Sunday, July 12, 2009
Short Kut+Sankat City
Short Kut - The Con Is On
If Neeraj Vora’s Short Kut - The Con Is On looks like a poor copy of Priyadarshan’s films, it’s probably because it is taken from the Malayalam Udayananu Tharam.
There is a menagerie of ‘chawl-walas’ and an actor who could have been Paresh Rawal if he had dates to spare as the landlord (Siddharth Randeria in Rawal’s Hera Pheri get-up). The original was a hit, but Short Kut - The Con stops just short of unbearable, which goes to show that all copies don't work.
Produced by Anil Kapoor—who should have known better— starring Akshaye Khanna, who is reported to be very ‘choosy’ this film is a ‘kon’ in every department--starting with Anees Bazmee taking credit for the script.
Shekhar (Akshaye Khanna) is an assistant director (to Neeraj Vora, if you please—such vanity!) who wants to make his own film. He lives in a chawl in which every resident is some kind of freak—maybe that was Vora’s idea of humour. A flop actor buddy of his, Raju (Arshad Warsi) comes as an unwelcome guest, and steals Shekhar’s ‘superhit’ script.
He becomes a star overnight, while Shekhar, unable to recover from the betrayal, goes rapidly downhill. To make things worse, his actress girlfriend Mansi (Amrita Rao) runs away from home and insists on marrying him, and Shekhar is can’t bear taunts about living off his wife.
Film people making films about the industry usually get it so wrong. Are films made the way as shown in the film? There seems to be just one white-clad director around—if you don’t count Abbas-Mustan doing an embarrassed cameo to say “cut.”
You expect that a man as wounded as Shekhar would want to take revenge, but when he is forced to make a film (produced by the demented chawl gang!) with the now arrogant Raju, he meekly agrees and puts up with his misbehaviour. You wait for the worm to turn, and that doesn’t happen, even after a Bowfinger-inspired climax.
The drama is non-existent, in the name of comedy, everybody wears weird costumes and shouts. Akshaye Khanna in an unflattering wig, mostly wears one peevish expression, Arshad Warsi hams away; Amrita Rao is in her much-publicised ‘sexy’ makeover, which means she wears very skimpy clothing and acts as badly as she does anyway, squeaky voice and all. A song from the film says it all – Patli gali se nikal bhi ja.
Sankat City
A bunch of people playing passing the parcel with bags of cash, suitcases getting exchanged, landing up in a garbage dump and so on… doesn’t seem like something that could happen only in Mumbai.
Just because there is a crazy gangster in the long list of unsavory characters, you are expected to believe this is Sankat City. This sort of caper has been done often enough to count a tiresome (most recently 99), to give director Pankaj Advani credit, he does lend it a kind of spoofy quality, but spoils the effect by many obvious gags like the lost twins with matching lockets, amnesia and co-incidences galore. If it’s Mumbai, there has to be a film producer, his South Indian assistant, a builder, a chatty cabbie and an anorexic bar dancer doing an item number.
Almost all the actors have put-on accents (South Indian, Punjabi, Marathi, Pahadi and so on) and a loud acting style that announces, “Look at meeee, I’m so funeeee.”
Guru (Kay Kay Menon) is a car thief whose troubles start when he steals a Merc with a bag of cash in the boot. The driver who was to deliver it had gone off to meet his girlfriend, leaving the key in the ignition. Guru’s partner Ganpat (Dilip Prabhawalkar) hides the money and then loses his memory, so Guru has to find another way to return the cash that belongs to a gangster Faujdar (Anupam Kher).
A builder (Yashpal Sharma) who owes money to Faujdar and a producer (Manoj Pahwa), who borrows get caught in the merry-go-round too. Guru teams up with a conwoman (Rimmi Sen) to steal from the builder, and lose the money when the bag gets switched in a bus. They manage to trace it to a garbage tip only to see it crushed by a dumper.
It’s a small world there, where everything connects to the gangster, the same cabbie turns up whenever a taxi is needed, and just one supari killer is conveniently at hand whenever a job is to be done.
This sort of thing is hard to pull off over a full-length feature, when you don’t get the audience to really care for any of the characters and the humour sometimes falls into into gross category – like the Don’s guru’s in a bath tub being scrubbed by acolytes, or the builder’s towel dropping.
It is to Advani’s credit that he mostly keeps things going at a brisk pace and has a few really funny lines punctuating the woozy plot. Of this week’s lot of soggy releases, this one’s most spirited… but that is not saying much. Compared to Short Kut, anything is a masterpiece.
If Neeraj Vora’s Short Kut - The Con Is On looks like a poor copy of Priyadarshan’s films, it’s probably because it is taken from the Malayalam Udayananu Tharam.
There is a menagerie of ‘chawl-walas’ and an actor who could have been Paresh Rawal if he had dates to spare as the landlord (Siddharth Randeria in Rawal’s Hera Pheri get-up). The original was a hit, but Short Kut - The Con stops just short of unbearable, which goes to show that all copies don't work.
Produced by Anil Kapoor—who should have known better— starring Akshaye Khanna, who is reported to be very ‘choosy’ this film is a ‘kon’ in every department--starting with Anees Bazmee taking credit for the script.
Shekhar (Akshaye Khanna) is an assistant director (to Neeraj Vora, if you please—such vanity!) who wants to make his own film. He lives in a chawl in which every resident is some kind of freak—maybe that was Vora’s idea of humour. A flop actor buddy of his, Raju (Arshad Warsi) comes as an unwelcome guest, and steals Shekhar’s ‘superhit’ script.
He becomes a star overnight, while Shekhar, unable to recover from the betrayal, goes rapidly downhill. To make things worse, his actress girlfriend Mansi (Amrita Rao) runs away from home and insists on marrying him, and Shekhar is can’t bear taunts about living off his wife.
Film people making films about the industry usually get it so wrong. Are films made the way as shown in the film? There seems to be just one white-clad director around—if you don’t count Abbas-Mustan doing an embarrassed cameo to say “cut.”
You expect that a man as wounded as Shekhar would want to take revenge, but when he is forced to make a film (produced by the demented chawl gang!) with the now arrogant Raju, he meekly agrees and puts up with his misbehaviour. You wait for the worm to turn, and that doesn’t happen, even after a Bowfinger-inspired climax.
The drama is non-existent, in the name of comedy, everybody wears weird costumes and shouts. Akshaye Khanna in an unflattering wig, mostly wears one peevish expression, Arshad Warsi hams away; Amrita Rao is in her much-publicised ‘sexy’ makeover, which means she wears very skimpy clothing and acts as badly as she does anyway, squeaky voice and all. A song from the film says it all – Patli gali se nikal bhi ja.
Sankat City
A bunch of people playing passing the parcel with bags of cash, suitcases getting exchanged, landing up in a garbage dump and so on… doesn’t seem like something that could happen only in Mumbai.
Just because there is a crazy gangster in the long list of unsavory characters, you are expected to believe this is Sankat City. This sort of caper has been done often enough to count a tiresome (most recently 99), to give director Pankaj Advani credit, he does lend it a kind of spoofy quality, but spoils the effect by many obvious gags like the lost twins with matching lockets, amnesia and co-incidences galore. If it’s Mumbai, there has to be a film producer, his South Indian assistant, a builder, a chatty cabbie and an anorexic bar dancer doing an item number.
Almost all the actors have put-on accents (South Indian, Punjabi, Marathi, Pahadi and so on) and a loud acting style that announces, “Look at meeee, I’m so funeeee.”
Guru (Kay Kay Menon) is a car thief whose troubles start when he steals a Merc with a bag of cash in the boot. The driver who was to deliver it had gone off to meet his girlfriend, leaving the key in the ignition. Guru’s partner Ganpat (Dilip Prabhawalkar) hides the money and then loses his memory, so Guru has to find another way to return the cash that belongs to a gangster Faujdar (Anupam Kher).
A builder (Yashpal Sharma) who owes money to Faujdar and a producer (Manoj Pahwa), who borrows get caught in the merry-go-round too. Guru teams up with a conwoman (Rimmi Sen) to steal from the builder, and lose the money when the bag gets switched in a bus. They manage to trace it to a garbage tip only to see it crushed by a dumper.
It’s a small world there, where everything connects to the gangster, the same cabbie turns up whenever a taxi is needed, and just one supari killer is conveniently at hand whenever a job is to be done.
This sort of thing is hard to pull off over a full-length feature, when you don’t get the audience to really care for any of the characters and the humour sometimes falls into into gross category – like the Don’s guru’s in a bath tub being scrubbed by acolytes, or the builder’s towel dropping.
It is to Advani’s credit that he mostly keeps things going at a brisk pace and has a few really funny lines punctuating the woozy plot. Of this week’s lot of soggy releases, this one’s most spirited… but that is not saying much. Compared to Short Kut, anything is a masterpiece.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
K I
Kambakkht Ishq
They have the money to sign on Hollywood stars and shoot in the US and Italy; they have the money to blow up on spectacular action sequences and designer wardrobes for the cast; they have the resources to splurge on marketing and promotion. But they don’ have the brains to get a fresh script or to use that money to create a memorable viewing experience.
All the extravagance is just a cover for totally stupid and regressive content, right out of the fifties—like a five-star hotel garnishing leftovers with caviar. It may look good, but it still stinks!
