===Salaam-E-Ishq ===‘Tribute To Love’====

Salman Khan .... Rahul

Priyanka Chopra .... Kkamini

John Abraham .... Ashutosh

Vidya Balan .... Tehzeeb

Akshaye Khanna .... Shiven

Ayesha Takia .... Gia

Govinda .... Raju Taxiwala

Shannon Esrechowitz .... Stephanie

Anil Kapoor .... Vinay Malhotra

Juhi Chawla .... Seema Malhotra

Sohail Khan .... Rustom Dastoor

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It is hard to cram six different love stories in a single movie. Nikhil Advani does it, but with relative success.
‘Salaam-e-Ishq’ works only in patches. The film is technically topnotch and its plot keeps flitting from one storyline to another in a free-flowing way. And Advani (the director) blends drama with humour and romance to try to come up with a wholesome entertainer. While humour in the film works, drama doesn’t. The second half desperately tries to bring a tear to your eye, but in vain.
This 3-hour-45 minute ‘Tribute To Love’ starts off quite grippingly. One after the other, the twelve characters are introduced. And the characters are colourful. There is a young married couple deeply in love with each other. There is a taxi driver who waits everyday for his dreamgirl, an angrezi mem, at the airport. There are two lovers with broken engagement. There is an item girl who would do anything to get a role into a Karan Johar film. There is a middle-aged man with unfulfilled desires. And there is a newly wed couple unable to consummate their marriage.
In this huge ensemble, ‘Salaam-e-Ishq’ gets tangled in the second half. Of the six love stories only three manage to make an impact. The others more-or-less remain bland.
Here is a brief look at the six different tracks:
Ashutosh and Tehzeeb (John Abraham and Vidya Balan): His father was adamantly against him marrying a Muslim girl. But Ashutosh married Tehzeeb because he loved her, and still does. Things take a grave turn when Tehzeeb is badly injured in a train accident and loses her memory.
Shiven and Gia (Akshaye Khanna and Ayesha Takia): He is always late when it comes to meeting Gia. An impulsive Shiven gets engaged to his girlfriend, only to have second thoughts about marriage. He doesn’t want to get tied down. And when he somehow manages to break off the engagement, he has second thoughts again. Now he realizes what he has lost.
Raju Taxiwala and Stephenie (Govinda and Shannon Esrechowitz): Raju, a taxi driver, passes his days with the hope that one day his dream girl would walk out of the airport door and straight into his heart. That day does come when Stephanie arrives from New York. But she comes to search for her boyfriend who is about to marry “an Indian girl”.
Kkamini and Rahul (Priyanka Chopra and Salman Khan): Kkamini is an item girl eager to change her image to get a role in a Karan Johar movie. She wants to be known as a “tragedy queen”. So she hatches up a fictitious story about an imaginary boyfriend named Rahul. But to her surprise, Rahul (in flesh and blood) walks into her lifebapiad and claims to be her boyfriend.
Vinay and Seema (Anil Kapoor and Juhi Chawla): Fifteen years after his marriage to Seema, Vinay finds his married life too monotonous and gets attracted to a beautiful, sensuous young woman. But his extra-marital fling is soon exposed to his loving wife.
Ramdayal and Phoolvati (Sohail Khan and Isha Koppikar): Ramdayal, a farmer from Haryana, is so eager to spend suhaag raat with his newly wed bride that he always ends up doing something wrong. One comic blunder follows another and their marriage remains unconsummated.
Out of these six tracks, the stories featuring Akshaye Khanna and Govinda are the most entertaining. While Akshaye is simply superb in playing an eccentric, commitment phobic lover, Govinda brings the house down with his trademark humour. Sohail Khan, too, is very funny. But his track with Isha Koppikar is relegated to the background for most part of the film.
The Salman-Priyanka track is bland and boring. It is a story without any head or toe. And to make things worse, both Salman and Priyanka have acted poorly. Salman’s performance is utterly superficial. Priyanka’s is mechanical.
The Anil Kapoor-Juhi Chawla track works solely because of performances. On the other hand, the track featuring John and Vidya lacks any depth. It merely ends up as the story of a man trying to revive the lost memory of his wife. Vidya is natural in her performance while John leaves much to be desired.
South African actress Stephanie is brilliant. She brings out a whole gamut of emotions in her character. The same goes for Ayesha Takia.
‘Salaam-e-Ishq’ could have been a much better film had it not got heavy and tiresome in the second half. Despite too many tear-jerking moments, there are hardly one or two scenes that genuinely stir your emotions. All the drama simply fails to make any impact.
Of the six stories, four meet together at a big fat Indian wedding in the end. Thankfully, there is some humour in the climax to send the audiences back home with a smile on their faces.
Watch it for Akshaye and Govinda.

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Rakht !!!

Bipasha Basu .... Drishti
Sanjay Dutt .... Rahul
Dino Morea .... Sunny
Neha Dhupia .... Rhea
Sunil Shetty .... Mohit
Amrita Arora .... Natasha

Director : Mahesh Manjrekar



A suspence thriller with supernatural tones, pillared with a good range of stars from Sanjay Dutt, Sunil Shetty, Bipasha Basu, Amrita Arora, Neha Dhupia, Dino Morea to camoes by Abhishek Bachchan and Yana Gupta, Rakht appears to have all the necesarry ingredients of a gripping Bollywood flick.

