Golmaal Returns - Bollywood Movie Review

Cast: Ajay Devgan, Kareena Kapoor, Tusshar Kapoor, Anjana Sukhani, Arshad Warsi, Amrita Arora, Shreyas Talpade and Celina Jaitley
Director: Rohit Shetty
Rating: *

The sequel to the successful “Golmaal” is filled with in-house jokes - for instance when Ajay Devgan weaves the titles of his films into the dialogues. Or the hilarious takeoff by that talented Ashwini Kalsekar on Rani Mukerji’s randy tart’s act from Sanjay Bhansali’s “Saawariya”… it’s a rare moment of genuine laughter in this comedy of earsplitting guffaws, all emanating from the screen rather than out of it.

Fast, furious and fatuous “Golmaal Returns” isn’t quite that Diwali blues-chaser you expect it to be. The comic timing, though skilled, is wasted by the actors in sequences that try to breathe fire into a burnt-out oven.

No wonder the comicality is half-baked and often repetitive. The jokes from the first film are extended to the second, often with far-from-funny results. Many large sections of satire just lack attractive attire.

What was Kareena Kapoor doing in this corny concoction? Playing a fan of the saas-bahu serials, she’s named Ekta, as a homage to the soap queen Ekta Kapoor whose brother incidentally plays Kareena’s brother in the movie.

Tusshar Kapoor is a howl. And a whine. And a whoop. And a snivel. Since he is mute, he sharpens his ability to emote through jungle calls. He’s a revelation.

The camaraderie among the cast is quite evident. The male actors bond with gusto and Shreyas Talpade, who is the new recruit to the revelry, joins in without skipping a beat. His comic timing is delightfully sinewy.

But what happened to Arshad Warsi? His quick entry and exit as cop begins to get on the nerves after a while.

But Tusshar and Shreyas whip up a wacky humour. Most of the material about a suspicious wife and several red herrings strewn across a path that’s self-consciously forged on the grounds of Hyderabad’s Ramoji Film City is very old-fashioned in its approach to slapstick humour. Crowds hover around studio-built malls and streets trying to look casual.

They provide a rough and random backdrop to what’s basically material for a sex comedy on stage.

The characters run in breathlessly, say their jokey lines, fall over each other in rituals of suggestive laughter and then fall out of the frames waiting for the next gag to beckon them. It’s all supposed to be hilariously funny. But is often just a pretext for more a pantomime of parody than the real thing.

At the end there’s a threat for a third segment of “Golmaal”.

It would all depend on how much money the part two manages to bring in.

Going by the audiences’ riotous response, it seems no-brainers are eminently fashionable.

Golmaal Returns - Bollywood Movie Review

Cast: Ajay Devgan, Kareena Kapoor, Tusshar Kapoor, Anjana Sukhani, Arshad Warsi, Amrita Arora, Shreyas Talpade and Celina Jaitley
Director: Rohit Shetty
Rating: *

The sequel to the successful “Golmaal” is filled with in-house jokes - for instance when Ajay Devgan weaves the titles of his films into the dialogues. Or the hilarious takeoff by that talented Ashwini Kalsekar on Rani Mukerji’s randy tart’s act from Sanjay Bhansali’s “Saawariya”… it’s a rare moment of genuine laughter in this comedy of earsplitting guffaws, all emanating from the screen rather than out of it.

Fast, furious and fatuous “Golmaal Returns” isn’t quite that Diwali blues-chaser you expect it to be. The comic timing, though skilled, is wasted by the actors in sequences that try to breathe fire into a burnt-out oven.

No wonder the comicality is half-baked and often repetitive. The jokes from the first film are extended to the second, often with far-from-funny results. Many large sections of satire just lack attractive attire.

What was Kareena Kapoor doing in this corny concoction? Playing a fan of the saas-bahu serials, she’s named Ekta, as a homage to the soap queen Ekta Kapoor whose brother incidentally plays Kareena’s brother in the movie.

Tusshar Kapoor is a howl. And a whine. And a whoop. And a snivel. Since he is mute, he sharpens his ability to emote through jungle calls. He’s a revelation.

The camaraderie among the cast is quite evident. The male actors bond with gusto and Shreyas Talpade, who is the new recruit to the revelry, joins in without skipping a beat. His comic timing is delightfully sinewy.

But what happened to Arshad Warsi? His quick entry and exit as cop begins to get on the nerves after a while.

But Tusshar and Shreyas whip up a wacky humour. Most of the material about a suspicious wife and several red herrings strewn across a path that’s self-consciously forged on the grounds of Hyderabad’s Ramoji Film City is very old-fashioned in its approach to slapstick humour. Crowds hover around studio-built malls and streets trying to look casual.