Sabbir Khan’s Kambakkht Ishq is supposed to be about the battle of the sexes—but it is a tirade against women, all of whom in this film are sorely lacking in brains or self-respect. The ‘hero’ Viraj (Akshay Kumar), a Hollywood stuntman, is such a stud, that he is constantly being chased by women, as he beds them and then flings them out of his house, his car, drives over one who has been running after him, and abandons a Hollywood siren (Denise Richards as herself) who wants to make “golden babies” with him, at the alter, without a backward glance. And then, he claims to hate women and marriage!
The man-hating ‘heroine’ Simrita (Kareena Kapoor) models to pay for medical school, and is such a bimbette that she performs surgery with a dangling watch on her wrist and leaves a part of it inside the patient, who happens to be Viraj. The musical ringing of the watch from Viraj’s stomach provides a running gag. Then, to get him back to the hospital and extract the watch, Simrita tries to drug him, dope him, and in desperation, seduce him with a dizzy (she takes the spiked glass meant for him) strip tease, but he—the Punjab ka puttar—doesn’t touch the Indian girl, because she is the kind who can be taken home to mother. Worse, she is a surgeon, but doesn’t realize that the act hasn’t really taken place.
While this moronic and tasteless tale (borrowed from the Kamal Haasan film Pammal K Sammandam by four scriptwriters!) is unfolding, Viraj and Simrita curse and swear at each other, he has a whole ‘eve-teasing’ number in Italy, as she runs about, dressed in increasingly skimpy clothing. She tries to break up the marriage of her equally scatty friend Kamini (Amrita Arora) to Viraj’s buddy Lucky (Aftab Shivdasani), just because she does not believe in marriage. Poor Kamini, constantly referred to as “Kameeni” suffers the indignity of having a man fart in her face as her wedding degenerates into pie-throwing, bottle-breaking mayhem.
Is this funny? No. Thrilling? No. Entertaining? Hardly. Meaningful? Not by a very long shot. In short, a total waste of time and money. Akshay Kumar should stop playing such creepy guys, and Kareena Kapoor deserves better than to be a skinny clotheshorse. And both of them seem to be inordinately proud of this piece of junk. This is the kind of cinema with which ‘Bollywood’ wants to woo the world? This is the kind of film that gets a huge opening? Depressing thought!
They have the money to sign on Hollywood stars and shoot in the US and Italy; they have the money to blow up on spectacular action sequences and designer wardrobes for the cast; they have the resources to splurge on marketing and promotion. But they don’ have the brains to get a fresh script or to use that money to create a memorable viewing experience.
All the extravagance is just a cover for totally stupid and regressive content, right out of the fifties—like a five-star hotel garnishing leftovers with caviar. It may look good, but it still stinks!
Sabbir Khan’s Kambakkht Ishq is supposed to be about the battle of the sexes—but it is a tirade against women, all of whom in this film are sorely lacking in brains or self-respect. The ‘hero’ Viraj (Akshay Kumar), a Hollywood stuntman, is such a stud, that he is constantly being chased by women, as he beds them and then flings them out of his house, his car, drives over one who has been running after him, and abandons a Hollywood siren (Denise Richards as herself) who wants to make “golden babies” with him, at the alter, without a backward glance. And then, he claims to hate women and marriage!
The man-hating ‘heroine’ Simrita (Kareena Kapoor) models to pay for medical school, and is such a bimbette that she performs surgery with a dangling watch on her wrist and leaves a part of it inside the patient, who happens to be Viraj. The musical ringing of the watch from Viraj’s stomach provides a running gag. Then, to get him back to the hospital and extract the watch, Simrita tries to drug him, dope him, and in desperation, seduce him with a dizzy (she takes the spiked glass meant for him) strip tease, but he—the Punjab ka puttar—doesn’t touch the Indian girl, because she is the kind who can be taken home to mother. Worse, she is a surgeon, but doesn’t realize that the act hasn’t really taken place.
While this moronic and tasteless tale (borrowed from the Kamal Haasan film Pammal K Sammandam by four scriptwriters!) is unfolding, Viraj and Simrita curse and swear at each other, he has a whole ‘eve-teasing’ number in Italy, as she runs about, dressed in increasingly skimpy clothing. She tries to break up the marriage of her equally scatty friend Kamini (Amrita Arora) to Viraj’s buddy Lucky (Aftab Shivdasani), just because she does not believe in marriage. Poor Kamini, constantly referred to as “Kameeni” suffers the indignity of having a man fart in her face as her wedding degenerates into pie-throwing, bottle-breaking mayhem.
Is this funny? No. Thrilling? No. Entertaining? Hardly. Meaningful? Not by a very long shot. In short, a total waste of time and money. Akshay Kumar should stop playing such creepy guys, and Kareena Kapoor deserves better than to be a skinny clotheshorse. And both of them seem to be inordinately proud of this piece of junk. This is the kind of cinema with which ‘Bollywood’ wants to woo the world? This is the kind of film that gets a huge opening? Depressing thought!
Sunday, June 28, 2009
NY + 1
New York
The terrorist attack on World Trade Centre ob September 11, 2001 destroyed peace in the world forever, and divided people in the US into ‘patriots’ and ‘outsiders’. It also put innocent Muslims on the defensive, and that continues years after the cataclysmic event.
A Muslim character in Kabir Khan’s earnest New York tells another that they should now put it behind and get on with life. But Khan doesn’t take his own advice. The film comes a little too late, portraying as it does, the mass arrest and torture of randomly arrested Muslims post 9/11 (done with great power in Khuda Ke Liye) and the revenge planned by a few.
Omar (Neil Nitin Mukesh) is trapped by a FBI officer Roshan (Irrfan) into re-establishing contact with college friends Samir (John Abraham) and Maya (Katrina Kaif). In love with Maya, Omar had been heartbroken when she chose Samir.
Roshan believes Samir heads a terrorist cell, and wants Omar to infiltrate and report on their activities. Omar discovers that Samir had been arrested and tortured after 9/11 and he wants to regain his dignity.
The debate about the right and wrong of such revenge is rather watery and the implications of the act never really explored. What the film does (like Shoot on Sight) recently is point the finger of suspicion at Muslims—they are all potential terrorists, it says, if the provocation is severe enough. It certainly does not serve the cause of peace… its politics are fuzzy, and instead of avoiding jingoism, it inadvertently promotes it.
Khan keeps a tight grip on the narrative, however, and the film is also wonderfully shot. He also gets an unexpected sincere performance from John Abraham. Irrfan provides the meat, Neil Nitin Mukesh the muscle and Katrina Kaif the garnish. It’s a watchable film, but does not either provoke debate or quell it, which seems like an opportunity for raising the issue of understanding and empathy between communities wasted.
Runway
The title Runway, so you expect something to do with airports; then you realize it was probably meant to be ‘runaway,’ as in fugitive.
Anyway, whatever it is called, the film goes nowhere. It is obviously meant to be a showreel for Amarjeet (whose family seems to have produced the film), so within a few minutes, he has strutted about bare-chested, had a song, a fight scene, a shower scene and so on..
The plot, such as it is, is about Allan (Amarjeet), who takes in a contract killing job to save his girlfriend (Deepal Shaw) dying (in full bridal regalia) of a drug-induced illness. He does the job of shooting a “Mister Victor,” and then finds that a killer (Lucky Ali) keeps shooting at him.
There he is, on the run from cops and killer, with just a night-club dancer Shaina (Tulip Joshi) to help him. It doesn’t make much sense, this running all around over Mauritius (where the club dancer sings some Chhapra ka paani kind of number!), and never figuring quite who is doing what and why.
Amarjeet looks like a cross between Emran Hashmi and Harman Baweja and displays no exceptional acting skills. No help from the rest of cast either.
The terrorist attack on World Trade Centre ob September 11, 2001 destroyed peace in the world forever, and divided people in the US into ‘patriots’ and ‘outsiders’. It also put innocent Muslims on the defensive, and that continues years after the cataclysmic event.
A Muslim character in Kabir Khan’s earnest New York tells another that they should now put it behind and get on with life. But Khan doesn’t take his own advice. The film comes a little too late, portraying as it does, the mass arrest and torture of randomly arrested Muslims post 9/11 (done with great power in Khuda Ke Liye) and the revenge planned by a few.
Omar (Neil Nitin Mukesh) is trapped by a FBI officer Roshan (Irrfan) into re-establishing contact with college friends Samir (John Abraham) and Maya (Katrina Kaif). In love with Maya, Omar had been heartbroken when she chose Samir.
Roshan believes Samir heads a terrorist cell, and wants Omar to infiltrate and report on their activities. Omar discovers that Samir had been arrested and tortured after 9/11 and he wants to regain his dignity.
The debate about the right and wrong of such revenge is rather watery and the implications of the act never really explored. What the film does (like Shoot on Sight) recently is point the finger of suspicion at Muslims—they are all potential terrorists, it says, if the provocation is severe enough. It certainly does not serve the cause of peace… its politics are fuzzy, and instead of avoiding jingoism, it inadvertently promotes it.
Khan keeps a tight grip on the narrative, however, and the film is also wonderfully shot. He also gets an unexpected sincere performance from John Abraham. Irrfan provides the meat, Neil Nitin Mukesh the muscle and Katrina Kaif the garnish. It’s a watchable film, but does not either provoke debate or quell it, which seems like an opportunity for raising the issue of understanding and empathy between communities wasted.
Runway
The title Runway, so you expect something to do with airports; then you realize it was probably meant to be ‘runaway,’ as in fugitive.
