Image source: gomolo.in

Who said Bollywood doesnt expand beyond its formula ridden territory? Who said it couldn’t match the intensity and out-of-the-box film making of Hollywood? and who said that they simply couldnt make a real comedy post the Hrishikesh Mukherjee-Amol Palekar-Utpal Dutt era?

Well, whoever said would be damned to heaven! once you subject yourself to a great experience of watching this Akshay-Kareena super dumbo, executed by a maestro named Sabir Khan with tons and tons of money spent by some absolute fools, you’ll thank the almighty for giving you the opportunity to witness HELL in real time just as he presnted you with a live Swayamvar of one Ms Sawant

Not convinced? well, i’ll just give you a little snippet from this stupidest plot of all time: A watch, accidentally left inside Akshay’s stomach by a lady doctor (happens to be our dearly Bebo), keeps playing the song ‘Om Mangalam‘ every hour like an alarm. Afraid of getting sued, she plays every trick in her book to get the watch out of his stomach, and after a series of mindless, headless or whatever less incidents she manages to take him under water, where Akshay actually proposes her (yes, under water – how romantic), and inject him to perform the surgery!!!

Tangri na khincho meri!

Dont worry, you’re up against more such mastery crafts that will blow your mind. Kambakkht emosssions — anger, frustrattion, helpnessness, irrtitations and a whole gamut of such dearies will soon convert into yawns, giddiness, khujli, staring at wrong places, and finally a self ejection from the trauma that must need a bout of Saridons to soothe the agitated khopri.

So, what are you waiting for? go grab your tickets to watch this cult classic that can give Tashan and CC2C a run for their money. and you’ll also find some thick skinned creatures such as Bollywood Hungamas who wouldnt give a fraction more than 3.5 for such master piece. shame on them. let them not spoil your journey. aaj ka shaam, Kar do Kamwaqt ke nam! [pun seriously intended]

[This Kambakhht Ishq review is cross posted via this source]

Image courtesy: gomolo.in

The prospect of watching a film after such a long time was at first looked under grave threat due to a long wait for tickets (the fact is: Vodafone Tuesday one-on-one free ticket scheme). Finally the battle was won by wifey dear who held onto it and grabbed the tickets. The Kabul express memory was still intact, and experiencing another rare docu-dramma from Bollywood was far too enticing to overcome any torrent incited delay

But all such euphoria lasts as little as Pritam’s originality is!!

John was horrible and so was his team of ‘terrorists’, who were planted like crude looking landmines that never went bust. C’mon Kabir, what happened to your senses? events just kept rolling w/o any sense,  just for the sake of it. Irrfan, who tried to play to the gallery looked more like an irritating CID officer than a seasoned FBI officer. At some point of time you get a feeling that he even owns the FBI! Katrina does, what she does best — sit pretty (even when she gets shot -. the only saving grace of NY, if any, is Neil Nitin Mukesh and a couple of tracks that lasted till we reached home.

New York seriously lacks the ‘seriousness’ it needed to deliver the statement home. poor acting, lacklusture script, and above it all the frivolous attempt to punch the Bollywood masala to make it commercially viable clearly let me down. Such movies require a raw intensity, and Dir Kabir Khan completely failed to extract that out of his cast. A classic case of where a good attempt self destructed itself.

So, i was out surfing again, and after a while, found this new kid on the block: gomolo.in. uhh aah. On a first glance, it seemed like an indian version of Imdb, but after playing a bit, the fun starts. Inspired by Imdb, the site, it seems, intend to provide a robust platform for the movie lovers to meet and share anything and everything on movies. It has started with a very comprehensive database on Hindi and Bengali movies, and if their objectives are to be believed then Gomolo.in truly could be the first total Indian movie poratal covering every language a film is made in the country. The site is just a new-born, and has a lot of scope for improvement.

Found a web viral on youtube too. it’s funny

Here is what Mid-day has to say about the site. What could seperate out gomolo with its close rivals is its  focus to develop a strong network of people around the well-researched content. the site also has a handful of quality articles, which the real movie buffs would find very useful. They should soon start reward schemes for contributions to lure people to join. it’s interesting to see how they can create a niche for themselves in the age of orcut and facebooking. will they too join the trend of self-integration with orcut/facebook? their ‘movie locator’ app could surely be the one to start with.