They provide a rough and random backdrop to what’s basically material for a sex comedy on stage.

The characters run in breathlessly, say their jokey lines, fall over each other in rituals of suggestive laughter and then fall out of the frames waiting for the next gag to beckon them. It’s all supposed to be hilariously funny. But is often just a pretext for more a pantomime of parody than the real thing.

At the end there’s a threat for a third segment of “Golmaal”.

It would all depend on how much money the part two manages to bring in.

Going by the audiences’ riotous response, it seems no-brainers are eminently fashionable.

Fashion - Bollywood Movie Review

Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Kangana Ranaut, Mugdha Godse, Samir Soni, Arjan Bajwa
Rating: ****

Somewhere in the second-half of the heartrending evocation of the tragedy that underscores the glamour of the fashion world, all dialogues cease, as Madhur Bhandarkar, in his inimitable style, records Priyanka Chopra’s character’s descent into hell.

It’s as though the music and the zing have suddenly decided to go out of her life.

This is where we realise the truth about all works of art. The sum-total of Bhandarkar’s vision is far greater than the captivating components that characterise his protagonist’s journey to painful self-realisation.

If we look at the issue of morality in Bhandarkar’s cinema, then all his protagonists reach a stage in their life when they cannot look themselves in the eye.

That moment of reckoning in “Fashion” reflects itself effortlessly in Priyanka’s face.

It’s her character Meghna’s journey from the innocent aridity of Chandigarh to the corruption of Mumbai’s modeling world.

This remarkably resonant film is arguably Bhandarkar’s most accomplished work to date, though “Page 3″ comes close in terms of etching out even the smallest of characters.

Mahesh Limaye’s cinematography is a little predictable in its bustle-and-bristle images. Fortunately the storytelling is anything but predictable.

Screenwriting has always been the greatest strength of Bhandarkar’s cinema. The screenplay conveys a lived-in ‘overheard-at-a-party’ kind of conversational tone.

Rhetorics and high-drama are exchanged for fearless transparency in the characterisations and conversations. What we eventually look at is not a tantalizing dekko at the beau monde but a breathtaking map of a heartbroken humanity who occupy the upper crust of the urban social order and eventually have to slow down to wonder, ‘Is this really worth it?”

By the the time ramp queen Meghna Mathur reaches this self-searching stage, “Fashion” becomes not a macro-cosmic view of the ramp world, but a story of two women, one who already ‘has-been’ there (Kangana Ranaut) and the other who just about saves herself from catastrophe in the nick of time.

The sequences between Priyanka and Kangana are the highlights of this bumpy journey into heartbreak and desolation. Some sequences leave a lump in the throat like the one where the ousted ramp queen Kangana confronts and warns Priyanka in a restaurant loo, or later after they bond.

Whether it’s sexual or emotional, Bhandarkar has never flinched from telling it like it is. “Fashion” shocks us with its brutal forthrightness on matters of the heart.

Samir Soni performs a complex tight-rope as a closeted-gay designer, who balances a lover with his mother’s demand for a wife with a marriage of convenience with a stunning model friend played by Mugdha Godse.

Mugdha is the female discovery of the year. With a great figure and face that registers a spectrum of emotions, she gives a compelling consistency to her goodhearted model’s character.

What Kangana does in “Fashion”, no other actress can do. But there’re no surprises in her performance as she has done it before.

Priyanka catches you completely unawares. Her transformation from the bubbly Chandigarh girl to the super-ambitious supermodel, who dumps her boyfriend and conscience to pursue her dreams, is achieved with a gentle subtlety and bridled passion.

This is Priyanka’s coming-of-age film. She looks like a zillion bucks. And acts like a woman who connects with the darkest, most desperate human emotions without wallowing in them.

Every character is written to accentuate the specific actor’s grace in the given space. The performances of Kitu Gidwani and Ashwin Mushran stand out. Harsh Chaya’s ‘gay lisp’ was the only annoying appendage.

Also, the ramp walks could have been done with slightly more élan and subtlety.

Eventually, the evocative screenplay decides to give its fallen heroine a second chance. But that seems more like cinematic liberty.

Bhandarkar takes us through a labyrinth of emotions, some devastating in their gut-level directness. But at the end, we come away with a film that gives us something to hold on to permanently even as the characters on screen lose practically everything worth holding on to.

A truly outstanding film.

Fashion - Bollywood Movie Review

Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Kangana Ranaut, Mugdha Godse, Samir Soni, Arjan Bajwa
Rating: ****

Somewhere in the second-half of the heartrending evocation of the tragedy that underscores the glamour of the fashion world, all dialogues cease, as Madhur Bhandarkar, in his inimitable style, records Priyanka Chopra’s character’s descent into hell.

It’s as though the music and the zing have suddenly decided to go out of her life.

