Guru Review Courtesy IMDB (fzkl)

Guru is what you get when you combine a cash starved director/producer high on cocaine under the influence of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead trying to help an upcoming actor whose popularity ratings are as high as pathetic the movies under his belt are.

It is not tough to imagine that when the title of the movie is the name of the protagonist, the movie should be a three and half hour ad for the protagonist. But really, Abishek Bachchan is so over-hyped with very lame movies to his credit that he badly needed a good movie to justify all the hype. However, if he thought that a movie with Mani Rathnam titled Guru would give him the credits he was badly mistaken.

Then I wonder, how did Mani Rathnam manage to make a movie as lacking in substance of any sort as this one? Then I reel back and realize that all his good movies most often never made money because they were never for the masses. Most had a serious tone and were of the depressing sort. But good movies they were and hence ended up not making any money. Probably realizing that he might not have enough life left in him to make money, better now than later, he has concocted a commercial lame a** movie.

Within the first half hour you are subjected to two pointless songs. This is followed by the bearable first half of the movie. The ability to bear only arises if you are the kind who likes the rags to riches kind of story and is all waiting to know what happens next. The music is bland and is best described as a collection of sounds from previous AR Rahman tracks. Nothing original here. A DJ in a club could spin better sh*t. Add to this pointless entities like Aishwarya Rai, Madhavan, Mithun Chakraborthy and Vidya Balan and you have the perfect recipe for a commercially successful film. I have no doubts this movie will go on to make a lot of money because the movie gives the viewer just what he wants to see with no scope for using the brain. The cinematography (the usually saving grace of the worst of Mani Rathnam's movies) is mediocre at best.

Mithun Chakraborthy gives me nostalgia of an earlier generation of stars I watched while in my childhood. Vidya Balan is cute but that is all there is to it and I might as well go to go-ogle image search to admire her cuteness. Not sure if the 170 bucks was worth it. Aishwarya Rai looked true to her age of 35. Old and wrinkled. While I thought that way in the early part of the movie when she was supposedly playing young, she looked like a granny when she was supposed to look 40ish. She should give up on the movies and see if she can play a dumb and deaf grandma in one of the soaps, well enough. It would be too hard to be bad at acting at least in this role.

As the movie progresses, so does the overconfidence of Gurukanth Desai and the progressive misery of Abhishek Bachchan's acting which culminates in an Indianized version of the courtroom scene that comes up in The Fountainhead. While its a disgrace to mention the book in the same article as this movie, its simply the truth. There is a line in The Fountainhead, after the courtroom speech by Howard Roark that goes "Roark stood, his legs apart, his arms straight at his sides, his head lifted - as he stood in an unfinished building. Later, when he was seated again at the defense table, many men in the room felt as if they still saw him standing; one moment's picture that would not be replaced". It is quite clear that this was the effect Mani Rathnam was trying to obtain out of Abhishek Bachchan's dialog in the climax but it ended up something like "Gurukanth Desai stood, his hands bent like a leper as he would on an old building overlooking a lake. Later, when he left the silver screen and reappeared as Abhishek Bachchan the public thrashed him so bad that for a long time in his life he felt as if they kept thrashing him ever day for aping Howard Roark; one moment's picture that he would definitely like to forget".

The saving grace of the movie is how the introductory credits were put across. Names printed on possibly a typewriter. Verdict: No good movies have been in theater in the recent past and if one is desperate, then of the existing movies this might be bearable.

Update: A friend of mine reminded me of the Vidya Balan - Madhavan lip lock and I had to include a line on that. I remember reading somewhere that kissing consumes more calories than sex and a full workout. I don't know if thats true, but what I do know is that the dude dehydrated Vidya Balan to death!.