Muffy St. Bernard
2004-07-29 14:07:37 UTC
{This review is best seen in its native habitat -- with lots of screenshots
and a bonus "Feeding Gallery" -- at:
http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff/bollybob/rdisco.html
But if you absolutely cannot get over there, here it is...the first new
BollyBob review in over a year!}
Disco Dancer, 1982
Starring: Mithun Chakraborty, Kim, Rajesh Khanna
Music by Bappi Lahiri
Produced & Directed by B. Subhash
My critics often ask two questions:
1) Muffy, why don't I wear more black eye shadow right above your false
eyelashes, to give you a more dramatic look?
2) Don't your reviews simply exaggerate the wackier aspects of Indian
movies, and imply that Western movies in the same genre do not contain
similar moments of total, glorious lunacy? Do you honestly believe that a
Bollywood spy film like "Great Gambler" or "Shaan" is crazier than -- say --
your average James Bond flick?
I refuse to answer the first question because it's personal (and how dare
you ask, masher!), and I don't know anything about James Bond so I can't
give a really good answer to the second question. But you might ask the same
thing about the 80's film "Disco Dancer," a sort of benchmark for
aficionados of wacky Bollywood: is it any more ridiculous than Hollywood
kitsch classics such as "T.G.I.F." or "Can't Stop The Music?" Or, more to
the point, I can imagine people gearing up into a frenzy of pre-review
indignation: "Muffy, are you going to pick on 'Disco Dancer' just because it
was made in India? Why are you so snobby and ethnocentric? Why don't you
take advice from people who really KNOW how to apply cosmetics? WHY DO YOU
HATE US SO MUCH?!?"
Before you get all defensive, let me put on my glittery burgundy thinking
cap for a moment and try to answer your question in a way that isn't stupid.
Superficially, Western disco movies are just as laughable and tasteless as
"Disco Dancer"...the costumes are ugly, the plots are vapid, and watching
Steve Gutenberg frolick with The Village People is a grotesque thing, that's
for sure. But Indian films like "Disco Dancer" exceed Hollywood's own disco
wackiness in a few important ways: they have an almost religious level of
sincerity, endless layers of melodrama, a lack of technical skill and -- to
top it all off -- the fact that by the time "Disco Dancer" came out, much of
the rest of the world was already trying to forget that the whole disco
thing had happened. Kids wearing "Boney M" T-shirts in the early 80's got
lynched on the streets, and they probably deserved it too.
India in 1982, however, must have been going through absolute disco fever.
Like the Hindi-Go-Go films of the 60's, Indian filmmakers didn't seem to
know exactly what disco dancing entailed -- was it really just Mithun
Chakraborty lying on the ground and randomly kicking his feet in the air,
and does a man need to look GOOD in his outfit in order to be taken
seriously? -- but they threw themselves into the movie with such gusto that
you can't help but wish that disco -- or at least this strange, enthusiastic
version of it -- were back in style. Though perhaps not anywhere nearby.
Maybe just in India again. Somewhere far away.
In Hollywood, disco movies were always about vapid, superficial people with
some measure of talent trying to become famous, presumably to support their
drug habit (or their skinny girlfriend's drug habit). But that sort of plot
was deemed WAY too superficial for Bollywood when they got around to making
this film. The plot must be inspiring, tragic, and beautiful! So they
pulled together a disco hero, a disco heroine, and (most importantly) a very
cruel disco villain. They also needed a devoted and self-sacrificing mother
and a lifetime of trauma and arrested development. Then they threw Bappi
Lahiri in there -- to lay a pastiche of stolen Western songs over tinny
synthesized bips, bongs, and laser zaps -- and they didn't just end up with
a disco MOVIE, they had a disco EPIC...one that turns a flippant dance floor
trend into a life-sustaining form of religion. One that finally explains the
TRUE meaning of disco: it's not a WORD, apparently, it's an ACRONYM, and it
stands for...well, "Dance, Item, Singer, Chorus & Orchestra."
Hmmm. Well, that part of the disco religion falls a little flat. But the
rest is a gem! As BollyGord -- our newest film-loving member -- said so
aptly about "Disco Dancer," "It's the future of the 70's...in the 80's!"
