After days of frenzied traveling through Udaipur , Jaipur and Pushkar I have settled down in to the daily humdrum. And gosh!! I remember how the Italians, that I was traveling with, had chided me for not seeing Lage raho munnabhai….. Yes, that’s true. A movie buff like me and yet to see Lage raho munnabhai. I guess that is the price I have to pay during days of hectic business activity.

Anyway, here, with release of DVD of Lage raho munnabhai, I get a chance to see it finally and boy!! what a movie this Rajkumar Hirani has made!!!!. After the utter disappointment of Don and Umrao Jaan it is a relief to watch a well made film that doesn’t pander to base tastes of audience and instead levitates the audience to its high moral ground.

For all the hard work put in by Sanjay Dutt , Arshad Warsi , Boman Irani and the cast, the true hero of the film remains the director Rajkumar Hirani. Underachievement and disappointment are endemic to movie sequels and when you are trying to match up to something as well made as Munnabhai MBBS you are always climbing uphill. Yet the fact that Hirani manages to better on his previous work is truly a sign of the immense talent of this man. And why not he has come here the hard way unlike the Johars and the Chopras and this experience shows.

What had amazed me about Munnabhai MBBS was the economy of dialogue and screen time. No character received a second of screen time extra than the screenplay required and surprisingly the same holds true for Lage raho Munnabhai though here the threads are much more complex. Of course some of them look contrived but then Hirani is not God and I do not expect him to act like one. Deciding how much screen time is enough for any character is an art in itself and Hirani seems well versed in it.

That said, nothing can take the credit away from the super performances by the entire cast
especially Boman Irani. He plays a Punjabi to the boot taking care of those small idiosyncrasies and avoiding any stereotype and the same goes for Dilip Prabhvalkar who plays Mahatma Gandhi. Vidya Balan looks gorgeous and even betters her performance in Parineeta. Of course, Arshad Warsi and Sunjay Dutt deliver stellar performances especially touching is the scene after Munna slaps Circuit and then tenders an apology. Simply awesome!

And if this bounty was not enough, even the songs give you a sweet memory to ruminate on. Nothing pathbreaking but simply delicious in melody and picturisation and then there is the social message. No pushing down the throat, no preaching. Just a sweet pill of morality.

The makers could have certainly made a more hilarious movie like No Entry or the likes but instead they kept the emotional part and made it a product they could be proud of.
Hats Off to these guys.
Loads of inspiration for my business…

I decided to take a break today from work after an enormous amount of work I put in yesterday as described in my earlier post. So I took the liberty today of watching Umaro Jaan. So how was it you ask? Well let me put it this way. If there was ever a test to see how big an Ash fan you are, here it is. Go and sit through Umrao Jaan. I did.

I wouldn’t have gone for this movie in first place but yesterday I was enticed into doing it when Ash tempted me to eat the ‘forbidden apple’ while watching ‘Rendezvous With Simi Garewal’ and I regret it every bit.

J. P Dutta has made the big switch from war movies to musical and I think he fails miserably (in fact his talent at handling war movies also came into question with LOC).
Umrao Jaan (Aishwarya Rai) is the story of a beautiful girl who is forcibly sold into a brothel, falls in love with a young Nawab (Abhishek Bachchan) on her first dance and as events unfold looses her love. The Nawab’s father is opposed to their love and throws him out. But one fine day the Nawab dumps his love as hastily as he picked it up and returns to his palace and then it is upto her to win him back with the help of Faisal( Sunil Shetty) who is also madly in love with her. But she is again dumped by her lover, by her family and pretty much everyone else. Phew even my dumbest friend who applied for MS didn’t get so many rejects.

The point is that the story wants you to believe that they both are madly in love with each other when the screenplay has taken no pains at all to build such emotional bond. The plots seemed loosely connected or was it the slow pace that put me to sleep. But, what is sad is the fact that J.P. Dutta has learnt nothing from LOC. The era of three and half hour films is over and today good editing ( as recently seen in Lage Raho Munnabhai) is everything. And though this is supposed to be a musical the songs are rank mediocre. Annu Malik seems to be running out of inspirations.

As for Ash, yes she dazzles you with those looks but clearly its not enough to carry the movie through. After the movie I tried to remember one Ash movie that has turned to be a Box Office super hit and surprisingly there was none. I hope she gets her priorities right soon because she can’t ride this wave of popularity without results forever. Her age is going to catch up with her one day and then she would look like someone who was famous for sometime. Wake up Ash.

As for her die hard fans, my advise is don’t go for this movie unless they promise you a dinner with Ash or something like that.

Piping hot Daal Batti and soft Missi Rotis. What a combination? Pride of every Rajasthani. And while savoring this there was another ‘hot’ combination on TV.
Hrithik Roshan and Mandira Bedi.

It was an irony playing out there, the lively, energetic Dhoom series being promoted through the dull and dead ICC Champions Trophy. I have had two anticlimaxes in this week with Don and Jaanemann. Just hoping that the West Indies stand up to the bulldozing Australia. Keeping my fingers crossed this time.

