He's back! But is he better?

It is a thankless job to do a remake. No matter how much effort you put in it, everyone cosily makes the blanket judgement, “the original was far better”. So when happening director Farhan Akhtar decided to remake the 1978 cult classic “Don”, he should have seen it coming. The original, which starred India’s greatest star of all time, Amitabh Bacchhan, was an epoch making film of its day. Replacing him with today’s reigning king, Shah Rukh Khan, was a great first step. The rest… well, here it is.
Don is a much feared and ruthless, well, don, running a huge crime outfit and has been eluding police capture for a very, very long time. After many desperate attempts, Inspector D’Silva (Boman Irani) manages to get Don grievously injured, but decides against telling the world about it. Why? Because he happens to find an innocent village bloke named Vijay who happens to be Don’s spitting image. With all the right training, D’Silva transforms Vijay and sends him out as a mole to infiltrate the organization. But when D’Silva dies himself, carrying the secret to his grave, what’s gonna happen to Vijay aka Don, who both the police and members of his own outfit are after?
The good things first. As would have been expected, the look and feel of the film is an absolute stunner – its surprising how Indian films have reached near Hollywood quality on the production values on a fraction of the budget ($8 million). Gone are the disco beats, the bell bottom pants, and the long sideburns – the new Don, a pretty convincing Shah Rukh, with his designer glasses and leather outfits packs quite a punch. The music is very deliciously techno, and even though I’ve heard many dissenting voices, I felt the techno versions of the classic songs “Yeh Mera Dil” and “Khaike Paan Banaraswala” was arresting. And of course, Don’s women/ mistresses Kareena Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra couldn’t have been more ravishing.
So where does it falter? The script man! Farhan Akhtar seems to have faced the same problem that Bryan Singer was plagued with in this year’s “Superman Returns” – they were both so overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the project that these otherwise-fabulous directors let their grips slip. “Don” seems to be such a fanboy tribute, that’s its difficult to see it as a serious work of cinema. Farhan (son of Javed Akhtar, who wrote the original) tries to put in so many twists of his own, that many glaring plotholes are visible. And a running time close to 3 hours, things get so tedious at certain points that you begin to wonder whether it really is a thriller you are watching. Shah Rukh does a neat job on the whole, but really, can anyone possibly beat the charisma of Bacchhan? (He’s probably the only star in the world who is having 2 of his films remade while he’s still at the top of his game). It’s also painful to see such great veteran talent like Om Puri getting wasted in a menial role. Let’s hope Farhan goes back to making those small, thoughtful films like his unforgettable “Dil Chahta Hai” again, and leave the big budget stuff to someone else.
Critics have been unkind towards this remake, but then again, aren’t all remakes uniformly squashed? Don is definitely not a great remake, but it’s good to know that an entire new generation of Indians has been re-introduced to this iconic character, and quite appropriately on the Diwali / Eid festive season. I, for one, definitely felt goosebumps erupt when I heard Shah Rukh Khan repeat that oh-so-famous monologue, “Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai” (“It is not just difficult to catch Don, it is nigh impossible”). Ah well, Farhan is a gifted filmmaker, he’ll get another chance to silence his critics… but you still regret on what could have been.

Animation’s “Golden Quartet”

