Braddy's Big Bollywood... umm... Breakthrough. Yeah, That Alliterates.

I borrowed a movie from a friend last night - Ghajini, a Bollywood film inspired by the Christopher Nolan movie Memento, and supposedly my friend's all-time favorite movie. I'd never seen a Bollywood movie before, and I've always been fascinated by the plot of Memnto, which features a character suffering from anterograde amnesia (an inability to retain new memories following a tramautic event). So I decided to give Ghajini a try. Hooray for new experiences, right?

Just a warning about new experiences - some of them are, like, really extremely crazy.

Ghajini is about the most disjointed movie-watching experience I've ever had - ever. See, I thought I knew kind of what to expect from the movie going in. After all, here's the movie poster:

Hardcore, no?

Now let's take a look at the description on the back of the movie box:

Imagine being one of the most successful businessmen in the country. Sanjay Singhania is a rich businessman who owns a cellular phone company. Kalpana is a model who brags to her friends and peers that she is the love interest of Sanjay, though in reality she doesn't even know the man.

When Sanjay comes to know about this anonymous admirer of his, he decides to dispel her delusions. But on his way he sees a beautiful woman helping the handicapped kids cross the road. Instantly, Sanjay falls for her. Later, he comes to know that she is Kalpana, the same model who boasted of being his girlfriend.

Sanjay gets introduced to Kalpana but doesn't disclose his real identity. Love blossoms between the two.

...What?

As it turns out, there are two plot threads in the movie. One follows Sanjay Singhania, a man with no long-term memory who tattoos his body with clues which should lead him to identify his girlfriend's murderer. The other plot, which unfolds all in flashbacks, follows Sanjay Singhania who falls in love with a woman through a CRAZY mixup.

In the first twenty minutes of the film, Sanjay stabs a man to death. Then, not twenty minutes later, we get this:


and this:


That last picture is pretty darn hilarious. This *NSYNC wannabe is actually the SAME PERSON as the guy on the movie poster. By the end of the film, he completely transforms into a rage-driven, animalistic revenge machine that punches people to death. In the climax, he hits someone so hard that he breaks the other guys neck and his head does a complete 180. The dude is LITERALLY lying on his belly and staring up at the sky in awe AT THE SAME TIME.

I'm not the only one noticing a disconnect, right? It's like I stuck in the DVD to Silence of the Lambs, and then, about halfway through, the movie switches over to a musical adaptation of Hitch. The tone switches with breakneck speed from psychological thriller to romantic comedy to melodrama to straight-up horror DOZENS of times over the course of three hours.

Now, it probably sounds like I didn't care for Ghajini, while I actually... probably didn't care for it much. There was a lot of great stuff - some of the cinematography was FANTASTIC, the music was catchy, and the rom-com bits WERE pretty funny. I have to wonder how much of the weird disconnect is due simply to cultural differences between Hindi and Hollywood films.

Unfortunately, it may be too late for Ghajini. I'm glad I watched it, but I doubt the movie will ever be a thing I love forever.

But boy HOWDY, did I have fun watching it!