READY (HINDI FILM)
Teen Thay Bhai
Director: Mrighdeep Singh Lamba
Actors: Om Puri, Deepak Dobriyal, Shreyas Talpade
Rating: *
Three brothers hop on to bikes, hitching a ride on a highway in Himachal. The biker, who’s given a lift to Shreyas Talpade’s character, it turns out, is a gori (white) girl. It’s amazing! He can’t believe his luck. Right then, imitating the iconic kissing scene from the Alicia Silverstone Aerosmith video, he pulls himself forward, spreads his legs wide open before the biker’s seat, gawks at the woman’s breasts that read ‘Guess’, for her jacket’s brand name. “Guess?” he remarks, “Silicone.” She says ya. He gets off.
Eh? Don’t. Even. Ask. It’s been over an hour of sheer nothingness since the film started, and none, including me, could care less to figure what’s going on. Let me try. Over a sequence before, these men had polished off plenty of parathas with “merijuaana” in it. Hot hippies, who’d appeared from thin air, had offered them the stuff. They ran away. The police caught these guys instead.
Ever seen one of those tennis racquets sold at roadsides, which give out electric shocks to kill flies? These fellows manage to shove one of those instruments up a top cop’s bum while in jail. They’re on the run now. So you figure. Nope, it’s still not comedy, when there’s no context.
Om Puri, the actor, if I’m not mistaken, turns 61 in October this year. Om’s co-stars in this film, Talpade and Deepak Dobriyal, in real life, are both in their mid-30s. That the three of them have been brought in as brothers from birth, who pretty much grew up together, defies only logic behind casting -- not frontiers of medical science. So you don’t question.
It’s the public flogging of some of the finest actors in cinema right now that gets your goat. They play losers in their own right. One of them (Om) has three fat daughters to marry off. The second bloke (Dobriyal) is a hopeless dentist, born with an odd fetish for ironing clothes. Excuse me? The third one’s (Talpade) a Punjabi regional film actor, with particular love for a pet dog, broken English, Hollywood, and Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Alta vista, baby!” Hmmm.
The trio – Chixy, Happy, Fancy – from one Gill family had a one-eyed jack(ass) of a dada (for a grandfather), who’s just passed away. By casual estimates of how generations roughly work, a 61-year-old man’s granddad is likely to be at least in his early 100s. This gent, who just died, looked a fairly hail and hearty He-man to me.
He’s left behind a bizarre sort of will that instructs the three brothers, currently separated and estranged (Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited), to spend a couple of days at a dilapidated mountain bungalow for three years in a row (adapted from some play called Mad Madder Maddest). If they meet this minor condition, the said multi-crore property -- which if I heard right, is the mountain itself -- becomes theirs. The scene shifts straight into the third year.
The bros, with no food supply, but loads of cheap whiskey, keep tanking up from the bottle, when not tearing each other apart. Title track sounds mysteriously similar to Ibn battuta (from Ishqiya); background score bears neat sound of the slide guitar.
Old men, taking turns at obscure behaviour, stick moisturising cream up their nostrils; appear with face covered in coal; burn underwear (briefs, not boxers) from the y-front…. Cockfight carries on. Once in a while, you hear Om Puri break into his infamous “Haaa haa ha” (lol, from the incredible sitcom Kakkaji Kahin in the early ‘90s). For most parts, he lets out supposedly funny, loud, long farts. The longest one of course is this confounding flick itself. Sometimes, you wish filmmakers wrote their own reviews to enlighten us on exactly what they've made.
Thank You Hindi Movie review
Thank You is an upcoming Hindi romantic comedy film directed by Anees Bazmee and produced by UTV Motion Pictures. It features Akshay Kumar, Bobby Deol, Sonam Kapoor, Suniel Shetty, Irfan Khan, Celina Jaitley & Rimi Sen.Tanku You Hindi movie is slated for early 2011 April release. Some scenes in this film are being shot in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada & Bangkok.
F.A.L.T.U HINDI MOVIE
Characters:
Jackky Bhagnani: RiteshLive to laugh at others and yourself is our man's motto. Footloose and fancy free, he leads life a day at a time. After all, tomorrow never comes! He tackles issues as they arise only to get into a deeper mess that the last. However, his 'never say die' attitude just makes him bounce back.
