Rating: 3/5

Indian cinema and Bollywood touch a century and as with any anniversary, we can look back and see both the highs and lows. I went into the movie expecting to be treated to four stories that recall big Bollywood moments. But what I got instead was a pleasant bouquet of four shorts which showcase how integral a part of Indian life Bollywood is. Directed by four of the star directors in Bollywood, the experience is at times moving, and at times introspective. The shorts all raise pertinent questions for today’s generation and fortunately does not sermonize. The Plot: Karan Johan directs the first short and in terms of fitting the occasion, this is the only one that falls short – why am I not surprised? Randeep Hooda and Rani Mukherjee play a couple trapped in a loveless marriage. Their world is turned upside down by the entrance of Avinash, played brilliantly by newcomer Saqib Saleem. Avinash is young, confident, Rani’s colleague and gay. When she discovers he is gay, she does not even bat an eyelid. Then the young man realizes her husband is gay and pursues him. When she discovers her husband is gay, she throws a tantrum and ends their marriage. In typical K Jo style, the short has nothing to do with the concept at hand, so he uses old Hindi songs to tenuously tie the story to the experience. Fortunately, the story is good enough for us to forgive K Jo his transgression. Dibakar Banerjee directs the second short. This one is probably the highlight of the experience. The short tells the story of a lower-middle class man who gets to play a small part in a movie. Nawazuddin Siddiqui continues to impress with his acting. The next decade or two should see this fantastic actor take center-stage as Bollywood enters the second century. Zoya Akhtar gets the third short. This one is a fairy tale that traces a young boy trying to live his dream – to dance like Katrina Kaif, against his father’s wishes. Ranbir Shorey plays the role of the father with usual panache. The most impressive part of this short is the way the relationship between the boy and his older sister is developed. I found myself thinking, “Thank God for sisters” on more than one occasion. Anurag Kashyap get the final short. This traces a young man’s attempts to meet The Big B. The story is simple, but Kashyap is able to bring home the craze that The Phenomenon inspires in India. The Verdict It is a nice experience and you won’t feel cheated at the end of it. So go ahead and watch it.

Rating: 2/5

Shootout at Wadala is a movie that disappoints on various levels. The biggest disappointment is in the treatment of the subject. The story of Manya Surve is one that has been begging to be made into a big movie, but it is unfortunate that this happened to be the one. John Abraham as Manya comes up short. The movie begged for a younger Sanjay Dutt. John Abraham lacks the acting talent required to bring Manya to life. He plays Manya is a single dimension and robs the viewer of the chance to root for this unlikely goon. Apart from the treatment of the story, the movie is replete with negatives. First there is the music is jarring and does nothing to enhance the film. Then the item numbers, there are three. Priyanka Chopra, Sunny Leone and Sophiya Chaudhary get one each and none of them make any sense or appeal to any of the senses. To make things worse the choreography of all the songs is way below par. Then there are the terribly stilted dialogs. The movie boasts three screenplay writers. Unfortunately, not one of them seems to know how a conversation is carried out in normal life. Take this gem when ACP Afaaque Khan, played by Anil Kapoor, is riding in the van with Manya and Manya is telling him his story, when out of the blue Manya asks the ACP, “So what were you doing when I was going to prison?” The ACP then launches into his own story. Ugh! Then there is the fact that no attention was paid to the details. The movie is set in the 80s but you have Manya and friends drinking out of pint-sized beer bottles which didn’t show up till early in the 2000s. Then you have a scene where one of Manya’s friends is in a modern Harley-Davidson jacket. In the same scene, Manya is wearing a Ferrari F1 jacket. I can go on and on about the props that were completely out of place. Not to say that everything in the movie is bad. There is Sonu Sood. The guy just gets better and better. Here playing Dilawar, one of the Haskar brothers, he is brilliant. His sense of costume is impeccable and I didn’t see him wear one thing that didn’t suit the period. But in the end, Manya Surve was hard done by. His story deserved more than this. The Plot Manya Surve is a quiet, hardworking boy living in Mumbai. His father is a drunkard and his brother a wannabe goon. Manya works hard at his studies, hoping to finish college, land a job and take his mother out of the mire. Along the way, he would like to marry his college sweetheart Vidhya. But fate intervenes and when he tries to help his brother, who is getting beaten up, he ends up holding the person his brother eventually kills. He is convicted for the murder and sent to prison. He breaks out of prison, with his new friend Munir, and they return to Bombay to start their own gang. Along the way, they take on the Haskar brothers and kill the older one. Fate intervenes again and it is the moment when Bombay Police decide something needs to be done about the escalating violence in the city. Manya Surve is chosen as the example to be set. What happens next is the first encounter in the Maximum City. Verdict Get the Vastav DVD and watch it again. Or pick up the book Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of The Mumbai Mafia by Hussain Zaidi. In fact, the movie is based on a part of this book. The book is better and a lot more fun to read.

