Friday, January 15, 2010
CPD+TWR
Chance Pe Dance
It is educative to watch a film like Chance Pe dance in a multiplex hall full of screaming teenagers yelling ''So cuuuuute'' every time Shahid Kapoor looked at the camera and made a cute face (which he does a lot) or did a dance step (which he does a lot too). But in between Shahid Kapoor's cuteness and his dances, there is not very much else in Ken Ghosh's film.
It is the typical story of Sameer (Kapoor) a young man who comes to Mumbai to become a ''hero''. He leaves his father's sari shop in Delhi to try his luck in films. But he has to face disappointment because he has no connections. Every time he gives a good audition and is promised a role, he ends up losing it to someone with clout.
As can be expected, he finds a female, Tina (Genelia D'Souza—delivers generic chirpiness) to offer help and support. A struggler's tale has been done recently, and much better in Luck by Chance. There is not much more that Ghosh can add to an aspiring actor's story. The only unusual touch is that he gets thrown out of his rather fancy rented pad and has to live in his car.
To make a living, till he gets his big break, he teaches dance at a school so there's a sub-plot, about how he whips reluctant kids with 'loser' attitude into a winning team. But at no point is there an emotional connect with the character and his problems, more so since it is inevitable that he will succeed.
For once, you also wish that a film were longer, because neither Sameer's work with the kids, nor his own troubles, are seen with any depth. More than an actor, Shahid Kapoor is an 'item boy' in the film, building up towards an eight-pack revealing climax. Now he deserves better.
The Waiting Room
This little film sprang up without any promotion. Chances are that regular moviegoers haven’t even heard of The Waiting Room.
Directed by first-timer Maneej Premnath, it is a nicely shot and well acted suspense story set in the waiting room of a small railway station. The train has been delayed, four passengers are sitting in there, and around then there is drama going on, over the hunt for a serial killer.
It is raining, the atmosphere is eerie, the lights go an and off, the TV delivers macabre news of chopped-up murder victims. Tina (Radhika Apte) fears that the man trying to be too friendly (Raja Choudhary—the actor from Gulal) might be the killer and is jumpy. Karan is suspicious of an older couple, a jeweller (Sandeep Kulkarni) and wife (Pratiksha Lonkar), who also suspect that the younger ones are a runaway pair. Suspense about the identity of the killer is gradually built up.
Unfortunately, the film’s one-location setting and TV-serial like look, might work against it in the cinemas, but it is a good one-time watch on home video.
It is educative to watch a film like Chance Pe dance in a multiplex hall full of screaming teenagers yelling ''So cuuuuute'' every time Shahid Kapoor looked at the camera and made a cute face (which he does a lot) or did a dance step (which he does a lot too). But in between Shahid Kapoor's cuteness and his dances, there is not very much else in Ken Ghosh's film.
It is the typical story of Sameer (Kapoor) a young man who comes to Mumbai to become a ''hero''. He leaves his father's sari shop in Delhi to try his luck in films. But he has to face disappointment because he has no connections. Every time he gives a good audition and is promised a role, he ends up losing it to someone with clout.
As can be expected, he finds a female, Tina (Genelia D'Souza—delivers generic chirpiness) to offer help and support. A struggler's tale has been done recently, and much better in Luck by Chance. There is not much more that Ghosh can add to an aspiring actor's story. The only unusual touch is that he gets thrown out of his rather fancy rented pad and has to live in his car.
To make a living, till he gets his big break, he teaches dance at a school so there's a sub-plot, about how he whips reluctant kids with 'loser' attitude into a winning team. But at no point is there an emotional connect with the character and his problems, more so since it is inevitable that he will succeed.
For once, you also wish that a film were longer, because neither Sameer's work with the kids, nor his own troubles, are seen with any depth. More than an actor, Shahid Kapoor is an 'item boy' in the film, building up towards an eight-pack revealing climax. Now he deserves better.
