Ghajini

Starring

Aamir Khan.... Sanjay Singhania
Asin .... Kalpana
Jiah Khan .... Sunita

Director : A.R. Murugadoss

Music Album : Ghajini

If you can digest an overdose of physical violence, then Ghajini is a film you shouldn’t miss for Aamir Khan’s unforgettable performance.

It’s been years since I saw a Hindi film that had so few dialogues for the leading man. Quite unlikely for a masala movie about romance and revenge! Stoically, Aamir Khan walks and rips through the film with the charm of a Casanova and the beastliness of a vengeful man, and delivers a performance that will be remembered even though the movie itself may be forgotten after a few months.

‘Ghajini’is a film that ought to be seen for the sheer novelty of its theme. Inspired – and to some extent, lifted – from Hollywood’s ‘Memento’, it tells the story of a man who can’t remember anything beyond 15 minutes. He suffers from short term memory loss. But somehow he has found ways to remind himself of just one thing – that he has to find and kill the man whose name his murdered lover ( Asin ) whispered in his ear just moments before he too was hit on the head with an iron rod, never to fully recover his memory again. So, through tattoos and polaroids and notes he keeps reminding himself of just one aim – to find Ghajini, the killer whose face and whereabouts he neither knows, nor can remember.

As our amnesiac hero, Sanjay Singhania (Aamir), closes in on Ghajini and goes about bumping off one bad guy after another, we are given repeated flashbacks into his past life, when he fell in love with a struggling model Kalpana (Asin), an Indianized version of the French ‘Amelie’ who helps the poor and needy on the streets. It is this very quality of Kalpana that makes her the target of a gangster, who hunts her down and kills her.

Now, Sanjay, with his limited memory and eight pack abs, lives for one purpose – revenge. He is like a loose canon, a self-propelled torpedo that keeps veering off the course and leaves behind a trail of broken bones, wrung necks and pummeled jaws wherever he passes through.

And oh! I almost forgot. There’s also Sunita ( Jiah Khan ), a medical student interested in the case study of our amnesiac hero. She’s a frail collegian who hinders and helps Sanjay in his mission.

Director A.R. Murugadoss tells a long story at a brisk pace and shows no frugality in depicting violence in all its goriness. It is blood curdling stuff gruesomely glorified. Stuff that gives you the heebie-jeebies! It’s mostly hand-to-hand combat with frequent use of iron rods that serve the sole purpose as skull-crushers. Repulsive!

But if you have stomach for such revolting violence, you would enjoy sitting through ‘Ghajini’ for many reasons. First, it’s unique plot. Second, Aamir’s mind-blowing acting. Third, Asin’s confident debut in a heart-winning performance. Jiah Khan is appropriately cast in a role that doesn’t demand much from her. Pradeep Rawat, as the antagonist, is menacing.

There is a gaping hole that yawns right at the very base of Ghajini’s story. If a man can’t remember that his lover was killed or who killed her, why does he need to remind himself again and again to take revenge. Wouldn’t his vengeance wane away with his memory? Murugadoss should have established some internal link that keeps pushing the protagonist back to his mission – something like sporadic dreams or memory flashes.

Anyway, realism is something you shouldn’t expect from ‘Ghajini’. It’s a full-on masala film that is stylishly shot and has above average music by A R Rahman . It’s a film that needs to be enjoyed with mouthful of cola and fistful of popcorns even though the no-holds-barred violence keeps getting on your nerves. Despite its long duration of three-plus hours, the movie, with its quick pace, doesn’t weigh heavy, and leaves you with a mind out of time. Anterograde Amnesia, anyone?

Chandni Chowk To China

Starring

Akshay Kumar .... Siddhu Sharma
Deepika Padukone .... Sakhi
Ranvir Shorey .... Chopstick
Mithun Chakraborty .... Dada

Music Album : Chandni Chowk To China

Here’s a chop-suey with desi tadka. Karate with some dhobi patak wrestling. But this cocktail called Chandni Chowk To China turns out to be utter mess.

Akshay Kumar can no longer be the saviour of no-brainer comedies that have become a sort of excuse for many directors to hide their incompetence behind. Making a good no-brainer requires brains. It requires a script in which humour is so potent that even if the story stretches beyond the point of its credibility, the gags still flow out of the situations in the plot, however implausible they may be. That is certainly not the case with ‘Chandni Chowk To China’, which is like an over-stewed chop-suey with burnt tadka.

The movie, mind you, is not an out-and-out comedy. It see-saws between being slapstick and weepy, and also has a generous smattering of ouch-ing tiger and hideous dragon.