Anyway, whatever it is called, the film goes nowhere. It is obviously meant to be a showreel for Amarjeet (whose family seems to have produced the film), so within a few minutes, he has strutted about bare-chested, had a song, a fight scene, a shower scene and so on..
The plot, such as it is, is about Allan (Amarjeet), who takes in a contract killing job to save his girlfriend (Deepal Shaw) dying (in full bridal regalia) of a drug-induced illness. He does the job of shooting a “Mister Victor,” and then finds that a killer (Lucky Ali) keeps shooting at him.
There he is, on the run from cops and killer, with just a night-club dancer Shaina (Tulip Joshi) to help him. It doesn’t make much sense, this running all around over Mauritius (where the club dancer sings some Chhapra ka paani kind of number!), and never figuring quite who is doing what and why.
Amarjeet looks like a cross between Emran Hashmi and Harman Baweja and displays no exceptional acting skills. No help from the rest of cast either.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
PG and Let's Dance
Paying Guest
Move 1966 Mumbai to 2009 Bangkok, and you have a remake of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Biwi Aur Makaan. That film was reportedly a remake of Bengali Jaya Che Kali Boarding and was later made into a Marathi film called Ashi Hi Banwa Banwi by Sachin.
Maybe the men in drag as a comic device needed a fresh plot to make it work. Paritosh Painter’s Paying Guest, may have been based on a successful play, but as a film, it starts off at a disadvantage. The plot is old and totally predictable. The audience’s willingness to see the film, then depends on their curiosity—do they really want to see Jaaved Jaffery and Shreyas Talpade parade around as over-dressed women?
Four friends (Ashish Chauhary and Vatsal Sheth are the other two) live together in Pattaya, and happen to be thrown out of their jobs and rented home on the same day. At the only other paying guest joint (a swanky villa, actually) they can find, the landlords Ballu (Johnny Lever) and his wife (Delnaz Paul) insist that they will rent out rooms only to married men, In desperation, two of them get into drag (hideous) and pretend to be the wives.
It is really lazy scripting then, to include such tired gags as the landlord being the former boss of one of the ‘drag’ guys, and the girlfriend of one of the ‘husbands’ landing up as a friend of the family. If it is still marginally funny, it’s because the actors seem to enjoy the tomfoolery, and some of the lines are witty—one suspects a lot of them ad libbed.
There are the mandatory song-and-dance breaks, for which four leading ladies are duly provided (Neha Dhupia, Celina Jaitly, Riya Sen, Sayali Bhagat)—and not one of them leaves any impression. What do you make of a Gujarati character (Paul), who mangles her English, and a villain (Chunky Pandey) who lisps? Just that the writers and director couldn’t even be bothered with thinking up some fresh material…do they have so much contempt for the audience?
Let’s Dance
A young woman, who loves dancing aspires to be in a music video; and her appearance in one, makes her a ‘star’? Aarif Sheikh’s Let’s Dance may have got a few dance steps right, but everything else is off kilter.
Even if you didn’t know it was a straight lift of Jessica Alba starrer Honey, you’d suspect it’s origins were not entirely local…though it has echoes of Naach, Rangeela and Aaja Nachle.
Suhani (Gayatri Patel) teaches dance to a bunch of street kids (they don’t all look like urchins), fighting to keep her rehearsal space, which the landlord wants to sell. For someone with no regular income and no family (at least none mentioned), she shares a large apartment with a TV reporter friend (Sugandha Garg), who has a profession that is convenient to the script.
Her only desire is to be in a video by RJ (Aquib Afzal), and she miraculously gets the opportunity. While she becomes a ‘star’, she also gets to romance a dhabawala (Ajay Chaudhary) across the street. She tries to get a rude teenager (Aabhaas Yadav) who dances beautifully, to join her class, but the slum boy would rather peddle drugs. And when she does make a breakthrough by springing him out of jail, she is blacklisted for resisting RJ’s advances.
Much too easily (in a city with real estate problems), she is gifted a large hall, where she decides to stage her own dance show, to give the street kids a chance to display their talent. The TV reporter roommate comes in handy to whip up support. And for added melodrama, the rude bloke’s kid brother ends up in hospital in a coma.
Surprisingly, for a film based on dance, the music is not peppy—except for the Taare tod ke la number—and the choreography consists of mostly hip-hop and breakdance moves, with a lot of energy very little grace.
Newcomer Gayatri is earnest and confident, but as she says in the film, she is not Madhuri Dixit—and not even she could do much with a soggy Aaja Nachle kind of script. Aquib Afzal (blinding wardrobe) can’t act, Ajay Chaudhary hasn’t enough to do, the only other bright spot is Aabhas Yadav as the slumdog with attitude.
Move 1966 Mumbai to 2009 Bangkok, and you have a remake of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Biwi Aur Makaan. That film was reportedly a remake of Bengali Jaya Che Kali Boarding and was later made into a Marathi film called Ashi Hi Banwa Banwi by Sachin.
Maybe the men in drag as a comic device needed a fresh plot to make it work. Paritosh Painter’s Paying Guest, may have been based on a successful play, but as a film, it starts off at a disadvantage. The plot is old and totally predictable. The audience’s willingness to see the film, then depends on their curiosity—do they really want to see Jaaved Jaffery and Shreyas Talpade parade around as over-dressed women?
Four friends (Ashish Chauhary and Vatsal Sheth are the other two) live together in Pattaya, and happen to be thrown out of their jobs and rented home on the same day. At the only other paying guest joint (a swanky villa, actually) they can find, the landlords Ballu (Johnny Lever) and his wife (Delnaz Paul) insist that they will rent out rooms only to married men, In desperation, two of them get into drag (hideous) and pretend to be the wives.
It is really lazy scripting then, to include such tired gags as the landlord being the former boss of one of the ‘drag’ guys, and the girlfriend of one of the ‘husbands’ landing up as a friend of the family. If it is still marginally funny, it’s because the actors seem to enjoy the tomfoolery, and some of the lines are witty—one suspects a lot of them ad libbed.
There are the mandatory song-and-dance breaks, for which four leading ladies are duly provided (Neha Dhupia, Celina Jaitly, Riya Sen, Sayali Bhagat)—and not one of them leaves any impression. What do you make of a Gujarati character (Paul), who mangles her English, and a villain (Chunky Pandey) who lisps? Just that the writers and director couldn’t even be bothered with thinking up some fresh material…do they have so much contempt for the audience?
Let’s Dance
A young woman, who loves dancing aspires to be in a music video; and her appearance in one, makes her a ‘star’? Aarif Sheikh’s Let’s Dance may have got a few dance steps right, but everything else is off kilter.
Even if you didn’t know it was a straight lift of Jessica Alba starrer Honey, you’d suspect it’s origins were not entirely local…though it has echoes of Naach, Rangeela and Aaja Nachle.
Suhani (Gayatri Patel) teaches dance to a bunch of street kids (they don’t all look like urchins), fighting to keep her rehearsal space, which the landlord wants to sell. For someone with no regular income and no family (at least none mentioned), she shares a large apartment with a TV reporter friend (Sugandha Garg), who has a profession that is convenient to the script.
Her only desire is to be in a video by RJ (Aquib Afzal), and she miraculously gets the opportunity. While she becomes a ‘star’, she also gets to romance a dhabawala (Ajay Chaudhary) across the street. She tries to get a rude teenager (Aabhaas Yadav) who dances beautifully, to join her class, but the slum boy would rather peddle drugs. And when she does make a breakthrough by springing him out of jail, she is blacklisted for resisting RJ’s advances.
Much too easily (in a city with real estate problems), she is gifted a large hall, where she decides to stage her own dance show, to give the street kids a chance to display their talent. The TV reporter roommate comes in handy to whip up support. And for added melodrama, the rude bloke’s kid brother ends up in hospital in a coma.
Surprisingly, for a film based on dance, the music is not peppy—except for the Taare tod ke la number—and the choreography consists of mostly hip-hop and breakdance moves, with a lot of energy very little grace.
Newcomer Gayatri is earnest and confident, but as she says in the film, she is not Madhuri Dixit—and not even she could do much with a soggy Aaja Nachle kind of script. Aquib Afzal (blinding wardrobe) can’t act, Ajay Chaudhary hasn’t enough to do, the only other bright spot is Aabhas Yadav as the slumdog with attitude.
KKD+2
Kal Kisne Dekha
Nihal Singh from Chandigarh (that’s how he is referred to all the time), played by newcomer Jackky Bhagnani in Kal Kisne Dekha, comes to Mumbai to study science, in a college with an enormous campus and a building with gigantic Doric columns—which couldn’t possibly be in Mumbai, but that is the least of the film’s problems.
In the only time NS from C, enters a classroom, he asks his physics professor (Rishi Kapoor—why this?), who is teaching post-grads about Newton and the apple, “Why do we dream?”
The rest of the time, he sings, dances, races bikes, chases spoilt rich miss (Misha Vaishali Desai), gets into scraps with college bullies, and generally poses around in various foreign locales, where his father (Vashu Bhagnani), the producer of the film, could afford to splurge on shoots.
When it’s almost interval time, the director Vivek Sharma (or someone else) must have asked, “But where’s the story?” And so, Nihal’s ability to ‘see’ the future is dusted and trotted out, as he tries to prevent some vague terrorists (Rahul Dev and moll) without a cause from blowing up Mumbai. Even as he runs about, with Mumbai’s police force behind him (since when do they go entirely by some college student’s intuition and not their own intelligence?), he pauses to sing, dance etc., at various pretty places, flinging his arms out a la Shah Rukh Khan and trying to look soulful. Meanwhile, the professor grins evilly and a loony don (Riteish Deshmukh) with gay sidekicks does nothing in particular. And there’s Archana Puran Singh, shrieking around too, unrecognizable and not at all a rustic “bebe” type.
