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Reviews
Deewangee (2002)
better than i expected but no masterpiece
note: spoilers galore....
let me, as i often do when writing reviews, be brutally honest.....i went in to watch deewangee with no expectations....none, zippo, zilch, nada.....the sole reason i decided to waste 3 hrs. of my time on the film was coz of the actors......two of hindi cinema's most under-rated leading men who on any given day can act the pants off most of the so-called superstars and heartthrobs.....so imagine my complete and utter shock when i found out that deewangee was actually worth watching for reasons other than it's lead actors......i'm still picking my jaw off the floor as i write.......
the story of deewangee (and i'm being generous with the terminology) is a convoluted mix of primal fear (richard gere and the very yummy ed norton), darr (srkkkkkiran) and every other lop-sided love triangle you can think of with real-life references to the late music czar gulshan kumar who before he was brutally killed was the baby-faced genius who turned t-series into a big player in the music industry....
hotshot lawyer raj goyal stakes his name on the line when he successfully defends a young music teacher for a charge of murder...only to find that his naive client isn't what he thought he was.......and of course coz this is a hindi movie.....there's a pretty young lady involved......
but what deewangee lacks in originality it makes for in style and surprisingly even substance.....the director anees bazmee....is no genius but he does know that the key to a pulling off a film like this is to keep it moving...and try to surprise your audience while you're at it.......which is something he does manage to do consistently......i was also surprised at the look of the film.....it was not ground-breaking or even different....but it was smooth and polished and managed to walk the blurry line between tackiness (see humraaz sets for tackiness galore) and lavish displays of "elegance" (k3g)........not an easy thing to do in bollywood.......
bazmee also peoples his script with some tremendous actors who with their mere presence add a weight and a credibility that was missing from the similarly themed humraaz......seema biswas, farida jalal, suhasini mulay, suresh oberoi and to a lesser extent tanaz currim and tiku talsania....all belong to that rare category of bollywood supporting actors who can actually......dare i say it......act......and none of them disappoint in the film.....each takes their brief roles and makes them more meaningful and multi-dimensional than the script ever intended for them to be.....on a side note.....am i the only one who thought that seema biswas given half a chance can be one heck of a pretty lady?
but deewangee really gets it's gold star rating for it's lead performers and their performances......
urmila matondkar will never be mistaken for a shabana azmi or even a tabu......but she can do what bollywood has increasingly reduced it's female leads to in the 90s.....look really pretty, dance really well, generate chemistry with a telephone pole if she has to and occasionally flail her arms and play damsel in distress while waiting for hunky hero to save her.......all of which she does satisfactorily.......
akshaye khanna seems to be finally living upto all the promise he showed in border......the actor who took a self-imposed hiatus for almost three years coz of the sheer stupidity of the scripts being offered to him.......has now with deewangee, in the last year and a half three fairly intelligent films (one - dch - was downright brilliant) to his credit in all of which he has turned in an excellent even award-worthy performance.......he's an ideal pick for a multi-hero film like this coz he is one of the few actors in bollywood who is a giving actor.....by which i mean he has enough acting chops to both share the screen with another powerful actor or command the screen on his own.....khanna has the more conventional knight in shining armour role in the film.....but he gives it his all and is equally convincing while being empathetic to a naive client, testing his psychopathic foe's limits and romancing urmila in the alps......on another side note - i have half a mind to personally go and burn down those bloody mountains - the way indian filmmakers have embraced switzerland - it's like they all have dual citizenship or something - either that or they all have yash chopra alter egos...which is a very scary thought
this is my third review in succession of a film with ajay devgan as it's lead .....and i'm fast running out of words that aptly describe the level of his skill and subtlety as an actor......but he is shaping up to be one of those actors who are a genuine pleasure to watch regardless of the film they are in or the role they are portraying.....devgan gets the more showy role and as is his wont - embraces the role with a vengeance....he's excellent as the shrewd now i have a split personality-now i don't tarang.......his transformation from one personality to the other is genuinely chilling and yet he manages to be likable enough so much so that in his final scenes......i actually felt sorry for the brute......it's nowhere near the virtuosity of company or tlobs.......but it's miles ahead of the normal nonsense we get served up as acting on a regular basis.......