This is where we realise the truth about all works of art. The sum-total of Bhandarkar’s vision is far greater than the captivating components that characterise his protagonist’s journey to painful self-realisation.

If we look at the issue of morality in Bhandarkar’s cinema, then all his protagonists reach a stage in their life when they cannot look themselves in the eye.

That moment of reckoning in “Fashion” reflects itself effortlessly in Priyanka’s face.

It’s her character Meghna’s journey from the innocent aridity of Chandigarh to the corruption of Mumbai’s modeling world.

This remarkably resonant film is arguably Bhandarkar’s most accomplished work to date, though “Page 3″ comes close in terms of etching out even the smallest of characters.

Mahesh Limaye’s cinematography is a little predictable in its bustle-and-bristle images. Fortunately the storytelling is anything but predictable.

Screenwriting has always been the greatest strength of Bhandarkar’s cinema. The screenplay conveys a lived-in ‘overheard-at-a-party’ kind of conversational tone.

Rhetorics and high-drama are exchanged for fearless transparency in the characterisations and conversations. What we eventually look at is not a tantalizing dekko at the beau monde but a breathtaking map of a heartbroken humanity who occupy the upper crust of the urban social order and eventually have to slow down to wonder, ‘Is this really worth it?”

By the the time ramp queen Meghna Mathur reaches this self-searching stage, “Fashion” becomes not a macro-cosmic view of the ramp world, but a story of two women, one who already ‘has-been’ there (Kangana Ranaut) and the other who just about saves herself from catastrophe in the nick of time.

The sequences between Priyanka and Kangana are the highlights of this bumpy journey into heartbreak and desolation. Some sequences leave a lump in the throat like the one where the ousted ramp queen Kangana confronts and warns Priyanka in a restaurant loo, or later after they bond.

Whether it’s sexual or emotional, Bhandarkar has never flinched from telling it like it is. “Fashion” shocks us with its brutal forthrightness on matters of the heart.

Samir Soni performs a complex tight-rope as a closeted-gay designer, who balances a lover with his mother’s demand for a wife with a marriage of convenience with a stunning model friend played by Mugdha Godse.

Mugdha is the female discovery of the year. With a great figure and face that registers a spectrum of emotions, she gives a compelling consistency to her goodhearted model’s character.

What Kangana does in “Fashion”, no other actress can do. But there’re no surprises in her performance as she has done it before.

Priyanka catches you completely unawares. Her transformation from the bubbly Chandigarh girl to the super-ambitious supermodel, who dumps her boyfriend and conscience to pursue her dreams, is achieved with a gentle subtlety and bridled passion.

This is Priyanka’s coming-of-age film. She looks like a zillion bucks. And acts like a woman who connects with the darkest, most desperate human emotions without wallowing in them.

Every character is written to accentuate the specific actor’s grace in the given space. The performances of Kitu Gidwani and Ashwin Mushran stand out. Harsh Chaya’s ‘gay lisp’ was the only annoying appendage.

Also, the ramp walks could have been done with slightly more élan and subtlety.

Eventually, the evocative screenplay decides to give its fallen heroine a second chance. But that seems more like cinematic liberty.

Bhandarkar takes us through a labyrinth of emotions, some devastating in their gut-level directness. But at the end, we come away with a film that gives us something to hold on to permanently even as the characters on screen lose practically everything worth holding on to.

A truly outstanding film.

Heroes - Bollywood Movie Review

Film: “Heroes”
Director: Samir Karnik
Cast: Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol, Salman Khan, Preity Zinta, Mithun Chakraborty, Dino Morea, Sohail Khan, Vatsal Sheth
Rating: ****

Not since Rakeysh Mehra’s “Rang De Basanti” have we seen a film so inspiring. Portions of “Heroes” are pure genius, sparkling with the unshed tears of a mother whose child dies before she can hold it in her arms and nurture it.

Here’s a piece of cinema that we need to applaud for its idealism and absolute absence of cynicism in telling a story that invites the conscience to cry for a country and global society that can’t think beyond its own nose.

But wait. “Heroes” is not a flag-waving exercise propagating the join-the-army message.

Yes, to begin with, the film does put that message forward. But soon enough you journey across the toughest Indian terrain of intense warmth and acute cold in pursuit of a dream that transcends everyday existence. And you realise “Heroes” is about bereavement and how to cope with it without getting cynical about subjects like patriotism.

To a wife in Punjab who copes with a child and her dead soldier husband’s parents on her own, or a wheel-chaired soldier who has lost his kid brother to war, or to an ageing couple coping with the death of their only son to war, does it matter if the country needs to be protected from outside aggression?

The answer to the question is not provided in rhetoric and sermons but in the course of the vivid journey that takes our two narrators Sohail Khan and Vatsal Seth to the heart of the country.