All disco messiahs need a tragic past (otherwise they end up like the
aforementioned Steve Gutenberg: idly plinking away at the keyboard in an
expensive loft and wishing he could afford a bigger coke spoon) and little
Jimmy is no exception. He's grown up in the sort of an environment that
would leave most people bitter, hateful, and prematurely aged. He lives in
Bombay with his mother and spends his days busking with Raju (Rajesh
Khanna), a man who occasionally taps his fingers on Jimmy's disturbingly
scrotal bongos...and perhaps by doing so manages to instill Jimmy with some
good, strong life lessons: the meek will inherit the earth and everybody
should be happy with the way things are.
When you hear poor people say things like that near the beginning of an
Indian film, you know they're going to face some pretty tough times,
probably sooner than later.
In the moments when Jimmy isn't being hand-fed by Raju he is spending time
at home being hand-fed by his mother, which seems a little odd because he is
definitely old enough to feed himself. When, 18 years later, Jimmy is STILL
being hand-fed by his mother -- in front of his adoring fans, no less -- you
start to wonder why more kids in India don't turn into helpless, atrophied,
breast-sucking agoraphobics.
Jimmy -- who himself has never seen a fork or spoon -- has the hots for
Ritu, the daughter of the evil villain next door. This villain -- named Mr.
P. N. Oberoi -- is so vicious that he keeps a stick next to his front gate
specifically to beat visitors with. When Jimmy tries to teach Ritu how to
play her guitar, Mr. Oberoi goes on a mad child-slapping spree of a sort
seen frequently in Walmart but rarely on the silver screen. He also throws a
sucker-punch at Jimmy's mom and sends her toppling to the ground...and then
to jail, unfairly branded a thief. She becomes the star of a daily "slum
parade" in the poor section of town...I've heard that everybody loves a
parade, but not when it consists of a mob that follows your mom around
yelling that she's a thief. This makes Jimmy fighting mad and is the
beginning of a mealtime grudge that lasts him well into adulthood, even
after they've moved to another town.
Some ex-Bombay slum-dwellers turn to drugs, but not Jimmy...he turns to
something far more addictive and destructive: disco. In his bedroom, under a
poster of a comparatively handsome and talented John Travolta, Jimmy does a
sort of awkward, crippled, over-sexed but extremely honest hybrid of disco
and interpretive goth dance. During the day he sings happy songs to newly
married couples and he takes particular joy -- you would too -- serenading a
very fat woman who has just married a dwarf. You knew there had to be a fat
woman and a dwarf, didn't you? If you weren't 100% sure I bet you were
hoping.
Jimmy is not the only Disco Dancer in town. A mean man named Sam has claimed
the disco crown for himself (along with the testicle-squashing jumpsuit
which comes with the territory). He and his dance partner smile a lot and
are able to jump out of their bodies using a form of astral projection, but
that doesn't mean they're good dancers...in fact, Sam is the worst dancer
I've ever seen, even at weddings. His awkwardness cannot be captured in
still images. He moves like a drunken uncle with an inner ear infection
while dancing to "Koi Yahan Nache," a blatant rip-off of "Video Killed The
Radio Star." Still, his fans seem to love him, and huge crowds of them --
dubbed by two women who say "hello, hello, autograph, hello" over and over
again -- chase him all around town.
In the Green Room, his manager -- David Brown -- finally gets sick of Sam's
womanizing sleaziness. Or maybe it isn't the womanizing he's fed up
with...maybe he's annoyed by Sam's habit of always referring to himself in
the third person. After walking out on a steamy scene with a thermos in the
background, David Brown decides he needs new talent. Guess who he chooses to
manage next? No, not Donna Summer -- she gave up disco YEARS ago, along with
the rest of the Western hemisphere! He spots Jimmy prancing all alone down a
dark alley -- high on the disco drug -- and it becomes obvious: Jimmy will
be a star.
It doesn't look good at first, though, At Jimmy's stage debut, Sam's bitter
dance partner tries to disrupt the performance by showing off her fantastic
gold boots and cryptically shouting "We won't listen to the Street Smart!"
But the fickle crowd DOES listen -- the guy in the snazzy blue jumpsuit is
particularly enthralled -- and before you know it Jimmy is teaching the
audience how to disco dance with a rollicking game of Simon Says. Going
further than any disco dancer has ever gone before, he also rolls on the
ground, girlishly kicking his feet in a way that isn't supposed to be gay
but is. Mithun's disco experience is primarily about rolling around on the
ground. At one point a gaggle of women poke him affectionately in the
belly...is this perhaps the Indian interpretation of "the Polka?"