So in the name of entertainment you have the tomfoolery of a goofy cook Sidhu (Akshay) who’s tired of his dreary existence of chopping vegetables everyday and being kicked about in his butt by his righteous, hard-working Dada ( Mithun Chakraborty ). Leaving Chandni Chowk, Sidhu goes to China after a bunch of Chinese men convince him that he is the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese warrior, even though Sidhu is told by a feng shastra expert ( Ranvir Shorey ) that he was a machchar (mosquito) in previous life. Little does Sidhu know that he’s taken to the other side of the Great Wall to fight and kill an evil and powerful ganglord Hojo (Gordon Liu).

In the name of drama, on the sidelines, there’s a dull, tortuously boring and weepy subplot of a Chinese cop separated from his twin daughters after losing his memory while fighting Hojo many years ago. The twins grow up to be Sakhi and Meow ( Deepika Padukone ). While Sakhi is a telemarketing model who uses a variety of gizmos, Meow does Hojo’s dirty work.

Initially beaten and battered by Hojo, how Sidhu takes his revenge is what the remaining movie is about.

Nikhil Advani , who made the super turkey Salaam-e-Ishq two years back, may not get a hit movie to his filmography this time around as well. Working with a tacky script that runs in many directions without going anywhere, Nikhil makes a complete hodgepodge of this mad-cap caper despite having a crowd-puller like Akshay at the helm. By the time the movie ends you sincerely wish it were the director and the writer who were at the receiving end of Mithun’s many kicks on Akshay’s bum.

As for the charmer, Akshay, himself, his goofy act is becoming a tad too predictable by now. After digesting his antics in Welcome and Singh Is Kinng , the audiences are already overfed. And he goes about doing the same in ‘Chandni Chowk To China’. He does make you laugh at times, but the humour doesn’t have the explosive effect that you expect from Akki.

Deepika Padukone catches your eye when she fights and hops like a monkey gone nuts, but she is insufferable as the sentimental Sakhi in search of her estranged family.

Gordon Liu has an arresting screen presence but a poorly etched role to match it. Ranvir Shorey is totally wasted in an inconsequential role. The moist-eyed Mithun Da oscillates between crying and hollering in the name of acting.

With its forgettable music, lowbrow performances and shoddy direction, ‘Chandni Chowk To China’ is like a trip you never wish to have made. Promoted as a no-brainer, this naan and noodle combination can seriously wreck a few wirings in your head if you watch it more than once.

Slumdog Millionaire

Starring

Dev Patel .... Jamal Malik
Anil Kapoor .... Prem Kumar
Irrfan Khan .... Police Inspector
Freida Pinto .... Latika

Question: How convincingly and credibly can a British director make a film that’s set right in the underbelly of aamchi Mumbai – with its slums and squalor – and yet tell a life-affirming, buoyant tale with a universal appeal?

Options: (a) Not a chance in hell. (b) It’s a fluke (c) He’s a cheat. Someone ghost-directed. (d) The guy deserves an Oscar.

Saving the answer for the last, let it be said at the outset that Slumdog Millionaire is a kind of movie that is made only once in a while. It requires more than just an accomplished director to tell a story that cuts through cultural barriers while still being rooted in the grime and crime of Mumbai’s netherworld that lies in the shade of the symbols of India Shining – the skyscrapers and malls. It takes more than just a good ensemble cast to make a film like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ work. Everything has to fall in place – the script, screenplay, direction, acting, music, editing – in sync with each other to have a movie as frisky, stark, shocking and uplifting as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. It doesn’t happen often. May be it’s the stuff of destiny.

That’s also what the film’s story is about. An uneducated chaiwala ( Dev Patel ) at a call centre is on the verge of winning 20 million rupees on the Indian version of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’. How did he manage to answer all the questions correctly? Is he a cheat? Well, the show’s host ( Anil Kapoor ) and a local cop ( Irrfan Khan ) certainly think so. But may be he’s not. May be everything that happened in this slumdog’s life somehow conspired to bring him to the hot-seat of the television show where he would know almost all – if not all – the answers!

As we are given flashbacks into the life of the protagonist Jamaal (Dev Patel), we are taken into Mumbai’s underbelly where he grew as a kid with his elder brother Salim and a girl named Lathika.

Orphaned as kids, the three impoverished musketeers of this story have to survive the big bad world of Mumbai. It’s a world where goons take kids under their wing and gouge out their eyes to make them beg on the streets. It’s a world where orphaned girls end up in brothels or as some ganglord’s mistress. It’s a world where young teens take to theft and killing because there’s none but criminals to guide them. It’s a world that Jamaal grew in and out of, but his brother Salim and love Lathika could not.

Against the backdrop of this filth and squalor unfolds a beautiful love story, a story where a guy does the impossible just to find the girl he loves, and in the process wins a few millions as bonus.

