The Hindu Business Line : Bollywood-007!

So it was Bheja Fry which proved you didn’t need stars to make money: the Rs 1 crore
producers spent gave them a return of nearly Rs 20 crore, making it the biggest hit this year.

Shubhra Gupta

It’s that time of the year again, when Bollywood’s bagmen are busy doing the maths — about 220-odd ‘A’ grade films, 15 certified hits. What does that make 2007 — good, bad, indifferent?

The ratio of hits and flops may seem skewed, but the fact is that this year for Hindi cinema has been pretty much like the previous one, and the one before that. The fact is that globally the movie business has always been crash-and-burn. The box office determines the fates of moguls and superstars like a capricious lover: always slow to bestow favours, you never know what it will like, and what it will spurn. The world over, there are always more flops than hits.

So, 15 hits make it an average year for Bollywood, business wise. But in terms of creative leaps by brave new directors, it has been a very good year. More than the big ones which made it huge, it was the constant stream of the small-on-budget-but-high-on-ideas movies that 2007 will be remembered for.

SRK rules

Let’s take a look at the big guns first. The year has ended with Shah Rukh Khan’s Om Shanti Om on the top of the totem pole. A couple of weeks into its run, the production house (SRK’s own) lost no time in claiming space in all major dailies, to tell the world that OSO is the most successful film in the history of Hindi cinema. Put it down to hyperbole. Or put it down to its lead star. Place the retro-fit, ‘I-am-the-king’ six packs of OSO alongside Chak De, India, SRK’s other film which has wowed the audiences, and the only Yashraj movie to stand out from its own clutter this year, and it’s clear that 2007 has been the best of his career.

Mani Ratnam was the first to make the hit parade, with Guru, his biopic on Dhirubhai Ambani. It was his first Hindi venture which broke through the barrier; it was the first time Abhishek Bachchan carried a movie on his shoulders; it was also the first time that Aishwarya displayed, to an extent, her mettle as an actor (her very first role was also in Mani Ratnam’s 1997 Iruvar where she showed promise, and which she squandered in a row of terrible, mindless flicks).

Comedy is the king

It was the second week of January, and Bollywood was on song. The year, from then on, was the usual patchy ride, totting up losses and gains. In strictly commercial terms, comedy was king. Again. All the laugh-a-thons got the audiences breezing in and out of theatres, and made pots of money.

David Dhawan’s Partner paired Salman and the newly-resurgent Govinda, ripped off Hollywood hit Hitch, and went to the top of the charts. First-time director and long-time TV stand-up comic artist Sajid Khan stole the storyline from Three Men and a Baby and made Heyy Babyy. So Akshay Kumar, Fardeen Khan, Riteish Deshmukh went from being boyz-to-men, via a baby, and Babyji, the ill-dressed Vidya Balan, and lots of very funny gags.

Indra Kumar returned to the movies after a sizeable gap with four feckless men, top lined by Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi, and a bunch of silly jokes in Dhamaal: he didn’t even need a heroine. And then of course, there was Priyadarshan’s Bhool Bhoolaiyan, which confirmed what we suspected all along: Akshay Kumar’s comic timing has become superb, and in some places in Bhool Bhoolaiyan a madcap medley of crazy characters and locked-rooms-in-havelis and saffron-clad ghost busters, he’s almost as good as Govinda.

Then there was Vipul Shah’s Namaste London, a revisiting of old Manoj Kumar territory, in which Akshay (yes, again) plays the patriotic ‘Punjab da puttar’, and woos the comely Katrina Kaif, straight off the London turf back to the homeland. More rom com than straight up comedy, it was Shah’s second straight hit, and the beginning of Akshay’s happy progress this year. And Anurag Bose’s Life In A Metro claimed our attention not so much for its several stories in one film (the format was familiar), but for its performances: Irrfan, Konkona, Kangana and Sharman Joshi.

Biggest let-downs

The biggest flops were the films geared to be the biggest hits, all big-budget, multi-starred extravaganzas, starting with former Karan Johar protégé Nikhil Advani’s Salaam-e-Ishq. It’s been a bad year for the biggest Bollywood studio, Yashraj. Except for Chak De, which gave Shah Rukh one of his most memorable roles, everything else sank: Siddharth Anand’s Tara Rum Pum (neither Saif nor Rani could save it), Shaad Ali’s Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (Abhishek, Bobby, Preity, Lara and London didn’t cut it), Laga Chunari Mein Daag (Rani as the golden-hearted good-time girl didn’t either), and Aaja Nachle (the still-stunning Madhuri didn’t come back with this one).

And the biggest dud of the year is undoubtedly Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya, the first movie produced by Sony Pictures. The director’s self-indulgent vision marred the debuts of promising newcomers Ranbir and Sonam, though both benefited from the enormous blaze of media attention which surrounded the run-up to the release. As well as the fallout: in showbiz, even negative publicity is good publicity.

Different cinema

What really made this year worth our while was a clutch of small movies, which celebrated the cinema of real difference, exhilarating both in terms of content and style. Debutant Sanjay Khanduri’s blackly comic caper Ek Chalis Ki Last Local, whose sad-sack hero, played by Abhay Deol, makes his appearance kicking a cola can down a deserted Mumbai station, made one sit up and take notice.

Another first-timer, Navdeep Singh gave us this year’s most exciting movie: Manorama Six Feet Under was true-blue noir, with a crackerjack story, and superb performances, again by leading man Abhay Deol, and Vinay Pathak.

Sriram Raghavan’s second Bollywood outing Johnny Gaddar was a hugely entertaining crime thriller: again, coasting on a lovely cast, and quirky characters. In all these films, the script was the star.

So it was in debutant director Sagar Bellary’s Bheja Fry, which proved you didn’t need stars to make money: the Rs 1 crore the producers spent gave them a return of nearly Rs 20 crore, a twenty-times over profit, making it the biggest hit this year. Om Shanti Om is still working to get those margins.

Today, two big movies of two of the biggest stars will vie for the top spot: Aamir Khan’s directorial debut, Taare Zameen Par, and Akshay Kumar’s out-and-out comedy Welcome. May the best man win.