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Thursday, April 25, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD JOKER
EDITOR'S PICK
`Joker`: A fun original village tale of aliens (IANS Hindi Film Review)
Rating: ***
Imagine if Shah Rukh Khan left his posh job at NASA in "Swades" and
returned to a village filled with escapees from a lunatic asylum and you have
the basic plot structure of Shirish Kunder`s "Joker", a film as crazy
in intent as its characters make the proceeedings appear to be.
The film is fun to watch when it isn`t trying to be too clever for words, or
when it isn`t tripping over with its tongue-in-cheek smart-ass humour. The
characters are uniformly self-deprecating. Some of the material connected to an
outsider helping set a scrambled village in order through mirthful masquerade
echoes Farah Khan`s "Tees Maar Khan", though this time Akshay Kumar
plays a far more `serious` character.
He doesn`t even have a romantic duet with his co-star Sonakshi!
I wonder why Akshay Kumar chose to distance himself from this film! He has done
much worse comedies in his career. Crass, loud, inane, repetitive and unfunny
ones. "Joker" is none of these. The humour is never below-the-belt.
Its big USP is its audacious originality. A village named Pagalpur that has been
wiped off the Indian map during the British Raj, a scientist-hero who is trying
to make contact with aliens, a heroine who has nothing to do except stand
attentively listening to her live-in partner`s crazy schemes to bring aliens
down to earth, and a village filled with crazy maladjusted anachronistic
oddballs for whom the clock stopped ticking 50 years ago - these populate
Kunder`s kookie kingdom.
Welcome to blunderland!
There is an arresting sense of frozen farce in the proceedings. The characters
are so silly they end up being distant avatars of the zonked-out villagers in
Farah Khan`s "Tees Maar Khan". The spoofy ambience is painted in
believable shades. The film is shot an interesting shades of iodized sepia which
creates a sense of fading flamboyance in a location where the characters have
lost their sense of time.
Beneath the veneer of joviality the film has a serious message on the
malnourished state of rural India. Politicians are shown to be so conniving and
caricatural, they seem real! Likewise the `aliens`, actually villagers dressed
in pumpkins and other fruits to attract outside attention, are so clumsy they
look more aliens than real aliens.
"Peepli Live" gone berserk, "Joker" is funnier and less
vulgar than a lot of the over-the-top situational comedies that rely on double
meanings, cleavages and gay-bashing to tease titters out of a comatose script.
Not everything in "Joker" works. Some of the material echoes the
calibrated linear movements of a televidio serial with our hero Agastya aka
Sattoo moving from one place to another with the villagers in tow.
Yet setting aside the aimlessness the film gradually builds to a moderate
momentum where we don`t need to feel cheated by a film that splits the comedy
genre wide open without fracturing the farce. The jokes hold up.
And so do some of the performances. Shreyas Talpade as a gibberish-mouthing
villager who gets all weak kneed in front of journalist Minissha Lamba, steals
every scene from Akshay Kumay whenever they are together.
Could this be the real reason why our Rowdy Kumar decided to distance himself
from this film? Like it or not "Joker" is a masterpiece compared with
Akshay Kumar Blue or Thank You.
Flawed? Yes. Seriously so, specially in its failure to pin the aliens` theme
down to a manageable streamlined structure. That apart, "Joker" is an
utterly original parable on rural development, done with lots of colour,
vibrancy, attitude, gusto and giggles.
Actors Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan, who are working together for the first time in "Thugs Of Hindostan", are among the nominees for the Best Actor - Male category at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne 2017.Read More
'Joker' trailer to release with 'Cocktail'The first trailer of Shirish Kunder's "Joker", which is reportedly Akshay Kumar's 100th film, will release along with Homi Adjania'sRead More
Promotion of Joker on the sets of Dance Ke Superkids