[This write up too was written a long time ago, when Don had just hit the theaters.]I watched Don today afternoon and I must say I’m totally blown. I can’t figure out why the movie got such bad reviews in the popular press. I guess the pre-release hype blinded our holier-than-though movie reviewers from appreciating Farhan Akhtar’s Don for what it is.
The thing with “remakes” is that when made by skillful directors like Farhan they take a life of their own, beyond the original. While watching these movies, the question shouldn’t be, “How does this compare with the original?”, instead it should be, “Given today’s time and period, with a contemporary star cast and state of the art technology, how would have Chandra Barot made Don, if he were given another chance?” Once you grasp this basic idea, things fall into place and you are able to see the movie for what it is and appreciate the director for what he is trying to convey. Chandra Barot in one of his many interviews after the release of the new Don, said that when he set out to make the original Don, the intention was to make a style statement that would redefine "cool" for his era. Farhan set out to do exactly the same when he made his Don. And in this respect I feel he has succeeded. The new "Don" is by far the slickest film that Bollywood has made in a long, long time. It is our version of the Matrix. In this context, perhaps “remake” is not the right word, the movie should’ve been called Farhan’s “adaptation” of “Chandra Barot’s Don”, that would have had all the snotty reviewers singing paeans of the movie – as they did for Vishal Bharadwaj’s “Omkara” (a very fine movie)- his adaptation of Othello.
Another common thread that ran through all those scathing reviews last week was that classics such as “Don” should not be remade. Even attempting such a atrocity is shameful and upstarts such as Farhan should be condemned to Dante’s Inferno for such a travesty. I find this argument totally absurd. It is criticism for the sake of it. The least that such critics should do is acknowledge that in spite of all their alleged failings, new remakes at least serve the purpose of turning the spotlight back on old classics lost in the obscurity of cold storage. For instance, Farhan's venture gave the long forgotten single hit wonder, Chandra Bharot, a second lease of fleeting fame. J P Dutta's Umrao Jan, a disastrous remake, resulted in record sales of DVDs of the old Umrao Jan!
All in all, remakes are experiments that are worth the effort. If they click, voila, we have a great new movie, else at least we have the old classic to fall back upon, this time in new enhanced DVD format!
Critics beware, "Don ke dushman ki sabse bada galti yeh hai ki woh Don ka dushman hai!"
[This write up too was written a long time ago, when Don had just hit the theaters.]
