The joke’s on the aliens

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Joker

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JOKER3.JPG [2]

Joker is a joke, a gag pulled on all manner of films about aliens — it pisses on films about humans searching for aliens, on green and brown aliens giving us darshan, on films about humans (read filmy Americans) being abducted by aliens, and on aliens themselves. Whoever thought that aliens were higher beings made of finer cerebral matter needs to see the last scene of Joker.

Whatever Hollywood may have us believe, according to Bollywood, aliens are not just dullards, but will pick the dumbest amongst us for friends, and as dance partners.
Appropriately, Joker has a harebrained plot. In America lives an Indian scientist named Agastya (Akshay Kumar). At his home, which he shares with his partner Diva (Sonakshi Sinha), he has installed many rectangular and cylindrical screens and all sorts of dish antennas to catch the movement and conversations of aliens. This paraphernalia has been assembled thanks to the $1 million grant he received for two years. He often catches brief snatches of alien gibberish whereupon all his gizmos get excited and start rotating and throwing current. But this is not enough for the guys funding him. He needs to get in touch with at least one alien. So he’s put on a one-month deadline. Just then he receives a message — his father is dying and wants him to come home.
Let’s pause here and consider Agastya’s village which is technically in India but is not to be found on India’s political or geographical map. There’s a story about why it got left out, but this you must discover for yourself. Suffice to say that the village sits unacknowledged, without electricity and water, in the middle of three states and is called Paglapur.
The proverbial “Pitaji bimar hain, jaldi ghar aao” taar is a hoax and the reason why daddyji — Paglapur’s crosseyed-when-convenient Mukhiya — summoned Agastya is that he wants his scientist son to help the retarded village and its villagers.
We don’t meet all the 600 villagers, but the few we are introduced to are most certainly in need of help, if not incarceration. One walks around in a little Roman soldier skirt, while another behaves like a Roman Emperor; a kid hangs from the ceiling because he thinks he’s a lalten, and Agastya’s brother (Shreyas Talpade) only talks gibberish — “Kala ghis ghoot ghoos-ghoos.” All villagers, except Agastya, follow what he’s saying. The village’s headmaster dresses like C.V. Raman and does literal translation of all Hindi phrases — “bal-bal bachche” becomes “hair-hair remains”, “tu aa gaya” becomes “you come gone” and “ulti chatri” is “vomit umbrella”. Then there’s Lord Falkland who, incidentally, is Paglapur’s brightest spark and if the film had paid heed to what he was saying all along, Joker would have wrapped up in 25 minutes.
Anyway, after spending some time with characters and ticks inspired from all over the place — Prasoon Joshi’s brilliant Happydent advert, Bol Bachchan’s tod-marod-ke-bol dialogue, and, of course, The Gods Must Be Crazy — Agastya and Diva realise that these nincompoops really do need their help. Agastya goes to the chief ministers of the three states, but no help is forthcoming. So he figures that the only way out is to attract the media’s attention. He designs artistic crop cycles in Paglapur’s fields and soon a media jamboree ensues, a la Peepli [Live], to cover the story of aliens trying to make contact with humans. But Agastya’s old gora rival Simon exposes the hoax. Agastya then comes up with what is the film’s most inspired, most hysterical shtick. Paglapur’s particularly slow inmates are boiled in coloured water, decorated with tarbooz shells, karela, Shimla mirch and cherries and then made to wear Amitabh Bachchan’s chak-mak Diwali suit from Saara zamana and make shy appearances, not just for the TV cameras, but also for the full armored battalion that White House has dispatched to Paglapur.
This skit is so hysterical that I wanted to roll up and down the aisle laughing. I didn’t because I didn’t want to miss the many-legged alien octopus skittering about while talking like Spielberg’s ET. Just for this spoof, Joker is worth a dekho.

I would really like to know who sowed the seeds for Joker. Was it that 2002 film Signs and the bizarre earnestness with which M. Night Shyamalan tried to pass off tripe as science fiction? Shirish Kunder’s Joker, when it mocks Mr Shyamalan’s idiotic film, or spoofs other films about aliens, it works. As long as it rests on hoary alien stories and activities, it's fun. The moment it tries to stand on its own, it buckles.
I worry for Shirish Kunder, editor, director, husband of Farah Khan and writer of that atrocious Tees Maar Khan . He doesn’t have a single original idea in his head. Joker, written and directed by Kunder, is a bit of this and a bit of that with some sitcom-type jokes and dialogue thrown in. Some of them work, including the mildly political commentary on media, India’s sadhu babas, stuff that passes off in the name of development and American paranoia. We totally buy the story of Paglapur — villagers lost and stuck in a time warp who fear a World War II German attack every time a commercial plane flies overhead, at the same time every day — because the whole premise is so mental, so random. And because we sort of fall in love with this enchanted village that gets lit up by stunning jugnu lamps every night. But when Joker turns around and does exactly what it has been mocking all this while, i.e. when it runs out of jokes, it stinks.
Akshay Kumar allows Paglapur’s attendant madness and its loony inmates to overshadow him. That’s nice. Sonakshi Sinha can't act and doesn't try to. She and Akshay make a strange but cute pair. Chitrangada's item number? Let's not call it that. Special appearance is more appropriate.