It seems RGV is re-remaking SHOLAY, by remaking RGV ki AAG. Big B this time has decided to stay away from the potential scary movie! This recent report reminded me of the sublime experience of being among the distinguished few who had the good fortune of watching that poetry-in-loose-motion kind of a movie. Here's what my thoughts were on that ocassion. Worth a re-visit:

RGV ki AAG: Must Watch

Don’t go by what the critics are saying. They are the same people who wrote Sholay off on its release 32 years back

Don’t go by box-office reports. After all, when have good movies had a good run?

Ram Gopal Varma has weaved magic in celluloid with his latest offering.

RGV ki AAG is a statement on state-of-the-art direction, performances and the nuances of filmmaking. Only this time, the mastery is so deliberately subtle that it might fool the ordinary viewer into believing that he is watching a C-grade (actually, a don’t see grade) film. Ramu, a self-proclaimed Sholay fan, has paid tribute to his favourite movie in a style that we might call the “reverse illumination technique”. This esoteric method is based on this old jungle saying: we know what day is only because we know what night is.

Put beside Sholay, RGV ki AAG looks so charmingly stale, that it only accentuates the original’s impact. That’s where RGV, the Sholay fan succeeds. Ramu stays clear from the easy temptation to cast the actors in roles that may have conventionally suited them. Leading the pack is Nisha Kothari as Basanti, who is as convincing and believable as Rajnikant would be as a physics professor. The other actors too, have delivered controlled performances as perfectly lifeless caricatures lest we start liking them and forget the original cast. Big B’s Babban Singh is more of Agneepath’s Vijay Dinanath Chauhan than anything else. Even he was meticulous with his performance by way of making it too loud and theatrical to look convincing. After all, could he have risked undermining Amjad Gabbar Khan’s impact?

Structurally, the story is the same. Only the backdrop has shifted to Mumbai. There are only a few inconsequential changes in the characterization. AAG is about a Ganglord versus two hitmen. Or to put it mildly, RGV versus your intense desire to like the movie.

Ramu has taken painstaking care to make the movie technically as shoddy as possible. The cartoon-like close combat scenes, the nauseatingly alternating pan-zoom of the camera and the color filters all add to the aesthetic appeal of this masterpiece. Musically, it’s sheer sound pollution. The editing is as smooth as a knife through concrete. The dialogues make even the TLV Prasad - Mithun potboilers look like art-house cinema in comparison. Undeniably, Mohanlal, in his heavily accented tone, saying “Lauha Geram hey” takes the cake.

All of these fall perfectly in the right places for a pattern to emerge out for an observant viewer.

Unmistakably, AAG is Ramu's clever tribute to India’s most successful movie ever, in the way that he showed that Sholay cannot be remade, that how bad Sholay could have been but didn't be and that how silly all the comparison is. He succeeded in getting a sizable number of people to leave the hall by interval. This observant correspondent believes that they marched off to the nearest outlet to buy Sholay VCDs or DVDs.

Moreover, hopefully there will be a sequel to AAG with Nisha Kothari in a triple role and all other actors “plutoed” to mere blink-and-you-miss roles. Let’s keep our fingers firmly crossed for RGV ki AAGAMI. After all, every silver lining has a dark cloud.