“Heroes” is shot in the hearts of characters who are wounded by war without going to the battlefront.

This isn’t the first film about the war bereaved coping with their loss. At times “Heroes” is redolent of J.P. Dutta’s “Border” and “LOC Kargil” - homesick soldiers writing lovelorn letters, the battery of war vehicles winding their way through mountainous terrain and soldiers coming home in coffins.

We’ve seen it all before. But director Samir Karnik succeeds in taking the theme of patriotism and soldierly duties far beyond the clichés.

Some interludes woven into the multitude of grieving characters’ lives are heart rending. The look in Preity’s eyes when she holds her dead husband’s letter in her trembling hands, or much later when our two narrators travel in a vehicle loaded with coffins of war martyrs, or Mithun Chakraborty’s breakdown before his dead son’s picture.

“Heroes” connects with us in ways that are emotional and spiritual. Often while you watch the characters live through a devastating loss, you feel the screenwriter, dialogue writer and director breathe a vigorous life into the scenes.

All three segments of bereavement and reconciliation are designed with a great deal of emotional honesty and clamped intensity. If one has to pick a favourite, it would have to be where Vatsal-Sohail meet Preity, who plays the brave Punjabi war widow.

Disappearing into herself to emerge with a character who is dignified in her tragedy, Preity gives the film’s best performance.

Effortlessly and persuasively, Karnik goes from pure emotionalism to unstoppered populism. Watch Sunny Deol’s fight in the pub where he swings into full-fledged action from a wheelchair. It is truly a paisa-vasool sequence.

Besides Preity, Sunny, Mithun Chakbraborty, child actor Dwij Yadav and Sohail Khan leave the strongest impression. Vatsal’s rawness goes well with his spoilt-rich-coming-of-age character.

The two cinematogaphers - Binod Pradhan and Gopal Shah - create stirring echoes of spiritual and emotional majesty without letting the colour schemes become over-representational.

On the minus side, the songs and dances are largely over-stated and obtrusive. Sohail and Vatsal’s striptease with Riya Sen and Amrita Arora belongs to another film, another world.

A special word for Karnik and Aseem Arora’s dialogues. The conversations convey both the reality of life and the richness of a life that exists beyond the mundane everyday chit-chat.

After watching “Heroes”, one wonders whether it was really Samir Karnik who made the no-show “Kyun, Ho Gaya Na”.

Roadside Romeo - Bollywood Movie Review

Film: “Roadside Romeo” (animation)
Director: Jugal Hansraj
Cast: Voices of Kareena Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan, Javed Jaffrey
Rating: **

‘Oh Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou?’ Forget Shakespeare and all his spin-offs. “Roadside Romeo” is the coolest wham.

What’s it about? Well, it’s a bout of a pout and a bit of a kick, a whacky romance between two savvy under-dogs thrown our way in a casual chic manner that makes the animation characters seem like replicas of their potboiler avatars from feature films.

Maybe the plot should’ve been less formula-driven to go with the innovative format and genre. Nonetheless, this has got to be the most urbane and coolest take on the rites and wrongs of that thing called love.

First things first. So far animation films in India have been mainly restricted to revisionist interpretations of the mythologicals.

In “Roadside Romeo”, director Jugal Hansraj goes for the jugular and the jocular. The story of a rich canine from the well-to-do part of the city and the slum seductress Laila is peppered with every ingredient that makes an alluring entertainer.

The main voices are used to telling advantage. Saif scores subtle points over Kareena whose dubbing tends to veer towards boredom. But then she is the blasé seductress, isn’t she?

But it is Javed Jaffrey’s seasoned voice that brings great vigour and vivacity to the slum-lord’s role.

There are the non-primary characters too, giving the central romance a catchily cute spin without taking the slim narrative to an over-the-top stratosphere.

Most important, the quality of animation and the detailing that has gone behind its execution are exemplary. We really haven’t seen anything like this in Hindi. The songs, dialogues and action add up to quite a fun-filled festival of swirling colours and dancing divas and devils.

“Roadside Romeo” is a smartly-executed piece of slip-in-slip-out cinema. It makes for ideal popcorn entertainment that kids will enjoy and the grown-ups will giggle about.

Shoot On Sight - Bollywood Movie Review

Film: “Shoot On Sight”
Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Greta Scacchi, Gulshan Grover, Mikaal Zulfikar
Director: Jagmohan Mundhra; Rating: ***

“Shoot On Sight” works as a wake-up call for those slumbering in their bourgeois belief that terrorism is as far away from home as Osama Bin Laden is from the US.