Right from the opening reels, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ unspools at feverish pace as Simon Beaufoy’s superbly crafted screenplay – adapted from Vikas Swarup’s book ‘Q&A’ – takes us into the innards of a Mumbai slum. Unflinchingly, the movie mirrors some stark realities that few Indian filmmakers have dared to tell – the killing of Muslims by a rioting mob, the brothels that thrive in the by-lanes of Mumbai, the greedy and cold-blooded gangsters who maim and blind little kids, and the cops who torture the suspects in custody. Yet, against this shocking reality there’s something that jars. That’s the film’s English dialogues. Danny Boyle and Beaufoy have stuck to English, rather than Hindi dialogues for the most part of the film, despite the fact that you would hardly find an uneducated slumkid or a chaiwala in India who speaks English fluently. But why Boyle and Beaufoy did so is understandable. They were making a film for the international audience. If not for this cinematic liberty, the movie would not have cut across the cultural fault-lines as it does now.

The performances in the film are topnotch, right from the kids Ayush Khedekar (as the kid Jamaal) and Azharuddin Ismail (the kid Salim) to Dev Patel (grown up Jamaal) and Freida Pinto (Lathika). Patel, who gets maximum screentime, is quite a find. With conviction he switches from a vulnerable contestant in the hot seat to a confident guy who dodges the trap laid by the game show’s host and even puts all his money on the line on the final question, all for the sake of love.

Anil Kapoor as the deriding host, Irrfan Khan as the empathetic cop and Saurabh Shukla as the cussing constable deliver upto the mark.

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ would not have been the same without A R Rahman ’s gritty, grungy and extraordinary score that literally breathes life into the movie’s frames – be it ‘Paper Planes’ when the kid Jamaal and his brothers sell candies in train, or the raunchy ‘Ring Ring Ringa’ when the brothers (as teens) visit the red light area.

There are some brilliantly executed sequences in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ that prove Boyle’s mettle as a director. The kid Jamaal, locked in a makeshift toilet, jumps into a shit-hole just to get the autograph of his favourite filmstar. Or when the grown up brothers meet again on an under-construction building. Or the exhilarating finale when Jamaal doesn’t know the answer to the question that’s ironically the most personal to him. After all the suspense and drama, the movie leaves you in an ecstatic mood with Rahman’s ‘Jai Ho’ (a dash of Bollywood song and dance in the end) and sends you home with a bounce in your walk and smile on your face.

As for how good Boyle is in ‘Slumdog’, the answer is –

(d) The guy deserves an Oscar.

Raaz - The Mystery Continues

Starring

Kangana Ranaut ....Nandita
Emraan Hashmi ....Prithvi
Adhyayan ....Yash


Music Album : Raaz - The Mystery Continues





A painter has haunting premonitions about a girl he’s never met. A girl whose hidden insecurities come to surface when she is faced with a deadly truth. And a lover who won’t let go of the woman he loves. A mysterious story unravels among these three characters in Raaz - The Mystery Continues .

The movie, a Vishesh Films presentation,


is not a sequel to Raaz but an entirely new suspense thriller directed by Mohit Suri .


Emraan Hashmi as Prithvi

A silent brooding artist who expresses all his feelings through what he paints. He has a unique gift that goes beyond his talent as a painter. He can see future. And now he sees Nandita’s future – fearsome and deadly. Can he save her soul?

Kangana Ranaut as Nandita.

She is a young, accomplished and independent model. She has found her life in Yash. Behind her self-confident façade lies a woman vulnerable to fear and insecurities. She is about to witness a terrifying struggle for survival. What will survive – she or her fear?

Adhyayan as Yash.

Yash is a charismatic and extremely ambitious man. A documentary filmmaker, he aims at dispelling and debunking religious superstitions and paranormal beliefs. His strong commitment to rationality and logic sometimes results in him challenging and taking a stand against existing age-old traditions and myths.

And yet when Nandita, who is closest to his heart, claims to be traumatized by supernatural occurrences, will his belief still hold true?

Synopsis:

A brooding artist Prithvi (Emraan) experiences mysterious and distressing visions about Nandita (Kangana), a woman he has never met, which he paints on a canvas. Intrigued by these visions, Prithvi tracks her down and warns her that these are not merely paintings of her, but accidents waiting to happen.

At first Nandita refuses to believe him and dismisses him as an eccentric stalker. However, the striking resemblance between Prithvi’s paintings and the near-death incidents in her life is hard to ignore.

Haunted by a series of deadly and paranormal experiences, her reason crumbles in the face of fear.

Now, one of Prithvi’s paintings has revealed her as dead. The only way she can change her fate is to unravel this mystery with his help, at the risk of alienating herself from her boyfriend, Yash (Adhyayan), a rational and logical man who refuses to believe in Prithvi’s premonitions.

Will Natasha risk her love and her life to unravel this mystery? Is there no escape? Are some mysteries better left unsolved, some secrets left uncovered, and some questions left unanswered?

‘Raaz – The Mystery Continues’ is produced by Mukesh Bhatt . The film is set to hit the theatres on January 23, 2009.