Arshad Warsi: Google Chand
Google Chand is Mr. Fix it, who is never short of a solution for any problem under the sun.
Riteish Deshmukh: Baaji Rao
Innovative but misunderstood. Baaji struggles with life till he finds the group that accepts and appreciates him.
Pooja Gupta: Pooja
A fun loving tomboy, Pooja lives to be with her three guy friends and to enjoy her music. Her dad wants her to get married and Pooja is at pains to foil his plans.
Chandan Roy Sanyal: Vishnu
A nerd to the core. Vishnu's life revolves around his friends even though they are a classic case of opposites attract.
Angad Bedi: Nanj
The dumb cluck with a heart of gold.
Synopsis
A question to begin with. Consider life as a building where you have been stranded on the ground floor while all the lift doors leading to the floors of success have been shut on your face, what would you do? Well, our Faltus would create such a basement that the floors above look cheerless and dreary.Faltu is a story of coming of age of today's youth. They don't choose a different path but create one.
Faltu is a story about a group of friends that are considered a total waste. The cherry on the cake being that they take pride in the fact. These hard-working back-benchers are hardly seen working.
They crowd up the clubs of the town while the lecture halls remain empty. However a turn in their life leads them to such a situation where fates of many more like them comes in their hands.
PUNJABI FILM DHARTI BY JIMMY SHERGILL
Jimmy Shergill and Navniat Singh after the grand success of Mel Kara De Rabba are back again. Punjabi film titled DHARTI is the new project by Navniat which is being produced by Jimmy Shergill.
Punjabi film DHARTI is a political drama, where Jimmy plays the role of an Air Force officer.
Prem Chopra and Anupam Kher are the other big names associated with DHARTI. The film will be released in Punjabi as well as Hindi. Renowned Music Director, Jaidev Kumar has given Music to the film. While Mika Singh, Daler Mehndi, and Rabbi Shergill have lended their voices to the songs of film DHARTI. Miss Punjaban Japji Khaira is palying the lead role opposite Jimmy.
Prem Chopra and Anupam Kher are the other big names associated with DHARTI. The film will be released in Punjabi as well as Hindi. Renowned Music Director, Jaidev Kumar has given Music to the film. While Mika Singh, Daler Mehndi, and Rabbi Shergill have lended their voices to the songs of film DHARTI. Miss Punjaban Japji Khaira is palying the lead role opposite Jimmy.
DUM MAARO DAM
Synopsis
Goa. Paradise on Earth. But every Paradise has a few snakes.
Multiple lives collide brutally one day at Goa Airport... and change forever.
Prateik Babbar: Lorry
A student on the verge of following his girlfriend to a US University. But when his scholarship gets rejected, his life threatens to spiral out of control, until he meets a smooth talking hustler who promises to get it back on track. For a small price. His soul.
Abhishek Bachchan: ACP Vishnu Kamath
A self destructive cop fleeing his own past, Kamath is given the job of destroying the brutal local and international drug mafia in Goa. As he begins his ruthless, relentless campaign and takes on the murky drug world... he discovers nothing is what it seems.
Rana Daggubati: DJ Joki
A local musician and mute spectator to what is happening around him, Joki drifts aimlessly through life after an encounter with the drug mafia cost him everything he held dear. Today he discovers history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. Will he finally have the guts to take a stand?
Bipasha Basu: Zoe
An aspiring airhostess who saw her dreams turn to dust, Zoey in a way represents Goa itself. A child of the hippy generation, a mix of local and foreign culture, innocence and beauty have gradually been replaced by cynicism and abuse.
Aditya Pancholi: Lorsa Biscuta aka the Biscuit
A ruthless local businessman, the Biscuit has his finger in every Goan pie, legal or illegal. The point person between all the various Mafias operating in Goa, the Biscuit finds himself pushed to the extreme limit with Kamath's arrival. But he knows who to turn to:
A mysterious shadow
The ultimate drug kingpin. Many names, many identities but no one knows who he is....
We hurtle into the bylanes, beach shacks and raves of Goa with Lorry as his life spirals out of control, with Joki as he tries to redeem the past and with Kamath as he goes no-holds-barred after the mysterious shadow figure behind it all...
