Be wary — there be SPOILERS ahead:

I just got back from the theater, having watched Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna; it was OK... just OK.

The most negative aspect of the entire film, I would have to say, is its length; its utterly indefatigable, interminable length. The movie's a predictable venture, yet it takes three and a half hours to tell its tale, and, unfortunately, in doing so, indulges in a lot of repetition. Some moments — in hindsight — actually feel placed to increase the movie's running time. It's almost as though someone sat down and said, "well, it's a Karan Johar film: it has to be long... OK, we're going to go ahead and loop all the 'flashback' moments we can, and, when that fails, we'll just shoot one moment from myriad angles, and cut them all together."

The pacing, too, I found upsetting. During the first hour and a half or so, the film is thoroughly manic-depressive; moments of high hilarity, followed immediately by insanely vocal fights and sqaurrels. Speaking of the humor, I have to say, too often, I found it simply annoying — formulaic and obligatory. The jokes and style I loved in Kal Ho Naa Ho, I found stale and over-done in Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. Many great directors end up "borrowing," years later, from their own protéges, usually with disastrous results; it almost seems as though, here, Karan Johar's gone stale, and grown desperate, before he's even had a chance to pass his prime. The one thing I do appreciate having been borrowed, is the depiction of "non-Indians." I feel that — in an industry that too often fucks up every aspect of white people and how the English language is spoken by them across the world and its various parts (and that does this in an ever-increasingly "'global' society") — Kal Ho Naa Ho championed a new path; one in which New Yorkers spoke like New Yorkers, and in which not every person the Indian characters met just "happened to be" "perfect"-Hindi-speaking N.R.I.s. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna keeps this up, and I'm boundlessly glad that it does. OK, all this said, the last hour and a half or so of the film, then, is taken up mostly by Rani Mukherjee's perfectlly-painted face's being marred by two carefully symmetrical streams of tears.

What really ended up getting to be about Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna was just how closely it treaded on hypocrisy. For a film that touts being about "realistic relationships; about love and about marriage," the movie, by its end, really is nothing more than "Karan-Johar romantic cinema." It's not a tale of how couples fight; that's only a smaller part of it. The movie, as a whole, is to be filed under the Shah-Rukh-Khan-romance genre, and not much more. This is Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dilwale Dulhanyia Le Jaayenge, Dil To Pagal Hai, and every other archetypical "Bollywood romance," only it tries to have a more "meaningful, earthy" backdrop. For one thing, on earth, people don't run into one another fractionally as often as they do in Johar's world; this isn't just about "suspending disbelief" — sometimes, even without "thinking about it too much, and thus killing the 'movie-going experience,'" things just seem ridiculously (read, stupidly) easy for the characters. Extra-marital affairs are not new to India, and they've been best when not forced to take a back-seat to getting the two lovers together at the end. Silsila is great; Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is just "OK."

As for the performances, I found them somewhat sporadically appreciable. This is a Shah-Rukh-Kahn film, and, as such, if he blows, the film sinks. Well, Shah Rukh Khan is a good actor, and I think he does well here. Honestly, I haven't seen him this "Shah-Rukh-Khan" since Dil To Pagal Hai; there are scenes in which he really does revert to some painful, hammy over-acting. Fortunately, though, he's good for the most part, and if you're in the theater watching this film (and you know what you're going in for), you probably won't be disappointed by him. Rani Mukherjee is all right, but, after Black, I guess I expected her to do more acting and less "typical shit." Her role is about as basic as it gets, and she really doesn't put anything interesting into it. Preity Zinta is OK, and Abhishek Bachchan has a scene or two that have him stand out (in a good way), and a scene or three in which you wish you could fast-forward at a movie theater (right, dude?). Kirron Kher is excellent, though, and this means mcuh coming from me, as I usually don't care much for her. She and Amitabh Bachchan — who truly is pitch-perfect, and grants the film enjoyability every time he's on screen — share an almost-tangible chemistry, and I very much favored the few scenes that were devoted to their interactions with each other.

So, on the whole, I found Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna to be a decent film, though nothing spectacular. I think the film goes wrong (besides in its length) in trying to be both "big-budget [very big-bidget] romance," and "realistic domestic drama." After Chalte Chalte — which was not only better than this film, but quite good (and quite under-rated) on its own — I think Shah Rukh Khan did this film only because of its director. The people who go to see the work probably won't walk out pissed (I didn't), but they won't be dlown away (as I wasn't), either.

Sorry, but I just had to post this little "tid-bit" separately:

What the f*** was with the "flower scene" in the street? The music, the camera-work, the cuts, the intensity... it was played up as as important as Gandhi's assassination. A scene like that — which clocked in, I think, at a good two minutes — could (and should) have been done with subtlety, in passing, not with the entire orchestra beating out a note together.

There... Sorry.

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Ali