Oh, hey. What, I actually have a blog here? I’m afraid I nearly
forget sometimes. Not for wanting to, but for the insanity of life (getting a
job [and a good one at that!], trying to graduate, working 40+ hours a week at
the newspaper, competing in National Novel Writing Month and so much more) and
the necessity of writing for the other blog weekly. Good news is, though, that
the other blog is doing amazingly well (blogging about Aishwarya Rai is
apparently the way to have a post that’s more-read than the entire, very
popular, sports section of the website).
BUT ANYWAY, I’ve had this written in pieces for at least a
month. I’ve just haven’t gotten around to the rest of posting it. Haha. But
better late than never, right? Here we go!
On goes the SRK saga, though this one predates my quest to
watch through his films. Several folks on Twitter assured me that Don
was one of the SRK films that I simply had to see. Papaya and I watched
it with one of our brothers who is now anxious — as we all are — for the
release of Don 2 at Christmastime.
I really enjoyed Don. It’s slick and cool as an action film
— I’ve called it one giant excuse for SRK to walk around being a badfanny for
two hours — while holding a smart and intellectually gripping plot at the same
time.
Genre films and particularly action-genre films are always
interesting because they come with a predefined set of tropes to work with to
please an audience’s expectations, but a really good film knows how to work
those for its advantage. (Forgive me for the theoretical framework here; I’m locked
into a semester of studying genre films where things like this come up often.) Don
understands what’s expected of it as an action film and mostly does it. There’s
sexy foreign locales (starting an ironic contrast of Paris’s underbelly and
then onto Malaysia, where of course everyone speaks Hindi), hot women (though
see note about Bebo), flashy cars (though see caveat below), spectacular stunts
(fight midair over a parachute, anyone?) and things that explode against logic
(like when a car runs into a bus). All of that plus the songs that make it
Bollywood (see: the silly Khaike Paan Banaraswala song that's hilarious but pretty much has nothing to do with anything).
