Bhopal : A Prayer For Rain

For the people in Bhopal, the abbreviation MIC stands for emotions ranging from horror to despair to rage.  With an organization called Union Carbide it would go onto a reaction that would be justifiable in any court of law.  But when it comes to a certain Warren Anderson (Martin Sheen), I can quite confidently say that they would not want him to Rest in Peace. Anderson passed away on 29^th September 2014.

Main Tera Hero

And he is back!!!! About a year after his biggest disaster in which he made a hash out of a wonderful Sai Paranjpe classic, he is back to being his old self. One that the sly old fella spoilt us with in the late 90s and early 2000s – usually with a certain Govind Ahuja in the lead.

Gang of Ghosts (Hindi 2014)

Most Satish Kaushik movies are fraught with corny lines that make your cringe.  Usually he is also in front of the camera to delivery these liners in his typical poetic manner but this time around he decides to stay behind.  Let’s have a look at some of these vignettes from Shri Kaushik’s latest release – Gang of Ghosts.

Krrish 3

Let me be honest at the very outset. I walked into Krish 3 expecting a disaster. In fact I was hoping that it would be a disaster. So much that I am beginning to believe in that dialogue from Om Shanti Om, "agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaho toh poori kayanat usse tumse milani ki koshish mein lag jaati hai" (if u sincerely wish for something then the universe conspires to ensure that you get it).

Policegiri

Lets start off with some simple questions.  Did you enjoy Singam? The Ajay Devgn remake of the Tamil Super Hit of the same name? Did you wish through the movie that if only it was Sanjay Dutt playing the role of Ajay Devgn.  If you fall into the segment that has answered yes to both questions then you will love Policegiri like very few movies in the recent past.

Rangrezz

So what is it that makes a Priyadarshan movie? Let's examine this conundrum as closely as we possible can. Firstly the movie has to be copied - sorry inspired - by a movie that has originated from the South of the Vindhyas. The other directions or geographic territories are meaningless. In this case it is a Tamil movie called Naadodigal (Nomads) or loosely translated as Rangrezz (the 2 zs don't really help).

Bhool Bhulaiyaa

It took 14 years for Priyadarshan to probably gather to courage – because that’s what it would have taken a lot of – to remake a movie that he was a Second Unit Director.  To his credit, he is the only one out of the 3 in the movie who managed to make a move into Bollywood. 

 

But needless to say, he doesn’t emulate the magic that Fazil created on screen in 1993 with the national award winning Manichitratazhu (read as Mani Chitr tayu).  A movie that coincidentally has been fodder for remakes galore – Apthamitra in Kannada, Chandramukhi in Tamil and Telugu (dubbed), Rajmohol in Bengali, and of course the topic of this write up in Hindi.

 

The only reason I can think of as to why these movies fell short was the incapability to handle the topic with the seriousness that it required.  Of course the character played by Akshay Kumar – Aditya Srivastava – does have a humourous streak in him and enjoys playing the fool.  But I guess AK did a bit too much in his attempt to tell the audience that his comic timing is still alive.

 

Siddharth Chaturvedi (Shiney Ahuja) & Avni (Vidya Balan) are a newly married couple.  Sidhharth comes from a royal family and is actually the incumbent king of the village.  He has, however just returned from the states where he got married to Avni.  He had been there for his studies.  Upon Avni’s insistence and a little bit of his own desire, he decides to stay in his ancestral palace.

 

However, the resident spirit of the home doesn’t take too kindly to their stay.  A danseuse – Madhulika – who used to perform at the palace many moons ago is in love with Shashidhar (Vineeth) – the royal poet.  The fact doesn’t go too lightly with the Maharajah who in a fit of jealousy, executes the poet. 

 

Madhulika in turn commits suicide but before that puts a curse on the palace – no Maharajah will ever reside in the palace or else I will be the cause of his death.  To date, the curse stands.  And when Siddharth moves in, some funny events start occurring  that point a finger towards his cousin Radha (Ameesha Patel). Siddharth of course doesn’t believe in ghost stories and calls for his friend Aditya Srivastav – a psychiatrist to help.

 

This movie has a Priyadarshan touch to it – loud – REALLY LOUD.  Of course, several unnecessary attempts at comedy are also in order because it comes from his table.  But, to be fair, the movie is a frame to frame copy so there is very little value addition other than the above 2 points.

 

Most of the performances are also ordinary.  Shiney Ahuja in fact looks as constipated as he can possibly get.  I guess his moment of truth passed with Hazaaron Khwaishein – like with most of the people associated with that movie.  Even Vidya Balan is a tad above average but it was early days for her.  The support cast also – ordinary. 