If Jackky Bhagnani and the over-made up, badly dressed Vaishali Desai have any talent or star quality, it’s not visible in Kal Kisne Dekha. In fact, if a producer dad wanted to deliberately sabotage his son’s acting career, he couldn’t have done a better job that this.
Karma - Crime, Passion, Reincarnation
The film’s title is a dead give away, and in scene two, if a character sees a ‘ghost’ wandering in the woods, any regular Hindi moviegoer can figure out the rest. Not to mention that the plot of Karma - Crime, Passion, Reincarnation is that of Chetan Anand’s Kudrat with cosmetic changes.
New York based Vikram (Carlucci Veyant), visits his father Ranvir (Vijayendra Ghatge) in Ooty after many years, accompanied by his wife Anna (Alma Saraci). Vikram is angry with his father and wants to go back as soon as possible.
But Anna starts getting visions, and seems to know Ooty well, though she has never been there before. It doesn’t take to figure out that there is reincarnation involved, and that the ‘ghost’ (Claudia Ciesla) is Linda, who was murdered thirty years ago, and has been reborn as Anna.
Vikram does not believe his wife at first, but an internet search (would papers even archive a snippet about the disappearance of a tourist so many years ago?) he also sets about trying to unravel the mystery.
The plot, old though it is, has enough interest to keep the viewer interested, director M.R. Shahjahan has worked in a competent paint-by-number mode, without a touch of freshness or any surprises. If at all there are a few convenient coincidences, like Linda’s friend and compatriot still around in Ooty, after what happened, and not aged a bit in thirty years.
Alma Saraci has an innocent charm that is appealing; the rest of the cast do their parts adequately. Hindi cinema has had so many excellent films on the theme of reincarnation (most of them studded with exquisite songs) that for an Indian viewer, there is absolutely no novelty here, though the film has been making the round of foreign film festivals and even winning awards.
Zor Lagaa Ke Haiya
The heart and mind are in the right place—a film that sends out a ‘Save the Trees’ message—but the script is not.
Zor Lagaa Ke Haiya is just the kind of film the Children’s Film Society used to (and presumably still does) churn out regularly, hoping to uplift kids with moral sermons. Girish Girija Joshi has got together a cast of energetic kids, some well known grown up actors in tiny parts and Amitabh Bachchan to do a voiceover, but his film is long, mostly dreary and, in the end, not even all that moving or inspiring.
Four kids living in a suburban high rise, fight with a homeless beggar (Mithun Chakraborthy—effective get-up) for some flimsy reason, and build a ‘house’ in the only tree in their building, to keep an eye on him; they do so at all hours of the day and night, with no parental intervention. In fact, parents are hardly seen, and the building doesn’t even seem to have a watchman. Helping these kids is Ram (Ashwin Chitale ) the son of a labourer working on a construction site nearby—the unselfconscious friendship between kids from diverse backgrounds is a really nice touch.
Predictably, the villains are a builder (Gulshan Grover) and his henchman (Mahesh Manjrekar), who want to cut down the tree. By now the beggar and the kids have become friends, and they unite to thwart the builder’s axe-wielding underlings.
It’s all very well to get all huffy about one tree, but the idea conveyed is that any random bunch can actually stop any project for eccentric reasons. The kids want to save the tree not for aesthetic or environmental motives, but just because their little wooden look-out is on it. And they manage to save it, not by convincing others that it is important not to cut trees, but by using the ‘religious’ excuse that is so often pulled out to prevent perfectly legit developmental projects. As film meant for children, it just sends out confusing signals.
The film may win awards for its simplistic environment conservation lesson, but is hardly likely to win a kiddie fan following. Which is a pity, because rarely do so many actors (Seema Biswas, Mahesh Manjrekar, Riya Sen, Raj Zutshi) come together just for a cause, and the purpose is not even served.
Nihal Singh from Chandigarh (that’s how he is referred to all the time), played by newcomer Jackky Bhagnani in Kal Kisne Dekha, comes to Mumbai to study science, in a college with an enormous campus and a building with gigantic Doric columns—which couldn’t possibly be in Mumbai, but that is the least of the film’s problems.
In the only time NS from C, enters a classroom, he asks his physics professor (Rishi Kapoor—why this?), who is teaching post-grads about Newton and the apple, “Why do we dream?”
The rest of the time, he sings, dances, races bikes, chases spoilt rich miss (Misha Vaishali Desai), gets into scraps with college bullies, and generally poses around in various foreign locales, where his father (Vashu Bhagnani), the producer of the film, could afford to splurge on shoots.
When it’s almost interval time, the director Vivek Sharma (or someone else) must have asked, “But where’s the story?” And so, Nihal’s ability to ‘see’ the future is dusted and trotted out, as he tries to prevent some vague terrorists (Rahul Dev and moll) without a cause from blowing up Mumbai. Even as he runs about, with Mumbai’s police force behind him (since when do they go entirely by some college student’s intuition and not their own intelligence?), he pauses to sing, dance etc., at various pretty places, flinging his arms out a la Shah Rukh Khan and trying to look soulful. Meanwhile, the professor grins evilly and a loony don (Riteish Deshmukh) with gay sidekicks does nothing in particular. And there’s Archana Puran Singh, shrieking around too, unrecognizable and not at all a rustic “bebe” type.
If Jackky Bhagnani and the over-made up, badly dressed Vaishali Desai have any talent or star quality, it’s not visible in Kal Kisne Dekha. In fact, if a producer dad wanted to deliberately sabotage his son’s acting career, he couldn’t have done a better job that this.
Karma - Crime, Passion, Reincarnation
The film’s title is a dead give away, and in scene two, if a character sees a ‘ghost’ wandering in the woods, any regular Hindi moviegoer can figure out the rest. Not to mention that the plot of Karma - Crime, Passion, Reincarnation is that of Chetan Anand’s Kudrat with cosmetic changes.
New York based Vikram (Carlucci Veyant), visits his father Ranvir (Vijayendra Ghatge) in Ooty after many years, accompanied by his wife Anna (Alma Saraci). Vikram is angry with his father and wants to go back as soon as possible.
But Anna starts getting visions, and seems to know Ooty well, though she has never been there before. It doesn’t take to figure out that there is reincarnation involved, and that the ‘ghost’ (Claudia Ciesla) is Linda, who was murdered thirty years ago, and has been reborn as Anna.
Vikram does not believe his wife at first, but an internet search (would papers even archive a snippet about the disappearance of a tourist so many years ago?) he also sets about trying to unravel the mystery.
The plot, old though it is, has enough interest to keep the viewer interested, director M.R. Shahjahan has worked in a competent paint-by-number mode, without a touch of freshness or any surprises. If at all there are a few convenient coincidences, like Linda’s friend and compatriot still around in Ooty, after what happened, and not aged a bit in thirty years.
Alma Saraci has an innocent charm that is appealing; the rest of the cast do their parts adequately. Hindi cinema has had so many excellent films on the theme of reincarnation (most of them studded with exquisite songs) that for an Indian viewer, there is absolutely no novelty here, though the film has been making the round of foreign film festivals and even winning awards.
Zor Lagaa Ke Haiya
The heart and mind are in the right place—a film that sends out a ‘Save the Trees’ message—but the script is not.
Zor Lagaa Ke Haiya is just the kind of film the Children’s Film Society used to (and presumably still does) churn out regularly, hoping to uplift kids with moral sermons. Girish Girija Joshi has got together a cast of energetic kids, some well known grown up actors in tiny parts and Amitabh Bachchan to do a voiceover, but his film is long, mostly dreary and, in the end, not even all that moving or inspiring.
Four kids living in a suburban high rise, fight with a homeless beggar (Mithun Chakraborthy—effective get-up) for some flimsy reason, and build a ‘house’ in the only tree in their building, to keep an eye on him; they do so at all hours of the day and night, with no parental intervention. In fact, parents are hardly seen, and the building doesn’t even seem to have a watchman. Helping these kids is Ram (Ashwin Chitale ) the son of a labourer working on a construction site nearby—the unselfconscious friendship between kids from diverse backgrounds is a really nice touch.
Predictably, the villains are a builder (Gulshan Grover) and his henchman (Mahesh Manjrekar), who want to cut down the tree. By now the beggar and the kids have become friends, and they unite to thwart the builder’s axe-wielding underlings.
It’s all very well to get all huffy about one tree, but the idea conveyed is that any random bunch can actually stop any project for eccentric reasons. The kids want to save the tree not for aesthetic or environmental motives, but just because their little wooden look-out is on it. And they manage to save it, not by convincing others that it is important not to cut trees, but by using the ‘religious’ excuse that is so often pulled out to prevent perfectly legit developmental projects. As film meant for children, it just sends out confusing signals.
The film may win awards for its simplistic environment conservation lesson, but is hardly likely to win a kiddie fan following. Which is a pity, because rarely do so many actors (Seema Biswas, Mahesh Manjrekar, Riya Sen, Raj Zutshi) come together just for a cause, and the purpose is not even served.
Anubhav
Anubhav: An Actor’s Tale
The title of the film makes it sound as if it is about an actor’s experiences in the film industry, but what the eponymous protagonist goes through, can happen to anyone.