on every other level deewangee inhabits the kind of mediocrity i initially expected from the film......it's songs, choreography, dialogue, cinematograhpy even it's direction are all just about okay.....not bad but not great either.....but deewangee never aimed to be a masterpiece.....it was meant to be a commercial who-dunnit......the kind that bollywood can and does churn out on a regular basis but not the kind that will rewrite cinematic history......it does achieve it's modest goal and in devgan and khanna.......actually comes close to being something even better.......but not quite........
final rating - 5/10 - a smart reworking of a been-there done that plot with some fine acting.....that's about it
Road (2002)
doesn't quite live up to expectations
it's been over two weeks since i saw road and i'm still not quite sure what to make of it....or in fact how to review it....so here goes nothing....
the plot isn't much to speak off....boy likes girl, girl likes boy, girl's father hates boy, so girl and boy run away to get married but out of the goodness of their heart stop to give lift to stranger who turns out to be psycho....chills, thrills and spills follow....with the occasional naach-gaana thrown in for good measure.....
writer rajnish thakur's idea is novel however his actual script has one too many holes.... eg. the ease with which manoj bajpai's character makes a sudden re-appearance after a fairly violent fight...or how the friendly truck driver who helps vivek oberoi's arvind vanishes and then reappears a couple of reels later....one or two gaffes are fine....but as the movie nears the end they begin to pile up to such an alarming extent that they take away from the movie....
having said that...for the second time in as many weeks....it's the actors who make the movie work.....like in shakti where the actors rose above a sub-standard movie...in road too, manoj bajpai, vivek oberoi and antara mali, especially the first two, raise the grade of the movie on the strength of their performances.....
after vivek oberoi's unusual but effective debut in company...it was common knowledge that he could act....his role in road helps us figure out if he can do all the other things expected of a conventional hindi film hero....can dance with style....check....can fight with style...check...can romance with style....check....can do everything done by every other hindi film hero since cinema's inception and can still leave his own personal stamp on the screen....check....mr. oberoi...welcome to super-stardom....i look forward to seeing you on my screen more often.....
much has been made of antara mali's "exposure"...especially in the song makhmali yeh badan...i didn't have too much of an issue with it esp. since the song refers very specifically to her badan...however if she does want to be taken seriously as an actress....she needs to stop taking fashion advice from kareena kapoor, sex symbol tips from urmila matdonkar and instead go have tea or lunch or anything with madhuri dixit or tabu or kajol even preity zinta or karishma kapoor and take copious notes on how to effectively combine screen presence, acting skill and sensuality.....
unsurprisingly the acting honours go to the talented manoj bajpai....this is the manoj bajpai i know and love....the one who effortlessly portrays the many shades of psychosis....he was psychotic but odd in kaun....psychotic but mean in aks and here he is psychotic but vulnerable.....his babu takes the simplest tasks like peering at lakshmi's belly piercing and turns it into an insight into an obviously sick mind....bajpai is by turns weird, freaky, nasty, child-like and always wonderful...i'm so glad he ditched the jodhpurs and went back to some real acting......
road is also a superior-looking movie....it's stylish and cool in a very mtv-like way.....the cinematography by sudeep chatterjee is excellent....helping the pace of the movie, capturing it's "something is not quite right here" ambience and effective in taking an inanimate object - the road and turning it into a character in it's own right.....the background score is also good though it does stoop to stealing from the score of "speed" once in a while......
the music on the other hand leaves much to be desired.....other than makhmali yeh badan....i could barely make out the difference between the other songs....in an effort to come up with a funky soundtrack....sandeep chowta goes over the top and comes up with something that sounds suspiciously like it was composed entirely in his kitchen with arbit banging on different pots and pans.....