Another master-thriller from Sriram Raghaban, who debuted with Ek Hasina Thi, shows how Indian cinemas are slowly making a paradigm shift towards Hollywood style of film-making; neatly packaged, fast paced, and innovatively conceptualised piece of work that keeps viewers’ interest intact till the credits appear; An end-to-end, value-for-money entertainer that perfectly suits its well-conceived plot while keeping the typical Bollywood overdoses at bay. Neil Mukesh, the grandson of legendary singer Mukesh, is truly a great find, and, if well guided, he may well be the face that the industry is desperately looking for.

Johnny Gaddar, the film, is in perfect rhythm with evolving urban lifestyle and taste, but may not suit the larger framework of Indian audience. The dismal performance indicators at Box-office MUST NOT deter you from watching this film.

The Story : Set in Mumbai, the film focuses on a small section of the city’s notorious nightlife. An ensemble group of five men, the eldest is 60+, the youngest in his 20s. They have their fingers in various legal and not so legal activities.

They are friends and businessmen too. They get an offer to make a fortune in four days. All they need is to invest Rs.50 lakhs each and they will make a 100% profit. All the gang members are up for it as it will catapult them into the big league.

The youngest member of the gang, Vikram makes a devilish plan to grab the entire fortune and disappear to an unknown place with his lady love and start a new life.

Thus begins the tale of theft, betrayal, murder and vengeance. Vikram’s opening gambit is a neat double cross. But as he plunges further into his diabolical plan … he realises that the stakes in this game are high. And the only losers he can afford to leave behind are the dead ones. What starts as a simple caper goes horribly wrong when one of the gang is killed before he can make the exchange and the money he was holding disappears.

Then follows a ruthless search for the thief and killer who must be a traitor amongst them for who else could have known about the heist?

The viewer knows exactly what has happened but the characters in the film don’t. A reverse suspense thriller …. WHODUNIT??

Johnny Gaddar (title track)

Priyadarshan’s Dhol is a mix bag, which largely disappoints and fails to excite, barring a few odd laughs. The most annoying part itself is the central theme of the movie which is kept away from the story till the fag end. May be the director tried to use the trick of unraveling mystery the old way; those stone-aged movies where certain objects were introduced out of nowhere just to keep the story going.

Though not a comedy trash like Priyadarshan’s recent flicks–provides a few gags after all–Dhol is certainly skippable.

[ Latest Box office Trend: Average ]

The Story: Sharman, Rajpal, Tushar and Kunal want to make it big in life but with the least possible effort. They have been doing all sorts of jobs with hardly any money. They decide that the only way to get rich (without working too hard) is to marry a rich girl. The four cannot believe their luck when Ritu (Tanushree) shifts into their neighborhood. All four of them try various methods to get close to the girl including impressing her grandparents but somehow nothing goes right. But the boys are persistent and end up discovering a spine chilling truth.

O Yara dhol bajake

Pandit Chaturvedi, the most revered Hindu priest of Benaras, India, has always been a picture perfect symbol of Hinduism, treading along the traditional lines of religion. Despite his impeccable knowledge in Vaidic traits, never did he question his inner soul when it came to religion and its dictates. But a toddler, whom he incidentally adopts, would shake his beliefs when he realized that the godsent tiny soul he fell in love with is not a Brahmin boy as he was told by his wife so that she can adopt the boy, but a Muslim child who was abandoned by the mother. Shaken and raged, he heartlessly returns the son to his biological mother, and goes on performing every rituals to cleanse his body. mind and soul; but only to fail. Pandit’s life starts falling apart between love and his religion, where the later has had always the priority.

Amidst a communal flare and signs of brutality everywhere, Pandit Chaturvedi finally realizes that his understanding of religion was never right; the true duty of a religion is to love and be loved: unbiased. He dared the fanatics by embracing his beloved Karthikeya, the son he abandoned because of his religion.

Gist: Dharm is a very powerful movie with riveting thoughts that will shake the feigned secular beliefs. i personally feel that everyone must watch this movie, and the State Govts should have made it tax free rather than awarding movies like Chak De the same.