It’s a frightening piece of fiction laced with a fair amount of warmth and affection that lulls us into a false sense of wellbeing. In essence, the plot takes us back to the domesticated terrorism of Alan Pakula’s “The Devil’s Own” or more recently Subhash Ghai’s “Black And White” where a young wide-eyed seemingly-unspoilt guest in the house turns out to be a closet-terrorist.

Where “Shoot On Sight” scores is in laying out the blueprint for global terrorism through characters who appear real in words, body language and political ideology.

Jagmohan Mundhra has earlier balanced a social cause with a message in “Provoked”. Here the ‘thrill’ element emanates far more effortlessly from the characters and their predicament, partly because the theme of terrorism renders itself far dramatically to a cinematic treatment than domestic violence.

London is shot by cinematographer Madhu Ambat with all its inherent buzz and blemishes without fuss or rush. The flow of adrenaline as the British cops zero in on their distinguished Pakistani colleague’s nephew as a terrorist is rather reined in than rushed.

This isn’t a film that’s in a hurry to get there. But it knows how to value the audiences’ time.

And this is where “Shoot On Sight” scores the optimum impact. Mundhra revels in generous levels of understatement most of the time. Whether showing the fanaticism in the mosque (Om Puri, aptly extravagant) or the dilemma of the cop’s Pakistan-British daughter - Mundhra packs it all into the simmering cultural cauldron with dexterity and dignity.

While on the whole the characters in the cop-protagonist Tariq Ali’s home and workplace come to life with vigorous fluency, some portions of the storytelling fall flat. Naseer’s assistant, played by Laila Rouass, comes to a soggy end in a river with the suddenness of a video-game with its socket pulled out. The hastily-executed climax in a shopping mall where Tariq Ali’s nephew is shot down with a sweeping-under-the-carpet haste, is a screaming shame.

Mostly, Mundhra uses economy of expression to great effect. Sometimes just one or two scenes are enough to establish the camaraderie between characters creating a crisscross of inter-relations with disconcerting deftness.

There’s just one intimate interlude in the kitchen at the start between the Pakistani cop Naseer and his British wife played Greta Scacchi. It’s enough to show the enduring empathy between the couple. The rift that seeps into their marriage because of the closet-terrorist nephew’s presence in their house is again represented in a flash of anger and indignation where Naseer accuses Scacchi of discrimination.

A culturally-defining moment that stays with you after the last bang-bang.

A major part of the film’s success goes to the the actors. Om Puri as a radical clergy, Gulshan Grover as Naseer’s butcher-friend, and the British actors, who play Naseer’s colleagues at the precinct, they all add a wealth of credibility to Mundhra’s tale of malevolence in a city that’s outwardly a haven for healing.

Debutant Mikaal Zulfikar as Naseer’s nephew gives a comfortably-defined performance. Mikaal gets the point early in the narrative when on arrival from Pakistan in London, driving from the airport he gets to know his English aunt has not converted to Islam.

Watch the young actor’s subtle shift of expression from easy grace to disgust and disapproval — it’s frightening to see because it reflects the reality about how young people all over the world are converted to extremist causes.

What finally gives “Shoot On Sight” a compelling edge beyond the expected, making it more than just a pantomime of post-terrorism mores, is Naseer.

As always Naseer merges into the character pitching the emotions at a level where they appear to be thought of on the-the-spot and certainly not for the sake of a camera. Domestic scenes and details served up in delicious vignettes provide a back projection to Naseer’s complex character. Naseer glides effortlessly with his character as it goes from cultural comfort to fundamentalist isolation. The actor and the character become one.

Karzzz - Bollywood Movie Review

Film: “Karzzz”
Cast: Himesh Reshammiya, Urmila Matondkar, Danny Denzongpa, Gulshan Grover, Shweta Kumar, Dino Morea
Director: Satish Kaushik
Rating: * ½

This is Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Dhoom. Creating dhoom in motions of staged frenzy is Himesh Reshammiya without his trademark cap but with so much hair you wonder if it’s there to tear after you go through two-and-a-half hours of drama and hysteria in “Karzzz”.

Our Indiana Jones is Urmila Matondkar reprising Simi Garewal’s villainous gold-digger’s act with a vengeance. She not only creates dhoom, she also crashes into a temple of doom (literally) before being declared dead by the script. RIP.

Yup, now we know what the blurbs meant by “Vengeance is back”.

Many of Urmila’s chic gowns capture her in backless splendour. Whether matching steps with the rock star or pulling out all stops to mow her reborn lover-boy (Dino Morea turns into Himesh after the first 15 minutes) down with her zooming airplane (it was just a car in the original for poor Simi). Urmila is mean and seductive, in kill-kill measures.

But we don’t see much chemistry off the dance floor between Himeshbhai and sexy Urmila.

Is anyone really bothered with the telling of the story? And honestly, was the original “Karz” anything but a kitschy compendium of montages motivated by the theme of reincarnation?