also ineffective is the choreography.....i have had just about enough of seeing "choreographer" ganesh acharya make impromptu guest appearances on my screen (shakti and road in recent memory)....i watch bollywood films to see the stars shake their booty among other things....mr. acharya should leave the dancing to the people paid to do it and concentrate on the actual choreography.......antara mali looked like she was having an epileptic fit while doing aerobics on a moving conveyor belt....the last time i checked that was not a known dance style.....
rajat mukherjee's second film shows heavy rgv influences....the off-beat storyline, the unusual music, the stylised look with the usual list of rgv favorites as it's cast...but mukherjee is obviously a director of some talent.....it is difficult to execute something like road within the confines of bollywood formula....and mukherjee does a decent job...but like a large number of newer directors seems to have absolutely no sense of what to do with the songs...they all seem to be there coz it's a bollywood film and what's a bollywood film without songs.....
the best bollywood directors not only understand plot and pacing but also know how to use songs to either push the story forward or underline plot points....in road the songs do neither....they are almost all picturised as some sort of dream sequence, are badly placed and slow down the proceedings...like the first two songs come too close together....as a viewer i had barely gotten over the headache i had after the first song when i heard more ominous banging and screeching....if only mukherjee had also imbibed rgv's gumption of leaving out songs if they do not fit within the scheme of the film.....it would have been a less painful film to watch
a special mention has to be made of the bollywood gods who obviously took some time after the climax sequence of mujhse dosti karoge to give the over-used cupid fairy a break and send the fairy of new ideas and interesting scripts to visit the dreams of bollywood script writers and directors....though the quality of the films differ....they are at least all trying to be different.....
that being said....a special note to all of bollywood copycat directors (you know who you are!!!!!!) who after watching road have begun planning "rasta", "rahi", "chauraha" and "highway".....a film like road works inspite of it's flaws coz it's been over 20 yrs. since we saw the last bollywood road film (bombay to goa) and i hope to god all of you have the good sense to know that the audience hopes it will be another 20 yrs. till we see the next one....so go back to making "tu mere dil ka tota, main tere man ki maina" or whatever other diabetes-inducing crap you were planning to spew out....that atleast i can ignore......
final rating - 6.5/10 -watch it coz you may never have seen anything like it in bollywood
Shakthi: The Power (2002)
so near yet so far
I sat down to watch Shakti with a lot of trepidation....though the reviews had been mixed.....they all seemed to agree on one thing.....the brutality and the gore was just too much and many reviewers questioned if a film like shakti which promotes itself as a film about female emancipation is in fact more detrimental to women that the normal bollywood formula film.....to my amazement i was pleasantly surprised with shakti........
loosely adapted from the sally field starrer not without my daughter......the story of shakti is simple enough (spoilers ahead)....circumstances take nri nandini to india where she is shocked at the brutality and violence of her husband's father.....after her husband is killed.......nandini finds herself in a desperate struggle to leave the country with her father-in-law hot on her trail to get her son and his heir......
from this fairly formulaic premise, shakti builds into an engrossing, compelling and yes, brutal movie......shakti takes place in a fictional feudal town in bihar....a state that has long been known for it's bloody caste wars and general lawlessness....in fact the violence depicted in shakti maybe closer to reality than many of us would like to admit.....but the question about how much violence is too much violence has to be asked....
here is my answer.....according to taran adarsh (BOO!!!!!), females and gentle ladies like myself have our delicate sensibilities offended at the reckless spilling of blood......unfortunately for taran, my sensibilities are rarely offended by gross brutality (whether this does not make me a gentle lady is debatable).......i sat through bandit queen and bawander..two recent films that put some pretty terrifying stuff on screen........but i am offended when violence is used as gimmick......when throwing a bomb or chopping someone's head off in the most primitive way is shown as a reason for the front-benchers to break into loud applause.....and this was my primary problem with shakti....not too much violence but too much gimmicky violence......what other reasonable explanation can there be for the annoyingly stupid - "look i kick ass like keanu reeves in the matrix" excuses for stunt work that krishna vamsi showcases in the film.......they are fairly poor special effects which not only slow the momentum of the film but take away from it's effectiveness.....
