"Dil Dhadakne Do" (Hindi Movie Review)

"Dil Dhadakne Do" is a non-tragic version of Titanic -  What happens when a dysfunctional family that never find time for each other land up in a cruise for ten days. And the problems that come from a lifetime of miscommunication and under-communication surface to the sea - until they get a life-saver, actuallly a life-boat to find happiness in a sea of unresolved puzzles. Zoya Akhtar weaves a story with too many characters and unwarranted adult scenes which make a not-so-perfect viewing in 165 minutes. Neither the audience nor the players in the movie have an escape route - because we are all at sea with a contrived tirade of pride and prejudice from a mechanical rich man's family led by Anil Kapoor. But for the stark message of the movie - Give love to your kids but also give them freedom to do what they want - and some remarkable performances by Anil Kapoor (father), Shefali Shah (mother), Priyanka Chopra (daughter) and Ranvir Singh (son), the movie crawls until a cameo performer Farhan Akhtar restores some sanity. 

Zoya's strength is her characterisation - each artist gets his or her arclight performance but her weakness in the movie is to get too many characters mess with the main storyline of the Mehra family, it dilutes the intensity of the story. By making the family pet-dog Pluto talk about the story and the stereotypes presented in it through the voice of Aamkir Khan, Zoya may have scored a self-goal because it makes the film a documentary with comments from Aamir's voice with the caustic pen of Javed Akhtar. For a long time, you feel you are watching another Raju Hiran's film where relentless commentary runs in the background with subtextual messages and chatty scenes. What redeems this monotony, occasionally, is the background score by Shankar Ehsaan Loy and associates - it is mostly chords, violin and piano. The songs are a saving grace but come few and far in between - it is either an aberration when you don't expect or a rarity when you desperately need it, spacing is bad. The Punjabi Song in the second half is the only song that stays despite another impressive album from the trio music direcors. Cinematography stands out because this is again a film that is promoting cruise tourism, sixteen years after the film "Titanic" swept the world. 

Despite a brutal portrayal of how the rich live, think and behave with one another, Zoya's characterisation shows gaps in understanding. Inconceivable that with so many friends invited on cruise, the son and daughter grow up with such emptiness and rudderlessness and without affection and understanding from parents. Neither do we find friends who can be sounding boards for each other. It is as if everybody is on their own trip of making it big and so full of themselves with never-ending vanity and disaffections. Whether such paradoxes in parenting exist in totality or is a figment of Zoya's fiction is unfathomable and surreal. Impossible that the mother loathes everything but has a stigma against divorce. Impractical for a rich kid to be forced into father's biusiness and not raise a moment of protest in so many years. Whether it resonates widely and whether it is credulous, one should ask the director and the story-writer - could there be greyness in some of the stereotypes that she typically shows as in her earlier films like ZNMD and LuckByChance. What she shows is a rich society that has taboos, doesn't talk turkey, traps their children in hopeless marriages and enslaves them in illiberal notions of misery while moving on in other aspects - that is the most incredulous aspect of the story - which is a surprise because Zoya invests well in her storylines with intelligence and plausible emotions. The fun part of the film is carried out by Ranvir Singh and Anushka Sharma in a sizzler of a romantic track that shows the chemistry between them. If only Zoya had a better editor and a story-writer with authentic sensibilities of the worlds being projected, and invested in entertainment, this film would have scored high. Now it is upto the audience to filter this low-emotion false imagery the way they want. Or, enjoy the beautiful visuals of Eurozone countries like Greece, Turkey and Spain on a cruise themselves - which is what the film anyway wants. Watchable but doesn't give you a high like "Zindagi Naa Milegi Doobaara". I would watch ZNMD or Titanic again anyday than this sober fare.

Rating: 3/5

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"PK" (Hindi Film Review)

Aamir Khan's latest film has raised enough curiosity while in the making and post-production stages. This year's most-awaited film combines Aamir Khan's starpower and universal appeal with the production values of Vinod Chopra and Raj Kumar Hirani and the stamp of quality associated UTV Motion Pictures. It delivers mostly in a 153 minute saga of an atypical story of an alien who lands on our planet without a bonafide reason but meanders his way through the deserts of Rajasthan to the din of Delhi. To a large extent, the promo preceding the release of the film gave away the plot - a nude Aamir Khan is stranded on a railway track holding a 1980-model two-in-one transistor that is diagonally held to cover his vital parts. But what does an Alien know about Earthlings? What does he know about human beings? How does he communicate with them? In which language? What binds him to stay on and move from Rajasthan to Delhi and back to Rajasthan? These are the questions that move the needle  in a dramatic way characteristic of Raj Kumar Hirani who gave India some of the memorable films of the 21st century. 