Punctuated with a soundtrack that moves from pulsating dance tracks to haunting Konkani songs, shot right in the midst of the teeming international tourist hotspots, Dum Maaro Dum takes you on a dramatic, thrilling trip filled with twists, turns, suspense... and a shocking finale!
I AM NUMBER FOUR(ENGLISH)
I Am Number Four about an alien, who hides in a small-town in Ohio and falls in love with his high school classmate, has generated buzz as the next Twilight. But this is a film so bland and formulaic that it makes the Twilight films look like Citizen Kane.
Alex Pettyfer plays the alien, John Smith, who was only one of nine to make it out of their planet, when the vicious Mogadorians attacked. Each of the nine has a specific power. But now the Mogadorians have followed them to earth and threaten to wipe out the human race.
The first three have been killed and John is number four. I couldn’t figure out what made the Mogadorians so angry but they snarl incessantly and even have a frothing, dinosaur-like beast that they shuttle around America in a closed truck.
There is no logic or narrative to speak of – which would be fine if the special effects were crackling but director D. J Caruso doesn’t even give us any spectacular battles.
This is Hollywood pulp aimed straight at the teen market. Clearly I don’t fit into that demographic. I’m going with two stars.
YEH FAASLEY(HINDI)
Yeh Faasley is the torturously long and convoluted story of a young girl unravelling her mother's mysterious death.
Arunima, played by Tena Desae, returns home after a long stint in boarding school. Her father Devinder, played by Anupam Kher, is generous and loving but slowly Arunima discovers that his version of how her mother died isn't the whole truth.
Devinder has hidden from Arunima many aspects of their troubled marriage - the two met in college and she, a Rajasthani princess fell in love with a "Jath-mazdoor," as he describes himself.
Arunima begins to investigate and finds herself torn between her love for her father and her duty to her dead mother.
There is a sliver of a story here but director Yogesh Mittal has twisted and stretched it into a tale of mind-numbing foolishness and boredom.
It feels like Mittal couldn't decide what he was making - a thriller, murder mystery or family drama - and so bunged in a bit of everything: we have the spooky hill station house where the incident happened; the scared servant who may or may not be telling the truth; another man - Pavan Malhotra posing as Rajasthani royalty - who may or may not have been in love with the mother.
None of this is very interesting to begin with and the amateurish acting and direction only makes it worse.
Fine actors like Malhotra and Seema Biswas are wasted.
Anupam Kher tries hard to portray the complexities of a man who is passionately in love with his wife and yet deeply insecure but he is also mostly reduced to screaming and curling back his lips.
And what can I say about the dialogue? At one point, Devinder says he hated his wife's passion for music because:hum mazdooron ko music se kya lena dena and at another, Kiran Kumar, playing his lawyer says: Ek ek jam baap beti ke pyar ke naam.
Kaccha Limboo (HINDI)
True to its name, Kaccha Limboo is an unripened film. Director Sagar Ballary tosses many ideas together but doesn’t let them mature. The result is an over-long film that meanders all over the place but still doesn’t manage to say anything substantial.
At the center is Shambu, a 13-year-old, played by Taher Sutterwala. Shambu inhabits that no-man’s-land between childhood and adolescence. He’s rebellious, resentful and his hormones are kicking in. He is also over-weight, which makes everything bad that’s happening to him, worse – he’s frequently bullied and called names like Elephant ka pichwada.
Shambu’s parents aren’t purposefully neglectful. They are just too caught up in their lives to realize that things are going seriously wrong. When Shambu reaches a point where he can’t cope any longer, he runs away only to realize that life outside his middle-class apartment is even more nasty, brutish and short.
Ballary earnestly recreates the textures of the early teen years: the awkwardness, the necessity of belonging, the acute boredom in class and the excitement of first crushes. Sutterwala and some of the other children, many of them first-timers, are unaffected and sincere. But the efforts are felled by the screenplay, also written by Ballary, which lurches clumsily in all directions without reaching a destination. There is no narrative momentum. The plodding plot unfolds randomly and by the time the film ends, the emotions you may have invested in Shambu, have evaporated into exhaustion.
Kaccha Limboo could have broken new ground but its insights are few and far between. See it if you must.