If Rishi Kapoor did Monty, Himesh does full Monty. Between the two Montys is a molehill masquerading as a big pot-boiler.

This reincarnation of the blockbuster on reincarnation is a bit of a contradiction in terms. On one hand it’s high on production values, generating what one would call a cinematic adrenaline that takes audiences into the an exotic embrace. Every stage performance by the rock star is accompanied by a bevy of international backup dancers(mostly female) who prop up Himesh’s set pieces and complement his energy level.

On the other hand, the drama is distilled by an absence of inner-drawn energy. As an actor Himesh has his limitations which come bubbling to the surface in the long monologues about “punar janam”, present tense and past mostly imperfect.

Rishi, where art thou?

To his credit, Himesh takes you beyond the performance. He has a disarming simplicity bordering on naivete to back up his claims to stardom. The actor is honest. But he connects with his audience. And the man playing the character is aware he isn’t trying to achieve an award-winning level in his performance.

Having got that in place, Himesh just has a ball. His enjoyment in the songs and dances is sometimes contagious, sometime amusing, never dull, never exasperating.

As for the narrative, it doesn’t seem to believe in an updated progress report. Like a recalling of a past life Satish Kaushik’s seems frozen in the 1970s. The contemporised props and locations hardly help wipe out the feeling of watching a film that belongs to another time zone, far beyond the theme of reincarnation.

The big confrontation sequence where Kamini (Urmila) breaks down and confesses to having killed Monty the rock star is staged in a sprawling set representing the outer flank of a mansion.

What lies beyond the exterior? Who cares?

If you treat “Karzzz” as an ongoing “Chitrahaar” of Himesh’s songs strung together by a bristling bead of sweaty players you just might end up enjoying this kitschy homage to a potboiler that boasted of great songs and a wonderful central performance.

Himesh Reshammiya aims for the same. No harm in being ambitious.

Hello - Bollywood Movie Review

Cast: Sohail Khan, Sharman Joshi, Isha Koppikar, Gul Panag, Amrita Arora, Sharad Saxena, Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif and Dalip Tahil
Director: Atul Agnihotri
Rating: *

Hello, hello, hello? What is this, boss?

Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller “One Night @ The Call Centre” is converted on celluloid to ‘One Excruciating Night At A Call Centre’.

The six much-loved characters have a past before they gather at a call centre run by boss Dalip Tahil who dreams, sings and performs bodily functions based on his migration to Boston.

The call centre resembles a large Ekta Kapoor set for a saas-bahu serial. Those at least are less dead at the centre.

Crammed into this word space of telephonic babble are a betrayed wife (Amrita Arora), a girl (Gul Panag) who’s being forced by her singing-dancing-demented mother to marry an NRI, a mixed-up frazzled neurotic chick (Isha Koppikar), a senior citizen (Sharad Saxena) who’s been deserted by his son and two guys — Sharman Joshi and Sohail Khan — who don’t seem to know what they want.

Frankly, neither does this film. The filmmaker seems to be confused about the characters faster than we can keep up with their mind space.

What works within a novel’s format need not work as a film. The characters seem thoroughly scattered and go every which way that the woozy screenplay takes them. After a while, we just give up trying to make sense of the jumble of characters and their problems.

Maybe a call-centre to provide a centre to these call-centre-ists?

Attempts to recreate a call centre atmosphere are restricted to random shots of distressed gori ladies ((white women), like the one who asks one of our protagonists why she can’t wash her bras in the dishwasher and a guy on a plane who insults India precipitating a patriotic harangue from Sohail, who incidentally swings like a celluloid Tarzan from comic virtuosity to outbursts of incendiary indignation.

Sohail as always is what keeps us from walking out.

Staging a walkout would be the mildest form of protest for this urbane atrocity. What Anurag Basu achieved effortlessly in “Life… In A Metro” is here reduced to a mocking pantomime of urbane angst.

The film goes from fretful episodes mimicking the saucy witticism of the American series “Friends”, to a cheaply ironic shot at “Conversations With God” when our group of muddled call centre suburban nearly topple over and plunge to their death and are rescued by, ha ha, god.

God saves these ginks. But who will save this weird look-see at longings and eccentricities of people who would rather be unhappy than happy?

A few redeeming moments (like the time when Amrita connects with her long-distance husband and finds out about his extra-marital affair) cannot salvage this hip-and-non-happening disaster, probably the worst film you’ll see this year.

Kidnap - Bollywood Movie Review

Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Imran Khan, Minissha Lamba, Vidya Malvade
Director: Sanjay Gadhvi
Rating: **

“Kidnap” is a thriller gone so wrong, you wonder if criminals in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh would believe the clumsy way Imran Khan handles the whole abduction.