As David Brown says at the end of the number: "Jimmy, YOU HAVE DONE IT!"
Bombay is instantly consumed with Jimmy fever: Jimmy ice cream! Jimmy
chocolate! Jimmy fabrics! Jimmy T-shirts and perfumes! But the disco dancer
doesn't let success go to his head...that would make him a multi-dimensional
character. He still spends much of his time being hand-fed by his mother,
and when he manages to slip away from her he engages in coy fights with
Sam's resentful dance partner, who he drags around by the back of her knee
(a technique familiar to fans of Harpo Marx). He also threatens to autograph
his name on her lips, which would be tragic for such a beautiful woman (even
if her "brain stinks of wealth.")
But guess what? Sam's partner is actually Ritu...the daughter of that
horrible villain from the beginning of the movie! Since the villain has a
vested interest in Sam's career (and doesn't want to see his daughter
hanging around with such a disco-dancing, mommy's boy piece of trash), he
spends the rest of the movie trying to kill Jimmy. And everybody knows that
the best way to kill a disco dancer in India is by putting a Greek and an
Australian on the job.
The Greek is Vasco. His gang of finger-poppin' "West Side Story" thugs learn
the hard way that you shouldn't break Jimmy's guitar. Transforming from
disco dancer to disco fighter in the blink of an eye, Jimmy sends the
members of Vasco's gang flying into those beautifully-arranged piles of
loose bricks that you always see in Bollywood fight scenes. The gang member
who drove Jimmy into this ambush will forever mourn the day he learned the
secret code signal that started the fight: 22 erratic, disjointed honks of
his car horn. For completists, here is the signal as I understood it,
expressed in Morse Code dashes and dots:
"-..-- --..- .-.. ...- .-.-"
The Australian is, of course, the burly and bald-headed hero of the BollyBob
Society, Mr. Bob Christo himself! In this movie Bob plays a more menacing
role than usual, strikingly attired in a black turtleneck and a pair of
wrap-around shades. His most powerful fighting technique is something I
think of as "the Christo Claw," which means tensing your hand up like a
bird's talon and then touching another person's face. It doesn't look like
much, but the victims of this technique scream a lot.
Bob never gets a chance to use "the Christo Claw" on Jimmy...he's just not
fast enough and he's not the hero of the movie (as much as we BollyBobs wish
he were...hint-hint, Aditya Chopra!) Nope, Jimmy sends the foreign tough
guys packing, and then totally ruins a young girl's birthday party by
telling everybody there about how horrible his childhood was. When he
repeatedly refers to himself as an orphan, nobody has the nerve to tell him
that his mother is standing right next to him (with a handful of birthday
cake ready to shove into his mouth), but that must be because Jimmy is such
a big star. After all, every woman in town has a picture of Jimmy in his
"Krishna Pigeon" outfit under their pillows, which isn't surprising because
every other man in town looks pretty ugly.
We get to see Jimmy "perform" several times, occasionally backed up by four
chubby sax players that I think of as "The Tower Of Pigtails." He also
performs with a bunch of men wearing shower-curtain capes; he dances around
Krishna's crown and what appears to be an enormous golden dosa. During one
song at the peak of his career -- where he again lies on his stomach and
kicks his feet like the sassy coquette he is -- he wears a headband with
zebra-striped horns on it...you know, the usual disco stuff.
Even though the actual DANCING in the movie rarely even approaches disco --
it's more like an aerobic routine performed by easily-bored people who are
perpetually off-balance -- the MUSIC is certainly disco music. The problem
is, it's BAD disco music. Other than the plaintive "Jimmy Jimmy" number --
sung by Ritu, at last repentant and wearing pants that I can only describe
as "hot slacks" -- the songs are bland and forgettable, the beats
repetitive, the playback singing dull and unemotional. If it weren't for the
outrageous costumes, horrible dancing, and the strange camera lens which
turns every image into a fly's-eye-view of a pile of vomit, the song
sequences would be very painful indeed.