some of the most effective scenes of violence in shakti are not the cool stunts or the "main tera khoon pi jayunga" kind of killing.....it's the simple scenes......like when nana patekar uses his hands and feet.....to hit out at karishma kapoor outside the police station after one of her first attempts at escape.....and when karishma fights back....there's no yelling or cool moves......she uses her hands rather ineffectively, flailing against him in desperation, to pummel him finally getting a gun but using the butt of the rifle to keep the goons away....it's crude but effective......no slow motion neccesary....
but gimmicky violence, extremely useless music (all the songs are either boring or wrongly placed) and choppy editing aside......shakti scores with it's generally well-done background music (except for the cheesy western srk theme...that is so sholay), interesting cinematography ( i loved the constant panning of the desolate landsacpe and the quick swoop close-ups)and most importantly it's performances.......
nana patekar has done this kind of thing before...the i'm so loony i'm dangerous role....most memorably as anna in parinda.....but it's the kind of thing he does very effectively as he demonstrates in shakti.......
srk's short but sweet role as a petty thief and nandini's knight in holey vest kind of armour is a throwback to the kind of heroes hindi cinema used to have before they all morphed into harvard-educated, armani-wearing, sensitive 90s men (remember anthony gonsalves....even jai and veeru).......and perhaps srk is one of the few current bollywood actors who has the requisite star power and charm to pull of the role.....he does so with panache (even his hamminess seems necessary here) but for the second movie in succession struggles with his accent.....after turning devdas' posh british accent into a crude american drawl ('yeah yeah'......for crying out loud!!!).......his bihari accent wavers constantly between bambaiiya and bihari with the occasional posh english word thrown in......in a lesser actor it would be laughable.....in an actor of srk's calibre....it's unforgiveable coz it points to lazy acting or lazy directing or both.....as for sanjay kapoor.......he still reminds me too much of his older brother who is a much much better actor.....and actually played a longer version of sanjay's role...the village pacifist to better effect in virasat
but the stars of the show are the women....they represent two diametrically opposite views......deepti naval plays the submissive, long suffering mother who watches the brutality silently and even jokes about it when she laughingly tells a tailor she'll chop him into a thousand pieces if he screws up the measurements for her beloved son's new clothes.......karishma plays on screen what many are thinking as they watch.....first confusion, then horror and disgust at the brutality.....
it's been a while since deepti naval had a meaty role and she latches on to it for dear life.....as ma she moves fluidly between undying love for her son and undying loathing for her brute of a husband.....her final scene is memorable for it's scathing dialogue and deepti's bang on delivery of it....
karishma kapoor has an uncanny knack of picking roles all other reputed actresses have rejected and turning it into pure gold.....she has also for the last couple of years worked single-mindedly to erase all memories of "sarkailyo khatiya" from our heads.......once again she succeeds in both.....as nandini she delivers her most heartfelt and hard-hitting performance to date....showing love, confusion, fear, loathing and surprising will with ease.....she lives her role whether it is screeching desperately for her son or giving her father-in-law a piece of his own medicine.....
and yet shakti also disappoints.....it showcases all that is wrong with bollywood formula and why many current directors are seriously rethinking it.....in the midst of highly effective melodrama....bollywood formula demands an item number, the jhakaas entry for the hero, the 5 songs, the extended and overly melodramatic fight sequences.....shakti has it all and it's all jarringly out of place....
krishna vamsi makes a decent debut but if he had had the courage to abandon the formula completely.....it would have been a far far better movie
final rating - 7/10.....
ps indian censors continue to annoy and amaze me...they ban bandit queen....heavily censor bawander but let shakti go with a few curse words blocked out.....crap!
Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (2002)
same old same old
MUJHSE DOSTI KAROGE -
And once again after a decent gap of a couple of months we are taken back into the magical world of yash chopra movies.....the alps, the women in chiffon, the wonderful bonds of family and friendship and the same story repeated over and over again...
