![]() For some reason Jordan/Janardan is arrested and imprisoned. Because that’s what you do in Prague when you see on your front lawn the man who had dinner with you in your house a couple of days ago. Her husband’s reaction is to pull a gun at Jordan/Janardan. Before leaving, he comes to say goodbye to her and because he was sneaking into her house, he sets off the burglar alarms. We never really find out what happens in Eurojam because that’s not really the point of the film, is it? The point is to get him to Prague so that he and the much-married Heer can have an affair, which they do. A record company signs him and takes him to Prague for a mysterious event called “Eurojam”. After living in a mosque for two months, he comes to the canteen manager and starts living with him. By this time, he’s figured out that he is in love with Heer however his immediate problem isn’t heartbreak but homelessness. There’s some drama when the business loses money and Janardan is kicked out of the house. Janardan comes home and gets into the family business (something to do with trucks). She has a list of things she wants to do before she gets married in two months. After the usual antagonism, the two become friends. The manager of the canteen he frequents tells him that to be a true artist, one must experience pain and heartbreak. Janardan is a college kid who wants to be the Indian Jim Morrison but he isn’t getting anywhere. It’s a tough job, not helped by the fact that aside from the task of livening up a bad script, he also has to convince us that MC Hammer’s dhoti pants and weird jackets can be a rock star’s costume. It essentially becomes a series of bucket lists punctuated by songs that Ranbir Kapoor, who plays Jordan/Janardan, tries to salvage. Instead, thanks to some spectacularly bad acting by Heer (played by debutante Nargis Fakhri) and a script that’s so half-baked that it’s like raw blood pudding, “Rockstar” begins engagingly before chucking all notions of logic, sense and causality out of the window. The most disappointing thing about “Rockstar” is that it could have been a decent film. Now, if you’re going to go around having irresponsible conversations like that under a bed sheet, while snuggling fully clothed with your loved one, you’re obviously going to get pregnant. Since this is a Bollywood film, it wasn’t a carnal moment that the audience was made privy to but a conversation, which went something like this. Possibly to tug at our heartstrings, director Imtiaz Ali shows us the moment when Heer got pregnant. You see, Heer was married to someone else when she had an affair with the ‘rockstar’, a.k.a Jordan, whose real name is Janardan. She also got pregnant and landed up with some terminal bone marrow disease, which is the Bollywood equivalent of being smote by lightning. ![]() If there was a screengrab for the reminiscing heroine, then I could have captioned it, “I had an affair with a rockstar and all I got was a lousy t-shirt.”Īctually, that’s not entirely true. At this point, she goes up to a room and starts rubbing her face in a dirty red T-shirt, which had in the past been worn by the love of her life, who is the rock star of the film’s title, when he was, apparently, sniffing her earlobe. ![]() ![]() Somewhere near the end of Imtiaz Ali’s “Rockstar” (not to be confused with “Rock Star” starring Mark Wahlberg), Heer the heroine starts feeling faint and gets that I’m-going-to-die-soon look that veteran Bollywood watchers will recognise in a jiffy. Jennifer Aniston is woefully underused in a standard-issue "good woman who stands by her man and holds on to her values" role, but it is nice to see the musicians played by real-life guitarists Zakk Wylde and Brian Vander Ark, bassist Jeff Pilson and drummer Jason Bonham.Among the many things that don't make sense are the cap and the retro drawing style. Wahlberg enjoys himself onscreen, but it is impossible not to compare this to his performance in the vastly more complex and intelligent Boogie Nights, another movie about a naive young man who is brought into a world of debauchery and corruption. The movie's biggest problem is that it cannot make up its mind whether it wants to be a satire or play it straight. Rock Star is in that last category, yet it is still has moments of guilty pleasure. There is logic, there is movie logic, and then there is the kind of "throw some big musical numbers and some good-looking stars on the screen and no one will notice that it makes no sense whatsoever" logic. This is an unimaginative rise-and-fall story that never really captures our hearts or even our attention at least that makes it easier to ignore major lapses in the story line.
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