This year’s Diwali came with much anticipation for all of us, especially for the Wife: We were finally going to get to watch Om Shanti Om and Saawariya. The Day couldn’t come sooner. The marketers of the movie were in overdrive, advertising the movie like crazy. It was almost like they wanted everyone to go and watch the movie on the first day itself, before anyone had time to publish reviews. Now why would they do that?

Finally the Diwali day came, and we rushed through the unimportant things - like doing the pooja and bursting crackers - and drove right to the theater. And there we stood, with 300 of our fellow movie lovers (read: poor, confused souls) eagerly awaiting to see Shahrukh’s 6-pack. Three hours later, I was a changed man!

Om Shanti Om is the most confused movie of the year. It’s almost like the scriptwriters took the scripts of some 4-5 old hindi movies, stuffed them along with some crackers, burst the scripts to pieces. Then, they sent out some interns to interview buffaloes on the topic of punarjanm till they had a 2-hour long movie. And then, half-way through the movie, they lost this script, so they put a 20-minute song, which is really an attendance call of bollywood’s so-called stars, which adds absolutely nothing to the already non-existent story line. They also recorded an old woman coughing like crazy, added some bits of drums, and passed it off as the background music. But most importantly, Shahrukh Khan delivers a drunk-monkey like performance in the first half, followed by a schizophrenic-with-one-personality-angry-with-the-other performance in the second half. The only saving grace of this movie is the ending - The realization that the movie is over and you are now a free man once more is worth a lot more that the value of the ticket.

Of course, my happiness was short lived, because we went to watch Sawariya soon afterwards.

To say Saawariya is a crappy movie would not be correct. Horrendously Ridiculous comes close, but it doesn’t really capture the essence of the absurdity that this movie is. After watching this movie I felt like tying up Sanjay Leela Bansali alone in a room, forcing him to watch a cockroach chase a spider round-and-round a water fountain for 3 hours. That too in blue light. Because seriously, that’s what this entire movie is. It’s two grossly untalented kids, who probably got kicked out of college for lack of attendance and ended up on this set to spend the rest of the day. And for the love of God, I can’t figure out why the whole movie is in blue! Maybe the director was trying to get every frame half-black half-blue so that the WinZip compression would work better to save some electrons, what with all the global warming and all. That’s the best explanation I could come up with, because nothing else can explain the lack of daylight (or plain light, for that matter) in this movie.

Sawaariya is one long song with some breaks for dialog. And by dialog I mean girly giggling by the chic and some punch-me-in-the-face expressions accompanied by pig-like grunting by the hero. One wonders if all the actors are the props and the set is the real star in this movie. I came really close to concluding that the bridge-over-the-fake-river is the central star of the movie, because everyone of the other actors looks like they were made of rock. And the rocks had moss growing over them. And the rocks were painted blue.

I have only a splitting headache to show after watching these two movies. But I would recommend both movies to all of you. Sharing your suffering and pain, they say, makes the healing process faster.

[Update: Since I found out that I had paid for the movie tickets, I've started a campaign to get SLB to return my money]

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