Saturday, June 03, 2006
Evil+Love
Sacred Evil
A nun is sent to a witch for healing because she hears and sees things. Due to this, Sacred Evil gets into the eye of a blasphemy storm. Reportedly based on a true story of a case real-life witch Ipsita Ray Chakraverti handled, the film then follows the two women around Kolkata, as Sister Martha tells Ipsita (Sarika) the tragic story of an Anglo Indian girl, Claudia (Lynsey Pow, pretty and passable).
Bad enough she discovers from a chatty hairdresser that her mother had not died, as she was told by her drunken father but had eloped with an English sailor. Ipsita listens, a picture of understanding and patience -- head tilted to one side, trite interjections --as the tale gets murkier.
As if following in the footsteps of her mother, whose spitting image she is, Claudia gets into her own obsessive, doomed-to-fail romance with a boorish French historian (Frederic Andrau).
Where’s the witchcraft, you wonder as the narration proceeds to its expected climax? Where’s the blasphemy? If at all the film offends, it's because after all that eerie build up with ghosts and shadows, candles and crystals, it does not deliver even a faint "boo".
Debut filmmakers Abhiyaan Rajhans and Abhigyan Jha do a decent job of recreating Kolkata of the sixties, and manage to get the redoubtable Soumitra Chatterjee to do a cameo as a brown sahib ("pardon me, my pipe beckons"). That's all the surprise you are going to get in this film. As for Sarika's comeback—it’s as much a damp squib as this movie.
Love Ke Chakkar Mein
B.H. Tharun Kumar, the choreographer, had made his directorial debut with the forgettable Nayi Padosan. Three years later, as Love Ke Chakkar Mein shows, he hasn't improved much.
Surprisingly, Rishi Kapoor agreed to be a part of this sleazy enterprise. Kumar and his writers look for inspiration towards Indecent Proposal and the Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, based on a Neil Simon play, and add their own silly twist to it.
Vicky (Akshat Bhatia ) wants to marry rich girl Neha (Namita) , but her father (Satish Shah) insists he get a well-paying job first. His porn-surfing boss Kochar (Rishi Kapoor) asks for a night with his girlfriend.
Vicky's friend sends Bijli (Parmita Katkar), a hooker to please the boss. This bit of deception gets out of hand, and Vicky has to keep coming thinking up bigger lies to cover up the first one—including staging the fictional girlfriend’s death from AIDS.
In the hands of a better team, this Chakkar could have been a good comedy as well as a satire on what a man has to do to achieve his goals in these competitive times. First of all, Vicky who rides around a swank bike and rents a cool apartment with his buddies, doesn’t look sufficiently down and out. Then the actor playing him and the rest of the young bunch look like they were picked out of a chorus line. The funniest scenes in the film are the bickering between Rishi Kapoor and Satish Shah (they know what comic timing is all about), both talking at cross purposes, on account of the lies they have been fed. The corniest bits—Shoma Anand as Kochar’s TV soap-addicted wife, who keeps getting into get-up of characters from TV – Jassi, Malini Iyer, etc., and startling her husband.
A nun is sent to a witch for healing because she hears and sees things. Due to this, Sacred Evil gets into the eye of a blasphemy storm. Reportedly based on a true story of a case real-life witch Ipsita Ray Chakraverti handled, the film then follows the two women around Kolkata, as Sister Martha tells Ipsita (Sarika) the tragic story of an Anglo Indian girl, Claudia (Lynsey Pow, pretty and passable).
Bad enough she discovers from a chatty hairdresser that her mother had not died, as she was told by her drunken father but had eloped with an English sailor. Ipsita listens, a picture of understanding and patience -- head tilted to one side, trite interjections --as the tale gets murkier.
As if following in the footsteps of her mother, whose spitting image she is, Claudia gets into her own obsessive, doomed-to-fail romance with a boorish French historian (Frederic Andrau).
Where’s the witchcraft, you wonder as the narration proceeds to its expected climax? Where’s the blasphemy? If at all the film offends, it's because after all that eerie build up with ghosts and shadows, candles and crystals, it does not deliver even a faint "boo".
Debut filmmakers Abhiyaan Rajhans and Abhigyan Jha do a decent job of recreating Kolkata of the sixties, and manage to get the redoubtable Soumitra Chatterjee to do a cameo as a brown sahib ("pardon me, my pipe beckons"). That's all the surprise you are going to get in this film. As for Sarika's comeback—it’s as much a damp squib as this movie.
Love Ke Chakkar Mein
B.H. Tharun Kumar, the choreographer, had made his directorial debut with the forgettable Nayi Padosan. Three years later, as Love Ke Chakkar Mein shows, he hasn't improved much.
Surprisingly, Rishi Kapoor agreed to be a part of this sleazy enterprise. Kumar and his writers look for inspiration towards Indecent Proposal and the Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, based on a Neil Simon play, and add their own silly twist to it.
Vicky (Akshat Bhatia ) wants to marry rich girl Neha (Namita) , but her father (Satish Shah) insists he get a well-paying job first. His porn-surfing boss Kochar (Rishi Kapoor) asks for a night with his girlfriend.
Vicky's friend sends Bijli (Parmita Katkar), a hooker to please the boss. This bit of deception gets out of hand, and Vicky has to keep coming thinking up bigger lies to cover up the first one—including staging the fictional girlfriend’s death from AIDS.
In the hands of a better team, this Chakkar could have been a good comedy as well as a satire on what a man has to do to achieve his goals in these competitive times. First of all, Vicky who rides around a swank bike and rents a cool apartment with his buddies, doesn’t look sufficiently down and out. Then the actor playing him and the rest of the young bunch look like they were picked out of a chorus line. The funniest scenes in the film are the bickering between Rishi Kapoor and Satish Shah (they know what comic timing is all about), both talking at cross purposes, on account of the lies they have been fed. The corniest bits—Shoma Anand as Kochar’s TV soap-addicted wife, who keeps getting into get-up of characters from TV – Jassi, Malini Iyer, etc., and startling her husband.
Labels: Cinemaah