But it's later in the film -- at the "Internationalntie Of Dance
Competition" (yes, that's what the sign says) -- that the dancing reaches
its pinnacle. I am of course talking about the must-see performance by the
"Disco King & Queen Of Africa," who appear to be an epileptic man and a very
bored secretary respectively. If "Disco Dancer" were only this single
30-second dance routine -- and perhaps the brief performance by the "Disco
King & Queen Of Paris" as well -- the film would deserve its title on that
basis alone, and it would have earned its place in the upper ranks of Fun
Bad Bollywood Films.
You won't cry when you watch "Disco Dancer." You won't find yourself feeling
a deep personal identification with Jimmy (permanently morose and sulky),
Ritu (as much personality as a bug or a fish) or Jimmy's mom (so much of a
martyr you wish her sari would get caught in somebody's car door, because
that's obviously the sort of suffering she desires). There's very little to
like about the music, and the fight scenes are just plain bad. But what
makes "Disco Dancer" so special, really? Why does it have such a reputation
amongst afficionados of Bollywood kitsch? How did it manage to inspire a
song by Devo, a group of people already so kitschy and over-the-top that
they'd seem to require no further inspiration for their music?
Besides the usual explosive Bollywood bombast, it's that the film takes
disco so darn SERIOUSLY. You can make a movie about hip-hop and have the
music be a SYMBOL for something important. You can do the same thing with
blues, jazz, swing, and any number of other styles of music or dance
throughout history. But DISCO? Come on fellows, the idea alone is funny. All
disco ever inspired anybody to do was have sex, take pills for their STD's,
then go out and have more sex. I'm just glad that India made at least one
movie about it before the fad ran its course.
The sequel, of course, left Disco behind: "Rock Dancer," featuring Samantha
Fox. The less said about it the better.
LATE-BREAKING NEWS!
Forget all about that Stephen Hawking stuff, we've made a really important
discovery! After hours of scrutinizing the Disco Dancer screenshots --
under controlled conditions, of course -- our experts let out a surprised
gasp: could it really be? Sitting on the table in Sam's love-pad? Is
that...A THERMOS???
Indeed it was! We have made a crucial find that will force us to reevaluate
the entire history of thermoses in India. Disco Dancer was released in
1982, meaning that this is the most recent thermos discovered in an Indian
film.
If you've seen a thermos in an Indian film, please let us know! And if it's
in a film released after 1982 you might have made an even more important
discovery than this one! Imagine!
Muffy St. Bernard
http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff
and a bonus "Feeding Gallery" -- at:
http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff/bollybob/rdisco.html
But if you absolutely cannot get over there, here it is...the first new
BollyBob review in over a year!}
Disco Dancer, 1982
Starring: Mithun Chakraborty, Kim, Rajesh Khanna
Music by Bappi Lahiri
Produced & Directed by B. Subhash
My critics often ask two questions:
1) Muffy, why don't I wear more black eye shadow right above your false
eyelashes, to give you a more dramatic look?
2) Don't your reviews simply exaggerate the wackier aspects of Indian
movies, and imply that Western movies in the same genre do not contain
similar moments of total, glorious lunacy? Do you honestly believe that a
Bollywood spy film like "Great Gambler" or "Shaan" is crazier than -- say --
your average James Bond flick?
I refuse to answer the first question because it's personal (and how dare
you ask, masher!), and I don't know anything about James Bond so I can't
give a really good answer to the second question. But you might ask the same
thing about the 80's film "Disco Dancer," a sort of benchmark for
aficionados of wacky Bollywood: is it any more ridiculous than Hollywood
kitsch classics such as "T.G.I.F." or "Can't Stop The Music?" Or, more to
the point, I can imagine people gearing up into a frenzy of pre-review
indignation: "Muffy, are you going to pick on 'Disco Dancer' just because it
was made in India? Why are you so snobby and ethnocentric? Why don't you
take advice from people who really KNOW how to apply cosmetics? WHY DO YOU
HATE US SO MUCH?!?"
Before you get all defensive, let me put on my glittery burgundy thinking
cap for a moment and try to answer your question in a way that isn't stupid.
Superficially, Western disco movies are just as laughable and tasteless as
"Disco Dancer"...the costumes are ugly, the plots are vapid, and watching
Steve Gutenberg frolick with The Village People is a grotesque thing, that's
for sure. But Indian films like "Disco Dancer" exceed Hollywood's own disco
wackiness in a few important ways: they have an almost religious level of
sincerity, endless layers of melodrama, a lack of technical skill and -- to
top it all off -- the fact that by the time "Disco Dancer" came out, much of
the rest of the world was already trying to forget that the whole disco
thing had happened. Kids wearing "Boney M" T-shirts in the early 80's got
lynched on the streets, and they probably deserved it too.