The strong point of the movie is its realistic presentation by director Mahesh Manjrekar and its colorful cast that keeps adding momentum to a farely decent story with their convincing portrayal of their characters.

Bipasha Basu plays a tarot card reader Drishti, who has an incredible abilty to predict future with her cards and forsee certain incidents much before they actually happen. She is a widow with an 8-year-old boy.

Among Drishti's clients is Rhea (Neha Dhupia), who is an abused wife seeking some help to find solution to her husband Sunny's (Dino Morea) violent behaviour. Drishti advises Rhea to leave her husband. Her advice only angers Rhea's husband and he threatens Drishti with dire consequences if she did not stop counselling his wife.

Mohit [Suniel Shetty] is a car mechanic, who is emotionally inclined towards Drishti. He is a slightly eccentric man because of his troubled childhood.

Rahul (an unsuitable name for Sanjay Dutt's character) is the principal of a school and is engaged to a beautiful woman named Natasha (Amrita Arora). Natasha is a fast girl with a sensuous demeanour. She is committed to Rahul. But then, she is also spotted in the embrace of a young man named Abhigyan (Himanshu Malik) at a party.

One night after a late party, Natasha goes missing. No one has any clue to where she is or what happened to her. Rahul seeks Drishti's help to find her.

As the threads of many stories come together before Drishti, and as more blood is spilled, the face of the killer begins to come together gradually before her till the finale when the killer stands exposed.

Rakht's strength lies in its progressive story that keeps engaging a viewer more and more as it moves towards a climax which, sorry to say, is a bit of a letdown. Besides this, Mahesh Manjrekar has made an overuse of background sounds and music, which, although skillfully composed by Sandeep Chowta, domiates the visuals at times rather than supporting it.

Convincing performances by Dino Morea and Bipasha Basu stand out among the fairly average acting by others. Sunil Shetty puts energy into some scenes with his presence, while Sanjay Dutt looks subdued.

On the whole, Rakht is a watchable flick with its shares of ups and downs. The movie's 'slow-than-usual' pace may not go well with certain viewers. Others will be impressed by the authencity with which Manjreakar creates an eerie and spooky ambience on the screen.

Good

Parineeta - The saga of love !!!

The sepia tone of the visuals lends nostalgia. Brilliant display of acting skills by newcomer Vidya Balan and Saif Ali Khan captures the emotional complexities and nuances of the two central characters of Parineeta, which is director Pradeep Sarkar’s celluloid adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s story.
Having a gripping literary story at a movie’s base only puts more onus upon the director and the actors to justify a well-presented adaptation from book to the big screen. And director Pradeep Sarkar (his maiden attempt) and the actors deserve an acknowledgement for making a film that remains with you even when it is over.
The movie, set in the Bengal of 1960s, authentically captures the ambience and the vibrancy of those times.
Parineeta is primarily a simple story of human emotions. But it is not an ordinary story. The characters in the story are not simply black and white, good or evil, but have many gray shades that come about with the change of situations.
Central to the story is the character Lolita (Vidya), an orphan who grew up in her uncle’s house. A woman of natural beauty, she is at times vulnerable, at times fiery, at times giving, at times unyielding, at times affectionate and at times vain.
In her neighborhood lives Shekhar (Saif), her childhood friend. The love between the two is unspoken and often expressed in metaphors.
But Shekhar’s scheming father has plans to usurp the property of Lolita’s uncle. And when his plans almost seem succeeding, comes in Girish (Sanjay Dutt), a London-based businessman who bails Lolita’s uncle out of financial crisis.
Compared to the impulsive and erratic Shekhar, Girish is a self-assured man of pragmatism and calm composure. As he begins to make a place in Lolita’s heart, the jealous side of Shekhar comes to the fore. His jealousy and suspicions often find an aggressive expression. The result is a rift between the lovers.
Shekhar vows to renounce the thoughts of Lolita, abandons his music and decides to marry Gayatri (Dia Mirza), the daughter of his father’s business partner. Lolita, too, accepts a different destiny for herself and settles down.
But the emotions that have been stifled keep simmering until they boil out in the climax of this story.
Parineeta would not have been the same without Vidya Balan. The gorgeous debutante has a remarkable range of facial expressions and there is not a single scene in the movie when you can catch her acting. She is natural. She brings out the nuances and contradictions of her character well enough.
Saif Ali Khan deserves no less praise for his sensitive, underplayed performance. The character Shekhar that he plays is a very complex man – he is passionate, possessive, jealous, pampered, egoistic, father-dominated, musically inclined and more. And Saif captures it all with finesse.
Sanjay Dutt exudes warmth and maturity befitting his character Girish. Dia Mirza and Raima Sen play their roles with conviction.
Director Pradeep Sarkar justifies the timeless story by the eminent Bengali writer. Sarkar takes selective liberties – for instance, he sets his story in Kolkata of 1960s as against the city of the early 20th century in Chatterjee’s book – but overall, he brings out the essence of the story.

Worth a watch !!!