Rajeevnath’s Anubhav: An Actor’s Tale is about an actor (Sanjay Suri), who struggles along with his friend Adi (Anoop Menon—also the writer of the film) to get a break, whiling away the time doing inane TV serials.
Because she saw him in a rather tacky production of Macbeth, rich girl Meera (Gul Panag) pursues him relentlessly, till they get married. Adi manages to get a producer for his version of Hamlet, with an item-number, but the moneybags dies before the film can be completed.
Meera gives birth to a child who needs an operation that would cost Rs 20 lakh. The doctor (Mita Vashisht), who admits to being a “bad woman” sends Anubhav to a pimp (Ran Zutshi) who turns him into a highly paid gigolo. Anubhav hides from his wife the fact that their daughter survived and is undergoing treatment, and pretends he has a job when the money starts coming in.
The director makes no attempt to understand the social conditions of a gigolo’s profession, assuming that everyone who sells their body must have a ‘majboori’ behind it, and instead of a look at today’s sexually open lifestyle turns the film into a Laga Chunari Mein Daag kind of melodrama with the genders reversed. At one point Anubhav expresses disgust at the kind of women he has to bed, and even there the director is bit off the mark—women who can afford to pay for a gigolo will hardly have body odour and “dirty necks”. And the women he is seen with look pretty glamorous—including the one (Sudha Chandran) who plays his mother in a serial.
You hardly sympathise with Anubhav’s plight, when helpless husbands thank him for doing a socially important job and then, miraculously, a satisfied client conveniently dies and leaved him a fortune. He becomes a star and starts over with a clean slate. It swings from implausible to simplistic, with just an unsavoury mess in between.
Rajeevnath is a fairly well known director from Kerala, so manages to get stars like Nedumudi Venu, Bharat Gopi and even Jackie Shroff for meaningless cameos, but the most giggle-worthy performances are by Mita Vashisht (who ought to have known better) and Raj Zutshi. Sanjay Suri must have thought he was being very brave doing this role, but it won’t take his career anywhere.
The title of the film makes it sound as if it is about an actor’s experiences in the film industry, but what the eponymous protagonist goes through, can happen to anyone.
Rajeevnath’s Anubhav: An Actor’s Tale is about an actor (Sanjay Suri), who struggles along with his friend Adi (Anoop Menon—also the writer of the film) to get a break, whiling away the time doing inane TV serials.
Because she saw him in a rather tacky production of Macbeth, rich girl Meera (Gul Panag) pursues him relentlessly, till they get married. Adi manages to get a producer for his version of Hamlet, with an item-number, but the moneybags dies before the film can be completed.
Meera gives birth to a child who needs an operation that would cost Rs 20 lakh. The doctor (Mita Vashisht), who admits to being a “bad woman” sends Anubhav to a pimp (Ran Zutshi) who turns him into a highly paid gigolo. Anubhav hides from his wife the fact that their daughter survived and is undergoing treatment, and pretends he has a job when the money starts coming in.
The director makes no attempt to understand the social conditions of a gigolo’s profession, assuming that everyone who sells their body must have a ‘majboori’ behind it, and instead of a look at today’s sexually open lifestyle turns the film into a Laga Chunari Mein Daag kind of melodrama with the genders reversed. At one point Anubhav expresses disgust at the kind of women he has to bed, and even there the director is bit off the mark—women who can afford to pay for a gigolo will hardly have body odour and “dirty necks”. And the women he is seen with look pretty glamorous—including the one (Sudha Chandran) who plays his mother in a serial.
You hardly sympathise with Anubhav’s plight, when helpless husbands thank him for doing a socially important job and then, miraculously, a satisfied client conveniently dies and leaved him a fortune. He becomes a star and starts over with a clean slate. It swings from implausible to simplistic, with just an unsavoury mess in between.
Rajeevnath is a fairly well known director from Kerala, so manages to get stars like Nedumudi Venu, Bharat Gopi and even Jackie Shroff for meaningless cameos, but the most giggle-worthy performances are by Mita Vashisht (who ought to have known better) and Raj Zutshi. Sanjay Suri must have thought he was being very brave doing this role, but it won’t take his career anywhere.
Monday, May 25, 2009
And as strike goes on...
Detective Naani
The ‘old lady’ detective is a popular genre in fiction—Agatha Christie’s immortal Miss Marple comes immediately to mind – so Romilla Mukherjee can be commended for making a senior citizen the lead in her film Detective Naani, but that’s where the praise ends.
The film is painfully long, mostly boring, has too many needless characters, badly picturised song and a harebrained plot.
Ava Mukhejee plays the 71-year-old Mrs Dutt, known by all as Naani, a chatty, inquisitive woman living in a housing complex full of strange people. One day she happens to notice a little girl’s face in the window of the apartment above hers. More mysterious goings-on follow—a body that falls out of the window and then vanishes, strange phone calls and the sinister couple upstairs (Sanjeev Vatsa, Mahru Sheikh) up to no good.
The cops, lead by Inspector Bhatia (Ankur Nayyar) treat her with polite contempt, but her daughter (Amrita Raichand), grandkids (Zain Khan, Simran Singh) and an assortment of neighbours help her to solve the case.
But while the Naani is trying to figure out what is going on, the film wanders over into unconnected tracks like the romance between two teens (no parents?) next door (Shwata Gulati-Amit Varma), the cops interest in the divorced daughter, and the antics of two detectives given the job of watching the building.
When the case is solved, it turns out to be far-fetched, and the actual villain behind the exposed racket is never even seen. The man in the building who is supposed to be a key baddie, just grumbles about his car being hit by a football. There is no real sense of menace, and the climax has the old device of the Naani being kidnapped and the grandson hiding in the boot of the goons’ car to save her. All the while the smart old lady has a phone in her bag (she calls her daughter), but does not summon the cops.
Detective Naani aims to appeal to all age-groups, but kids will find it very slow, and grow-ups won’t find anything at all to hook them. It’s just a debut gone waste.
Ocean of an Old Man
Rajesh Shera’s first feature Ocean of an Old Man has clearly been made for the festival circuit, where audiences have more patience for slow and abstruse films. But for the multiplex problem, it may never even have found a commercial release in India.
In the tradition of a school ‘art’ films of yore, that believes in a flat, bland, mode of story-telling this one looks like it didn’t even have a script to begin with—just an idea and a location. So the cast and crews must have enjoyed shooting on the pristine, peaceful beaches of the Andamans, and communicated to the viewer just seemingly random collection of images—some of them lyrical, some oddly detached.
An old schoolteacher (Tom Alter) loses his wife, child and many of his students in the terrible tsunami of 2004. The film is about his attempts to cope with the devastation. You care for the old man, because of what he has suffered, but after endless shots of his rowing up and down in a boat, cycling to his forlorn hut, and looking at the empty desks in his rudimentary classroom, you find it hard to stay awake.
There is undoubtedly an audience for this film (like for the equally obscure Frozen, last week), but it is not for everyone. Tom Alter, who has seldom been given film roles worthy of his talent, brings the right amount of pathos and dignity to his performance. For his sake, you wish audiences looking for an offbeat movie experience sample this film, but you also know it is a lost cause.
Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz
There is a very annoying kid in Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz, and it isn’t even born yet. It keeps whining from its mother’s womb, driving not just her, but the audience nuts.
Amy Thanawala makes her debut as a filmmaker and chooses a mix of Kya Kehna and Look Who’s Talking as a subject—a film dead on arrival. Who’d want to see a wan Miss Anupama Iyer (Tara Sharma) be stupid enough to get pregnant and try to jump off cliff, only to be saved by this irritating voice inside her.
So Anu leaves her family and relocates to Mumbai, where she gets a welcome fit for winning cricketer by her friend Raina (Rinku Patel), as if deciding to be an unwed mother is such a major achievement. She also gets a job easily, and every man she meets seems to fancy her. So the kid inside, gets to choose his Appa (that’s because Miss Nair is South Indian).
The next door neighbour (Avinash Tiwary) turns out to be gay (though they primly never use the word), so he’s out. The boss is a lech, so he is cancelled. That leaves Anupama’s prissy South Indian colleague (Makrand Shukla) and a wimpy professor Dhruv (Dharmendra Gohil), first seen being molested by his students!
The kid picks Dhruv, and he is only to willing to go with Anupama to pre-natal classes and medical check-ups and buy her endless water melons. Thanawala makes it seem as if it’s perfectly normal and socially acceptable for a girl to get pregnant and then pick a partner out of the many suitors, whose family is happy to have a daughter-in-law with someone else’s baby, and get on with life with no hassles.
At least, if the director had been honest enough to see the flip side and mention the problems of unsafe sex and unplanned pregnancies, the film would have served some purpose. As it is now-- long, melodramatic, pedantic, boring and badly acted—it’s enough to put anyone off babies for life!
99
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s caper comedy 99 has been given that title, because it takes just one more run to make a century in cricket, and the several protagonists of the film are just short of winning.
There is no law against a bunch of friends getting together and creating a script that is a collection of characters and gags that they must have seen and liked in the many such ‘con’ films and making an ‘original’ film. So, in the end, a few of the stand-up comic ‘items’ work, but not the film as a whole.
Like, the name of a Mumbai don – AGM—(Mahesh Manjrekar) is supposed to generate guffaws; there’s a giant of a hitman called Dimple (okay, funny), and a fat sidekick called Zaramud (Cyrus Broacha, not at all funny!)
