Dil Bole Hadippa! – A remake?

Bollywood is big, beautiful and grand. Please let it be! Indian Film making need not be outsourcing with lesser cost, cheaper actors and actresses, and unoriginal ideas. It’s an art and a business associated with that art. Please let it be!

The new Bollywood movie “Dil Bole Hadippa!” slated to release next week, 18th September, seems to be a remake of “She’s the man”. Of course, India is a Cricket crazy nation and so it only makes sense to transform the story around cricket. Sadly, the fact still remains that good actors are being exploited for bad roles and remake movies, just because producers fancy a burst of ignorant public rushing in to catch a story which they may not be aware of.

Someday I really would like to see a statistics portraying information of the number of hit remake movie to the total number of remake movies in Bollywood. There has been a “unoriginal”, hackneyed trend of remaking other language movies in Bollywood and later fishing budding actors with the lure of big money, big budgets and big production banner to act in these movies. This sad state of affairs throws light on the state of the industry itself. I do not yet believe that the industry lacks intelligent directors for there are one too many directors such as Rajat Kapoor, Farhan Akthar etc, who have given amazing original movies. It stands to show the desperation of Indian producers to make profit from every movie as though it’s biscuit pack came out fresh from a factory in Mumbai suburb with some fixed cost of manufacturing and distribution associated with it, and the producers must make a fixed amount of profit per movie.This also brings up the question, do big companies and organization have to churn profit from every movie in any way possible or should they spend a fixed amount of their money on experimenting with budding talents and original movies? The recent trend with all major production houses in India somehow falls into this horrendous formula:

1. Bollywood movies: Flick a story from any hollywood movie, preferably some romance in it, or a Tamil movie.
2. Regional language movies: Flick a story from Bollywood movies itself!
3. Change any sports to Cricket, any fight to a family melodrama, and any love to a trustworthy everlasting idealistic bond of relationship.
4. Change a background music to a foreground dance number.
5. Change the theme to Punjabi theme and make the hero to return from UK, USA, where Rishi Kapoor will be his father “surprisingly”.
6. Rope in a dummy director, budding actors and preferably the one with a recent success streak.
7. Hack the actors into every possible every TV program such as talk shows, news, stage shows, dance events, talent shows, singing contests to even controversies as these producers believe that every publicity is a good publicity.
8. Release in every damn theater by bullying it under a big production banner.

I for one, will not watch this movie in theaters as supporting such movies is just against creativity and innovative film making. Pushing the film on every media, forcing actors to appear on every TV show and finally releasing the movie in all multiplexes under Yash Raj Banner should not be the parameters influencing the success of a movie. By spending ones hard earned money and more importantly time, one will only be encouraging bad movie making and thereby resulting in more such shopworn movies, this time with a new set of budding actors praising this avaricious production house as “classic”. This fact also emphasizes the desperation of Yash Raj Films which has had a terrible year with no good movie after Chak De India!. While I would have expected the desperation to result in a more worthwhile movie to turn things around, sadly YRJ has opted the other alternative. As far as the performances in this particular movie, I expect Rani to deliver her best as it’s her big comeback and Shahid to continue his success streak after Kaminey! Although my jibe is an anguish against remaking films with no creativity, this particular movie fits the bill right with a namesake director roped in, well for namesake, along with a newbie with success streak, Shahid, and a desperate established actor looking for a grand comeback, Ms. Mukherjee. Dile Bole Originality Please!