Rating: 2/5

Back when I was growing up in Dubai, we spent the long summer days of the vacations watching movies on video. When we ran out of movies to watch we would pick up video collections of Jeetender’s songs so we could have a laugh. “Bees Saal Baad” the realization has dawned on me that it wasn’t just the actor, the movies were silly too. I agree that the 80s didn’t give us too many great movies, but if they wanted to remake a movie, did it have to be this one? The movie is replete with the standard scenes from the Bollywood movies of the 80s. There is the grand entrance of the hero with a fight sequence. There is a spoilt brat, modern, girl who the hero transforms. The transformation is depicted by the fact that she exchanges her Wonder Woman costumes for salwars. That said, I never imagined Tammanna would look so awesome in the Wonder Woman costume. There is a the fight scene with the tiger. There is a scene where the mother pleads to the Gods for a miracle to save her son, which arrives in the form of the tiger. The Plot Ravi, an orphan, returns to his village to restore his family pride. There he runs into the villains of the piece – Sher Singh and Narayan Das, played hilariously and brilliantly by Manjrekar and Rawal. Apart from them he runs into Sher’s Singh’s spoilt daughter, played by Tammanna. How he avenges the insults on his family while also transforming Tammanna makes up the rest of the story. Actually, not quite, because Ravi is not really Ravi. Verdict There isn’t much to redeem this movie, except the nostalgia value and the acting from Manjrekar and Rawal, who capture the Shakthi Kapoor-Kadar Khan era perfectly. And before you ask – No Devgan doesn’t have a scene in a white pant with matching white shoes.

Film: “Agneepath”
Starring: Rishi Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Priyanka Chopra, Om Puri
Written and Directed by: Karan Malhotra
Rating: 3.75/5

Long before the damsel in the den Katrina Kaif signs her writhe petition ‘junta ke naam’, the film’s imposing villain and by extension the film, have written their destiny. In bold bloodied letters. E-mail didn’t exist in the 1990s.

Sanjay Dutt as Kancha lording over a no-man’s-land called Mandwa where the only law that exists is lawlessness is so formidable in his vile antics, you fear for the hero, a decent bloke with eyes that tell a million untold stories.

Hrithik Roshan opts for a perfectly-tuned low-pitched performance to offset Sanjay Dutt’s larger-than-life diabolism. The combination of the flamboyant and the understated works.

This is Agneepath Retold or Agneepath Deconstructed. Either way, the revenge formula never seemed more rousing in its invocation of Good and Evil in their most elementary avatars.

Debutant writer-director Karan Malhotra has chosen to restructure one of the most complex but unsuccessful Amitabh Bachchan starrer. The plot leaps at you through its sanguinary design, building brick by brick an edifice of low-life and high-drama.

This new-rage “Agneepath” retains the core of Mukul Anand’s failed drama. And yes, it retains Harivnansh Rai’s “Agneepath” poem, though, alas, we don’t get to hear Amitabh Bachchan recite the lines.

Karan Malhotra’s script alters many of the original’s dramatic moments, adds new characters (most notable among them, Rishi Kapoor’s Rauf Lala), and finally fine-tunes and assimilates the plot’s subliminal statement on crime and retribution to a pitch where we often hear the screaming protests of social inequality through the protagonist’s pain-lashed expressions of angst, disgust and rebellion rather than his words.

Hrithik Roshan opts for a subdued interpretation of his vengeful character where he could’ve easily been larger-than-life. He lets Sanjay Dutt take charge of the blizzard of the bravura.

Sanjay Dutt is delightfully in form. During the “Chikni chameli” song when he quizzes the newly-arrived Mandwa-resident Vijay on why he’s where he is, Sanjay’s eyes go from the molten to the melting…His best in years.

But the finest performance comes from Rishi Kapoor. Playing a loathsome flesh trader and drug dealer who takes Vijay under his wings, he delivers a bludgeoning homage to skin-crawling villainy. A glorious departure from his lover-boy image.

The prolonged sequence where Hrithik Roshan takes on Rishi Kapoor is the single-most riveting episode of filmed violence in Indian cinema since Gabbar Singh’s mayhem over the Thakur’s family in Sholay.