Sachin (Kunal Khemu) and Zaramud owe money to AGM, so they are sent to Delhi to recover from a defaulter – the luckless but passionate betting man Rahul (Boman Irani). They stay at a grand hotel, where Sachin befriends Pooja (Saif Ali Khan). The two hoods manage to get the money and it is all stolen. So Rahul and the two come up with a fool proof plan to win it all back, and it involves cricket match fixer JC (Vinod Khanna, wandering in the wrong film).
Also in the mess, are a small time crook Kuber (Amit Mistry) and his buddy Dimple, a Bhojpuri film star and Rahul’s disgruntled wife (Simone Singh).
There’s always some kind of activity going on, lots of hits-and-misses, plenty of yelling over phones with bad connections, but none of it hangs together – it’s like a kid trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with mismatched pieces. For a caper, it has no thrills, and very few genuinely comic moments; but on the plus side are some of the actors who really look like what they are doing made sense to them—Mahesh Manjrekar, Boman Irani, Amit Mistry and Kunal Khemu get the right tone and attitude.
Maybe worth the price of a singleplex ticket and a chai, any more than that spent and it’s a waste of money. And if your friends ask what it is about, you won’t be able to tell them.
Frozen
Shivajee Chandrabhushan, the director of Frozen is a mountaineer, and the film is a heartfelt tribute to the rugged beauty of Ladakh—in gorgeous black and white, shot by Shanker Raman (who also wrote the script).
It must have been made under very difficult circumstances—the terrain is not easy to live in, forget conduct a film shoot—and you must appreciate the passion of the cast and crew. However, for viewers, who couldn’t care less what went into the making if they don’t get their money’s worth, and, moreover, are unused to snail-paced ‘festival films’, it could be very tough to sit through.
Karma (Danny Denzongpa) lives in a remote mountain outpost with his not-all-there daughter Lasya (Gauri) and son Chomo (Skalzang Angchuk Gultuk). It’s a hard life, Karma in debt and there are no takers for the apricot jam he laboriously makes by hand. Modern life is at the doorstep, whether it is in the form of the moneylender’s greed or the lust of a strange man called Romeo who chases after Lasya.
To make it worse, the army arrives and sets up a noisy camp nearby, so the peace and pristine beauty of the place is ruined. The film is not really plot or character driven, but documentary-like in its capture of the stunning landscape, and a bit detached in its narrative style.
Danny’s performance the brave yet battered Karma, and of course the dazzling location makes Frozen worth attempting, but even with sympathy for the people living such bleak lives in place, it could be as laborious as climbing a mountain.
The ‘old lady’ detective is a popular genre in fiction—Agatha Christie’s immortal Miss Marple comes immediately to mind – so Romilla Mukherjee can be commended for making a senior citizen the lead in her film Detective Naani, but that’s where the praise ends.
The film is painfully long, mostly boring, has too many needless characters, badly picturised song and a harebrained plot.
Ava Mukhejee plays the 71-year-old Mrs Dutt, known by all as Naani, a chatty, inquisitive woman living in a housing complex full of strange people. One day she happens to notice a little girl’s face in the window of the apartment above hers. More mysterious goings-on follow—a body that falls out of the window and then vanishes, strange phone calls and the sinister couple upstairs (Sanjeev Vatsa, Mahru Sheikh) up to no good.
The cops, lead by Inspector Bhatia (Ankur Nayyar) treat her with polite contempt, but her daughter (Amrita Raichand), grandkids (Zain Khan, Simran Singh) and an assortment of neighbours help her to solve the case.
But while the Naani is trying to figure out what is going on, the film wanders over into unconnected tracks like the romance between two teens (no parents?) next door (Shwata Gulati-Amit Varma), the cops interest in the divorced daughter, and the antics of two detectives given the job of watching the building.
When the case is solved, it turns out to be far-fetched, and the actual villain behind the exposed racket is never even seen. The man in the building who is supposed to be a key baddie, just grumbles about his car being hit by a football. There is no real sense of menace, and the climax has the old device of the Naani being kidnapped and the grandson hiding in the boot of the goons’ car to save her. All the while the smart old lady has a phone in her bag (she calls her daughter), but does not summon the cops.
Detective Naani aims to appeal to all age-groups, but kids will find it very slow, and grow-ups won’t find anything at all to hook them. It’s just a debut gone waste.
Ocean of an Old Man
Rajesh Shera’s first feature Ocean of an Old Man has clearly been made for the festival circuit, where audiences have more patience for slow and abstruse films. But for the multiplex problem, it may never even have found a commercial release in India.
In the tradition of a school ‘art’ films of yore, that believes in a flat, bland, mode of story-telling this one looks like it didn’t even have a script to begin with—just an idea and a location. So the cast and crews must have enjoyed shooting on the pristine, peaceful beaches of the Andamans, and communicated to the viewer just seemingly random collection of images—some of them lyrical, some oddly detached.
An old schoolteacher (Tom Alter) loses his wife, child and many of his students in the terrible tsunami of 2004. The film is about his attempts to cope with the devastation. You care for the old man, because of what he has suffered, but after endless shots of his rowing up and down in a boat, cycling to his forlorn hut, and looking at the empty desks in his rudimentary classroom, you find it hard to stay awake.
There is undoubtedly an audience for this film (like for the equally obscure Frozen, last week), but it is not for everyone. Tom Alter, who has seldom been given film roles worthy of his talent, brings the right amount of pathos and dignity to his performance. For his sake, you wish audiences looking for an offbeat movie experience sample this film, but you also know it is a lost cause.
Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz
There is a very annoying kid in Suno Na.. Ek Nanhi Aawaz, and it isn’t even born yet. It keeps whining from its mother’s womb, driving not just her, but the audience nuts.
Amy Thanawala makes her debut as a filmmaker and chooses a mix of Kya Kehna and Look Who’s Talking as a subject—a film dead on arrival. Who’d want to see a wan Miss Anupama Iyer (Tara Sharma) be stupid enough to get pregnant and try to jump off cliff, only to be saved by this irritating voice inside her.
So Anu leaves her family and relocates to Mumbai, where she gets a welcome fit for winning cricketer by her friend Raina (Rinku Patel), as if deciding to be an unwed mother is such a major achievement. She also gets a job easily, and every man she meets seems to fancy her. So the kid inside, gets to choose his Appa (that’s because Miss Nair is South Indian).
The next door neighbour (Avinash Tiwary) turns out to be gay (though they primly never use the word), so he’s out. The boss is a lech, so he is cancelled. That leaves Anupama’s prissy South Indian colleague (Makrand Shukla) and a wimpy professor Dhruv (Dharmendra Gohil), first seen being molested by his students!
The kid picks Dhruv, and he is only to willing to go with Anupama to pre-natal classes and medical check-ups and buy her endless water melons. Thanawala makes it seem as if it’s perfectly normal and socially acceptable for a girl to get pregnant and then pick a partner out of the many suitors, whose family is happy to have a daughter-in-law with someone else’s baby, and get on with life with no hassles.
At least, if the director had been honest enough to see the flip side and mention the problems of unsafe sex and unplanned pregnancies, the film would have served some purpose. As it is now-- long, melodramatic, pedantic, boring and badly acted—it’s enough to put anyone off babies for life!
99
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s caper comedy 99 has been given that title, because it takes just one more run to make a century in cricket, and the several protagonists of the film are just short of winning.
There is no law against a bunch of friends getting together and creating a script that is a collection of characters and gags that they must have seen and liked in the many such ‘con’ films and making an ‘original’ film. So, in the end, a few of the stand-up comic ‘items’ work, but not the film as a whole.
Like, the name of a Mumbai don – AGM—(Mahesh Manjrekar) is supposed to generate guffaws; there’s a giant of a hitman called Dimple (okay, funny), and a fat sidekick called Zaramud (Cyrus Broacha, not at all funny!)
Sachin (Kunal Khemu) and Zaramud owe money to AGM, so they are sent to Delhi to recover from a defaulter – the luckless but passionate betting man Rahul (Boman Irani). They stay at a grand hotel, where Sachin befriends Pooja (Saif Ali Khan). The two hoods manage to get the money and it is all stolen. So Rahul and the two come up with a fool proof plan to win it all back, and it involves cricket match fixer JC (Vinod Khanna, wandering in the wrong film).
Also in the mess, are a small time crook Kuber (Amit Mistry) and his buddy Dimple, a Bhojpuri film star and Rahul’s disgruntled wife (Simone Singh).
There’s always some kind of activity going on, lots of hits-and-misses, plenty of yelling over phones with bad connections, but none of it hangs together – it’s like a kid trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with mismatched pieces. For a caper, it has no thrills, and very few genuinely comic moments; but on the plus side are some of the actors who really look like what they are doing made sense to them—Mahesh Manjrekar, Boman Irani, Amit Mistry and Kunal Khemu get the right tone and attitude.
Maybe worth the price of a singleplex ticket and a chai, any more than that spent and it’s a waste of money. And if your friends ask what it is about, you won’t be able to tell them.
Frozen
Shivajee Chandrabhushan, the director of Frozen is a mountaineer, and the film is a heartfelt tribute to the rugged beauty of Ladakh—in gorgeous black and white, shot by Shanker Raman (who also wrote the script).
It must have been made under very difficult circumstances—the terrain is not easy to live in, forget conduct a film shoot—and you must appreciate the passion of the cast and crew. However, for viewers, who couldn’t care less what went into the making if they don’t get their money’s worth, and, moreover, are unused to snail-paced ‘festival films’, it could be very tough to sit through.
