Thus far my weekend has been a weird one - starting on Thursday, as all weekends should I stayed up way too late, and at around 3AM was in a bar having a conversation with a friend who was telling me about his girlfriend whom was researching cures for Cancer while we were making films. I justify the arts as this: we’re tasked with preserving, observing and creating culture.
This spun me to later thinking about Hollow Spaces, a film that’s pretty much done. What have I done? I think I have preserved culture in some respects but it’s not a pure ethnographical work. Then I got to thinking, and I’m sure a smarter person that I has said this before: the problem with ethnography is that it assumes an outsiders position, it attempts to be objective and may succeed. The only problem is the first “documentary” that went there wasn’t objective, it was a staged entertainment film, Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). Hollow Spaces is a film from the inside out, attempting to preserve a long, hot summer in which the country was in a depression. Have I made a film as nobel as say the brilliant The Exiles, which was locked in a vault and only rediscovered a few years ago? No, but I have documented time and problems, emotional tonalities that were sincere at the time, perhaps Hollow Spaces like The Exiles will look better in time, it’s why I made it. New, now and cutting age is nice, but being forgotten about is deadly.
With this said the consequence of documenting culture through an outsiders perspective, particularly through a distorted lens of history is here, in the form of Veer, a new Bollywood film I had the displeasure of seeing last night. I should note, my evening started at the opening of Lectures on the Weather: John Cage in Buffalo, and while I was fascinated by the video instillation in the corner about Cage (I knew very little about him), in practice, particularly some of the tribute pieces - well let’s call them planned chaos. I admit I don’t know the difference between good sound art and bad sound art: bad sound art to me sounds like a moron throwing everything into a blender and annoying me. But then again there are a lot of annoying things that are brilliant, Pee Wee Herman may be a good example.
So, I’m not the best person to judge this, and I can’t review this exhibition, but I walked out hungry and with a headache, which led me to the Regal Cinemas on Elmwood Ave and the worst stomachache ever (do not eat the popcorn, especially as a meal substitute).
Veer is a Bollywood film that starts off with some great special effects, it’s production values are right up there (in the beginning anyway) with the biggest budget of Hollywood and it contains a spectacular opening. Then.....shit starts to go wrong.
The film is vintage Bollywood, not the new hip hop inspired Bollywood. It’s an angry film about British imperialism, but the Brits are fucking brain-dead, which from an ethnographical point of view is where the film looses credibility. This isn’t a film that researches, critiques or examines relationships using the tools of anthropology or sociology, that’s for sure. It’s an entertainment film but the British, speaking very slowly for a Hindu audience speak lines of dialogue that are flat out acquired.
I once proposed that porno has a lot in common with traditional bollywood - they involve a story and a break in the story, in porno it’s for explicit sex, in Bollywood it’s for singing and dancing. The acting here is probably as bad as it is in porno, with music that’s awful. We actually get a song repeated several times throughout the film that opens with “every time I look in your eyes, I see my paradise” - here’s a song that lacks the complexity of Cascada, who I also consider to be unlistenable: “Cause evertime we touch, I get that feeling, and every time we kiss I swear I can fly”. Yes, it’s that bad.
Veer glorifies a serial killer who is like Robin Hood, I suppose, fighting for love and country. Veer isn’t Nelson Mandela, he’s given a love interest, well because he has to. Salman Kham is Veer, who is like Stallone crossed with Javier Bardem, and he’s a one note kind of guy - angry, even bred to be a killer. The film is very violent, surely it would be rated R had it been rated, it passed the Indian censors (I know because all Bollywood films choose to show the actual certification, like Dogma 95). Nudity doesn’t fly but cutting off a guy’s hand does. As does throwing a spike in a guy’s boots, running up and twisting his head around his body (a gruesome image).
Veer doesn’t work, and that seems to be the general conscious, does not every element of Hollywood and Bollywood, a good film make. But back to the British, I hate this movie so much I’m almost on their side: Veer is one dimensional with endless actions scenes that make Peter Jackson look concise. The British are even worse: no discussion of the economics of imperialism are made, this is dumb even by elementary school standards (where they teach that Columbus was a hero).
Anil Sharma, Veer’s director had previously directed another war film about India, Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyo (no, spell checker, that’s correct). That film, which I saw at the dearly departed Showcase Cinemas East Hartford, with good popcorn, I recall was a decent film about India and Pakistan, which ended in piece. Veer ends in betrayal and bloodshed, it’s an angry film but like a teenager it’s anger is unfocused, turning Veer in a clumsy mess, and when it gets messy it reverts to a stock song.
Veer is so bad I’ll take five Squeakquels, and as bad as the Chipetts singing Beyonces’ already awful Single Ladies is, I might even take it over the music of Veer. I have a long standing love/hate relationship with Bollywood that’s very unfair to it, I admit: I keep going, keep seeing the new Bollywood film that comes out until one sucks and it turns me off to the genre for many months. Veer, you are that movie and an early candidate for the worst film of the year, if not the 10’s.
Good popcorn can often times save a bad movie experience. So I have to wonder, Regal Elmwood Center is sort of out of the way from where I live, and I’ve seen two films there since living in Buffalo- both were awful, both times I had popcorn. Still, I don’t think National Amusements popcorn could have turned Veer into a good, worth while film.
On the flip side, if 3 Idiots is still playing in a theater near you, it’s worth checking out - a fun contemporary Bollywood flick about friendship and a different kind of imperialism, of the cultural and technological variety, but imperialism none the less. Perhaps there is a good film to be made about these things, certain the most interesting are films of the time confronting deep rooted issues, and thus is the power of film. If Bollywood is importing Hollywood formulas, then Veer is a brainless work like Ninja Assassin with paint by the numbers villains. Just listen to the way the British girls talk in “background noise” in one scene, NO NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER TALKS LIKE THAT. It reaches the level of awkwardness in another barely watchable Bollywood film No Entry, when a song about sexual penetration is sung by the women “no entry” - then the men go “yes entry”. Mother fucking creepiness.
If your going to have cultural villains in scenes taking place in London, why not take the time to actually get it right, when you’ve taken the time to craft an excellent action center piece about 20 minutes in to the film? The answer: this is careless, awful filmmaking at its worst.
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