India in 1982, however, must have been going through absolute disco fever.
Like the Hindi-Go-Go films of the 60's, Indian filmmakers didn't seem to
know exactly what disco dancing entailed -- was it really just Mithun
Chakraborty lying on the ground and randomly kicking his feet in the air,
and does a man need to look GOOD in his outfit in order to be taken
seriously? -- but they threw themselves into the movie with such gusto that
you can't help but wish that disco -- or at least this strange, enthusiastic
version of it -- were back in style. Though perhaps not anywhere nearby.
Maybe just in India again. Somewhere far away.
In Hollywood, disco movies were always about vapid, superficial people with
some measure of talent trying to become famous, presumably to support their
drug habit (or their skinny girlfriend's drug habit). But that sort of plot
was deemed WAY too superficial for Bollywood when they got around to making
this film. The plot must be inspiring, tragic, and beautiful! So they
pulled together a disco hero, a disco heroine, and (most importantly) a very
cruel disco villain. They also needed a devoted and self-sacrificing mother
and a lifetime of trauma and arrested development. Then they threw Bappi
Lahiri in there -- to lay a pastiche of stolen Western songs over tinny
synthesized bips, bongs, and laser zaps -- and they didn't just end up with
a disco MOVIE, they had a disco EPIC...one that turns a flippant dance floor
trend into a life-sustaining form of religion. One that finally explains the
TRUE meaning of disco: it's not a WORD, apparently, it's an ACRONYM, and it
stands for...well, "Dance, Item, Singer, Chorus & Orchestra."
Hmmm. Well, that part of the disco religion falls a little flat. But the
rest is a gem! As BollyGord -- our newest film-loving member -- said so
aptly about "Disco Dancer," "It's the future of the 70's...in the 80's!"
All disco messiahs need a tragic past (otherwise they end up like the
aforementioned Steve Gutenberg: idly plinking away at the keyboard in an
expensive loft and wishing he could afford a bigger coke spoon) and little
Jimmy is no exception. He's grown up in the sort of an environment that
would leave most people bitter, hateful, and prematurely aged. He lives in
Bombay with his mother and spends his days busking with Raju (Rajesh
Khanna), a man who occasionally taps his fingers on Jimmy's disturbingly
scrotal bongos...and perhaps by doing so manages to instill Jimmy with some
good, strong life lessons: the meek will inherit the earth and everybody
should be happy with the way things are.
When you hear poor people say things like that near the beginning of an
Indian film, you know they're going to face some pretty tough times,
probably sooner than later.
In the moments when Jimmy isn't being hand-fed by Raju he is spending time
at home being hand-fed by his mother, which seems a little odd because he is
definitely old enough to feed himself. When, 18 years later, Jimmy is STILL
being hand-fed by his mother -- in front of his adoring fans, no less -- you
start to wonder why more kids in India don't turn into helpless, atrophied,
breast-sucking agoraphobics.
Jimmy -- who himself has never seen a fork or spoon -- has the hots for
Ritu, the daughter of the evil villain next door. This villain -- named Mr.
P. N. Oberoi -- is so vicious that he keeps a stick next to his front gate
specifically to beat visitors with. When Jimmy tries to teach Ritu how to
play her guitar, Mr. Oberoi goes on a mad child-slapping spree of a sort
seen frequently in Walmart but rarely on the silver screen. He also throws a
sucker-punch at Jimmy's mom and sends her toppling to the ground...and then
to jail, unfairly branded a thief. She becomes the star of a daily "slum
parade" in the poor section of town...I've heard that everybody loves a
parade, but not when it consists of a mob that follows your mom around
yelling that she's a thief. This makes Jimmy fighting mad and is the
beginning of a mealtime grudge that lasts him well into adulthood, even
after they've moved to another town.
Some ex-Bombay slum-dwellers turn to drugs, but not Jimmy...he turns to
something far more addictive and destructive: disco. In his bedroom, under a
poster of a comparatively handsome and talented John Travolta, Jimmy does a
sort of awkward, crippled, over-sexed but extremely honest hybrid of disco
and interpretive goth dance. During the day he sings happy songs to newly
married couples and he takes particular joy -- you would too -- serenading a
very fat woman who has just married a dwarf. You knew there had to be a fat
woman and a dwarf, didn't you? If you weren't 100% sure I bet you were
hoping.
