Mother of all movies

I can't believe this is my third posting within 48 hours. A record of sorts for me.
Well this post is about the best movie I have seen in my entire life, and so it deserves more than a passing mention.

When I was a kid in college, I used to hear a lot about IMDB and the top-100 and so on. Names like 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Shawshank Redemption' used to do the rounds very often. Well, soon after I graduated and helped myself to the purchase of a TV and a DVD player, I started my own movie collection. Courtesy the bootleg DVD stores at Palika Baazar, a haven for immoral cheapskates like me. Thanks to these stores, I was finally able to see most of the so called gems like the ones mentioned above and many others.

However, I knew something big was still missing. Firstly, I still hadn't seen a movie that would make me jump out of my pants with laughter, roll on the dirty floor and beat myself senseless out of sheer delirious excitement. Secondly, all the good movies were English, and as a card carrying nationalist, it really pinched me sometimes. So all my life I waited for this one movie, a Hindi movie, 'The One' if you may. That wait was over yesterday night.

Now this movie didn't spend any money on publicity. However the sheer raw talent of this movie was so much that it gained a lot of word of mouth publicity. It was doing the rounds of bulletin boards, some of my friends who had seen it swore by it, and so many reviews raved about it that I felt like checking out what the hue and cry was all about.

So I went ahead and procured 'Gunda'. A typical low budget, made-in-two-weeks Mithun-starrer, 1 good vs 200 evil kind of movie. Five minutes into the movie I was totally hooked. Like a heroin addict who knows that its bad for him, yet he can't stop, I too was acutely conscious of the gray cells that were quietly dying, yet I couldn't look away.

In my opinion, the star of the movie is not Mithun, but the immensely talented dialogue writer. Consider the following gems:

"Mera naam hai Bulla, main karta hoon khullam-khulla".

"Bulla ka naam lekar tune mera khada kar diya hai...gusse se ek ek baal".

And one of my personal favourites:

"Ab yahan laashein (bodies) aise girengi jaise koi bachcha jab pishaab karta hai..tap tap"

The genius of the dialogues lies not in the extremely high quality but in the fact that they rhyme. 25 minutes into the movie, I noticed that not a single dialogue was out of rhyme with its predecessor. Along with the jaw-dropping background music, it almost felt like a three hour song! The extraordinary hamming effort put forward by all the 'actors' also helped the cause.

"Bulla mujhe mat maar...tujhe AIDS se bachaane ke liye main nirodh ban jaaonga"
"Towel ban kar teri kamar se lipat jaaonga".

Sheer genius!

Apart from the great Mithun-da, the movie boasts of a stellar crew like Mohan Agashe, Shakti Kapoor and the Neanderthal who played Inspector Salim in Sarfarosh. Some girl picked on the street plays Mithun-da's romantic interest.

Now, the movie's storyline is predictable yet gripping. Mithun-da works as a coolie in Ooty airport. Yes, thats right! I guess the airport administrators haven't heard about a little thing known as trolleys. Anyway, so with his high paying coolie job, Mithun-da fulfills all his simple pleasures in life like liquor every night and Maruti Esteem. Now things are going fine with him and his family, which comprises of his sister, his girlfriend, his dad and his pet monkey. Till one day he takes pangas with Bulla (the Neanderthal) and co. Like true Bengalis, they continue making noises at one another for the first twenty minutes of the film, without getting physical. However, the dialogues are poetic (as proved before) and the delivery is par-excellence. Bulla throws in a pathetic fake Punjabi accent once in a while which really spices things up.

So these two are at loggerheads, and nothing is happening. Till one day, things get slightly ugly at the sea-port. Don't ask me how a mountain town like Ooty got a sea-port. Bulla decides enough is enough and finds out that he is horny enough to rape Mithun-da's sister. So after some blouse ripping, Mithun-da's family count reduces by one, which really pisses Mithun-da off.

He proclaims that he has fixed the death dates for the five villains in advance.
The relevant dialogue containing the dates is:
"Do , chaar, chheh, aath, dus. Bus!"

This rhyme amuses Bulla so much that he goes ahead and knocks off Mithun-da's havaldaar father. This makes Mithun-da so mad that he stops fooling around with his girlfriend for a while.

"Nafrat ki aag mein jal kar main pyaar karna bhool baitha hoon".

So now Mithun-da is horny as well as pissed off. Well, so much testosterone proves too fatal for poor Bulla and his minions. The killings start and bodies begin to drop on the promised dates. Apart from Dominos, Mithun-da becomes the only other entity who delivers on time.

In the climax, Bulla (who has killed Mithun-da's girlfriend, by the way), along with an army of 2000 auto-rickshaws faces Mithun-da, who, understandably, is alone. So Mithun-da opens the trunk of his Maruti-Esteem (remember the fat coolie paycheck?). And lo and behold! Mithun-da has dozens of rocket launchers with him, the kind which would put Doom and Quake to shame.

So after some pow-wow and boom-dhoom with the rockets, the auto0rickshaws become cycle-rickshaws (consequently, this ticks off the citizens of Ooty, who are left with no transport). Seeing that Mithun-da is playing at God level with the cheats on, Bulla gives up and is swiftly killed by the God.

That, my friend is the end of the movie. Thats three hours well spent.