Karma (Danny Denzongpa) lives in a remote mountain outpost with his not-all-there daughter Lasya (Gauri) and son Chomo (Skalzang Angchuk Gultuk). It’s a hard life, Karma in debt and there are no takers for the apricot jam he laboriously makes by hand. Modern life is at the doorstep, whether it is in the form of the moneylender’s greed or the lust of a strange man called Romeo who chases after Lasya.
To make it worse, the army arrives and sets up a noisy camp nearby, so the peace and pristine beauty of the place is ruined. The film is not really plot or character driven, but documentary-like in its capture of the stunning landscape, and a bit detached in its narrative style.
Danny’s performance the brave yet battered Karma, and of course the dazzling location makes Frozen worth attempting, but even with sympathy for the people living such bleak lives in place, it could be as laborious as climbing a mountain.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Dash+2
Dashavtar
Without the gimmick of Kamal Haasan slapping on prosthetic make-up and playing every major role in the film, Dashavtar (the Hindi dubbed version of Tamil Dasavatharam) has quite a standard issue thriller plot.
Govindrajan (Kamal Haasan) a scientist in the US wants to prevent a vial containing a deadly virus from falling into the wrong hands, and escapes with it, with an ex-CIA assassin Fletcher (Kamal again) and his slinky moll (Mallika Sherawat) hot on his heels.
He lands up in India, has the Intelligence team led by a Balaram Naidu (Kamal, yet again) chasing him. At some point, a senile old woman (Kamal too), puts the vial into an idol and her hysterical granddaughter Andal (Asin—not Kamal for a change!) joins Govind on the run.
The film could have been wrapped up in a cool, snappy, 100 minutes, and the ‘ Don’t mess with Nature’ message delivered equally effectively, but because Kamal Haasan wants to play more roles, it extends to a sleep-inducing three hours. He keeps adding needless characters like a Sardar singer, an Afghan giant, a Japanese man, an environmental activist and, quite memorably, George Bush.
The director KS Ravikumar —and script writer Kamal-- keep the film moving, however, from one action/chase sequence to another, with just a few pauses for breath—a comic gag here, a song there.
The most stunning part of the film is the prologue, set in 12 Century Tamil Nadu, where a Vishnu devotee Rangaraja (Kamal, who else?) is tortured by the Shiavite king, strapped to the huge idol of Vishnu and thrown into the sea. How this connects with the present, and the ‘thunderous’ climax takes some frantic connecting of dots—but there is Chaos Theory involved.
Dashavtar is an expensive film, it has some spectacular effects and action scenes, but ultimately, there is the discomfiting thought that it was made to indulge an actor’s vanity. Stunts like Kamal as an American battling Kamal as a Japanese martial arts expert. At the end, you see Kamal Haasan in a make-up chair, getting all that rubber goonk slapped on his face… and not all if it is well done. The assassin, the old woman and the Afghan, in particular, look like hastily stuck on Halloween masks. The best—and the one the actor seems to enjoy most --is the regional chauvinist Naidu.
It could have been a fun ride, but the way is lumbers on, it is like reading a good book for a school assignment—punishing.
Chowrasta: Crossroads of Love
Darjeeling is clearly the star of Anjan Dutta’s Chowrasta: Crossroads of Love, a beautiful hill station that time seems to have left untouched—or at least not severely altered.
It is at Chowrasta in Darjeeling, that a few stories interconnect, with a former tea planter and now writer Jimmy (Victor Bannerjee) with suicide on his mind, meets with some of the most uninteresting characters imaginable (all speaking with weird English accents).
There is an actress Nandana (Rupa Ganguly) with a problem kid Rick(Neil Bose), a whiny ex-husband (Saswata Chatterjee) and a new lover (Arijit Dutta). There’s a couple that has eloped and the screechy, nagging wife (Aparajita) gives her laidback husband Sunny (Naved Aslam) and the audience a really tough time.
There’s a terrorist (Atul Kulkarni), who is in need of money, and happens to kidnap Rick—who is quite happy to be away from his parents and keeps demanding a particular brand of biscuits (paid product placement?), so that you actually start feeling sorry for the inept criminal.
Everybody just talks and talks (typical of Anjan Dutta’s films like Bong Connection and Bow Barracks Forever), and utter some unintentionally hilarious lines. Like Jimmy advising Sunny to serenade his wife, which will get her “panting like an Alsatian.” There is also some faintly obscene car analogy and a particularly gross one about a rhino horn in the backside (this is for the terrorist’s ears). You wonder what kind of writer Jimmy will make, when he also spouts “dancing in the daffodils” kind of words.
At 90 minutes, this one seems too long, and but for the lovely scenery and a stray interesting scene-- like Sunny’s serenade, or Jimmy’s attempt at “flying”-- it would be quite difficult to sit through.
Meri Padosan
Carrying on from the string of duds last week, coming out because of the multiplex-producers fight, is Prakash Saini’s Meri Padosan, that would find it impossible to get a release in normal times; it will still have to struggle for an audience.
It is set mostly in a studio basti, where little bungalows are cheek by jowl, and windows are left tantalizingly devoid of grills or curtains. In this voyeur’s haven lives a grumpy accountant Viju (Sanjay Mishra) and his pretty, dolled up, wife Kavita (Sadhika Randhawa).
Three bachelors move in next door (Sarwar Ahuja, Khayali, Snehal Dabhi) and ogle at the wife. The one of them, an aspiring filmmaker called Shyam Gopal Varma (!), enters a filmmaking contest with a reality-show kind of movie, in which he creates misunderstandings between the couple, so that he can shoot the ensuing fireworks.
It’s expectedly tacky, sexist, and quite unbearable, despite the potential of the plot (borrowed from a foreign film). A couple of the lead actors are just about passable, but some of the others seem to have been picked up from the bottom a particularly muddy talent pool.
Without the gimmick of Kamal Haasan slapping on prosthetic make-up and playing every major role in the film, Dashavtar (the Hindi dubbed version of Tamil Dasavatharam) has quite a standard issue thriller plot.
Govindrajan (Kamal Haasan) a scientist in the US wants to prevent a vial containing a deadly virus from falling into the wrong hands, and escapes with it, with an ex-CIA assassin Fletcher (Kamal again) and his slinky moll (Mallika Sherawat) hot on his heels.
He lands up in India, has the Intelligence team led by a Balaram Naidu (Kamal, yet again) chasing him. At some point, a senile old woman (Kamal too), puts the vial into an idol and her hysterical granddaughter Andal (Asin—not Kamal for a change!) joins Govind on the run.
The film could have been wrapped up in a cool, snappy, 100 minutes, and the ‘ Don’t mess with Nature’ message delivered equally effectively, but because Kamal Haasan wants to play more roles, it extends to a sleep-inducing three hours. He keeps adding needless characters like a Sardar singer, an Afghan giant, a Japanese man, an environmental activist and, quite memorably, George Bush.
The director KS Ravikumar —and script writer Kamal-- keep the film moving, however, from one action/chase sequence to another, with just a few pauses for breath—a comic gag here, a song there.
The most stunning part of the film is the prologue, set in 12 Century Tamil Nadu, where a Vishnu devotee Rangaraja (Kamal, who else?) is tortured by the Shiavite king, strapped to the huge idol of Vishnu and thrown into the sea. How this connects with the present, and the ‘thunderous’ climax takes some frantic connecting of dots—but there is Chaos Theory involved.
Dashavtar is an expensive film, it has some spectacular effects and action scenes, but ultimately, there is the discomfiting thought that it was made to indulge an actor’s vanity. Stunts like Kamal as an American battling Kamal as a Japanese martial arts expert. At the end, you see Kamal Haasan in a make-up chair, getting all that rubber goonk slapped on his face… and not all if it is well done. The assassin, the old woman and the Afghan, in particular, look like hastily stuck on Halloween masks. The best—and the one the actor seems to enjoy most --is the regional chauvinist Naidu.
It could have been a fun ride, but the way is lumbers on, it is like reading a good book for a school assignment—punishing.
Chowrasta: Crossroads of Love
Darjeeling is clearly the star of Anjan Dutta’s Chowrasta: Crossroads of Love, a beautiful hill station that time seems to have left untouched—or at least not severely altered.
It is at Chowrasta in Darjeeling, that a few stories interconnect, with a former tea planter and now writer Jimmy (Victor Bannerjee) with suicide on his mind, meets with some of the most uninteresting characters imaginable (all speaking with weird English accents).
There is an actress Nandana (Rupa Ganguly) with a problem kid Rick(Neil Bose), a whiny ex-husband (Saswata Chatterjee) and a new lover (Arijit Dutta). There’s a couple that has eloped and the screechy, nagging wife (Aparajita) gives her laidback husband Sunny (Naved Aslam) and the audience a really tough time.
There’s a terrorist (Atul Kulkarni), who is in need of money, and happens to kidnap Rick—who is quite happy to be away from his parents and keeps demanding a particular brand of biscuits (paid product placement?), so that you actually start feeling sorry for the inept criminal.
Everybody just talks and talks (typical of Anjan Dutta’s films like Bong Connection and Bow Barracks Forever), and utter some unintentionally hilarious lines. Like Jimmy advising Sunny to serenade his wife, which will get her “panting like an Alsatian.” There is also some faintly obscene car analogy and a particularly gross one about a rhino horn in the backside (this is for the terrorist’s ears). You wonder what kind of writer Jimmy will make, when he also spouts “dancing in the daffodils” kind of words.