Mujhse Dosti Karoge tries to be different.....honestly it does. It focusses on the friendship and subsequent love triangle of three childhood pals.....Raj, Tina and Pooja. As one of them pithily puts it......pyar dosti hai....oh wait sorry that was dil to pagal hai. Moving on....so mdk has this cool triangle between the scantily clad - nisha, the chopra version of the bharatiya nari - pooja and the gap clad - rahul.....oops that was also dil to pagal hai but you get the drift. Since the plot is redundant let's talk exciting stuff like this wonderful pseudo antakshari routine between sridevi, anil kapoor and anupam kher......my bad that was lamhe. Okay song picturisations then.....shot beautifully atop snow-clad mountains ( like every yash chopra movie since 1988), around the red telephone boxes and escalators of london ( see ddlj and k3g for more details) and an exciting on stage number (see kkhh for a slight but better variation on the same). Since nothing else is particularly new.....let's talk climax which features this awesome concept of the big man on top......yes God himself dropping in to sort matters out.....and there's this cute family dog....no no that's hahk....ok well mdk climax is hahk without the dog. Well atleast kunal kohli moved on to steal ideas from another banner instead of sticking with yash raj traditions.
MDK is not a bad movie but it's a movie we've all seen over and over again in some form or the other. The fact that it liberally borrows ideas from other famous yash raj produced movies does not help since all of the other movies are close to classics with characters, songs and sequences that still resonate with movie-goers. Even the English original, The Truth about Cats and Dogs which itself is inspired from Cyrano de Bergerac was no Oscar contender....but it was a well made romantic comedy exuding warmth and goodness which is something one cannot say for MDK.
The story is nothing to write home about, neither are the songs, the direction, the cinematography or even the acting. Kareena plays a watered down version of Poo, Rani plays a longer version of the saintly but soon dead Tina and Hrithik, well he does what he's being paid pots of money to do - exude charisma, shake a shapely leg or two and twinkle at the ladies. The biggest pity is these are all actors who are capable of much more, yet they settle for poor copies of roles they themselves have played before. And that's perhaps is the final word on MDK itself. It's a poor copy of movies made before by the same production house and that's a huge pity because the banner itself is capable of so much more.
So do you watch it.......i wouldn't reccomend it.....go rent ddlj, kkhh, hahk even qsqt and mpk and see what romance is truly about.....why settle for a cheap copy when the original is just a movie rental away
Company (2002)
good but could have been better!!
ramu comes back in style after mast and jungle...returning to the streets of mumbai for a taut and incisive look at the mumbai underworld...unlike satya which focussed on one man's induction into the club of small time gangsters who rule the streets of mumbai...he chooses to take a macro-look at the running of the "company"..
loosely based on the relationship of dawoood ibrahim and chota rajan...company makes for fairly compelling viewing...filmed like a docudrama....boasting of some crazy camera angles... and a single song...company is still head and shoulders above most recent hindi movies....
the story zips past in the first half...only to fall flat in the second...and some pasrts of tthe end like the killing of the chief minister is a little contrived....as someone who lived for 18 years in mumbai....i can attest to the authenticity of rgv's depiction...
the cast is awesome..perhaps the best ensemble performance in a while....ajay devgan proves he can do cool, cunning and intense all at the same time, vivek oberoi makes an excellent and unusual debut and mohanlal, who imo is one of india's finest contemporary actors, makes it look effortless. manisha, antara malli and seema biswas are all effective...
it doesn't have satya's raw power but that's part of it's appeal....ramu is one of those filmmakers who either makes a good film or bad one.....we're lucky he was in form this time around..
ps to simon booth...abt rgv's appeal....he does have mass appeal and is a very successful director...he's also known for being an innovative director who couldn't care less abt formula...he's also known for single-handedly ressurrecting urmila matdondkar's career and inspiring a brand new school of filmmaking....the satya school of filmmaking...which focusses on stark reality....the influence of which is seen in films like chandni bar and astitva