 

It is only the story that makes the movie really worth watching.  I have seen it on a couple of occasions without too much of an effort.  So I guess a 6 on 10 is in order.  However, I encourage you to take a look at the original (unfortunately without subtitles) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdp4xudz958 and make your mind up on which one is better.

 

Trailer on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adQ3aNpEFXg

Action Replayy

Dear Robert Zemeckis – I hope and pray to God that you never get around to watching this broad day light carnage. At this rate they will get to Forrest Gump in a bit. So it may well be worth it to put some stay orders on Vipul Amrutlal Shah lest he considers making Action Replayy 2 and then 3 and then eventually gets to being “inspired” by your best movie to date. Please consider this as a humble request to send your people to set up a representative office here in India – or at least ask Universal Pictures to do the same. It is a humble request / plea.


Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapur) and Tanya (Sudeepa Singh) are in a relationship for quite a while now. Funnily, Tanya is the person who has been asking Bunty to marry him for quite some time now. If I had someone like Tanya I would grab her with every single bone in my body – I mean seriously the chick is HOT guys!!!! She was to date known for only the small screen. 2 serials under her belt – Risshton Ki Dor & Kabhie To Nazar Milao – and thanks to Vipul Amrutlal Shah she is no longer seen only on a 29”screen . Nevertheless, for someone to reject several marriage proposals from Tanya would mean some kind of terminal illness or child abuse which has left a permanent scar on his brain and prevents him from understanding the difference between True Love and Hotness (trust me – Hotness prevails ). It would seem that Bunty has been a victim of the latter – CHILD ABUSE – those long drawn nights where his parents – Kishen (AK) and Mala (ARB) – who were never meant to be together spent hours on end fighting over the most trivial issues. These instances have gotten our poor little Bunty to a situation where he has given up on the institution of marriage completely.

But Tanya will have nothing of it. She has had it finally and wants Bunty to make his decision right away – Atta girl I say, I am first in line after Bunty. But my excitement is to be short lived as Tanya drags Bunty to meet her Grandfather (who she refers to as Grandpa in the same manner as a 6 year old would – and the bubble of Tanya has finally burst – Bunty you can have her). Now Grandpa (Randhir Kapoor) has an equally corny name – Gonsalves – Anthony Gonsalves (By now u are reaching for your own throat). He gives Bunty 24 hours to decide whether he wants to marry Tanya or not. But Bunty is more fascinated with the old scientist’s (Oops I forgot to mention that Anthony Gonsalves was a scientist) contraption or Time Machine as he refers to it. Bunty dodges the marriage question by claiming that it is his parents 35th Anniversary the next day and he is too busy to think about marriage. As luck would have it, Kishen and Mala cannot help but fight once again and things come to breaking point – DIVORCE!!!! I mean it took them 35 years to get there!!!! Some patience. Bunty swears that he will not let the D word enter the family and runs off to meet to scientist, takes his time machine and sets off to 1975 to change what he calls the one mistake in his life that he would change if he could – his parent’s marriage.

My sentiments of Action Replayy are best captured by one of my co-movie watchers who probably ruined his Diwali evening too. At the interval there was a loud, “THANK GOD”!!! that erupted from a dark recess in the movie hall. Just a word of advise though. If you have survived till the interval – believe me the toughest part is over. The 2nd half is much better but don’t get your hopes too high. Much better than the first half is what I meant. The 4 good things for me in Action Replayy were the introduction of Sudeepa Singh (purely from the perspective of hotness), the voice in the interval which said “Thank God”, The music which is really foot tapping and worth listening to and lastly the way Kishen says “Aawaaz Neeche”!!!! once he changes his avatar to a super confident one. The rest of the movie is vastly forgettable.

Direction is pretty much absent most of the time. Consistency has nothing to be written home about. Posters of Bobby (released 1973) still dot the lamp posts outside Capitol cinema in 1975. AK has lost his comic timing more than 2 years back. Ash has anyways been only furniture. The only time she has tried to act was when SLB directed her. The costume designing is a total khichdi between everything from the 60s to the first decade of the 21st century. The sets look good till you figure out quite clearly that a lot of it is Computer Graphics work very badly executed. The support cast with the exception of Kirron Kher and Om Puri is extremely insipid. This music as mentioned earlier is a saving grace but even that may have been “inspired” considering it comes from the house of Pritam. I know Nakhre is inspired from a 60s number. But the rest will eventually come to light (hopefully not). 2 on 10 is the verdict from my end. Not the worst movie of the year as predicted from my side earlier.