Raj Kumar Hirani's speciality is unique in Bollywood. He works with familiar starcast of lesser-known but proficient stage actors. He only collaborates with Shantanu Moitra and Swanand Kirkire as the duo who compose music and lyrics. His producer is Vinod Chopra who believes his stories have an evocative emotional appeal. His best-man for the job of writing, editing and dialogues is Abhijeet Joshi except whenever an extra dimension of a blockbuster novel is borrowed. He picks his lines from one kernel of an idea and then expands that to build layer after layer of experiential wisdom and learning on the theme to come up with a winning script. His films touch the Hindi heartland but resonate across the spirit of India everywhere. He doesn't rely on too much jazz, special effects or extravagant settings to work his magic on celluloid. He choses topics that test your integrity levels at the most basic levels and then weaves a credible human drama spruced up with enduring values of compassion, affection, honesty and faith. His films take you on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and end up usually on a high note - of optimism, of hope and cheerfulness. His films make buzzwords out of simple words that convey the central messsage of the film - like "All's well" or "Jaadu ka chappi".  ("Wrong number" in this film). His films are extremely high on cinema literacy - meaning the messages that are intended by his team in the process of content delivery are symbolically apt and exceptionally easy to digest by both the intellectuals and the unevolved. His films combine responsible film-making with entertaining comedy - a combination that makes him a nonpareil. No wonder, Aamir Khan chose him twice in his career. If you observe Aamir Khan's filmography so far, he hardly repeated his directors. Early on, he worked with director and uncle, Mansoor Khan in two films - QSQT and JJWS. Later, between 1990 and 1999, he worked with director Inder Kumar in "Dil" and "Mann". Afterwards, in spite of working with some exceptional talents like Asutosh Gowarikar , he never repeated directors until Hirani directed him in "3 Idiots" and now "PK". That speaks of Aamir Khan's faith in the scripting and execution capabilities of Hirani.

The story of the Alien stranded with a transistor needs to be told. Someone plucks a filament of thread from Aamir Khan's neck. That thread has a pendant  embedded with a  signal transmmitter that re-connects him to the starship which helped him descend to earth. So he cannot go back to his world unless the transmitter is found. This takes him to unusual places and people including Sanjay Dutt who plays a delectable character that protects PK to learn and grow into the worldly ways of Earth. Aamir is called PK because everyone thinks he is drunk and doesn't know what he is talking. But Aamir is clever, logical and intuitively smart - he can pick the lingos of people just by holding their hands and lo! he can divine their past and current intentions. PK's quirky nature kills the curiosity of most people except Anushka Sharma who is a TV anchor in search of breaking news stories. She works for a TRP-hungry Bomman Irani who reluctantly meets PK and piqued by his unfamiliar refrain and laser-sharp intellect. Anushka eventually wins the confidence and love of PK but the real twist in the film comes here where at least one of the two men in Anushka's life who had a great spell on her hold the key to his "return passport" - one of them is her lover Sushant Singh Rathore; the other is a Godman Futurist Sourabh Shukla. The conflict between PK and Sourabh Shukla is the central point of the film as director weaves a fantastic deconstruction of what makes people flock to faith and faith-healers and how religion has come to occupy a lion's share of our minds and dictates our choices. Roughly reminding of "Oh My God", "PK" takes a tangential tour of all the major faiths and puts threadbare questions that we don't seem to be asking while taking everything as gospel - why is white color used by Hindu widows and new Christian brides? Why do Hindus and Muslims take out their shoes entering the holy places of worship whereas we enter Churches wearing them? Why is black inauspicious for Hindus but good for Muslims? What if forecasts come true only because of coincidences that are not apparent to us at the time they occur? What about the superstitions that abound in every religion? Why are we not seeking logical explanations in the name of blasphemy? 