On the eve of the DVD release of The Little Mermaid in a few days time, I have been doing some thinking and decided that I had to make this post.
So what are the greatest animation films of all time? If you go by the critics’ point of view, the early Disney movies would make the cut – Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, Jungle Book… I have watched all these movies in my childhood and I really did enjoy them back then. When I watch them now, however, I noticed how incredibly juvenile they are. It’s not surprising really, because in those days, animation was primarily aimed at very young children, unlike today’s movies which include pop culture references with every scene. So for its day, those classics do deserve their praise, considering how they fought against the odds of limited technology and gave out stuff of that quality.
However, I’m coming back to the same question. If those movies are not on my books as the greatest animation films, then what are?
Disney was in deep trouble in the 70s and early 80s as it did not have any hit for a long time. It was then that Disney execs decided to do some major shuffling, and take up a radical new formula. They wanted something fresh, something that would forever take away that “kiddy” tag away from animation films. Their big gamble paid off in the end. Out came what I would call Animation’s Golden Quartet – 1989’s The Little Mermaid, 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, 1992’s Aladdin, and finally 1994’s The Lion King.
So what made them so different?
Disney decided that they had enough with sugarcoating movies. No more “Ha Ha He He” slapstick comedy that bored parents who chaperoned their children. So for the first time ever, Disney’s animated films began to include intelligent writing and witty dialogues that endeared themselves to all age groups. The heroes/ heroines weren’t stuck in the medieval age – they were contemporary, everyday characters that you were likely to meet, and hence could connect well to. Ariel was a feisty young teenager who was too brave for her own good, Belle was an independent-thinking woman who knew what she wanted. Finally, here were animated characters that spoke like real people. Robin William’s wise-cracking Genie in Aladdin, or the Jamaican crab Sebastian was such a leap forward in story writing, that it surprised an audience which were used to squeaky clean one dimensional characters.
One of the biggest reasons why the Quartet will always be among my all-time faves is because they incorporated seemingly divergent worlds into one unit – the traditional hand-drawn animation (with those oh-so-cute expressive eyes) with the age old tradition of good storytelling through music and songs, and adding them with lines which were genuinely funny and spoke down to the today’s age (the same quality as today’s Pixar movies).
Emotion was such a strong factor in the Quartet. There are scenes which give you goospimples on goospimples, like Simba’s tragic loss of his father, or that scene were he innocently asks Mufasa about “the stars in the sky”. It touched you right where it mattered the most – in the heart. We were genuinely hurt when Ariel loses her voice, or felt our mouth crack into a triumphant smile when Simba takes his rightful place back on the throne. Even live actors couldn’t be more expressive that those hand created works of art. Even after all these years (I’m 21), I’m still moved every time I watch it.
And to add to this colour of emotions was the most integral part of the Golden Quartet – Songs. With Howard Ashman, Tim Rice, Elton John, Alan Menken, Hans Zimmer doing the honours, what could you expect? Some truly wonderful pieces of music, Oscar-winning masterpieces that you just couldn’t stop humming. They pushed the story forward, and in fact you wonder how else the message could have been conveyed if it wasn’t for the songs. “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” in the Lion King was simply romance deified, and probably the best marketing pieces I ever heard was Sebastian in his Caribbean voice pushing the virtues of the sea in “Under the Sea”.
Things went pretty bad for Disney from then on, though. After a big shuffle at the company, its following movies (Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame) were cold and without a soul, and not surprisingly did very badly. Disney per se has not had an animated hit since 1994, with such poor movies like Chicken Little and Dinosaur.
Luckily, they came into a strategic partnership with Pixar who have made some truly remarkable computer animated films from Toy Story to Cars. While Disney/Pixar films are technically brilliant, no doubt, they are on the whole fun films to have a good time – but try as it may, they do not touch the heart or cause the hair on your hands to stand up. The music has been reduced to an also-ran (quite unlike the triumphant Zimmer score), and while things do appear more realistic, they fail to move you. Perhaps in the 21st century, emotion is considered to be too “sappy”. Whatever. At least Pixar is keeping the Disney family tradition alive, we must be thankful for that. Other studios, on the other hand, have reduced the genre to a South Park meets Tom and Jerry cartoon, by including references to Britney Spears or Paris Hilton to keep the adults happy. How long it has been since 1994 indeed.
Sadly, we have left those golden days of animation far behind us and it is unlikely that we would ever see such breathtaking masterpieces from the Disney stable again. Even though none of the Golden Quartet figure in the IMDb 250, who the hell cares? They will always be considered by me, and probably many others, as the ultimate in quality animation.