“Agneepath” works so wonderfully within its high-voltage ‘masala maad-dhaad’ genre because of the actors who instinctively grasp the street-level gut-wrenching grammar of Malhotra’s storytelling.

Barring Priyanka Chopra who seems strangely cosmetic in a land of looming credibility, every character shines through the crime-drama maze.

The action sequences by Abbas Ali Mogul convey rawness. Every blow that Hrithik Roshan so manfully receives on his chin makes you flinch. You wait for him to give back as good as he gets.

This is not a film for the faint-hearted. Its basic structure and the leitmotif of the ‘tree of death’ (where Vijay Chauhan’s father was hanged and where his wrongdoer will finally meet his nemesis) draw audiences into a vortex of viciousness and sadism.

This is a dark brooding world; this is a world where the laws of retribution and redemption are re-written according to who rules the underworld. This is “Agneepath” where the poet gets hanged and the pervert gets promoted.

Karan Malhotra revels in the language of commercial Hindi cinema. The characters in Vijay’s chawl are all good-hearted. Every character in Kancha’s kingdom is a creep or a coward. The battle lines are tightly drawn. The pace is breakneck.

The mob scenes of violence and religion often merge on the streets of Mumbai and in the lawless backwaters of the imaginary Mandwa. The narrative features a Gokul Ashthami matki-breaking sequence at the start and a Ganesh visarjan sequence towards the end, both shot spectacularly on Mumbai streets.

The background music is a suitable banshee of memories and pain. Since Hrithik Roshan has chosen the language of understatement to portray the wronged wounded social outcast Vijay Dinanath Chauhan, it is up to the eloquence-level of the soundtrack to supplement the hero’s stunning silences.

Every component of the film falls into place, with a resounding thump. “Agneepath” is brilliant in its brutality. It’s a riveting and hectic homage to the spirit of the cinema when revenge reigned supreme. And content was King. This new “Agneepath” takes us back to the era when there was no computer or cellphones. And communication with the audience was immediate and electrifying.

Relive that tingling sensation of watching the hero get his groove back. In gory detail. – IANS

Movie : Don 2
Rating: 3/5
Cast : Shahrukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Boman Irani, Kunal Kapoor, Om Puri, Lara Dutta, Nawab Shah, Alyy Khan, Sahil Shroff, Hrithik Roshan (cameo)
Directed by : Farhan Akhtar
Produced by : Ritesh Sidhwani, Far
Banner : Excel Entertainment
Music : Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy
Release Date : 2011-12-23

Story:

A sequel tale, the story begins with Don (SRK) surrendering himself at Malaysia Interpol to Roma (Priyanka) and her boss (Om Puri). But there is a reason behind that. Don wants to get in touch with his old rival Vardhan (Boman) who is in the jail and hatch a plot. The mission is to extract the plates that print currency in the prestigious DCB bank in Germany. Both manage to escape from the prison and reach Germany. For the mission, Don takes the help of hacker (Kunal) and hitman Abdul Jabbar (Nawab Shah) along with Vardhan. However, there is a twist in the plot. Whether Don manages to succeed this time or not forms the rest of the story.


Artist performances:

Shahrukh Khan has come up with an impressive performance and he carries it off with good style and mannerism. Priyanka Chopra was good and she has a reserved act this time. Boman Irani was effective. Nawab Shah was impressive and stands apart. Kunal Kapoor was brief but good. Lara Dutta was sexy. Om Puri was apt. Alyy Khan was adequate. Hrithik in his cameo is appealing. Sahil Shroff was standard.


Plus points:

Cinematography
Locations
Screenplay
Second half


Minus points:

Weak content
Poor songs


Analysis:

The film happens to be a sequel to the original hit 'Don' and it has been packaged with more richness and style. The film takes off on a slow note and it is not until the interval bang that it really picks up. But it is the overall feel and the efforts put in to cover different countries. Moreover, with less content, the challenge was to engage the audience for two plus hours and it was successful to an extent. As such, there are not many riveting scenes but it gives a satisfying taste after the film ends. At the box office, the openings will be strong and given the hype, the film would land in profit zone.


Verdict: One time watcher..

Ra. One Review: Ra.One, yes finally Shah Rukh Khan’s dream sees the light of the day. Yes there are innumerous expectations attached to this film. And it lives up to it. Now, if you are expecting an Inception or Transformers, Ra.One is not for you. Go watch it as an average Indian who is away from Hollywood films and you will be totally bowled over.