To be fair, the film raises valid questions last revisited in "OMG" about the overarching role that religion has come to occupy in our lives. There are a number of bad examples that improve the veracity of the claims of the agnostics and the intellectuals. But there are some omissions of what blind faith can sometimes do in improving the lives of people. But for that, the movie gives you a candid camera view that will influence us to revisit some of the responsibilities that we have abrogated ourselves from taking while handing over the baton to Gods and Godmen. For all that, "PK" deserves a rich rating which could have otherwise been a perfect five. Performance-wise Aamir Khan gives a five-star performance with an incessant glare that must have hurt his pupil in the shooting. He has proved again why he is India's finest actor who can make you think and laugh and cry with his histrionics, with lines or without lines. While this movie is an entertaining take on some of the themes touched upon in the "Satyamev Jayate", it has the potential to generate fresh controversy in the treatment of scenes - like entering a church with cocunuts and incense sticks but nothing sacrilegous inside a temple or a mosque. But respect for Aamir Khan goes up as he showed the courage to tackle sensitive topics through visuals like polygamy amongst muslims or the proliferating soothsayers who thrive on the fear of devotees. Anushka Sharma fits easily into a role cut out for her personality and she lives upto her reputation for "kissing" - the only thing you never expected in Raj Kumar Hirani's films. The romance between SS Rathore and Anushka is cute. Music by Shantanu Moitra befittingly elevates the moods of the film and never tries to dominate the scene itself - how many music directors in India can do that? Sourabh Shukla has given a masterly performance as a cold-blooded Godman. Don't remember if this was his best performance till date after "Satya".  Entertainment-wise first half rocks with hilarity oozing out of every scene as an alien comes to terms with life and living on earth. Second half dullens after a prolonged debate about religion takes over the script with half-hearted attempts. But the climax finishes off the movie and takes it to new high in true Hirani style of talking turkey and clearing the air on matters of life and death. 

Notwithstanding the vulnerabilities of the script and the occasional slippages, "PK" gives a paisa-vasool feeling and leaves you with searching questions that linger on. 

It is mostly suitable for family viewing despite some double-entendre dialogues in Bhojpuri on sex and memory. I rate the film 3.5/5 for the movie, warts and all.

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"Aaha Kalyanam" Telugu Film Review

"Aaha Kalyanam" is the second film of Nani to release in a fortnight. After the debacle of "Paisa", expectations were high for this film because it is coming from the second-most powerful production house in the country - Yash Raj Films  - with interests in home videos, music, domestic and overseas distribution rights etc. Yash Raj Films has produced this film as a bilingual in Telugu and Tamil with the same starcast  - Nani and Vani Kapoor playing the lead pair played in the original "Band Baaja Baaraat" by Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma. The original was a sensation that created stars out of both the Hindi actors. This film is Yash Raj Films' first foray into Telugu and Tamil. 

Story

The story is replicated without a frame being altered: Shakti (Nani) bumps into Shruti Subramanyam (Vani Kapoor) at a wedding reception. Shruti is keen to learn the trade of wedding planner and in a tiff with market leader (Simran) starts her own firm focusing on wedding plans called "Gatti Melam". She admits Shakti as a partner on condition that they do not mix romance with finance. However, one fine night, in a frenzy of success celebrations, passions flare up with both as they end up cosying in bed. Their attitudes change afterwards and soon they split to start individual agencies. Business suffers as their complementary skill sets no longer support each other. In the grand finale, both of them team up again for a wedding  on the insistence of a client who knows them since inception. They succeed in making the wedding a success and make a hard stop at expressing their love for each other. Happy ending for a couple who look good on screen - both Vani Kapoor and Nani.

Performances

Nani as the guy who runs through a roller-coaster of emotions delivers well with his effortless acting and high-variety voice modulation. As a former World Space radio jockey, he is one of the few actors who embellishes his characterisation with exceptional dubbing that gives depth to his voice.  His performance in the climax scene is worth the wait as he mixes it up with emotions and jokes well. 

Vani Kapoor is quite a glamorous find who is at ease in her role even if she lacks the vivacity of Anushka Sharma. She looks good in all the costumes but evidently has a typical North-Indian appeal. Her face resembles strikingly with Meenakshi Seshadri and Ankita in one face. At times, she dominates Nani which is a rare thing because Nani steals the show with heroines most. Simran as the industry leader makes a good comeback in a cameo. The rest of the starcast is nondescript and unknown - YRF has picked  anonymous actors which might have made the film less dramatic.

How Good is the film?

"Aaha Kalyanam" despite a rich baggage, banner pedigree, tested story that aced up the box office in the original and a lead pair that sizzles is a big dud and having seen the original, the fault may lie entirely on the YRF banner besides the lack of chemistry between Nani and Vani Kapoor. Firstly, the original storyline had lot of sizzle in typical Punjabi language which got lost in translation by dialogue writer Sashank Vennelakanti. The dialogues are  insipid,  written with military precision not emotional value that appeals to masses. Often, the editing of the film is flaky and at crucial scenes like Simran provoking Nani and Vani or when they take up assignments or separate into different units, the narrative turns abrupt.  