At 90 minutes, this one seems too long, and but for the lovely scenery and a stray interesting scene-- like Sunny’s serenade, or Jimmy’s attempt at “flying”-- it would be quite difficult to sit through.
Meri Padosan
Carrying on from the string of duds last week, coming out because of the multiplex-producers fight, is Prakash Saini’s Meri Padosan, that would find it impossible to get a release in normal times; it will still have to struggle for an audience.
It is set mostly in a studio basti, where little bungalows are cheek by jowl, and windows are left tantalizingly devoid of grills or curtains. In this voyeur’s haven lives a grumpy accountant Viju (Sanjay Mishra) and his pretty, dolled up, wife Kavita (Sadhika Randhawa).
Three bachelors move in next door (Sarwar Ahuja, Khayali, Snehal Dabhi) and ogle at the wife. The one of them, an aspiring filmmaker called Shyam Gopal Varma (!), enters a filmmaking contest with a reality-show kind of movie, in which he creates misunderstandings between the couple, so that he can shoot the ensuing fireworks.
It’s expectedly tacky, sexist, and quite unbearable, despite the potential of the plot (borrowed from a foreign film). A couple of the lead actors are just about passable, but some of the others seem to have been picked up from the bottom a particularly muddy talent pool.
Monday, April 13, 2009
2 When the Multiplexes shut down!
Ek Se Bure Do
This is another one of those long-delayed films that has come out because no major film is releasing due to the multiplex strike.
When Ek Se Bure Do was started, the producers must have thought they had a foolproof comedy—Arshad ‘Circuit’ Warsi and Rajpal Yadav in the lead with TV star Natasha (better known as Anita Hassanandani) and newcomer Tusha, a strong supporting cast of Govind Namdeo, Yashpal Sharma, Virendra Saxena.
By the time, it is released, the film directed by Tarique, has no plusses at all, except for one or two throwaway lines that the actors must have ad-libbed on the shoot.
The complicated crime caper has two petty crooks as the protagonists, two warring dons (Govind Namdeo, Yashpal Sharma), a dacoit, a lookalike of a don, and a hidden treasure, they are all after. The girls live in the house where the treasure is supposedly buried, and find themselves surrounded by imposters. Typical of an indifferently made film then that after all the hullabaloo over it, there is not even a glimpse of this ‘khazana’.
Every once in a while, there is a song-and-dance number with so many semi-clad girls, that the bill for dancers must have exceeded the fee charged by all the ‘stars’.
Not so long ago Warsi had a release like Kisse Pyar Karoon, which made a dent in his star value, and now this. Probably time for him to pray that no other skeletons fall out of long-forgotten cans.
Pal Pal Dil Ke Saath
If released a few years ago, Pal Pal Dil Ke Saath may have earned some audience interest, since it stars two cricketers—Ajay Jadeja and Vinod Kambli.
If it were not for the face-off between producers and multiplexes that prevents any big films from releasing, this one would probably have remained in the cans, and saved the cricketers and now actress-on-the-rise Mahi Gill considerable embarrassment. Why just them, if Sushma Seth and Shah were to see themselves in this film, they wouldn’t be mortified too.
The film looks like it was abandoned by all the actors—which explains the odd dubbing, which sounds like a couple of mimicry artistes did the voices for all of them.
The plot—such as it is— is narrated by Vinod Kambli, to a bunch of kids, who will get him funding for his script if they like it. The story involves a bunch of people trying to get their hands on the fortunes of an elderly lady, Mrs Kapoor (Sushma Seth). These include her grandson Ajay (Jadeja), his girlfriend Dolly (Mahi Gill), a conman called John Abraham (Satish Shah), a lawyer, his girlfriend and a gangster— all non-actors picked up from god-knows-where.
The kids actually listen to the script without booing; all they demand is an item number and Kambli obliges with a dance number by two fat, garishly-dressed people, in the middle of a forest.
It’s not the kind of film that deserves attentive viewing; it doesn’t even offer some unintentional laughs, like a ‘respectable’ bad film is supposed to do. Kambli’s script won’t get the ghost writer very far, and both cricketers ought to drop any acting ambitions that they may have… if they haven’t already
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Tasveer
8x10 Tasveer
You had just about forgiven and forgotten Bombay to Bangkok, when Nagesh Kukunoor springs yet another turkey in the form of 8x10 Tasveer.
Reports said that the director was attempting a Manoj Night Shyamalan kind of supernatural thriller, and to be fair, the idea is interesting, but Kukunoor did not manage to pull it off.
He was also worried about the end leaking out, but he underestimates the moviegoer— a few minutes into the film and anyone who has seen enough Hindi films can easily unravel the plot before the scenes come on.
This was not an Akshay Kumar kind of movie, but then he must have thought if Bruce Willis can do Sixth Sense why can’t he? But then Bruce Willis can manage a bigger range of expressions than blank face and frown.
He plays Jai Puri (who thought up the name?) who has the secret ability of going into a photograph and ‘seeing’ what happened when it was taken. The excursion involves CGI trips through hills, dales and snowscapes that are repeated ad nauseum, and after that Jai is left gasping for air and in severe need of a blood transfusion! Don’t ask why.
He also runs an environment protection agency, and wears a uniform, though it isn’t quite clear what they do, and why a fortune willed to his EPA becomes such a bone of contention.
Jai’s father (Benjamin Gilani), from whom he has been estranged for ‘environmental’ differences, has just died in an accident, and if an obsessive compulsive detective (Jaaved Jaaferi) who called himself “Happi with an I” didn’t turn up to tell him it was murder, he wouldn’t have suspected it.
His investigation means peering into the last photograph which lines up suspects- his mother (Sharmila Tagore), uncles (Girish Karnad-Ananth Mahadevan) and cousin (Rushad Rana)—and trying to figure out who did it. There’s also a girlfriend (Ayesha Takia) floating around.
It’s odd but Jai’s mother and girlfriend do not know of his powers, though neighbourhood folks know and approach him to hunt down missing people.
Even by the suspend-disbelief standards of such movies, this one is quite laughable, loosely scripted and quite weird. Imagine this scene, Jai and the girlfriend break into an uncle’s house. He instructs her to start looking around. For what, she asks. For proof, he replies! As is ‘proof’ is something to be found on the mantelpiece. Later they are chased and almost run down by a black van, but think nothing of it.
The over-long denouement is so chuckle-worthy, because you know that’s what is going to happen and can’t believe that someone can actually use such a hoary plot device.
And for a crime thriller, the film is also slow, repetitive and the mystery, when it unfolds, quite unbelievable.
Thankfully, there aren’t too many song breaks, and no great performances are required from the actors. All one can pray for is that Nagesh Kukunoor regains his form soon. Let lesser directors make half-baked thrillers.
You had just about forgiven and forgotten Bombay to Bangkok, when Nagesh Kukunoor springs yet another turkey in the form of 8x10 Tasveer.
Reports said that the director was attempting a Manoj Night Shyamalan kind of supernatural thriller, and to be fair, the idea is interesting, but Kukunoor did not manage to pull it off.
He was also worried about the end leaking out, but he underestimates the moviegoer— a few minutes into the film and anyone who has seen enough Hindi films can easily unravel the plot before the scenes come on.
This was not an Akshay Kumar kind of movie, but then he must have thought if Bruce Willis can do Sixth Sense why can’t he? But then Bruce Willis can manage a bigger range of expressions than blank face and frown.
He plays Jai Puri (who thought up the name?) who has the secret ability of going into a photograph and ‘seeing’ what happened when it was taken. The excursion involves CGI trips through hills, dales and snowscapes that are repeated ad nauseum, and after that Jai is left gasping for air and in severe need of a blood transfusion! Don’t ask why.
He also runs an environment protection agency, and wears a uniform, though it isn’t quite clear what they do, and why a fortune willed to his EPA becomes such a bone of contention.
Jai’s father (Benjamin Gilani), from whom he has been estranged for ‘environmental’ differences, has just died in an accident, and if an obsessive compulsive detective (Jaaved Jaaferi) who called himself “Happi with an I” didn’t turn up to tell him it was murder, he wouldn’t have suspected it.
His investigation means peering into the last photograph which lines up suspects- his mother (Sharmila Tagore), uncles (Girish Karnad-Ananth Mahadevan) and cousin (Rushad Rana)—and trying to figure out who did it. There’s also a girlfriend (Ayesha Takia) floating around.
It’s odd but Jai’s mother and girlfriend do not know of his powers, though neighbourhood folks know and approach him to hunt down missing people.
Even by the suspend-disbelief standards of such movies, this one is quite laughable, loosely scripted and quite weird. Imagine this scene, Jai and the girlfriend break into an uncle’s house. He instructs her to start looking around. For what, she asks. For proof, he replies! As is ‘proof’ is something to be found on the mantelpiece. Later they are chased and almost run down by a black van, but think nothing of it.
The over-long denouement is so chuckle-worthy, because you know that’s what is going to happen and can’t believe that someone can actually use such a hoary plot device.
And for a crime thriller, the film is also slow, repetitive and the mystery, when it unfolds, quite unbelievable.
Thankfully, there aren’t too many song breaks, and no great performances are required from the actors. All one can pray for is that Nagesh Kukunoor regains his form soon. Let lesser directors make half-baked thrillers.