Jimmy is not the only Disco Dancer in town. A mean man named Sam has claimed
the disco crown for himself (along with the testicle-squashing jumpsuit
which comes with the territory). He and his dance partner smile a lot and
are able to jump out of their bodies using a form of astral projection, but
that doesn't mean they're good dancers...in fact, Sam is the worst dancer
I've ever seen, even at weddings. His awkwardness cannot be captured in
still images. He moves like a drunken uncle with an inner ear infection
while dancing to "Koi Yahan Nache," a blatant rip-off of "Video Killed The
Radio Star." Still, his fans seem to love him, and huge crowds of them --
dubbed by two women who say "hello, hello, autograph, hello" over and over
again -- chase him all around town.
In the Green Room, his manager -- David Brown -- finally gets sick of Sam's
womanizing sleaziness. Or maybe it isn't the womanizing he's fed up
with...maybe he's annoyed by Sam's habit of always referring to himself in
the third person. After walking out on a steamy scene with a thermos in the
background, David Brown decides he needs new talent. Guess who he chooses to
manage next? No, not Donna Summer -- she gave up disco YEARS ago, along with
the rest of the Western hemisphere! He spots Jimmy prancing all alone down a
dark alley -- high on the disco drug -- and it becomes obvious: Jimmy will
be a star.
It doesn't look good at first, though, At Jimmy's stage debut, Sam's bitter
dance partner tries to disrupt the performance by showing off her fantastic
gold boots and cryptically shouting "We won't listen to the Street Smart!"
But the fickle crowd DOES listen -- the guy in the snazzy blue jumpsuit is
particularly enthralled -- and before you know it Jimmy is teaching the
audience how to disco dance with a rollicking game of Simon Says. Going
further than any disco dancer has ever gone before, he also rolls on the
ground, girlishly kicking his feet in a way that isn't supposed to be gay
but is. Mithun's disco experience is primarily about rolling around on the
ground. At one point a gaggle of women poke him affectionately in the
belly...is this perhaps the Indian interpretation of "the Polka?"
As David Brown says at the end of the number: "Jimmy, YOU HAVE DONE IT!"
Bombay is instantly consumed with Jimmy fever: Jimmy ice cream! Jimmy
chocolate! Jimmy fabrics! Jimmy T-shirts and perfumes! But the disco dancer
doesn't let success go to his head...that would make him a multi-dimensional
character. He still spends much of his time being hand-fed by his mother,
and when he manages to slip away from her he engages in coy fights with
Sam's resentful dance partner, who he drags around by the back of her knee
(a technique familiar to fans of Harpo Marx). He also threatens to autograph
his name on her lips, which would be tragic for such a beautiful woman (even
if her "brain stinks of wealth.")
But guess what? Sam's partner is actually Ritu...the daughter of that
horrible villain from the beginning of the movie! Since the villain has a
vested interest in Sam's career (and doesn't want to see his daughter
hanging around with such a disco-dancing, mommy's boy piece of trash), he
spends the rest of the movie trying to kill Jimmy. And everybody knows that
the best way to kill a disco dancer in India is by putting a Greek and an
Australian on the job.
The Greek is Vasco. His gang of finger-poppin' "West Side Story" thugs learn
the hard way that you shouldn't break Jimmy's guitar. Transforming from
disco dancer to disco fighter in the blink of an eye, Jimmy sends the
members of Vasco's gang flying into those beautifully-arranged piles of
loose bricks that you always see in Bollywood fight scenes. The gang member
who drove Jimmy into this ambush will forever mourn the day he learned the
secret code signal that started the fight: 22 erratic, disjointed honks of
his car horn. For completists, here is the signal as I understood it,
expressed in Morse Code dashes and dots:
"-..-- --..- .-.. ...- .-.-"
The Australian is, of course, the burly and bald-headed hero of the BollyBob
Society, Mr. Bob Christo himself! In this movie Bob plays a more menacing
role than usual, strikingly attired in a black turtleneck and a pair of
wrap-around shades. His most powerful fighting technique is something I
think of as "the Christo Claw," which means tensing your hand up like a
bird's talon and then touching another person's face. It doesn't look like
much, but the victims of this technique scream a lot.