The Waiting Room
This little film sprang up without any promotion. Chances are that regular moviegoers haven’t even heard of The Waiting Room.
Directed by first-timer Maneej Premnath, it is a nicely shot and well acted suspense story set in the waiting room of a small railway station. The train has been delayed, four passengers are sitting in there, and around then there is drama going on, over the hunt for a serial killer.
It is raining, the atmosphere is eerie, the lights go an and off, the TV delivers macabre news of chopped-up murder victims. Tina (Radhika Apte) fears that the man trying to be too friendly (Raja Choudhary—the actor from Gulal) might be the killer and is jumpy. Karan is suspicious of an older couple, a jeweller (Sandeep Kulkarni) and wife (Pratiksha Lonkar), who also suspect that the younger ones are a runaway pair. Suspense about the identity of the killer is gradually built up.
Unfortunately, the film’s one-location setting and TV-serial like look, might work against it in the cinemas, but it is a good one-time watch on home video.
Labels: Cinemaah
PI and DMG
Pyaar Impossible
In spite of having one of the country’s biggest banners backing him, Uday Chopra’s acting career has not exactly taken off, though he did display some comic flair in the two Dhoom films.
This time he has written and produced Pyaar Impossible for himself, with Jugal Hansraj as director. And the result can be summed up as ‘impossible.’ In all fairness, he has played an unattractive geek, who is not even noticed by the girl he loves. Problem is he has played Abhay like a caricature geek—glasses, bad clothes, oily hair, braces on teeth—which makes him look awful, but adds nothing to the performance. Geekiness is not just a ‘look’, and only an actor not sure of his acting skills would play him as such a broad caricature. Unless the idea was to spoof geek-goddess romcoms, which this isn’t. In fact Hansraj directs without even a touch of lightness. The result is a film that sinks before it even starts to swim.
Abhay loves Alisha (Priyanka Chopra) in college, and continues seven years afterwards, when he is still a geek, so dumb that he lets his prize software be stolen by the smooth talker Varun (Dino Morea—well cast), because he left his laptop unattended, without even password protection. Geeks of the world will howl with laughter or outrage or both.
His dad (Anupam Kher) tells him, go to Singapore and get the software back, like he did in DDLJ, in which he told Shah Rukh Khan to go to India to get his girl. SRK had sneaked into her home, Abhay sneaks into the office of the computer company. In between, he also plays nanny to now-divorced Alisha’s six-year-old monster of a brat.
There has to be something wrong with a woman who leaves her daughter in the care of a male stranger. Odder still, she works for an IT company and doesn’t know how to use a computer. In a Singapore school, the kid does a Karz kind of expository song and dance in Hindi—gyrations and all-- and nobody wonders what’s going on
Priyanka Chopra gets to wear super short, super glam outfits, even though they don’t exactly go with her harassed, single working mom character. Because the plot is such a cliché in Hollywood movies, she also acts as if she were in an American film or sitcom, pretending to be Jennifer Aniston—all overdone twitches, giggles, shrugs and simpers.
This film’s tough to sit through, almost impossible to enjoy.
Dulha Mil Gaya
A fifties story palmed off in 2010—even if the film had not been long in the making, it would have been outdated anyway.
Rich Trinidad playboy Donsai (Fardeen Khan) has the rug pulled from under his feet, when, according to his father’s will, he has to marry Punjab village girl Samarpreet (Ishita Sharma). He marries her and leaves, never expecting that a simple Indian girl will land up “saat samundar paar” looking for him.
A model called Shimmer (Sushmita Sen) takes the girl under her wing and glams her up so that Donsai really falls in love with her, without realizing she is the wife he abandoned. Somewhere in 1969 Hrishikesh Mukherjee had made Pyar Ka Sapna, with the same plot; before and since many ugly ducklings have been turned into swans with cosmetic make-overs and contact lenses instead of glasses—the formula is now worn threadbare. Not to mention how regressive it now is for a girl to try and win over a caddish husband. This Miss Punjab also tells Shimmer that Indian girls ought to put career before marriage, which prompts the commitment-phobic model to run and propose to her suitor (Shah Rukh Khan) on her knees.
