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You guys keep on saying about extraordinary acting skills of Saif Ali Khan. But I find his acting to be very stylized and synthetic. I mean, is Saif Ali Khan able to feel the soul of the characters he plays, like, say, Om Puri or Irfan Khan? or is he just that ultimate showman who is well conversant with ‘technicalities’ of great acting hence can fake it better than others?(like the women who fake orgasms, you know). Well, for me, his acting on the screen or his behavior off it, do not bespeak of that quite intelligence, intuition and self-awareness which the exceptional actors are usually born with. I have a friend who hates Saif Ali Khan to the hilt and this friend is one of the most intelligent and intuitive minds I’d ever seen. Whenever I try to force him to clearly define his vague feeling of hatred for the actor, he would simply say ‘he is a fake’. Though, I laugh off his remark, I secretly find it difficult to disagree with my friend whenever I watch Saif Ali Khan on the screen. For one thing, besides everything else, the most common trait among all the extraordinary actors is their very high degree of likeability. In other words, I firmly believe that, not all likeable actors are great but almost all the great actors are likeable. That’s probably because of their capacity for suffering; their in-born ability to perceive the myriad dimensions of human soul; their intuitive understanding that human psyche is basically structure-less hence an amalgam of incongruous thoughts. Therefore, it is very difficult to dislike a great actor because,through his role, he tends to reflect collective subconscious fears and vulnerabilities of the audience a lot better than his less-gifted peers, though he may not be an intellectual enough to concretely define this instinctive comprehension of the character he plays. But I find this vital trait of likeability is mostly missing in Saif Ali Khan. I don’t know. Sometimes the appearances can be quite deceptive and I may be wrong or even biased.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

1. Om Puri, Irrfan Khan and Naseeruddin Shah sometimes play roles that others would be loath to touch or not offered to others at all for whatever reason. Saif Ali Khan is not in their league.
2. To fake something well, one ought to be well acquainted with the technicalities or nuances of the craft/art. Even if Saif Ali Khan’s performance is “soulless” or he is a good “faker”, it does not detract from the joy of watching him make an effort unlike the Abhisheks and Priyankas who lack even a nodding acquaintance with the art of movies and treat it like a walk in the park.
3. Is there a statistically significant correlation between onscreen and offscreen performance/behavior for actors or stars be it Saif Ali Khan, Vivien Leigh, Om Puri, Marlon Brando or Frank Sinatra? The Human Mind is infinitely complex and behavior a function of geography, time, chemistry (in the purely chemicals’ sense of balance and imbalance), socialization et al.
4. Great actors are assailed with immense self-doubt and not easily satisfied. When director Elia Kazan showed Marlon Brando the complete film On the Waterfront, Brando is said to have walked off before the movie ended because he was so depressed with his performance.
5. You say almost all the great actors are likeable. Do we ever think of Hollywood greats like Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud or Jack Nicholson as likeable figures? Or is likeability of great actors a cultural anomaly of the Oriental mind?

I was talking about the masala movies and i feel that you don’t see or you are able to see the main crictically aclaimed movies of bollywood and you feel bollywood is bad.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Most “Masala” movies are plain awful.

ok,so did you watch any of the other ajay movie

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Not yet. It’s in our Netflix Queue. We got Company but the DVD was broken.

This film is incredibly silly. I don’t really remember much about Race as it barely has any redeeming qualities. But for some reason I can’t seem to forget Bipasha’s teeny tiny outfits and the memory of Akshay’s hairy chest unfortunately seems to be imprinted in my mind. I’m not that big a fan of Saif but acting wise he was superior to the rest. Akshaye disappointed me immensely. I really enjoyed his performances in Dil Chatha Hai and Gandhi My Father. There’s nothing to say about Anil Kapoor except he just really irritates me.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

Race was pathetic. A waste of time and $$.

have You watch any of ajay’s films and what do you think of ‘u me aur hum’

SearchIndia.com Responds:

As we have told you several times, we’ve watched several of Ajay’s films in the past including some recently on DVD.

U Me Aur Hum is releasing this weekend in the U.S. We will be watching the Hollywood film The Notebook tonight to see if there are any similarities with U Me Aur Hum.

Hi, this is my rather delayed response to your comments on my earlier post on March 23rd.

1. Guys like Ompuri not only play roles that others wouldn’t touch, they also reject the roles others readily accept (this is actually one of the reasons why Saif Ali Khan could be a fake). The acute sensitivity of good actors prevents them from taking up certain roles which they consider to be not having any story to tell or primarily carved up to please the audience hence whose design is predominantly cartoonish. A perceptive mind, the one great actors usually possess, is either repulsed at the prospect of playing such swanky stereotypes or ill at ease playing them. On the other hand, a fake is usually marked by his greediness and unbridled ambition to take up any role that fetches him name or even money as his insensitivity makes him immune to the ’spiritual stink’ that emanates from artistic deadness of caricatures which he accepts without any reservations.

2. Naw. I don’t agree. The moment you realize something as a fake, your joy of celebrating its beauty is totally diminished, no matter how close its resemblance to the original is. In fact, you feel thoroughly cheated and hate that thing more than any ‘ordinary fake’ which is readily visible. Forgive me if I again take that ‘fake orgasm’ thing as example. Will your love-making experience would be as great as it has been once you knew your partner is pretending and that she is faking something you expect from her than acting out something she innately feels???