But then, you can’t blame Imran. If the kidnap victim, a tycoon’s daughter with an allergy to wearing clothes, behaves like a hot temptress while being in captivity, then the hardest of criminals is bound to get confused.

Imran plays Kabeer, a guy who grows up in a rough remand home, living out the nightmare of torture and violence through sketches in the credit titles. This portion where Kabeer’s tortuous background is put forward in rapid fire movements is the most inventive part of this flat thriller.

“Kidnap” is an abduction story with no ransom. And that’s the least of its problems. Gadhvi’s screenplay goes wrong from the word go. The characters seem to function on auto-pilot. No rhyme or ransom seems to govern Kabeer’s progress from disgruntled kidnapper to a revengeful criminal to a reformed software engineer who at the end says goodbye and all the best to his kidnap victim whom he runs into in a restaurant.

If you ever wondered why crime pays, “Kidnap” tells you why. It tells potential kidnappers what not to do…Like ogle at your victim when she insists on bathing in the great big outdoors. It also tells the kidnapper not to visit his hostage’s home to find out why they aren’t picking up his threatening calls.

Yes, that’s the level of dim-witted kidnapping connivance that our kidnapper-hero is reduced to. Of course such a clumsy manoeuvre that puts to risk his entire endeavour as criminal on the run is a pretext for Gadhvi to stage the film’s classiest chase sequence between Sanjay and Imran, done in French Parkour style of outdoor action.

The songs, chase, drama and the lighter moments all get in the way of the storytelling. Kidnap is one big celebration of hurdles and obstacles created by a writer-director who had the best possible cat-and-mouse game in mind.

But somewhere along the way Gadhvi loses his way.

It’s hard to believe Gadhvi created the two ultra-chic “Dhoom” films since “Kidnap” lacks both style and substance. The characters are incredibly inept. So don’t blame the mawkish performances on the actors.

Sanjay, playing a suave billionaire, is made to break into a rival industrialist’s (Raj Zutsi) mansion to steal money. Just when you start scratching your head at the criminal’s wisdom at putting the tycoon through these perverse paces, he’s put into a fireman’s outfit squirting water into a burning prison campus.

Where did the smoke come from? Could it be the audiences fuming at being led up the garden path only to find a road block at the end of the reign-blow?

Baffling on many levels, the biggest piece in this jumbled jigsaw is the casting of Vidya as Sanjay’s wife and Reema Lagoo as her mom. Maybe they wanted to keep the family young.

Imran is just about the only bearable factor in the whole mess. He stays in character, expresses pain with more than just a grimace and scowl. His eyes search far beyond the set stage for answers to the question of human pain.

We join him in this search, wondering why “Kidnap” turns out be such an agonising journey into the doomed.

Ramchand Pakistani - Bollywood Movie Review

‘Ramchand Pakistani’ - a poignant tale set in two nations

Cast: Nandita Das, Rashid Farooqui, Noman Ijaz, Syed Fazal Hussain, Navaid Jabbar Maria Wasti
Director: Mehreen Jabbar
Rating: ***

Cross border problems is the basic theme of first time Pakistani director Mehreen Jabbar’s “Ramchand Pakistani”.

Since partition in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars, excluding the Kargil conflict. Six decades after partition, the common man continues to pay a heavy price for the tension between the two countries.

There are several cases of innocent people from India and Pakistan who are caught and sent to jail on mere suspicion.

Mehreen’s film focuses on the human sufferings on both sides of the border and she has succeeded in giving it unbiased treatment.

The stellar performances by the entire cast make “Ramchand Pakistani” an emotionally engrossing watch.

Set in 2002, the film, inspired by a true story, is about the accidental crossing of the Pakistan-India border by a boy and his father.

“The film is based on actual events. My father (former Pakistani politician and filmmaker Javed Jabbar) works a lot in the areas close to the desert. One day he came across a father-son duo who narrated their story to him. That is where we got the inspiration to make this film. I am sure it will reach out to audiences,” said Mehreen.

The film revolves around Ramchand, an eight-year-old Dalit Hindu boy. He lives with his parents - mother Champa (Nandita Das) and father Shankar (Rashid Farooqui) in a village in the border area of Pakistan.

One day, after a fight with his mother, Ramchand runs away from home. While walking aimlessly, he accidentally crosses the border not knowing this will cost him his freedom.

His father spots him crossing the line of control and tries to stop him. In doing so, he too crosses the border. As expected, the boy and his father are caught and put in a jail in India. After that starts their long battle to prove their innocence and secure freedom.

While at the mercy of jail authorities, Shankar tries to cope with the trauma of forced separation from his mother. His mother is shattered by their sudden disappearance.

