Rope, no hope. An overwrought girl is just about to hang herself from a ceiling fan, when this dude walks into the room, looks at her coolly and asks, “Wassup?”

Explicably, I’m getting a severe case of the Hyderabad blues. One of the nation’s largest film-producing centre with several studios dotting the hills, just isn’t the talking point among Bollywood’s top echelons — the way it was not so long ago.

Coffee, sweeter than a hundred toffees — she invites him over at night for a cup. And he’s as frisky as a pup. So while she’s in the kitchen, he strips stark naked.

A movement is on, small but significant. Okay, so it’s not exactly a New Wave lashing an arid horizon, like it did in the 1970s, with the emergence of filmmakers with something meaningful to say, and with either an inborn skill or a Pune Film Institute-education to say it loud and clear. Yup, I’m talking of an era when directors bucked the system and became such a vital force that they were reviled by Bollywood’s top movie moghuls.

Yikes. No no, they aren’t your grandparents though they’re behaving like some bygone-era pair of lovers, oohing over a pair of swans, aahing over a shower of meteors and he-he’ing over corny stuff like, “If you’re called Zee, just call me Doordarshan.

There’s something majorly amiss.That tribal rite of going to the movies just isn’t the same anymore. Never mind, the fancy price of tickets or the 100 bucks for pops of corn. It’s just that the romance of submitting myself to the wonderful people and their conflicts on the screen just doesn’t make me laugh... or cry... with the same purity of feelings today.

It’s back to the inhuman factor.

It was the first ‘adults only’ experience: B.R. Ishara’s Chetna (1970) brought sex out of the closet. Publicity posters flashed legs of Rehana Sultan in the role of a call girl And it clicked big-time. Chetna was sexually bold, narrating the story of a well-heeled young man who falls hopelessly in love with a booze-guzzling call girl.

Down cast eyes, a tentative smile and an uncertain body lingo add up to a ‘bahenji’ or a wallflower in the movies. Now those attributes were certainly not expected of the hi-fashion-model-turned-actress Diana Penty. Surprisingly that just what’s made her click, especially with all the young dudes-next-door.

Jeepers creepers. It’s one of those, guaranteed to cast a spell of woes over those who are still optimistic about expecting a shred of sense, sensibility and taste in popular entertainment. Naah, no chance, unless you derive pleasure from juvenile jokes, vulgar gags and sexual jiggery pokery.