Story:

Shekhar Subramaniam (Shah Rukh Khan) works for Barron Industries that produces gaming software. For past few years, none of their games are working in the market. Shekhar is a looser and a coward in his son Prateek’s (Armaan Verma) eyes. Prateek tells his dad that heroic games are no good, villians are kick ass and he likes them. So, only for his son, Shekhar makes a game Ra.One that portrays the villain stronger than the hero. He also installs Artificial Intelligence in the Villian that makes him think for its own. Now What’s next. Ra.One comes out of the game and creates Havok. And then G.one too is bought in the physical world from the virtual to defeat Ra.One.

Analysis:

As I said earlier, don’t go watch the film if you are already awestruck with Hollywood Sci-fi flicks. It’s definitely a stupendous job as per Bollywood standards and hats ff to Shah Rukh and his film to pull it off. Some visual effects used are par excellence. Coming to the story, Indianness has been added and that was required to make it a mass entertainer. However, the first half is better and fast paced while the second half could have been better. All the kids are definitely going to have a time of their life watching Ra.One.

Performances:

Shah Rukh Khan is back. He does full justice to both Shekhar as the stupid, god-fearing south Indian and even to G.One. Kareena Kapoor looks gorgeous and makes you fall in love with her all over again. Arjun Rampal is excellent but its Armaan who totally steals the show. The film totally belongs to him.

Technicalities:

Well, Priyanka Chopra and Sanjay Dutt’s cameo was not required. The sequence that is right in the beginning of the film was outright stupid and you really hope that the rest of the film is not like this. Editing in the first half is flawless while the direction could have been better in the second half. Music is the life line of the film. All the songs are good with ‘Chhamak Challo’ and Dildaara standing out. Background score was not novel. Some of the visual effects should definitely be commended and watching the film in 3D would be more impactful.

Plus Points:

- Performances- Visual Effects

- Music

Minus Points:

- Adding a little extra Indianness.

Final Word: Take the kids along and have fun.

Rating: 3.5/5

Banner: Red Chillies EntertainmentCast: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Armaan Verma, Arjun Rampal, Shahana GoswamiDirector: Anubhav Sinha

Producer: Gauri Khan

Bodyguard Cast: Salman Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Mahesh Manjrekar,Shatrughan Sinha,Hazel , Rajat Rawail,Asrani

Bodyguard Producer: Atul Agnihotri

Bodyguard Director: Siddique

Bodyguard Music Director: Pritam Chakraborty

Bodyguard Hindi movie release date: 31st August 2011

Bodyguard 2011 Hindi Movie Review:

Rating 4/5

On its release date, Bodyguard opened across 2,250 screens in 70 Indian cities and with 482 prints across the overseas territory. The film’s production company, Reel Life Production Pvt. Ltd, was bought by Reliance Entertainment for Rs. 64 crore. This earned Reliance the co-producer status and an equal share in the IPR for perpetuity. In addition to this, satellite rights of the film were sold to STAR network for Rs. 27 crore for seven years

Director Siddique has brilliantly used Salman factor in the film Bodyguard, which is remake of Malayalam movie with the same name. Salman’s body lurching action is the key attraction of the film.Salman Khan played a role of profession security guard. He safeguards Kareena in the film.

For three years now, every Eid, a Salman Khan movie has become one of the rewards of the festival. Whereas last year we had “Dabangg”, which despite its simplicity had layers into it, this year we are treated to “The Bodyguard” which isn’t a patch on “Dabangg”. Despite this, it has enough to hold the attention of festive audiences.

Bodyguard Lovely Singh (Salman Khan) is a nice, honest man of steel who is faithful to Sartaj (Raj Babbar). Sartaj, asks Lovely to guard his daughter Divya (Kareena Kapoor) day and night.

Lovely does his job diligently, but is unawares that Divya serenades him under a pseudonym Chhaya over the phone, and has fallen in love with him. Things get out of control when Sartaj’s enemies try to kill Divya while Sartaj thinks Lovely is trying to kidnap his daughter.

“Bodyguard”, conceptually, is based on the type of stories that have made Imtiaz Ali popular – sweet, gentle love stories, where the underlying theme being sacrifice for the sake of love. Yet whereas Imtiaz Ali reveals in a certain quaint subtlety despite the melodramatic nature of his films, “Bodyguard” director Siddique does not have that much of skills to pull that off.

The result is a film that has its few funny, slapstick moments but the problem area is the surprise twist in the end. It is an end that does not gel with the pace of the rest of the film and seems cooked up. That is especially true because director Siddique gives no foreshadowing or inclination before of a possibility of a character doing what she does in the end.

