Forget me not....

Just been to see my first real Bollywood movie. It was called Ghajin, a hindi remake of a tamil remake of Memento.Ok... to get this off my chest to start with... it was pretty damn bad.

So the first 10-20 minutes of the movie were ok(ish), kind of a standard action movie, of a very impressively buff Amir Kahn kicking some guys ass, then working out who he is etc.... The movie takes the basic idea of Memento (and everything else), that the main character has no short term memory. In fact the director goes as far as to write this at the beginning of the movie just in case people can't work it out. Anyhow, the first 20 minutes is not half bad as an action remake of memento. Then the horror sets in...

Suddenly, the movie drops into a flash back of our protagonist's life before he looses his memory. In summary, he's the owner of a huge cell phone company, amazingly rich and successful. A cute girl trying to get a break in the advertising film company she works in makes up a story that the big shot guy is in love with her and they're going to get married. Her boss is amazed, gives her breaks in the hope that the big shot will raise the profile of the company. The guy, hearing that a crazy woman is claiming to be engaged to him, secretly goes to see her, pretending to be an actor (she doesn't know what the big shot looks like), he falls for her. Much hilarity in sues... He ends up going to the company christmas party (where the big shot is the guest of honour), pretending to be himself (try and keep up). Even more hilarity ensues.

Ok, so that's the flashback... except that it isn't a flashback in the sense I'm used to, it is a whole (1.5 hour) romantic comedy that is dropped into the middle of the action film. As this is Bollywood, there are several song and dance numbers, which fit in as naturally as a sumo wrestler in a nunnery.

Thankfully, half way through this there is an interval..... Then it just keeps on going, dropping back into gritty action (think John Woo with indian accents), the girl rescues a train full of abducted children, is latter hunted down and killed in front of our hero, who is lobotomised at the same time, hence the memory loss. Eventually revenge is got, with the help of a somewhat awkwardly inserted female med-student character. There are more songs, people die, people cry, eventually memory man ends up caring for small orphans (I'm actually serious).

Apart from my basic hatred of musicals, whatever language they are in, it was just a damn strange movie. Most of the dialogue was terrible, the writers took the idea of memento, simplified it lots, took out all of the confusing cut scenes and re ordering. Added lots of fights and more cute women (although being a good Indian movie no one gets kissed). My guess is that after this, a studio exec decided that there weren't enough songs, or is wasn't enough of a family movie, so dropped almost a whole other film into the middle. After all, who cares if the film is nearly 4 hours long, there's an interval....and now its a family movie, with singing and dancing, and I'm assuming a catchy soundtrack for the small children to buy (to drown out the nightmares of the scenes of the nice lady being beaten to death with a metal bar).

Damn damn strange. Not going to buy the DVD.