The character Sushmita Sen plays, with two loony sidekicks, is so over the top as to be hilarious—unintentionally so. She has never looked or acted worse. Ishita Sharma is okay, considering it is her debut. SRK’s knight in designer suits only puts this one out of its misery with less suffering… too little, too late.
In spite of having one of the country’s biggest banners backing him, Uday Chopra’s acting career has not exactly taken off, though he did display some comic flair in the two Dhoom films.
This time he has written and produced Pyaar Impossible for himself, with Jugal Hansraj as director. And the result can be summed up as ‘impossible.’ In all fairness, he has played an unattractive geek, who is not even noticed by the girl he loves. Problem is he has played Abhay like a caricature geek—glasses, bad clothes, oily hair, braces on teeth—which makes him look awful, but adds nothing to the performance. Geekiness is not just a ‘look’, and only an actor not sure of his acting skills would play him as such a broad caricature. Unless the idea was to spoof geek-goddess romcoms, which this isn’t. In fact Hansraj directs without even a touch of lightness. The result is a film that sinks before it even starts to swim.
Abhay loves Alisha (Priyanka Chopra) in college, and continues seven years afterwards, when he is still a geek, so dumb that he lets his prize software be stolen by the smooth talker Varun (Dino Morea—well cast), because he left his laptop unattended, without even password protection. Geeks of the world will howl with laughter or outrage or both.
His dad (Anupam Kher) tells him, go to Singapore and get the software back, like he did in DDLJ, in which he told Shah Rukh Khan to go to India to get his girl. SRK had sneaked into her home, Abhay sneaks into the office of the computer company. In between, he also plays nanny to now-divorced Alisha’s six-year-old monster of a brat.
There has to be something wrong with a woman who leaves her daughter in the care of a male stranger. Odder still, she works for an IT company and doesn’t know how to use a computer. In a Singapore school, the kid does a Karz kind of expository song and dance in Hindi—gyrations and all-- and nobody wonders what’s going on
Priyanka Chopra gets to wear super short, super glam outfits, even though they don’t exactly go with her harassed, single working mom character. Because the plot is such a cliché in Hollywood movies, she also acts as if she were in an American film or sitcom, pretending to be Jennifer Aniston—all overdone twitches, giggles, shrugs and simpers.
This film’s tough to sit through, almost impossible to enjoy.
Dulha Mil Gaya
A fifties story palmed off in 2010—even if the film had not been long in the making, it would have been outdated anyway.
Rich Trinidad playboy Donsai (Fardeen Khan) has the rug pulled from under his feet, when, according to his father’s will, he has to marry Punjab village girl Samarpreet (Ishita Sharma). He marries her and leaves, never expecting that a simple Indian girl will land up “saat samundar paar” looking for him.
A model called Shimmer (Sushmita Sen) takes the girl under her wing and glams her up so that Donsai really falls in love with her, without realizing she is the wife he abandoned. Somewhere in 1969 Hrishikesh Mukherjee had made Pyar Ka Sapna, with the same plot; before and since many ugly ducklings have been turned into swans with cosmetic make-overs and contact lenses instead of glasses—the formula is now worn threadbare. Not to mention how regressive it now is for a girl to try and win over a caddish husband. This Miss Punjab also tells Shimmer that Indian girls ought to put career before marriage, which prompts the commitment-phobic model to run and propose to her suitor (Shah Rukh Khan) on her knees.
The character Sushmita Sen plays, with two loony sidekicks, is so over the top as to be hilarious—unintentionally so. She has never looked or acted worse. Ishita Sharma is okay, considering it is her debut. SRK’s knight in designer suits only puts this one out of its misery with less suffering… too little, too late.
Labels: Cinemaah
