Wednesday, October 15, 2008

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



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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.