Hasee Toh Phasee *Parineeti, Sidharth M.
Jan 26, 2015 0:13:18 GMT
dancelover and moviemavengal like this
Post by odadune on Jan 26, 2015 0:13:18 GMT
Just finished this on Einthusan, with some skipping around in the second half due to website gimpiness.
It's pretty well-acted most of the time, and did a fairly good job of holding my attention without actually having much going on plotwise, which is always an accomplishment (doubly so since I went into this with no particular interest in Sidharth and a very "meh" impression of Parineeti from Ricky Bahl). The director did a good job of keeping the setting and the character group dynamics real, and created some very sweet, unconventional romantic moments between the leads. I would definitely be interested in checking out another film from him, provided it didn't involve things he clearly has only a limited interest in researching, like pharmaceuticals, nonneurotypical personality types, and science fiction plot maguffins.
And really, that's the rub. There were scenes where I really believed in Parineeti as someone who thought *differently* from most people, and then there were scenes where she seemed like she was auditioning for a role in some slapstick, offensive-for-the-helluvit comedy or other, or for a child artiste's role. Sidharth mostly came off as blandly competent-I don't know if that's entirely his fault, because the script had a tendency to treat his character as a lens to study Parineeti's character through rather than a personality in his own right. He did best in the nurturing scenes, and was moderately good at the weaselly scenes, although those were the two aspects of the character I had trouble buying in one personality (I had a similar issue with Imran's character in Gori Teri Pyaar Mein, where the character's good and bad traits did not seem like they could coexist in one person. Maybe it's a Dharma Productions thing). His comic timing did not seem to be as good as Parineeti's. Parineeti's father (played by that one character actor who's in everything) was probably the most sympathetic character to me, inspite of his failure to stand up to his abusive elder brother (read: family patriarch). He seemed a lot like a more coherent version of Sidharth's character: a nurturing but somewhat passive and downtrodden person.
And Pari's magic energy-storing polymer is a lot harder to take seriously if you grew up watching this:
I get what they were going for-they wanted something that would seem cool and useful to an Indian audience ("this thing could power an apartment block for a whole year" or something like that) and also be small and portable, AND whose powers could be represented by a simple but striking visual effect. But again, this is a near match for a maguffin from a cycle of Disney comedy movies that started in the 1960s and was revived in the 00s(?) with Robin Williams as the quirky scientist, so I had trouble getting past that part.
I would say it's worth seeing just because there isn't much like it, and because there's a lot of things it does right, or less wrong than it might have: I try to imagine a pure Dharma version of this, and I keep coming up with something full of dubious comedy and overwrought melodrama, and when I try to imagine a version solely made by Phantom, the other production partner, I keep imagining some dark, nasty downer with even more vomit and drama about bodily functions. HTP is interesting because it's an attempt to tackle such issues in a grounded but mainstream and nonthreatening way, and sometimes it even succeeds.
It's pretty well-acted most of the time, and did a fairly good job of holding my attention without actually having much going on plotwise, which is always an accomplishment (doubly so since I went into this with no particular interest in Sidharth and a very "meh" impression of Parineeti from Ricky Bahl). The director did a good job of keeping the setting and the character group dynamics real, and created some very sweet, unconventional romantic moments between the leads. I would definitely be interested in checking out another film from him, provided it didn't involve things he clearly has only a limited interest in researching, like pharmaceuticals, nonneurotypical personality types, and science fiction plot maguffins.
And really, that's the rub. There were scenes where I really believed in Parineeti as someone who thought *differently* from most people, and then there were scenes where she seemed like she was auditioning for a role in some slapstick, offensive-for-the-helluvit comedy or other, or for a child artiste's role. Sidharth mostly came off as blandly competent-I don't know if that's entirely his fault, because the script had a tendency to treat his character as a lens to study Parineeti's character through rather than a personality in his own right. He did best in the nurturing scenes, and was moderately good at the weaselly scenes, although those were the two aspects of the character I had trouble buying in one personality (I had a similar issue with Imran's character in Gori Teri Pyaar Mein, where the character's good and bad traits did not seem like they could coexist in one person. Maybe it's a Dharma Productions thing). His comic timing did not seem to be as good as Parineeti's. Parineeti's father (played by that one character actor who's in everything) was probably the most sympathetic character to me, inspite of his failure to stand up to his abusive elder brother (read: family patriarch). He seemed a lot like a more coherent version of Sidharth's character: a nurturing but somewhat passive and downtrodden person.
And Pari's magic energy-storing polymer is a lot harder to take seriously if you grew up watching this:
I get what they were going for-they wanted something that would seem cool and useful to an Indian audience ("this thing could power an apartment block for a whole year" or something like that) and also be small and portable, AND whose powers could be represented by a simple but striking visual effect. But again, this is a near match for a maguffin from a cycle of Disney comedy movies that started in the 1960s and was revived in the 00s(?) with Robin Williams as the quirky scientist, so I had trouble getting past that part.
I would say it's worth seeing just because there isn't much like it, and because there's a lot of things it does right, or less wrong than it might have: I try to imagine a pure Dharma version of this, and I keep coming up with something full of dubious comedy and overwrought melodrama, and when I try to imagine a version solely made by Phantom, the other production partner, I keep imagining some dark, nasty downer with even more vomit and drama about bodily functions. HTP is interesting because it's an attempt to tackle such issues in a grounded but mainstream and nonthreatening way, and sometimes it even succeeds.