POPULAR: Harshali Malhotra is the talk of the town for her performance as a mute girl in Bajrangi Bhaijaan.
Bajrangi Bhaijaan, as most industry watchers had expected, is a blockbuster and might even be the biggest hit of Salman Khan. But unlike a normal Salman movie, this one actually has not just the superstar being talked about.
There are two others stars in the movie. One is Nawazuddin Siddiqui, whose performance as a Pakistani television journalist has come in for rave reviews. And anyone who went to the theatre to watch the movie couldn’t but be a little surprised at the murmurs and spontaneous clappings of audience when Nawazuddin came on screen. For a man who looks nothing like the traditional handsome actor in Bollywood, Nawazuddin’s is a story of perseverance and raw talent.
The other star of Bajrangi Bhaijaan is Harshaali Malhotra, who plays the little Pakistani girl who gets lost in India. Just seven years old, she has bowled everyone over by her screen presence and getting perfectly into character as a girl who cannot talk. Now, with the movie becoming such a huge hit, she has suddenly been thrust into stardom. Harshaali’s mother revealed in a news report recently how carefully they were managing her career.
As it turns out, while Harshaali owes her present stardom to Salman to a large extent, they had in fact rejected another Salman movie. The role she was offered in the Sooraj Barjatya movie Prem Ratan Dhan Paayo apparently didn’t have her as a major character. Then she got offered Bajrangi Bhaijaan and her family felt that after such an appearance role, it wouldn’t make sense to do bit roles. But they executed the decision wisely without antagonising anyone.
This they did by approaching Salman and telling him about their point of view. Apparently he agreed and once you have him on your side then everything else is easy to sort out. In the same report, Harshaali’s mother also revealed how her daughter had been offered another movie recently to play in a Katrina Kaif movie as her childhood character and this too they said no to because she would be on screen only for a few minutes. It is a smart way to go about it but there is also the fact that child artistes really find it difficult to hang on as full-fledged stars with movies in which they are present from start to end.
Case in point: Darsheel Safary, the boy who came into the limelight with Taare Zameen Par and then did a number of movies in which he had a big role but is now not heard much about.
Paying the price
There was a time when Bollywood filmmakers coolly took any plot they wanted from any country in the world or even from regional cinema in India. The idea that a creative product has owners seemed to be completely alien.
And then slowly it began to change and nowadays major filmmakers at least buy rights to movies they want to remake from other industries. An example of this is Drishyam, starring Ajay Devgn, which is being remade from a Malayalam movie of the same name.
But old habits die hard and some will still follow the old tradition. But then sometimes consequences will follow because the victims are not willing to grin and bear it anymore. That is how Kunal Kohli finds himself short of Rs25 lakh. He has had a couple of hits in the past and even got to a point when he got an Aamir Khan movie, Fanaa, to direct.
Since then his movies have flopped and for his latest project he is casting himself as the hero. But when news about his movie started appearing, a scriptwriter found the story suspiciously similar to her own. She knew it was not a coincidence because she had approached Kohli with her script and he had even agreed to buy provided she didn’t take credit. She refused the offer.
On realising that his movie’s story is in fact hers, she went to court and recently Kohli was asked to pay up Rs25 lakh if he wanted to release it. He has agreed and this will probably a good lesson for all of Bollywood that the old days are gone.
The movie he missed
Aamir Khan came out of the theatres after watching Bajrangi Bhaijaan and then, it is said, even shed a tear in public professing to be bowled over by the movie. He followed it up with a series of tweets that went, ‘ Just came out of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. OUTSTANDING! Salman’s
best film till today! Salman’s
best performance till today!’, ‘Amazing story, superb screenplay, heart warming dialogues! Great writing!’ and ‘Kabir Khan has made a truly special film!’
All this is, of course, quite impressive but also ironic considering that this was a movie that had been offered to Aamir to act in but he had refused. The writer of the movie KV Vijayendra Prasad had Aamir has his first choice and had approached him. He was quoted in a news report as saying that Aamir loved the script but said he was too tied up with other work to take it up. After this Prasad met Kabir Khan, the director, who got him in touch with Salman and the rest is now history.
Bachchan fixation
The filmmaker R Balki has an obsession with Amitabh Bachchan and for some time at least it worked for him. He made Cheeni Kum and Paa with Amitabh in unusual characters and they were reasonably well received. But the last movie Shamitabh was panned because, even though he called the plot — of a man who becomes a superstar using another’s voice — a homage to Amitabh’s iconic voice, it made no sense to many people.
When he announced his next project, which had Arjun Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor in the lead, everyone thought that he had finally got over the Amitabh fixation. But now comes news that Amitabh will indeed be there in the movie and, not him alone, wife Jaya Bachchan will also star alongside. However it will only be a small cameo appearance and the two will be playing themselves.
Incidentally this will be the first time the husband and wife come together for a movie after 14 years, which was in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. But that were proper roles as major characters, while Balki’s is just a special appearance.
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