyone else). His self-deprecatory mental asides worked well, and I was especially impressed with his ability to say Bhatwadekar unfailingly funnily. That he should fall in love with a porcelain-skinned Thai prostitute girl was something I did not expect, having been brought up with mainstream cinema, I kept waiting for the desi heroine to appear sometime. Hero-heroine ride a scooter, and there is a trasition somewhere that I recognise. She drives the scooter. Good. He sits straight in the back initially. Their adventures take them through a day and a night. The next day, when, clearly, they are in love or something close to that, he is not sitting so straight anymore. Leaning in, the heads almost aligned. Yes, I recognise that transition. It happens. The sardarji is also quite cute, despite being enormously fat.

The movie is nice, simple, and cute. Everyone in the movie is extremely like-able, no one grates on the nerves particularly. Now that is saying a lot in this time and age, especially when one has tolerated Manini De in Krish...