November 30, 2008

Two for the Money

We watched National Treasure: Book of Secrets and Bachna Ae Haseeno yesterday and both were entertaining, at least 🙂

Of course, Book of Secrets was a bit too predictable and had a bunch of large plot holes. Like the one where they are all stuck in an underground cavern and there’s water pouring in. They got to that place by figuring out that the water from a cavern above had to drain out. So they stopped the water in the cavern above, get to the one below and then when the water starts flowing again in the cavern above, discover that the water does not go anywhere in the new cavern unless a door (which is closed) is opened. So where was the water going to earlier? Confused yet? I was!

But it did have some neat historical points which had me scratching my head wondering if the facts were real or made up. It looks as if at least some of the facts were real – there were indeed three copies of the Statue of Liberty and the Resolute Desks actually exist. Of course, there are other minor items which were altered, or created out of whole cloth, to drive the story. Overall, Book of Secrets was entertaining but nothing special.

Bachna Ae Haseeno was, on the other hand, a gem because it’s an atypical Hindi/Bollywood movie. It’s a movie in three parts and the first part does seem to draw some inspiration from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge while it also makes fun of some of the items from DDLJ. But overall, the concept of the movie seems to have a marked resemblance to Autograph but unlike the usual Bollywood "adaptation", which simply copies other movies scene for scene, all the events in Bachna Ae Haseeno were totally different. So I’m left wondering if this was actually a case of coincidental resonance or if the writers for the movie did start with the core of Autograph but then went their own way.

An interesting factoid about Bachna Ae Haseeno is the title song. Like Unforgettable, where Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole collaborated across the divide of time, Bachna Ae Haseeno (the song) has Kishore Kumar posthumously collaborating with his son Sumeet Kumar. But the interesting thing about this particular song is that there’s another father-son collaboration (or pairing) at work here. The song was originally used on a movie starring Rishi Kapoor, the father of Ranbir Kapoor, the lead actor in Bachna Ae Haseeno 🙂

The story? I won’t spoil it for you. It’s worth watching the movie to enjoy the whole thing completely 😀

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