Bob never gets a chance to use "the Christo Claw" on Jimmy...he's just not
fast enough and he's not the hero of the movie (as much as we BollyBobs wish
he were...hint-hint, Aditya Chopra!) Nope, Jimmy sends the foreign tough
guys packing, and then totally ruins a young girl's birthday party by
telling everybody there about how horrible his childhood was. When he
repeatedly refers to himself as an orphan, nobody has the nerve to tell him
that his mother is standing right next to him (with a handful of birthday
cake ready to shove into his mouth), but that must be because Jimmy is such
a big star. After all, every woman in town has a picture of Jimmy in his
"Krishna Pigeon" outfit under their pillows, which isn't surprising because
every other man in town looks pretty ugly.
We get to see Jimmy "perform" several times, occasionally backed up by four
chubby sax players that I think of as "The Tower Of Pigtails." He also
performs with a bunch of men wearing shower-curtain capes; he dances around
Krishna's crown and what appears to be an enormous golden dosa. During one
song at the peak of his career -- where he again lies on his stomach and
kicks his feet like the sassy coquette he is -- he wears a headband with
zebra-striped horns on it...you know, the usual disco stuff.
Even though the actual DANCING in the movie rarely even approaches disco --
it's more like an aerobic routine performed by easily-bored people who are
perpetually off-balance -- the MUSIC is certainly disco music. The problem
is, it's BAD disco music. Other than the plaintive "Jimmy Jimmy" number --
sung by Ritu, at last repentant and wearing pants that I can only describe
as "hot slacks" -- the songs are bland and forgettable, the beats
repetitive, the playback singing dull and unemotional. If it weren't for the
outrageous costumes, horrible dancing, and the strange camera lens which
turns every image into a fly's-eye-view of a pile of vomit, the song
sequences would be very painful indeed.
But it's later in the film -- at the "Internationalntie Of Dance
Competition" (yes, that's what the sign says) -- that the dancing reaches
its pinnacle. I am of course talking about the must-see performance by the
"Disco King & Queen Of Africa," who appear to be an epileptic man and a very
bored secretary respectively. If "Disco Dancer" were only this single
30-second dance routine -- and perhaps the brief performance by the "Disco
King & Queen Of Paris" as well -- the film would deserve its title on that
basis alone, and it would have earned its place in the upper ranks of Fun
Bad Bollywood Films.
You won't cry when you watch "Disco Dancer." You won't find yourself feeling
a deep personal identification with Jimmy (permanently morose and sulky),
Ritu (as much personality as a bug or a fish) or Jimmy's mom (so much of a
martyr you wish her sari would get caught in somebody's car door, because
that's obviously the sort of suffering she desires). There's very little to
like about the music, and the fight scenes are just plain bad. But what
makes "Disco Dancer" so special, really? Why does it have such a reputation
amongst afficionados of Bollywood kitsch? How did it manage to inspire a
song by Devo, a group of people already so kitschy and over-the-top that
they'd seem to require no further inspiration for their music?
Besides the usual explosive Bollywood bombast, it's that the film takes
disco so darn SERIOUSLY. You can make a movie about hip-hop and have the
music be a SYMBOL for something important. You can do the same thing with
blues, jazz, swing, and any number of other styles of music or dance
throughout history. But DISCO? Come on fellows, the idea alone is funny. All
disco ever inspired anybody to do was have sex, take pills for their STD's,
then go out and have more sex. I'm just glad that India made at least one
movie about it before the fad ran its course.
The sequel, of course, left Disco behind: "Rock Dancer," featuring Samantha
Fox. The less said about it the better.
LATE-BREAKING NEWS!
Forget all about that Stephen Hawking stuff, we've made a really important
discovery! After hours of scrutinizing the Disco Dancer screenshots --
under controlled conditions, of course -- our experts let out a surprised
gasp: could it really be? Sitting on the table in Sam's love-pad? Is
that...A THERMOS???
Indeed it was! We have made a crucial find that will force us to reevaluate
the entire history of thermoses in India. Disco Dancer was released in
1982, meaning that this is the most recent thermos discovered in an Indian
film.
If you've seen a thermos in an Indian film, please let us know! And if it's
in a film released after 1982 you might have made an even more important
discovery than this one! Imagine!
Muffy St. Bernard
http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff