Karzzz 2008 Review

Karzzz

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Anupama Chopra, Consulting Editor, Films

A cartoon in a recent New Yorker magazine showed a director pitching a movie to a studio head. The director suggests: Let's remake an old classic with worse everything.

The pitch meeting for the new Karz must have been similar. Director Satish Kaushik's Karzzz is Subhash Ghai's 1980 cult film with worse everything.

Let's begin with the hero, Himmesh Reshmmiya. In the publicity interviews for the film, Himmesh has repeatedly declared that he should not be compared to Rishi Kapoor, the original film's hero because while Rishi was a handsome star, he, Himmesh is not at all good looking. The humility is appreciated but stating the truth doesn't change it.

Himmesh, despite intensive styling and waves of hair on his head, remains, an acquired taste.

He continues to sing with his trademark nasal twang but the unkindest cut is that here he tries hard to act. The scenes in which he attempts to emote by narrowing his eyes and furiously moving his lips are pure comedy.

His new heroine, Shweta Kumar redefines vapid. So Urmila Matondkar, who plays the murderous wife Kamini, must carry the burden of acting for all three of them. She delivers admirably, pursing her lips, widening her eyes and giving us five expressions when only one would have sufficed.

This Olympics of bad acting is constantly interrupted by brain dead Himmesh songs. A sample of the lyrics: If loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right, Tandoori Nights, Tandoori Nights.

Giving the songs stiff competition are the dialogues. At one point, Himmesh playing the rock star Monty is trying to convince Kamini that he is the reincarnation of her long dead husband. He says he will give her intimate details that only a husband can know and proceeds to say: Jab tum kiss karti ho tumhari aankhen band ho jaati hain. Monty presumably knows many people who kiss with their eyes open.

The original Karz was a superbly orchestrated melodrama. Ghai created moments that still have the power to make your hair stand on end.

Watch the climax when Kamini, played by a wonderfully elegant and icy Simi Garewal, becomes unhinged and admits that she killed her husband.

The new Karzzz is a clossal joke. At six or eight reels, it would have been a wonderful unintentional comedy ? a so bad that it's good film to add to classics like Manoj Kumar's Clerk and Sheetal's Honey. But at 18 reels, Karzzz is prolonged torture. Steer clear.

Hello Review

Hello

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Anupama Chopra, Consulting Editor, Films

Chetan Bhagat is a conjurer of pulp fiction. His books are unapologetically low-brow, simplistic and contrived but they are also pacey and entertaining.

Bhagat hooks you with interesting characters and keeps you turning the pages, even as you roll your eyes and groan at the silliness of it all.

I thought it would be difficult, if not impossible, to dumb down a Chetan Bhagat book. But director Atul Agnihotri and Bhagat himself, who co-wrote the screenplay and dialogue, manage it in Hello.

The film is based on Bhagat's second bestseller One Night at the Call Center.

The book has a beautiful and mysterious woman narrating the story to the author on a train. But it's Bollywood.

So, instead we have helicopters and Salman Khan who essentially plays himself - an actor/rock star. Before he listens to the story he performs an item number, which of course includes him taking his shirt off.

The story involves six characters who work at a call centers and how their lives change one night. Each one is grappling with serious personal issues but at the end of the night, all of them have taken charge of their problems and decided to follow their bliss.

In more expert hands, this could have been a fun, popcorn movie but Agnihotri plays it at the level of a cartoon.

The characters aren't given any time to develop and there is absolutely no sense of atmosphere.

The narrative is laced with lame attempts at comedy and one very strange song, which features dancers doing a weird airborne ballet.

The dialogue occasionally shows some spark - at one point, a character describes an NRI as the perfect groom because he is both a Bondhu and ameer but mostly we have to suffer lines like: Aam taur pe gore bewkoof hote hain.

If Hello was more sophisticated, the America bashing would have been offensive but this is too low IQ to matter.

Sharman Joshi plays his part of the loser Shyam with conviction and I enjoyed watching Sohail Khan do another dumb jock type.

But they can't infuse air into this limp film. Hello is tiresome. Read Chetan's book instead.

Drona Review

Drona Review

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Anupama Chopra, Consulting Editor, Films

In Drona, director-writer Goldie Behl has attempted to create a modern mythology. He has reworked elements of Amar Chitra Katha comics, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones into an exotic fantasy about an orphan, Aditya, played by Abhishek Bachchan, who grows up not knowing who he really is.

Only beautiful blue rose petals that arrive at regular intervals mark him as special. One day, a petal leads him to an intriguingly glowing bracelet, which is then seen on his wrist by a wicked magician who has enormous powers but apparently no hair stylist. And then all hell breaks loose.

There are things to be admired in Drona. It is a labour of love and the sweat can be seen onscreen. There are several nicely done sequences. I especially enjoyed Priyanka Chopra's entry. She plays Sonia, Drona's bodyguard who kicks butt with the same finesse as she carries off unwieldy brocade coats and boots.

The special effects here aren't organic but they aren't embarrassingly cheesy either and there is some high-octane action, including one sequence in a vast desert that concludes with Drona and Sonia on top of a horse, on top of a train. But, and this is the film's fatal flaw, Drona never lifts off from passable into spectacular.

Goldie Bhel has the ambition but he doesn't have the visual audacity. So the moments of shock and awe are too few and far between. Worse, the writing is painfully inconsistent. The are too many shifts in tone and Bhel is unable to create a fully-realised alternate universe.

There is a standard-issue suffering mother angle, which becomes unwittingly comical when the mother, played by Jaya Bachchan, turns to stone and poor Drona weeps hugging her statue. Abhishek plays the part convincingly but he doesn't look it.

Even when Aditya becomes Drona, he doesn't transform physically into a man of stature. He seems out-of-shape and weighed down by his costume, which looks like a left-over from Amitabh Bachchan's Toofan days.

But the weakest link in the tale is Kay Kay Menon, playing the evil asur descendent Riz Raizada.

The need of the hour was a memorable Machiavellian psychopath. What we have instead is tiresome hamming and not enough clever lines.

Disappointingly then, Drona remains a below average film. Given the scale, scope and effort, this is clearly not enough. But on a holiday weekend, with such slim pickings at the theaters, it will have to do.

Kidnap Review

Kidnap Review

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Kidnap

Anupama Chopra, Consulting Editor, Films

The world's richest man's daughter gets kidnapped. So what does he do? Among other things, he says: "Maine apne assistant ko bola hai ki mere dushmano ki list bana le". This is only one of the many spectacularly dim-witted moments in Sanjay Ghadvi's thriller Kidnap.

My other favourite is a scene in which Sonia, played by Minissha Lamba, tells her kidnaper Kabir, played by Imran Khan, that she really needs a bath. They don't have enough water so he takes her to the beach where she proceeds to do a sensuous dance in a transparent white tunic and sings, and I'm not kidding here, a song that goes: Mausam yeh awesome bada.

Of course, despite being in captivity, Sonia has a ready wardrobe of skimpy clothes just right for these special occasions.

Shibani Bhatija's script, about a young man who seeks revenge on a rich businessman by kidnapping his daughter, probably sounded good on paper. On screen, it is undiluted comedy. Ghadvi starts smartly setting up the back-story in the title sequence itself but then we cut straight to an item song which, I assume, was supposed to establish how carefree and cool Sonia is.

More than anything, she's miscast. Minissha is supposed to be 17 years old year and if that isn't enough of a howler, her mother is played by Vidya Malvade, who looks more like her older sister. What's worse is that Malvade spends most of the screen time trying to out-do Minissha with carefully arranged glimpses of cleavage. She seems barely traumatised by her daughter's kidnapping though we are told that she is coping by visiting the Siddhi Vinayak Temple.

For reasons that are never quite clear, the parents divorced when Sonia was a child. But they are forced to re-unite when their daughter is kidnapped and instead of a ransom, the kidnapper only demands that the father,
Vikrant Raina, played by a paunchy Sanjay Dutt, perform a series of tasks. Raina is an Indian Bill Gates. He is the world's richest man with a net worth of 51.7 billion dollars but the press or police never get a whiff of his actions even when he is stealing a bag of money or helping a prisoner escape by, believe it or not, disguising himself as a fireman. What can actors do with material like this?

Dutt looks bored. Imran scowls and tries to bring conviction to his role but the silliness of this enterprise is insurmountable.

See Kidnap only if, after Jaane Tu ya Jaane Na, you need to get another Imran fix. Or if you want a good laugh!

Ramchand Pakistani Review

Ramchand Pakistani

Powered by: Chakpak.com	Ramchand Pakistani

Anupama Chopra, Consulting Editor, Films

At one point in Ramchand Pakistani, Shankar, a poor Dalit farmer from Pakistan, who is rotting in an Indian jail because he inadvertently followed his son Ramchand into India, furiously tells his son that its all his fault.

The eight-year-old boy looks shattered and slowly his eyes brim with tears. It's moments like these that stay with you even when debutant director Mehreen Jabbar's film becomes a ponderous test of patience. Working from a true-life incident, Mehreen tells the story of a loving family that falls apart when the defiant boy has an innocuous quarrel with his mother and storms off. He unknowingly crosses the India-Pakistan border. His father follows him. Both are arrested and spend the next five years in jail.

Ramchand Pakistani underlines the human cost of geopolitics. When an Indian policeman asks Shankar if he has read the news about their respective armies amassing at the border, the farmer says no. His concerns are more basic: his son who refuses to go to school, his wife who loves surma and the 50,000 rupees loan he has taken.

And yet, the long and bloody history of the two countries, keep Shankar and Ramchand in prison. Of course the irony is that being a low-cast Hindu, Shankar is at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy in Pakistan. This story is rich in emotion and drama. Jabbar's heart is in the right place and her intentions are noble.

But in cinema, that is never enough. The telling of this tale is crushingly slow and often clumsy. Mehreen, working from a screenplay by her father and producer Javed Jabbar, sets up the tragedy skillfully but then, for far too long, the story stays still.

The writing is thin and the characters in the Indian jail aren't engaging enough to sustain the scenes. Soon enough, the parallel track of Ramchand's long-suffering mother, played by Nandita Das, also starts to sputter.
Thankfully, the bumpy narrative tracks converge into a predictable but immensely moving climax. The actors, Fazal Hussain playing Ramchand and Rashid Farooqui, playing his father, are very good. They give the film an emotional heft.

See Ramchand Pakistani for their performances. But be prepared to be patient.