Mumbai Salsa

Director: Manoj Tyagi
Cast: Virdas,Indraneil SenGupta,
Dilip Thadeshwar, Raymond Irani, Manjari Fadnis, Amruta Khanvilkar,
Linda Arsenio, Neelam Chauhan
Rating: 2.5/5

As TOI put it aptly it easy to label this one as Metro part two.
After reading just this line and seeing a rating of 3.5
I decided to watch this film instead of another new release
(Jab We Met)and as it turned out, it was a case of choices gone
wrong.

After almost a month of not being able to watch a movie at
theater I went for an morning(early) show of Salsa at a
neighborhood multiplex and here's what I got....

The film starts with a peppy song by Adnan Sami which starts
getting you into that frame of mind where you forget everything,
including the fact that it's just 9:30 in the morning on a Sunday,
but by the time the theme song fades away you inevitably start
falling back to the point from where you started.
Maybe it was just with me and my friend but quite a few people
from the cast looked lookalikes of some bollywood stars.

Vir Das looked like a pre-release version of Imran Hashmi,
Manjari reminded me of Shilpa Shetty while Indraneil from certain
angles looked like Priyanshu..

The feeling of deja-vu doesn't just stop there because
quite some scenes/situations seem to be picked from other
contemporary bollywood films,Metro, Jhankar Beats and Pyar ke
side effects to name a few.Maybe it's just a coincidence
or maybe not....

Most of the themes picked in the film are banal while situations
and their outcomes easily predictable.Over acting by few in quite
a lot sequences and vanilla dialogues take the film farther away
from being an entertainer. It's hard (atleast for me) to find out
how Salsa is different from Metro. Metro had better music for sure.
A couple of monologues and few fairly innovative scenes, dialogues
and songs save Salsa from being an outright flop show.

I particularly liked the scene where Maya gets dumped for the first
time,the one where Shahji compares how the drink a women orders in
a bar tells what's her state of mind, the one where Raj's boss tells
him the time one's personal life gets screwed his/her career begins
to peak up and the closing scene in which the narrator talks about
how some people need someone to find happiness while some find
that happiness in themselves.

Keeping in mind the khufiapanti(Salsa lingo) involved I think

Mumbai Salsa = 0.7*(Metro) + 0.1*(Jhankar beats n PKSE) + 0.2*(Tap Water)

Trivia:
1) In all there were 6 people in that audi, 2 of us, a middle
aged man (who seemed to be there to avoid her wife's Sunday
Morning nagging), a teenager and a couple who were more
interested in doing Seat Salsa.
2) One thing that stuck me was the
Sad but True "Code of Honour" that guys
(not sure about girls) have.
3) As both of us noticed that the background score
was quite mismatched atleast once(when Xen breaks down in front
of Neha).Funny thing is that rather it sounded a tune straight
from a horror flick
4) It's nice to watch a film early in the morning as it leaves you
with most of the day to spare plus the tickets also cost less.

Links:
1)India FM
2) Bollywood Archive
3) On Youtube

Philosophising Soccer

Links:
The_Philosophers_Football_Match
Script