[FrassyLap]

Jodha Akbar: Lost in a Yudh-War

jodha lost in a yudh-war]
if there ever was a war fought for so many lost causes,then it would have to be this tale of the great mogul retold in the most insipid manner with as many historical fantasies as a phantasmagoric mind can conjure ,never mind its miscast ,misconceived and misdirected from the word go .akbar is mr roshan who looks like a steroid gym bunny with the squeaky voice of a mouse,who spends ihis spare time taming toothless elephants and doing some ninja routines with his shirt off in the palace courtyard a la jackie chan,his virginal wife is a rajput princess who is married against her will as a political pawn,but insists on keeping her virginity for some unexplained reasons, while singing devotional songs ,badly tuned by mr.a.r,rehman,who also is responsible for the most inept background musical score in a historical epic,it varies from screeching to plain out of tune quawallis,poor jodha [ash]is left a sulking virgin as a result of a deadly misunderstanding created by akbars protective WET NURSE,PLAYES AWFULLY BY ILA ARUN in easily the worst performance since stone age,as the bride is sent packing back home, a horde of political conspiracies are being hatched by the vamp and villain and this becomes a typical bollywood formula of boy meets girl,loses girl ,sings songs and live happily ever after,but frankly by that time i was too fed up to endure this audio-visual torture and it is a royal torture in the true sense as it is over 3 hours long ,with a mix of everything that hollywood and bollywood have made since 1940 in the name of historical epics,the script borrows shamelessly from troy to mughaleazam to meera ,except come up with some really decent dialogue or even a remotely dramatic sense of proportion,the supporting cast looks more like a motley gang of clowns from a circus then a royal court and the urdu accents are atrocious ,the queen mum is kept standing in the court while akbar and his courtiers feast seated ,and we are talking of the queen hameeda bano,who has a magnificent edifice built in her memory by her son in delhi,the factual distortion is so screwed up you cant even say they are loopholes ,in fact its a canal through which you can sail the titanic,but that shipping disaster is nothing compared to this humorless ,dry as a bone epic,devoid of any juice or spice,this is even worse the last years taj mahal and that was bad enough.this is total hokum with sets which look like colors smudged onto the screen as if the moguls,who built wonders would bear to even go near these technicolour idiosyncracies which resemble the abodes of common nautch girls then sheesh mahal ,so painstakingly constructed by the great k.asif for mughaleazam ,shame on gowarikar and everyone associated with this third rate rip off , mr .roshan take some elocution and acting lessons,for its simply not enough to just have a hunky physique to make it as a HOLLYWOOD HOPEFUL,you also need some God given talent,which both mrs bachan and mr roshan are badly in need of, but unfortunately talent does not grow on trees.

Rate: *

usman khawaja.