The Flop Pile

Indian film reviewers have begun to develop a special kind of reviewers' idiom. As they are responsible for coming up with copy for a large volume of truly atrocious films, they have to continually come up with fresh language with which to hunt their quarry. The kind of meanness that you see about once a season with Hollywood flops is more or less routine at Rediff, where the films are ranked somewhere between "Disaster" (Tango Charlie) and, at the high end "Above Average" (Lucky: No Time For Love). I seem to remember that some films used to actually be "hits" and even "super-hits" in Bollywood, but that era is either over, or Rediff reviewers are so bitter they refuse to certify "hits" out of spite.

The reviewer for a film called C U @ 9 voices her outrage openly: "Did the writer suffer from hallucinations/illusions while writing fragments that he dared call a story?" And after about 200 words of contemptuous sarcasm, she tries to muster up just a little bit of a plot summary:

But if you insist, here's the jist: Some 'steamy' scenes with Isaiah aka Romeo and Shweta aka Kim, with the latter exposing and doing a shoddy job of it. Blood dripping between frames. A display of all the tools a carpenter would ever use. Predictable sound effects. [. . .]

Blood, blood and more blood.

To top it all, a pathetically inferior attempt at explaining the waste of your three hours.

Well, so much for a plot summary.

And the reviewer for Laila -- A Mystery is so pissed she verges on losing her cool entirely:

As far as the actors in the movie are concerned, I have seen people chopping vegetables come up with more expressions than they did! Apart from dropping her clothes every 3.2 seconds and arching her eyebrows, Payal Rohtagi does nothing. Ditto Chesz Shetty.

Let's not even talk about the actors, Farid Amiri and Rohit Chopra... or the jarring music... or the pathetic editing...

In fact, the movie is really not worth writing about.

Well, that's one way to end a review!
[Here's a previous post on Rediff's Bollywood reporting]