I don’t like to
come off as a movie snob, but when my friends who are highly intelligent and
capable individuals recommend movies like Grand Masti to me, I can’t help but
wonder why I am friends with these schmucks. I love and respect them of course,
but it makes me question how anyone with a functioning brain can enjoy dog barf
that is Grand Masti. Now don’t get me wrong we all have our guilty pleasure,
but Grand Masti does not and cannot qualify as guilty pleasure. Unless your
guilty pleasure is very bad porn fantasy of a 15 year old.
From what I can
gather, Grand Masti is directed by pubescent boys who recently discovered their
sexuality, and have very little concept of what actually goes on in college.
Grand Masti is sequel to mildly successful 2004’s Masti. At the time I was in
my teens and I have very little recollection of the movie. However I do
remember enjoying it. Not a great movie mind you, but overall a fun murder
cover-up with good music and message (at least the message I got from it at the
time).
Grand Masti
takes place six years after the events of the original and it seems very little
has changed in the lives of our three heroes, Meet (Vivek Oberoi), Prem (Aftab
Shivdasani) and Amar (Ritesh Deshmukh). They’re still very horny and their
wives are still too busy to satisfy their gluttonous sexual appetite. So how to
they remedy their sexless marriages? Well, by going back to their glory days of
college where the three followed the philosophy of ABC; which stands for Ass, Boobs,
and C for (well, it rhymes with hunt). Yeah, that’s the extent of humor in this
movie.
A college reunion and busy schedules of their wives presents our heroes with an opportunity to go back and for the lack of better words, get some. So they decide to go back to college on their own and maybe partake in those famous collage orgies India is so famous for.
A college reunion and busy schedules of their wives presents our heroes with an opportunity to go back and for the lack of better words, get some. So they decide to go back to college on their own and maybe partake in those famous collage orgies India is so famous for.
Upon their
return to college they discover that their ‘sex-topian’ college feels like a monastery
where and any interaction between opposite sexes strictly forbidden. All this
prudishness is thanks to college principle Robert Pereira (Pradeep Rawat) who
has a zero tolerance policy towards sex. Any guy caught hitting on a girl will
be hung from a tree and will be shamed in front of everyone by having his
underwear pulled down. And why such strict rules towards fraternization you may
ask? Is it to preserve a standard of education? No, try again. Is it to insure
that female students on campus can feel safe? Haha, nope, nice try though. It
turns out that the zero tolerance policy is due to principle’s impotence.
That’s right folks, the big twist in the end is if he can’t get some, then no
one will.
This movie is
worse than some fan-made movies, but at least you can excuse the fans for being
armatures. These are professionals, working in Bollywood for years; there is no
excuse for such a movie. All that is going for it is exaggerated facial
expressions, horrible puns, and painfully cheap sex humor. The movie has zero
originality to a point where it literally stole the shadow tent scene from ‘Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me’. To compensate for lack of originality some
genius thought it would be a good idea to have wave after wave of scantily clad women.
I’d like to ask
the actresses in this movie about their presumptively deplorable financial
situation because why else would they agree to do such a B-grade porn-esque
movie. If India was progressing with women’s rights and equality; this movie is
a stark reminder that the mainstream media and Bollywood (much like it’s
Western counterparts or even taking cues from them) allow patriarchy to thrive
and the hyper-sexualization/reduction of women as merely sexual objects even as
it portrays it as just innocent, deliciously naughty fun. One must remember
that South-east Asian society in some quarters still considers healthy discussions
of sexuality as taboo and has notoriously given men a license to being sexually
adventurous/abusive while it equally denies women implicitly the right to their
own sexuality and to rejecting their objectification by Bollywood which remains
mainly the playing ground of rich, monopolist dynasties of
film-making/financing men. The men in this movie are no more than bewildered,
sex-starved buffoons who find it ‘grand masti’ to objectify women and openly
flaunt their perversions and lack of sexual control. Two scenes in particular
stood out:
- The three heroes are stuck at a bank robbery, and the only way they can resolve the situation is if a beautiful woman strike sexy poses so one of the three who works at the bank can press the security alarm with his erection that is conveniently placed right under it. Yeah let that sink in for a minute.
- It’s the final confrontation between the heroes and the bad guys. They all end up hanging from a building and only way to save them if three women our heroes were fooling around with striped down to their undies to form a rope. Indian ingenuity at its finest ladies and gentlemen.
But Grand Masti
is an adult movie with adult humor, why does it matter if there are random
naked women in it? That could be a good argument only if the movie had the
least bit of decency to make an attempt at originality. Having adult content
doesn’t mean cheap humor. There is a fine line between pushing the boundary and
pandering to the lowest common denominator. There are number of movies that do
get adult humor right. Superbad, American Pie are among a few. Clearly Grand
Masti is attempting to imitate the success of these movies, but instead of
borrowing good ideas from them people behind Grand Masti decided to just stick
with ‘haha, look boobies’ jokes. And it seems to be a winning combination for
some horrible reason.
Grand Masti is
an attempt to make a Bollywood-version college movie that glorifies debauchery,
lack of respect for women, and the boys-will-be-boys culture. It’s an insult to
women and some male allies in India and world over who resist this
commercialization of sexual fetish by an increasingly capitalist Bollywood,
which is why the amount of money this movie has made scares me. The movie is profitable
by Bollywood standards, which means that millions of Indians men (I hope it’s
only men, because no respectable woman should stand for such objectification)
went out and watched it. One can only feel a sense of impending doom as the
realization hits that the 3rd movie in this installment will bring
more of the same.
A very special thanks to Ammad Wajahat.
A very special thanks to Ammad Wajahat.