NO STRINGS ATTACHED (ENGLISH)
Can two attractive, intelligent, inherently nice people be sex friends? That is, can they use each other’s bodies any time, any place without falling in love?
That is the question posed by No Strings Attached, which features Natalie Portman as Emma, a brainy med-student who compares relationships to a peanut allergy. They make her sick. So she suggests that Adam, played by Ashton Kutcher, an affable television writer and her become sex buddies. Which means no breakfast the morning after, no snuggling, no sickening nicknames for each other. Just brisk business with no strings attached. Of course this arrangement isn’t going to work and before you know it, love in all its glorious messiness creeps in.
No Strings Attached was rated R in the US and started life with a title that included a four-letter word. But the final product is far less edgy and far more studio-manufactured than it should have been. The film is genial and watchable but it never takes any real risks.
So while it’s refreshing to see a woman with a healthy sexual appetite but an aversion to emotional commitment, from the minute you see Emma and Adam together you know exactly how it’s going to go. Each gets a set of friends who talk them through their various dilemmas and the film climaxes with the usual near-misses and misunderstanding that are the staple of romantic comedy.
Still No Strings Attached has enough fun and smart lines to keep you entertained. Natalie Portman is awkward and at first, seems like she is working too hard. But eventually she finds a nice rhythm and chemistry with Ashton Kutcher who is the real surprise here.
I’ve always thought of Kutcher as bland and somewhat vacuous but in No Strings Attached, he finds a real sweetness and charm.
If you’re in the mood for some easily palatable romance on Valentine’s Day, No Strings Attached will hit the spot. Check it out.
7 Khoon Maaf
7 Khoon Maaf, based on a short story by Ruskin Bond, is about a woman’s quest for love. Only this woman, Susanna played by Priyanka Chopra, unerringly manages to find and marry the worst candidates, not once but six times.
She walks down the aisle with cheery optimism and the knowledge that if it doesn’t work, there’s always the other option. Why doesn’t she just leave or opt for divorce? Because, as her faithful butler explains, that is her nature.
This is a tough story to pull off and despite the voluminous talent on display here – from director-co-writer-composer Vishal Bhardwaj to Priyanka to co-stars like Irrfan Khan and Naseeruddin Shah – the film stumbles and fumbles.
The episodic nature of the narrative makes the plot predictable. You know that each husband is going to be killed – you are just waiting to find out how and why.
Bond’s slender story works marvelously because the author leaves much to the imagination. There are hints that most husbands were fortune hunters and at least one drank too much but their faults aren’t explicitly spelt out.
Here each one is assigned a fatal flaw – so if one is a sexual sadist, another is a gold digger. But few are memorable – there is one superbly creepy scene in which Neil Nitin Mukesh, playing a one-legged Army Major, caresses Susanna with his amputated limb - but most of them don’t make an impression. They seem more like walking targets than characters.
Thankfully Susanna has more texture. She is a chameleon – vulnerable and tearful in one moment and an unfeeling viper in the next. Susanna is vain and cruel and Priyanka doesn’t try to soften her. Instead she revels in the chance to go twisted, dark and frankly ugly. But beyond a point, even she can’t prop up the sagging plot.
SANCTUM 3DShe walks down the aisle with cheery optimism and the knowledge that if it doesn’t work, there’s always the other option. Why doesn’t she just leave or opt for divorce? Because, as her faithful butler explains, that is her nature.
This is a tough story to pull off and despite the voluminous talent on display here – from director-co-writer-composer Vishal Bhardwaj to Priyanka to co-stars like Irrfan Khan and Naseeruddin Shah – the film stumbles and fumbles.
The episodic nature of the narrative makes the plot predictable. You know that each husband is going to be killed – you are just waiting to find out how and why.
Bond’s slender story works marvelously because the author leaves much to the imagination. There are hints that most husbands were fortune hunters and at least one drank too much but their faults aren’t explicitly spelt out.
Here each one is assigned a fatal flaw – so if one is a sexual sadist, another is a gold digger. But few are memorable – there is one superbly creepy scene in which Neil Nitin Mukesh, playing a one-legged Army Major, caresses Susanna with his amputated limb - but most of them don’t make an impression. They seem more like walking targets than characters.