However, that would be a problem with urban audiences. As far as rural viewers go, the ending, fantastic as it may be, might actually work for the film. After all isn’t there enough elements of fantasy in the rest of the film like when Salman going in the opposite direction in a train, simply jumps on to a running train in another direction. If one can digest that, one can do the same for the ending.

A little more effort on the editing table would have eased a lot of things.

Salman fans, however, have much to cheer. They not only get to see their favourite star beating enemies to pulp, but also get to see his well toned torso, that in the end is revealed after jets of water blow away his shirt, much like the subway wind blew away Marilyn Monroe’s skirt.

Debutante Rajat Rawail provides comic relief to the film not just with his antics but also the funny messages on his t-shirts like ‘6 Pack Coming Soon’ pasted over his fat belly.

Salman is his well-chiseled self, and Kareena is as good as the script demands of her, which isn’t much. The music is catchy, especially Himmesh Reshamiya composed song “I Love You”.

The film deserves 4 stars due to its song, action and several twists.

Guzaarish

Main Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Aishwarya Rai, Aditya Roy Kapoor, Monikangana Dutta

Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali

Producer: Ronnie Screwvala, Sanjay Leela Bhansali

Music: Sanjay Leela Bhansali

Ethan Mascarenhas, a radio show host, is aided through every moment of his present life by the epicenter of his world – his nurse, Sofia D’Souza. On the fourteenth anniversary of his accident, Ethan decides to seek control over his own life. He makes a petition to the Court that shocks the world and leaves Sofia in an impasse that challenges their relationship and their love. Alongside all the tumult that follows, a young man named Omar Siddiqui bursts into Ethan’s world with a single-minded desire to learn magic from the very best. While on one hand Ethan passes on his magical legacy, on the other, he fights tooth-and-nail to demand the most basic right that every human being is entitled to – the right to his own life.

Guzaarish is the kind of film that demands that we create a separate category for it—a two and three-quarter rating perhaps. Because there is much to admire here: the film is beautifully shot by Sudeep Chatterjee. It has strong performances and there are several scenes, which genuinely move you. But there is just as much that is clumsy, including an unintentionally comical group-hug in the climax. Despite the many admirable elements, Guzaarish never becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Co-written and directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Guzaarish is cobbled together from many well-known movies. From Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Bhansali sources a world of magic and illusion in which rival magicians sabotage each other.

So the protagonist, Ethan Mascarenhas played by Hrithik Roshan, is great magician who becomes a quadraplegic when a trick goes wrong. There are shades of Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and several scenes and characters lifted from the 2005 foreign-language Oscar winner The Sea Inside, in which Javier Bardem gives an astounding performance as a bed-ridden man who fights to die. Ethan makes a similar plea for euthanasia or as he calls it: ‘ethanasia’.

To this busy canvas, Bhansali adds a beautiful nurse Sophia, played by Aishwarya Rai Bachchan; an apprentice Omar, played by Aditya Roy Kapur and a devoted lawyer, played by Shernaz Patel.

The best part of the film is the beautifully etched relationship between Ethan and Sophia, who wearing floor-length Sabyasachi skirts and gorgeous earrings, seems to be channeling Frida Kahlo.

She calls him Mr Mascarenhas and handles him with a tough love devoid of pity. So, when he pretends to be aroused, she tops it with some world-class moans of her own.

Bhansali is among the few directors who enable Aishwarya to shed her trademark artificiality.

Looking stunning, she delivers her most heart-felt performance in years.

Hrithik struggles and sweats with a difficult role. Ethan must be gloriously life-affirming even as he begs for death. But his character, like the film, is too over-wrought and obviously manipulative.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali has positioned himself as Hindi cinema’s poet of pain. His movies are operatic and highly melodramatic. But over the course of six films, the worlds Bhansali creates have become increasingly sealed off and removed from any known reality. So even though the characters in Guzaarish ostensibly live in Goa, the milieu isn’t one that you would recognise.

This fantasy would be effective if the writing was more organic and the emotions felt more authentic but Bhansali never gives us a chance to invest in these people.

Characters just randomly appear and disappear. So Sophia’s abusive husband drops in for one scene as does Ethan’s rival who scars him for life. It’s clunky and strangely disjointed.

Combining euthanasia with song-and-dance is a tough, tough feat and despite his prodigious talent, Bhansali can’t pull it off. Since we don’t have a two and three-quarter rating, I’m going with three stars.