Umrao Jaan: Is the Remake necessary ?

While flipping between Beckham-Rooney's efforts at the goal between Ecuador defense at Stutgart and Saif-Preity's gyrating stunts amidst fire-breating extras at Dubai I caught a glimpse of J.P. Dutta's forthcoming Umrao Jaan. Needless to say the over-hyped Ms. Rai lives upto her expectation of perfecting the wooden looks while delivering the opening lines. The male lead Abhisek Bachchan decided not to be outdone by his beloved and decided to take the race to the looks department by sporting a doped rockstar hairdo. The end product of this idiocracy is a deadly combo of a wooden ballerina and a bad wigged scare-crow trying to recreate one of the finest movies of Indian film history.

Having all the time in this universe to ponder upon the unsolved mystries of Bollywood my latest puzzle is : Why today's screwed up dumbos need to recreate the classics of yesterday ? Is it because they feel the treatment of the script could be more justified by the advanced new movie making technologies available to them ?

But nobody wants to rewrite Othello just because Mr.Scott Adams added the word "humongous" to the English vocabulary.

And nobody also wants to repaint the Mona Lisa becase Da Vinci didn't have photoshop software to lift Naomi Campbell's arched eyebrows on his creation's face.

Then why do the brain-dead directors want to have a go at yester years blockbusters with their new found technologies ?

A remake of special effects based King Kong could justify the use of new technologies. Sci-fi movies are the visual form human imagination and enhancing that experience with newer technologies is always welcome. I wouldn't mind in future if a 3-D holographic projector bring the image of shark in JAWS to life right in my drawing room provided they don't wet my house-owner's carpet with the obvious splashes.

Going by the same logic an armless Thakursaab kicking Gabbar mid-air in a gravity defying jump would certainly be a welcome from the usual Hindi stunts. And we can still hope in a remake of Qurbani, Firoze Khan will employ all his graphic designers to bring out the perfect facial expressions in otherwise a dead-pan lookalike Fardeen Khan. Or going by his past records he might infuse some extra digital flesh to the bust of the leading actress without the usual Sushmita silicon route.

But of all movies Umrao Jaan doesnot have its share of magical aliens like ET, outsized primates like King Kong or wired stunts like Matrix. How Mr Dutta and his creative team will render the Muzaffar Ali classic to newer heights of viewing pleasure is something as mysterious as the leading lady's acting talent.

But as one of the Hindi movie villian taught me the truest of all truths is "Paisa bolta hain", there are always enough suckers like you and me who will crowd at the theatres to compare the copy to the original. And remakers like RGV, J.P. Dutta and Feroze Khan will laugh all the way to their banks with a remixed Gabbar laughter.