Qalandar on Masala and DABANGG (Hindi; 2010)

EXCERPT:

“Abhinav Kashyap attempts to answer my questions. Acting like it’s 1983 won’t do, but neither will spoofing all the way to a gag-fest — leaving everything else aside, masala-as-slapfest just isn’t funny. Nor does the tongue in cheek cleverness, or rather, the cinematic presentation of cleverness (a la Bluffmaster!), sit comfortably with a mode the very lifeblood of which is “as if”: masala cinema takes the absolute significance of the story and characters that it is presenting for granted. What’s left, then?