Imdb profile

The film’s music, composed by pandit Debajyoti Mishra, has a list of excellent renderings from the likes of Sonu Nigam and Sreya Ghoshal.

Piya bole

Bhaee bhor

Jaago

Nadiya ke sagar

dharm

Nanhia tumhi ko dekhe

To be honest, i am in total awe with this talent; below is a compilation of his performances on the Show (in a chronological order).

Kabir Khan (SRK) — failed, discarded and despised, is a former captain of the Indian hockey team, who vows to savage his lost honor by transforming the national women hockey team into a winning one. Kabir, however, faces an uphill – if not impossible – task ahead. The team he has got is at best can be described as a collection of sixteen different state players: fragmented and individualistic, who don’t even have the self-belief; forget about the skills. As if that’s not all, Kabir and his team also has to fight the acute indifference and negligence from the board officials, who refuse to provide adequate support, leveraging the populist belief that Indian women are better suited in kitchen than playing a sport. All Kabir has left with is his belief and the will to bring the Gold for India.

What could be easily described as the best performance SRK has ever produced on screen: drives the entire story so brilliantly that at one point — when Kabir motivates the girls to bring out their best on the field, one feels the nerves getting pumped up and the fists tightened as if watching an India-Pakistan thriller. The rest of the cast were equally outstanding with each one bringing their characters live and so believable. And, that’s also what makes the movie appealing — the believability, unlike other Bolly-products, which would not think twice before flying a cow in the sky

Go for it!! Who knows, it might have just etched the turning point for Indian hockey…

Chak De

After a huge controversy in India, makers of Water had to complete the shooting in Srilanka, which was nominated for Oscar (under foreign film category) as a Canadian entry and went very close to wining it. I have no clue what the controversy was all about. Did we try to hedge the dirty past, which had suppressed women for centuries – sometimes in the form of sati, the child-marriages, disgraced widowhood and many more we’re not probably aware of – because we found it like a potential threat to our emerging image? I think somewhere we are scared to even admit the past, forget discussing.

Coming back to the movie, Water provides a very powerful snippet of these cultural blotches of our society during that early twentieth century time frame, where widowed women were denied their rights to live a respectful life. What could be termed as a gross violation of humanity, they were shoved and quarantined like harmful viruses, once their husbands would die – most of them were of their grandfather’s age, counting their last few days, at the time the marriage happened; sometimes the brides would be so young that they wouldn’t even know what marriage was all about. Imagine how inhumane it would be when an young widow – a playful little girl – was sent to a filthy widow home to spend rest of her life performing pujas (self purification that is!) to make amends for the sins from her previous life that supposedly caused her husband’s death. The home, located at one of the ghats of Varanasi, was already cramped with veteran (sarcastic) oldies. The wealthy men, many of them were revered figures, would use agents like Gulabi to bring the younger women from the home to fulfill their lust. So, as you see, a such ecosystem was created by men in the name of religion for their own purpose. The story walks you through this system through its characters – chuiya, a child widow (played by Sarala Kariyawasam, a Srilankan girl), Kalyani, a beautiful young woman (Lisa Ray), Shakuntala, a middle-aged woman (Seema Biswas), and Madhumati, the oldest of the lot, who ran the ashram (Manorama) – all of whom were primarily the victims of this system. The iconic representation was so strong in the movie that you will feel your skins crawl at some point, visualizing the women in your life in such context. The movie also shows a positive transition of the society towards the end, which were mainly leveraged by the great reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and brought through the characters of Narayan (played by John Abraham), an young man from the upper-class society and an ardent follower of Gandhi, and Sadanand (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), a priest who would later provide the inputs to Shakuntala that helped her finally realize the truth; ultimately giving her the strength to liberate the child from this infested system – a metaphor that the director used brilliantly to showcase the uplift. this is where it succeeded too – for being able to radiate the positivism. At least, it worked for me.

The music is also gracious and regarded as one of the best from AR Rehman, which he himself rated as 10/10. Listen it here.

Here is a video on Deepa Mehta talking about the cinematography from the film.