I have grown
with a healthy appetite for dance in cinema.
Now I don’t mean the usual Bollywood song and dance sequence – they are
fantastic in their own right. I mean
movies that are made for and about dance.
The Hollywood variety. Like
Grease, Footloose, Flashdance and of course the #1 dance movie of all time
Dirty Dancing. I am sure you get the drift.
Now most of
these movies have a story around them usually one of boy meets girl. Boy and Girl fall in love. Something tears them apart. Then love prevails. Or it would be a fight – Dancers with good
hearts v Dancers with not so good hearts.
Any Body Can Dance or ABCD as it is aptly titled comes from the latter genre
of movies.
A very simple
story of Vishnu (Prabhudeva) who is the Dancer with a good heart. The dance with a not so good heart is
Jahangir Khan (Kay Kay Menon). The
latter owns a dance academy called JDC.
Vishnu is the lead instructor cum choreographer cum patner. JDC has won the “Close Up Dance Dil Se co
presented by Spinz” in its first year.
In its 2nd year they win despite a mistake that doesn’t go
too well with Vishnu.
To make matters
worse, Jahangir gets in Chris from New York to take over from Vishnu and our
hero is given a desk job that he doesn’t accept. He is set to leave for Chennai (thank god
they didn’t say Allahabad) when he sees a bunch of slum kids from Dongri – he is
staying with his friend Gopi (Ganesh Acharya) – get into a fight on the day of
Ganesh Visarjan. Inspired, he decides to
stay and teach them to dance.
ABCD has put in
some kind of a silver lining on an otherwise quite drab year to date with maybe
a couple of movies that have been reasonably upto mark. I am at no point saying that it is Oscar
material. It is just entertainment. But
even that has been done well. Something
about Prabhudeva I would guess (remember my comments on Rowdy Rathore) and his
sincerity towards ensuring the right quality.
The dance moves
are obviously the best that you would see in this part of the world. May not be remotely close to the West but
when you see a bunch of local boys with this talent, you are bound to stand up
and take notice. They begin quite badly
but as the movie progresses, they just get several notches higher.
The music from
Sachin Jigar is also apt. Just the right
amount of sentimental and devotional songs interspersing an otherwise very
western soundtrack. Remo D’Souza has
probably lived upto his reputation of being amongst India’s best. I guess he has proven a point with the
direction also. I am going to stick my
neck out on this one and say that I can watch it again. Not required to see in 3D but definitely have
a dekko. 6 on 10.
Trailer on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZC67-NfOI
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