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The Adventures of Rakesh and Vimmi Trivedi

otherwise known as Bunty Aur Babli.

Caught a show on Sunday morning with Mons. Enjoyed every moment, really. The film walks the line between fun and outright goofy. There has been this continuous comparison with Catch Me If You Can and Bonnie and Clyde – very unwarranted, because Bunty Aur Babli is not about the mechanics of conning people or violent gunplay, it’s about, duh, Bunty AND Babli, two small-town crooks people who get a kick out of working together and have fun all the way. The dialogues are awesome, and I will say that Abhishek Bachhan and Rani Mukherjee fill out their roles with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek. The movie is chockful of references to Hindi movies, from Sholay (Bunty and Babli recreate the famous motorcycle scene) to Devdas (think candles and Aishwarya Rai )

Guest appearances by Prem Chopra, Ranjeet, Ravi Vasvani, Kiran Juneja, Puneet Issar ( trivia: What’s the significance of the last film in which Puneet Issar and Amitabh Bachhan acted together?), Rajesh Vivek and Raj Babbar.

Truth be told, I did NOT go to see it for the music, but it was just a coincidence that the songs “Dhadak Dhadak” and “Kajra Rey” were stuck in my head all of last week. Loved the way the percussion in the chorus of “Dhadak Dhadak” was synchronised to the sound of a train. “Kajra Rey” was wasted, in a way. The song is a funk-qawwali, the kind of energetic stuff that had Rishi Kapoor tearing curtains onstage and ladies clapping to the beat of glittering lightbulbs on their blouses way back in the seventies. This being the post-nineties, any song that has item-number potential has to happen in a bar with the same generic wiggling of assorted body-parts. The song had potential, man, and they screwed it up onscreen.

And yeah, as Mons pointed out, the choreography of Chupke Se had a Mani Ratnam influence lingering throughout, influenced by the collage of the songs in Dil Se.

Thankfully, the Blaaze song did not turn up anywhere, even in the end credits. Amitabh Bachhan lip-syncing to Blaaze? *Shudder*

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19 thoughts on “The Adventures of Rakesh and Vimmi Trivedi

  1. ::: What’s the significance of the last film in which Puneet Issar and Amitabh Bachhan acted together?::

    It gave Big. B a broken nose?

  2. It has Ranjeet?! Are you sure? For if it does, I MUST watch the movie.
    I mean the Ranjeet from countless B(and some A)movies, the one who slurps at the sight of pretty women.

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