On a more positive note, saw DHOOM 2 trailers and boy!! they do have an international feel when it comes to action albeit an inspired one. Hope Sanjay Gadhvi this time does a better cover up job( I have stopped expecting original movie magic). DHOOM was too much of TORQUE. This time I am betting on a mixture of MI2 and Transporter 2 but lets see how clever Gadhvi gets.

Mandira Bedi , on the other hand must be giving out a sigh of relief. Imagine having to play romantic comedy with Charu Sharma of all people with a crowd of retired men staring on. May be its time for a new face or maybe its time for a new sport what with cricket increasingly becoming a draggard. ICC Champions Trophy could have been a
carnival display but I guess, by hosting the matches at so few venues, BCCI has scuttled the proverbial golden goose. The teams were also in such poor touch they seemed to come out and play with a hangover.

Lets hope good sense prevails. Till then back to Rajasthan Calling and crispy Khasta Puri.

Well as I said, I am in rustic Rajasthan and here I am watching films set in glazzy locations. But if anyone requires a one line advice on whether to go for DON or JAANEMANN, I would vote for JAANEMANN.

I am feeling strange saying this because I have been a Shahrukh fan all my life and thought that Salman can’t act. However here he does come up with a brilliant performance and manages to impress me.

JAANEMANN is strange film. The director Shirish Kunder (Farah Khan’s husband) is strange man indeed. He is a true all rounder and handles the hat of writer, editor, director and background music composer. Kunder uses visual images as metaphors and fuses fantasy and reality. Kunder presents songs in a very new, fresh way, which takes the story forward. He uses background music intelligently.

The film starts on an interesting note. And first hour is immensely watch able. However thereafter the story drags and by the end of the three hours you start suffocating for fresh air. The plot is wafer thin, in one line it is the story of a ex-husband who helps his shy friend woo his ex-wife to escape from paying alimony but in the process falls in love with her again.

All performances are good in whatever the thin plot demands of them. Salman as Suhan is fabulous and this time he also carries the emotional scenes through without going over the top. Askhay, as the geek Chimpu, is his usual good self and does enough justice to his supporting role. Preity Zinta is used as a doll and the baby (salman and priety’s daughter) wins most of the scenes. Anupam Kher as Salman’s dwarf sidekick does a decent job but has most of the jokes directed at him(sad!!!) and also the dwarf stuff is not handled well technically.

Music is situational and some tracks like ‘Ajnabi Sheher’, ‘Humko Maloom Hai’ are very likeable but Farah Khan’s choreography lacks anything novel and the Karan Johar style dances could be done away with considering they look so hackneyed.

Technically the film is outstanding, just like DON and a little thin plotwise again like DON. But unlike DON it’s a little more entertaining and the characters have a semblance of emotional depth.

Watch out for Shirish Kunder in the future

What a contrast, I am in Rajasthan , soaking in the rustic setting and I have this free time on hand. So caught up with DON and Jaaneman both set in suave foreign settings. Came out a bit disappointed though.

Frankly when I heard that Farhan is making a DON remake, I had thought ‘Farhan ka motive samajhna mushkil hi nahi namumkin hai’. I saw Farhan as a trendsetter and yes he has set a remake trend this time but I seriously don’t know how much this moves the industry forward because DON wasn’t a classic by any stretch of imagination. But I guess he did it to fulfill his dad’s unrequited vision of a grandiose setting for the original DON.

For the uninitiated DON is about top mafia man Don (Shahrukh Khan), who heads a drug trafficking business from Malaysia, gets seriously injured in the police chase and is replaced by a village bumpkin look-alike Vijay by police commissioner DeSilva (Boman Irani) to find out root of the gang. Unfortunately the twist in the tale arises when D Silva is killed during a raid and now the secret about Vijay’s true identity is buried with him. And Vijay lands in trouble with both the police and mafia after him.

There’s no easy answer to, how much further has Farhan Akhtar taken the Bachchan flick? Outwardly this version of DON is slicker than anything Farhan or his chic ilk have ever attempted. The film’s emphasis on technical detailing hampers the audiences’ journey towards the characters. The characters are not detailed and drawn out as seen in the original where each character had their own shades. So there is little emotional depth and lot of glazzmattaz

On the acting front only Boman Irani as D Silva and Diwakar Pundit impressed me. I didn’t quite understand whether Shahrukh starred as Don or the Don starred as Shahrukh but its enough to say that I missed Shahrukh from Swades where he underplayed himself. I wished he did that more often. Priyanka as Roma, Isha Koppikar as Anita and Kareena Kapoor as Kamini pretty much stick to their profile. Nothing to write home about. Arjun Rampal as Jasjeet is plain disappointing though

About the music, though we have a couple of good songs like Aaj ki raat and the title track but the ‘autoriksha beats’ of khaike paan … really knocks of any points earned by them.

Full marks to Mohanan, the DOP, who does a perfect job to get all the right chic tones. Watch out for him.

All in all, I am praying that Farhan doesn’t go the Karan Johar way. We have enough of over-the-top, stylized directors. What we need is real substance. Fingers crossed.