As if garnering a guest stint in Tom Cruise's pet franchise Mission: Impossible was not enough, recidivist Anil Kapoor finds himself another taker in blinkered Hollywood. This time, as a co-star to the uber delicious Clive Owen, a man who makes bad seem so good you want to commit ten lifetimes of crime. In one day.
Mallika Sherawat is crying into her snake costume as we speak.
But riddle me this: Is he really such a phenomenal actor that he manages to find guest stints in Hollywood with such alarming regularity? Or is it a bad case of the Slumdog hangover, one of the most overrated movies, if not *the* most, of all time? Where Danny Boyle reduced us to a simpering, pitiable country onscreen that just elevated the cliche of turbans and snakes to a whole new dizzying height in the world's eyes? Or is it plain PR?
Don't mistake me - I don't think he's a bad actor, far from it, in fact. But his onscreen antics are strictly for the wolf-whistling, dancing-in-the-gallery, dialogue-spouting, movie-going everyman in India. Women have long since given up on him as a man who stealthily tiptoes into their hearts in dreams at night when the husbands are snoring away to glory, considering he's the very reason epilators and depilators exist.
My most endearing memory of Anil Kapoor during his heydays is of him and his cronies bicycling away on hilly terrain, providing the chorus to Jackie Shroff-Dimple Kapadia's 'Tera Naam Liya' in Ram Lakhan. He *was* Lakhan for me. His acting trademark is his portrayal of the lovable tapori. His serious histrionics were restricted to movies in his early years in the land of cinema, and they were only marginally successful. Think Pallavi Anupallavi and Saaheb.
My complaint is not so much that he's overrated as it is Hollywood's refusal to look beyond him for roles that require an Indian actor. As if he's not been pigeonholed enough already, the role he's playing in Cities with Clive Owen is that of a police officer trying to fight corruption blah blah blah. Give me a break.
Even in Slumdog, he was still the tapori he's always been - only, clad in designer suits and mouthing all of three dialogues as a testament to the "I can walk English, I can talk English, I can laugh English" trait that Bollywood seems so desperate to prove to Hollywood. Heck, if a pompadour, an impromptu jig and three pithy lines in English was all it took to get Hollywood to notice an Indian actor, Aishwarya Rai would have been a global phenome....
Wait.
Mallika Sherawat is crying into her snake costume as we speak.
But riddle me this: Is he really such a phenomenal actor that he manages to find guest stints in Hollywood with such alarming regularity? Or is it a bad case of the Slumdog hangover, one of the most overrated movies, if not *the* most, of all time? Where Danny Boyle reduced us to a simpering, pitiable country onscreen that just elevated the cliche of turbans and snakes to a whole new dizzying height in the world's eyes? Or is it plain PR?
Don't mistake me - I don't think he's a bad actor, far from it, in fact. But his onscreen antics are strictly for the wolf-whistling, dancing-in-the-gallery, dialogue-spouting, movie-going everyman in India. Women have long since given up on him as a man who stealthily tiptoes into their hearts in dreams at night when the husbands are snoring away to glory, considering he's the very reason epilators and depilators exist.
My most endearing memory of Anil Kapoor during his heydays is of him and his cronies bicycling away on hilly terrain, providing the chorus to Jackie Shroff-Dimple Kapadia's 'Tera Naam Liya' in Ram Lakhan. He *was* Lakhan for me. His acting trademark is his portrayal of the lovable tapori. His serious histrionics were restricted to movies in his early years in the land of cinema, and they were only marginally successful. Think Pallavi Anupallavi and Saaheb.
My complaint is not so much that he's overrated as it is Hollywood's refusal to look beyond him for roles that require an Indian actor. As if he's not been pigeonholed enough already, the role he's playing in Cities with Clive Owen is that of a police officer trying to fight corruption blah blah blah. Give me a break.
Even in Slumdog, he was still the tapori he's always been - only, clad in designer suits and mouthing all of three dialogues as a testament to the "I can walk English, I can talk English, I can laugh English" trait that Bollywood seems so desperate to prove to Hollywood. Heck, if a pompadour, an impromptu jig and three pithy lines in English was all it took to get Hollywood to notice an Indian actor, Aishwarya Rai would have been a global phenome....