Nandita is the only non-Pakistani actor in “Ramchand Pakistani”. Well-known Pakistani TV and stage actors like Rashid Farooqi, Maria Wasti and Farooq Pario’s performances are specially noteworthy.

Fazal Hussain, who plays the eight-year-old protagonist Ramchand, has been particularly appreciated for his outstanding performance.

“The younger Ramchand has been played by Fazal Hussain. A friend of mine who is a director himself suggested him after a lot of search. The older one, however, is 14 years old. He is the son of a mechanic in Pakistan and has acted for the first time ever in any film,” said Mehreen.

The no-frills film is made at a nominal budget. Technically, the film is not of high quality, but Mehreen’s narrative manages to hold the viewers’ attention till the credits roll out.

Drona - Bollywood Movie Review

Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra, Kay Kay Menon, Jaya Bachchan
Director: Goldie Behl
Rating: ***

Goldie Behl dares to dream. He’s back after a seven-year hiatus to let us know that “Bas Itna Sa Khwaab Hai” was not where his ‘khwab’ (dream) ended. As a matter of fact, the dream begins now.

“Drona” is a feeling not quite overpowering but purposely underplayed and designed to bring the till-now-barred-in-Bollywood “Lord Of The Rings” genre to our table.

On the storyboard “Drona” must have sounded outrageously ambitious. It’s a film that starts in the US, moves to the deserts of Rajasthan and makes an exit run into a never-never land where blue petals shower down on the screen creating an area of enchantment and incandescence without letting the spectacle dominate the characters.

As far as super-heroes go, the one that Abhishek plays in “Drona” is somewhat unique.

Seething, scowling, wounded and wanting, Abhishek plays a knight in a shining armour, a romantic at heart and a warrior only by force. He glides across the screen doing some of the most gently persuasive old-world stunts conceived on this side “Lord Of The Rings”.

The action often involves the leading lady Priyanka, who is quite good.

Behl with persuasive support from cinematographer Samir Arya builds a visual mindscape manifested in moving pictures that suggest a deep bond between the imagination and our traditional cultural representations of abstract art, from desert-based monuments to esoteric weapons that swirl across the breeze and kill only the evil.

First 10 minutes into this voyage to the realm of our Chandmama-Chandrakanta genre of fantasy literature, and we’re hooked. From the point when Priyanka, styled like our first full-blown Lara Croft and dressed and made up to kill (in more ways than ‘won’) enters the frame, the film takes off with an emphatic élan that just stops short of self-congratulation.

Equally arresting is the sequence where our desi dude, superhero Drona, meets the arch-villain Riz, played by Kay Kay Menon, for the first time. The chaos that breaks out and the ensuing chase across the narrow cobbled streets of an unknown foreign country (Prague?) are handled with a delightful eye for comic book bravura.

All through the telling of this tall and stately tale, Behl displays a restrain that goes a long way in giving the product the feel of a fantasy well-conceived, but never over-drawn.

The technique carries the characters fearlessly and fluently. Besides Samir Arya’s cinematography, which lends the colours of the imagination a hue of the home-grown, the art direction and the sound design suggest paces of a grace long-forgotten in our cinema where now, rapid fire storytelling is almost always equated with an entertaining cinema.

The dramatic conflict converges on Abhishek and Kay Kay Menon. The one silent, calm from outside and torn and troubled from within. The other ultra-flamboyant and theatrical, doing what can be called a reincarnation of Mogambo from “Mr India” and an indigenous version of Jack Nicholson’s Joker from “Batman”.

The theatrics that underscore the narrative’s calm surface don’t always work. Kay Kay’s character goes way over-the-top into an atmosphere of irredeemable grotesquerie.

Fine actor that he is, Kay Kay gives the flamboyant villainy his best shot.

Abhishek displays a wounded pride and a lacerated soul through his eyes. He is also immensely adept at handling the action scenes and goes many steps ahead from his earlier films to under-perform the scenes with heart-warming sincerity.

Priyanka’s styling and body language suggest a smouldering restless sensuality.

By the time we approach the climax, “Drona” has established its claim at taking a confident stab at a genre never done before. What it fails to do is to take that genre into the highest realm of creativity where the characters would have instinctively become children rather than casualties of the mythology and fantasy that Behl embraces with ample affection, but not enough of that quality of connectivity with the audience that superheroes have always achieved with the audience.

At the end you feel an empathy for the sword-wielding Drona who can’t fly through the air.

And that’s what makes this superhero so vulnerable and human.

Watch “Drona” for Abhishek’s reined-in performance as a reluctant hero, and his crackling hissing, but ambivalent chemistry with Priyanka. And for the use of special-effects not to overpower but nourish the plot that strides across two continents and cultures with confident steps.

Click here to see over 90 movie stills from Drona