Khatta Meetha

The build up to this movie was as big as it turned out to be a damp squib. Akshay Kumar visiting RK Laxman and the movie touted to be oriented towards the common man couldn’t have been further from the truth. Somewhere I had expected maybe just a little bit better than what it turned out to be. Thankfully I can provide 2 excuses for having watched this movie – that I need to review it and that mum wanted to have a dekko coz this was a remake of a Malayalam movie, Vella Anakalude Naatu (Land of White Elephants in translation).


Sachin Tichkule (AK) is a something of a good for nothing black sheep in what is considered to be an otherwise very successful family. The family used to be one of the royals of Satara but is currently relegated to having only one large mansion in which Sachin stays the parents (Kulbhushan Kharbhanda & Aruna Irani), 2 brothers who are married, 1 sister and her husband and 1 young sister (Urvashi Sharma). Our hero (wonder how we can call him that) is a government licensed contractor who is heavily in debt thanks to his payments not getting cleared by the municipal corporation thanks to him taking the easy way out and cutting corners.

Not that the rest of the family is not involved in spurious methods of making monies but the junior Tichkule is typically made the scapegoat coz he has no money ever. Things do start falling apart for the other members of the family when a bridge that they built collapses and leads to the death of 65 people. Using the family driver (Tinu Anand) as a scapegoat and with the help of the local politican Sanjay Rana, the elder Tichkules manage to wriggle out of a sticky situation. However they did not consider the effect one Azad (Makarand Deshpande) would have coz he has lost his wife and kid in the accident. When he does not receive any support from the government he decides to take matters up himself and starts investigating the people involved.

Parallely, Sachin is now thrilled to hear that a new commissioner has arrived in town and hopes that his payments would be released. New commissioner or not, how he expects the government to release payments when he has a case pending against them is beyond me. Nevertheless, to add to his misery, the new commissioner turns out to be Gehna Ganpule (Trisha) who was his college love interest – an aspect that is revealed only a bit later in the movie but is extremely predictable. Now it would seem that Sachin and Gehna parted ways in less than an amicable way over an argument when Sachin slaps her in a fit of rage coz she refuses to support the college strike. Now what comes to light is that our hero used to be a staunch follower of papa dear – Gandhivadi and all. But the tragic turn of his love life and 3 years of slogging of in Mumbai has gotten him down to ground zero. The love hate relationship comes to a head when Sachin gets Gehna incorrectly trapped in a bribery case.

Priyadarshan continues with his string of really loud movies which started with either Hulchul or Hungama (I cant recollect). For some reason he believes that the audience really cannot hear and that unless he gets his actors to scream, the message may not get through. The idea of the movie of course was to try and expose a corrupt government system which drains monies at every available instance. A little too late in the day to talk about this Mr.Priyadarshan coz it has been beaten to death. Tata Tea does a better job in under 60 seconds with each one of their Jaago Re campaign ads. Also, dear Mr. Priyadarshan please try and avoid the slapstick in your Hindi versions. If you can make much better / stronger movies in Malayalam which not only provide quality entertainment but also give a very solid message then why do you assume that the hindi movie goer does not have a bent of mind for serious cinema.

The acting throughout the movie is passé. AK really really really needs to take a long hard look into himself to see whether he would like to exit cinema with some respect left or bide his time some more and exit when he has no respect left. Trisha’s debut in Bollywood turns out to be a dampner. I don’t think she has dubbed for herself but at times u may be inclined to believe that she has especially when the accent heavily moves towards the one Hema Malini has in the Kent Aar Wo Purifier ad. The support cast has the usual suspects from Mr. Ps movies. Rajpal Yadav – please get a life. Manoj Joshi – capable of much more but relegated to some sidey role as the brother in law. You can do much better than playing a role of a sadak chhap Tharki. Johnny Lever was probably the only saving grace in his 6 mins and 48.5 seconds of screen time but there were moments where u would be inclined to think that Johnny bhai was really not interested in doing this movie.

Net Net Khatta Meetha was an experience worth forgetting. Keeping aside the fact that Trisha’s earnings were as big as the screen or the fact that she was a municipal commissioner wearing silk south Indian kancheepuram sarees in Satara or that girls in satara have started showing the bra strap as fashionably as they would in Mumbai or outside the country or the fact that the Computer animated elephant really appeared computer animated – it was still a bad bad experience. I would be kind if I were to give this movie 2 on 10. Clearly Ms. Kazmi has been bought out.