Happy New Year – When Writers / Directors Run out of Ideas

When singers/music directors run out of creativity they bring out remix albums. When writers /directors run out of original  ideas, the product is ‘Happy New Year’.

The movie has just the right remix to entertain the Indian audience, particularly those  who are not great fans of Holllywood movies, or so the director thinks. And the producer, as if to make a statement . – ‘Mere pass paise ki kami nahin hai’ has shown her largess in lavish sets and exotic locale. The hit jodi of SRK and Deepika are backed up by Sonu Sood and Abhisek Bachchan and seasoned actors like Boman Irani and Jackie Shroff. Then there are attempts to raise the patriotic fervor. The only ones who would be disappointed are those looking for some originality and depth.

So there are clichés and clichés – in dialogues, jokes, scenes, acting and themes. The film is a remix of Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, Step Up, Comedy Nights With Kapil, DID, SRK’s old movies and may be many more. Rather than copying one movie, it is safer to lift from a number of sources. No one can accuse you of plagiarism.

Only I wish, Farah Khan had been as adept in stealing  as her heroes in the movie, or rather avoided copying shamelessly some English movies to do justice to the main song of the movie ‘Dushman ke chhake chhuda de hum Indiawale’.

Nevertheless, the producer is laughing all the way to the bank carrying on with latest  trend in Bollywood that irrespective of the quality and originality, movies breach the 100 crore mark riding on branding and aggressive marketing.  Let us see, how long does this trend continue?