Two, entire sequences of the film have Tamil flavor rather than a Telugu touch. If this film is a remake of BBB, why couldn't YRF make a remake in Telugu instead of dubbing the film from Tamil? This is a big mistake because at several places, you don't get a feeling of involvement because everybody is a Tamil except the lead pair. There were four weddings or wedding receptions shown in the film and not one of them is a Telugu wedding. Infact, one gets a feeling there are two Tamil weddings, a muslim wedding (which was interesting and well-shot) and a Malayalam wedding but not a single Telugu attire is shown. At another place, where the families are visiting the wedding planner firm, there are four couples all of them wearing traditional Tamil or Kerala dress. With two assistant directors helping him,  director A Gokul Krishna could have done better in adaptation. Simply changing the registration plates of vehicles plying on the scene is not enough dubbing, YRF should have take better care. 

Three, YRF has been distributing Hindi films in AP as Vandana Films for the past 30 years. It would have understood the pulse of the local market better because in the past films like "Chandni" and "DDLJ" and "Dil to Pagal Hai" have been dubbed into Telugu with mixed success. Proper dubbing would have ensured the film registers well with the masses and the classes. Even the name of "Gatti Melam" appears as "Getti Melam" a couple of times.

Four, except for the climax song which mixes up the mannerisms and dialogues of three superstars  - Mahesh Babu, Prabhas and Rajinikanth, the film moves with a routine straight-lift of the Hindi original giving sometimes predictability in the second half. Hindi sensibilities are quite different from those of Telugu and the production team should have reflected them. 

Five, in 143 minutes, there is no comic relief as it is the story that sucks you in, no punchlines or typical adaptations that would have enhanced the cinematic experience for the mass Telugu viewer. It may be pertinent to note that an year back, Nandini Reddy made a film starring Siddharth and Samantha "Jabardast" which liberally borrowed the basic concept of BBB and made it into a loud entertaining film, which failed to click at the box office. This film by YRF, however, does justice to the basic plot but fails to hold the attention of the viewer with a non-native touch that is insensitive to the demands of two Telugu states who eat, drink and sleep entertaining movies. 

Lastly, Nani is a talented actor who seem to have been stopped by the iron-clad rules of YRF when they make films. Because of the loyalty to the script and story by Maneesh Sharma, Nani was not given much leeway in improvising his performance to get a few good laughs. His potential got capped in this film which could undermine its reception at the BO.

What's good

Technically, the film has outstanding production values. Cinematography is brilliant and captures the mood of the weddings in colorful variety with minimal deviations - the camera is faithful to the narrative and characterisations of the  principal  characters in the film and delivers a visual feast. Music by Dharani Kumar is another high. While the original score of BBB was composed by Salim- Suleiman, Kumar composes a few hummable songs that stand out, especially "No one dancing here" which was also choreographed well by Brinda. BGM by Kumar also shows command over instrumentation and rhythm. Director A Gokul Krishna extracts decent output from all the sundry cast and presents a blockbuster story in its most faithful format, perhaps insisted by a production house which is testing waters in the South but some dilution in the plot to accomodate Telugu nativities would have worked wonders in this clean film which brings a breath of fresh air for its contemporary plot, decent fare, rich production values, family fare without an iota of lewdity, violence and intimacy (except in one crucial pre-interval scene of passion). There is no villain, no stunts, no item dance and no multiple-meaning dialogues. For the quality of the film and the message of being positive and being entrepreneurial, the film deserves atleast an average rating of 2.5 on 5. Because of the ineptness of adapting it locally to the vernacular sensibilities, the film fails to rise above that. If you have seen the original, you needn't miss this one. But for those who have not seen the original, you will be drawn to the film.

"Badmash Company" Movie Review

To say Shahid Kapoor is the next big thing is not unreal if you watch "Badmash & Co." Yash Raj Films finally allows a director P Shetty to pursue script with conviction  - financial chicanery, family values and friendship with a rags-to-riches redux allows many variations and range of emotions to portray for Shahid aided by glamour from Anushka Sharma. Locations enhance the story rather than distract and absence of violence make it breezy and largely cheerful fare. Movie is just a bit long because there's no twist in the tail but the charm is a straight-forward screenplay that entertains.