Thankfully Susanna has more texture. She is a chameleon – vulnerable and tearful in one moment and an unfeeling viper in the next. Susanna is vain and cruel and Priyanka doesn’t try to soften her. Instead she revels in the chance to go twisted, dark and frankly ugly. But beyond a point, even she can’t prop up the sagging plot.
Sanctum is a low-IQ adventure movie, inspired by true-life events.
Think of it as the seriously dumbed-down, under-water version of 127 Hours.
Here a motley crew of cave divers are trapped in Esa’ Ala in Papua New Guinea, which is one of the largest cave systems in the world.
When a storm floods the caves, the divers are forced to dive deeper into the maze to find their way to the surface. It’s an incredible story told with the finesse of a comic book.
The characters are strictly one-note, the plot is predictable; the acting is, at best, awkward and the dialogue is laughably bad.
So characters say lines like: Life is not a dress rehearsal, you’ve got to seize the day and you understand, no matter what happens, you never give up.
Of course in a film like this, you can overlook clunky writing if the visuals are spectacular. Sanctum, which has been co-produced by James Cameron and shot using the same photography techniques as Avatar, has a few impressive sequences.
Each time the divers go through a narrow passage, director Alister Grierson effectively creates a sense of claustrophobia. In places, the caves have a haunting majesty. But mostly, the film is dark and monotonous and 3D doesn’t add much to the experience.
I suspect a documentary of the same events would have had a far greater impact because at least you wouldn’t be cheerfully waiting for annoying characters to die. See it if you must.
TANU WEDS MANU (HINDI)
Why should you watch Tanu Weds Manu? For R Madhavan who will win your heart as a sweet lovable NRI doctor Manu who has the misfortune of falling in love with a Kanpur-girl Tanu (Kangna Ranaut) who not only rejects him as a suitor but also uses him to elope with her ruffian boyfriend.
Hiding his heartbreak and disappointment behind a smile, Madhavan fits into the role of a goody goody NRI like a glove. He is hopelessly in love with Tanuja who doesn't miss a single opportunity to hurt him. Rules, they say, are meant to be broken and that's what Tanu's agenda in life is - to break all rules that a middle-class family swears by.
Well, an NRI coming home to find a suitable bride for him is very common in Indian society and director Anand Rai's comedy opens with the same. He tries to be as close to reality as possible - from the backdrop, to clothes, to character artists - all bring out the element of a middle-class setup perfectly.
With a marriage in the background providing a perfect place for Tanu's second chance meeting with Manu, the movie traces the relationship between the girl and the NRI. Surely, perfect material for sentimental romances with 'comedy ka tadka'.
But there is something missing to make it a perfect romantic comedy. First, the script is punctured, then there is no chemistry between Madhavan and Kangna and if that was not enough, the narrative doesn't flow at the desired pace - it's slower than it should be.
Though the director picked up an interesting subject, he has not succeeded in executing his story effectively on screen - there are not enough laughs in the film. Whatever funny scenes are there, credit goes to the chemistry between Madhavan and Deepak Dobriyal who plays his friend Pappi.
Kangana's dialogue delivery puts you off and she lacks the spunk and spark to play the free bird that she is in the movie. In fact, Swara Bhaskar, who plays her friend Payal, holds the fort as the Bihari girl who is marrying a sardarji (Eijaz Khan) who also happens to be Manu's best friend.
Payal is impressed with Manu and even tries to drill some sense into Tanu's head but Tanu, a rebel, doesn't want to admit her feelings for the man who is picked by her parents.
Critics won't appreciate the plot but Madhavan fans would find enough material to enjoy the film.
Music plays an important role in a wedding-based romantic comedy and the director could have got it right if he had opted for fast-paced peppy numbers.
In the performance department, full marks go to Madhavan, Deepak and Swara. The supporting cast of K.K. Raina, Rajendra Gupta and Navni Parihar don't have much to do, but whatever role they have, they carry it well. Jimmy Shergill as Kangana's ruffian boyfriend is wasted, so is Ravi Kishen as his sidekick.
If you are looking for a great romantic comedy, this is not the one, but watch it for Madhavan and his chemistry with Deepak.