3&4. There may not be an well-structured empirical correlation between onscreen and offscreen performance of an actor like you say. However, like an extraterrestrial object that is bound to share certain unearthly qualities of its peers despite its ultimate habitat in the infinite space, I believe, all great actors, share certain common above par perceptions and sensitivities that filter through their offscreen behaviors and public interviews. In other words, their commonality is usually marked by absence of generic insensitivity rather than presence of a bunch of well-defined traits or attitudes that distinctly stamp them as great actors(for ex, I cannot imagine Om Puri wooing an half-wit like Kareena Kapoor and getting a positive response). Though the refined perspicacity of genuine actors is differentiated by individual quirks and perspectives, they all tend to operate within a larger domain of precocious sensitivity. An intelligent actor is usually possessed by self-awareness of his mind so as to be overwhelmed by his reverence for life’s complexity to such a degree that the counterpart in Real Life instinctively becomes the reference of comparison for the role he is playing on the screen. This explains a bona fide actor’s intolerance for artificial roles that are neither rooted in reality nor a logical derivative of it and his vulnerability to self-doubt since your performance on the screen is never going to capture the soul of the corresponding real-life character in totality.

5. When I said likeability I was not actually referring to the actual persona of the actor. Rather I was referring to the likeability of the actor’s performance on the screen. A fake tends to view his characters through the eyes of his audience hence he would normally choose a role he thinks out of ordinary or would impress the crowd. His standards of acting are externalized and it reeks of conscious calibration in terms of the uncommon costumes/mannerisms/mindset/psychology (for ex, many actors wrongly believe playing the role of a psycho, lunatic or a mentally retarded personality would make them instantly famous. In fact, in many cases, performance of such actors in such roles does get rave reviews by witless critics and they do become famous undeservingly). One fine example is Kamal Hassan, whose soulless and overwrought acting is often hailed as ‘great acting’ simply because he chooses roles that are unconventional either in terms of appearance or demeanor. Actors like Kamal Hassan fails to understand that great acting is not all about merely donning the shell of a character in order to sell what you think would please the crowd. But in case of great acting, however, this ’shell’ usually becomes the natural extension of the thorough comprehension of the underlying psychological dynamics of the character rather than conscious enacting of attention-grabbing peculiarities or characteristics or ideals. On top of that, a great actor is also able to project vagueness, incompletion and complexity of human psyche as is found in real life effortlessly because he is usually hard-wired to the Reality and be able to draw his energies from the same. Hence, great acting naturally consists of two inevitable elements i.e. first, a verisimilar portrayal of a certain character by the screenwriter and second, a perceptive actor to discern the intricacies of such a role. Since great acting is not possible when either of these two elements missing, a culture with vibrant literary traditions is more likely to breed great actors and on the other hand, careers of great actors tend to be short or altogether suppressed in cultures that have no intellectual life. In case of the latter, what we usually find in place of great actors is ’skillful’ impersonators who is smart enough to figure out the mere imagery of great acting thus able to enact a remarkably high degree of mimicry. The impersonator is usually the one who can take on a wider gamut of roles owing to a mindset that has no barriers of sensitivities, intellectual predilections that can restrict his choice. He can take on a role a psychically sensitive actor finds abhorring or a role he finds ’special’ or reject a role that doesn’t have enough aesthetic or commercial pomp. If we scrutinize the acting careers of Sail Ali Khan or Amitabh Bachchan or Kamal Hassan, such lack of psychic forbiddance as found in authentic actors is very evident and they are strewn with heaps of insignificant kitschy roles with an occasional sparkle of impersonation of artistic acumen. Conversely, a great actor, with his ability to project a character as a complex alloy of unconnected emotional elements, is able to stir the subconscious of his audience despite his conscious willingness or unwillingness since he is watching a hazy reflection of reality than a performance that is a mere aesthetic scraps of kinesics stringed together to please him. Thus, a great actor’s performance is usually likeable if not ‘lovable’, for having a transparent personality, devoid of self-will and creative ambition, which can truly mirror the role he is playing as a part of the collective human psyche ( all actors can do this in flashes occasionally, though they are not exactly aware of what is happening ). Thus, great acting is more cathartic than aesthetic as it relieves the burden of reality that we suppress consciously/sub-consciously. It is difficult to hate such an onscreen personality which so readily dissolves into the soul of the character it assumes so as to be intensely suggestive of realness although it may make us restless as it often reminds us a facet of a truth we’ve subdued long back or been unaware of hitherto.

P.S.: You mentioned Jack Nicholson in your great actors list. But I believe Jack Nicholson is a typical Hollywood stereotype, very similar to Amithab Bachchan of Bollywood. He doesn’t belong to the class of Robert De Niro or even Al Pacino.

SearchIndia.com Responds:

We have read your comment.

We agree with you on Kamal Haasan - much overrated (reminds us of In the country of the blind…).

But we think Jack Nicholson still has it and towers head and shoulders above the Amitabh Bachchans. Whether it’s Chinatown or some of his later movies like Departed, Something’s Gotta Give etc, he’s a pleasure to watch on the screen. but we wouldn’t put him in the class of Brando of On the Waterfront or Streetcar Named Desire.

We didn’t think much of Saif Ali Khan (or for that matter any of the others) in Tashan.