Tuesday, February 22, 2011
ClickDil Toh Baccha Hai Ji Movie Review
Seriously, it isn’t funny when you see a middle-aged Naren (Ajay Devgan), a divorcing 38-year-old bank manager coiffed and perfumed to appear younger, happily foisting himself as an oddball in a bunch of twenty-somethings just to woo the cutesy 21-year-old intern June Pinto (Shazahn Padamsee) he has a crush on.
Nor is it amusing to earhole Milind Kelkar’s (Omi Vaidya) inventive poetry. A true-blue romantic at heart and still a virgin at thirty, Milind falls for a brutally ambitious radio jockey Gungun (Shraddha Das) and spouts poetic gems like “usse dekhte hi ghantiya baji dil mein, woh bhi Dolby Digital sound mein.” Trump that, anyone!
Slightly amusing are the shenanigans of the playboyish Abhay (Emraan Hashmi), a blissfully out-of-job gym instructor who woos a millionaire and much-married former beauty queen Anushka (Tisca Chopra) for money and material comforts but ends up falling in love with her step daughter Nikki (Shruti Haasan). Juggling the mother-daughter duo like a jockey astride two mares, he goes to woo the social activist Nikki in one sequence and willy-nilly ends up on a cot, doing not what he wanted, but donating blood.
It’s these little funny crackles that make Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji worth sitting through once. The movie isn’t a laugh riot it might have been, but it has some engaging moments - like the one where Naren waits in the car outside his office to give a lift to June, but she is zipped away on the motorbike by a young dude. Or the ones where a thrifty Milind haggles with a flower-seller to put extra lilies and roses in the bouquet for his unloving premika Gungun. Or the one in which he reads the farewell letter from her.
The film is also saved by its actors. Ajay Devgan, playing the embarrassingly-in-love Naren, braying out the karaoke “Koi hota jisko apna, hum apna keh lete yaaro” and turning mealy-mouthed in front of the pretty girl he loves, is a delight to watch. Omi Vaidya as the self-sacrificing lover is creditable while Emraan Hashmi could have played the role of a philanderer even in half sleep. What particularly works is the chemistry between the trio, living together under the same roof they consider lucky for their love lives.
Among girls, Shazahn does look appealing and performs well, at least better than Shruti Haasan, who appears just before the interval and is mostly busy spouting idealistic spiels about charity and debunking the ‘India Rising’ myth. Tisca Chopra and Shradda Das come up with best performances of the fairer lot.
At the end of the day, Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji is a film about unrequited love, heartbreaks, and renewed hopes. A virgin territory for Bhandarkar, it does pack in some crass gay gags and ribald humour with dialogues about losing one’s ‘V’ (you know what). But it all patches up tolerably in the end.
Give it a shot only if you are in the mood for some ticklish fun.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
Patiala House Movie Review
Times change, people don’t. That’s precisely also the case with Gurtej Singh Kahlon (Rishi Kapoor) -- a proud Sikh in Southall, London -- who has nurtured a visceral hatred for the goras ever since a fatal racist attack on his late mentor (Prem Chopra) two decades ago. Over the years he has grown (rather degenerated) into an autocratic figure whose diktat is the final word in the household called Patiala House, bustling with daughters, ghar-jamais, cousins and a sheepish, servile beta Pargat (Akshay Kumar) who toe the line etched by their bigoted bauji.
Everyone has had to sacrifice some dream. Someone wanted to be a rapper, but is now doing kirtans; someone wanted to be a chef but is making jalebis; someone wanted to be a film-maker but is a cabbie. Most of all, Pargat has smothered his dream of being a pace bowler for England and is now content with an utterly boring and humdrum existence as the keeper of a provision store in Southall. All because of the gora-hating, venom-spewing, domineering bauji.
But then, a young girl Simran (Anushka Sharma) with a questionable reputation prods and dares Pargat to realize his dream and play for the English team against the wishes of his father.
For most of its running time, Patiala House keeps zigzagging between melodrama and light humour. One moment, Advani wants you to yank out your kerchiefs to dry the moistened eyes, the next he tries to regale you with the antics of the Punjabi brood with its bunch of wannabes. That’s the course the film charts for the first half before slipping into a somewhat silly zone in the second half, as the odds and sods of the Patiala House literally run from pillar to post to keep the truth hidden from bauji.
The ensuing drama involving its share of soul searching and the change of heart of leading characters is of the variety one might expect from a dumbed-down Karan Johar film. What still makes the movie work is the cast, most prominently Anushka Sharma. Playing a girl who is a powerhouse of energy, endlessly chattering away, Anushka is impressively confident and convincing in her performance. If not for her, Patiala House would have been a dull and dreary yawn-fest. Akshay Kumar is well restrained as a 34-year-old man resigned to his fate and merely going through the motions of his daily chores. Rishi Kapoor does a creditable job as the revolting patriarch, towering over the actors around him.
The music (Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy) lends a great deal to the movie without ever being of superlative quality. Ditto for the screenplay that’s full of filmi dialogues and a painfully predictable plot. The cricket match sequences in the last half hour do inject a lot of verve into the proceedings, but all in all Patiala House remains an invitation strictly to those who enjoy melodrama served desi style.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
7 Khoon Maaf Movie Review
The ApunKaChoice movie review of 7 Khoon Maaf. Jesus! I feel bored to death. There’s no bell tower nearby to rush to and vent my indignation nor any spouse to bump off. And though I don’t exactly feel like being punished for someone else’s sins, I am overwhelmingly disappointed to see that Vishal Bhardwaj -- the bellwether of the herd of new-age Hindi film-makers, the auteur who so convincingly brought the Bard of Avon to the badlands of UP -- has now strayed into mediocrity with so artless and heartless a film as 7 Khoon Maaf, his seventh directorial work certainly not deserving of a pardon.Based on a short story by Ruskin Bond, the movie tells the tale of a woman named Susanna (Priyanka Chopra) who’s decidedly unfortunate in love and matrimony. In her fatal quest for love, she marries six times and every one of her hubbies turns out to be a rank scumbag: be it a lame chauvinist Major (Neil Nitin Mukesh), a junkie rockstar (John Abraham), a sadomasochistic poet (Irrfan Khan), a Russian double agent (Aleksandr Dyanchenko), a Viagra popping lech (Anu Kapoor), or a money-grubbing, mushroom-loving quack (Naseeruddin Shah). Jesus knows who Susanna’s seventh casualty is for Bhardwaj leaves an open strand in the end and gives the bored viewers a teeny quiz to hair-split. That’s the only intriguing part where you snap out of the slumber but soon see the end credits roll.
Granted that a story so episodic as this could not have been told but linearly. But why, pray, is the jumble of Susanna’s matrimonial misadventures reduced to the incessant yo-yoing between her elation at finding the ‘right’ man and her subsequent dejection at the discovery that he’s actually a scumbag. So while the hubbies are kicked to the famished man-eating panthers, or are drug-overdosed, or snake-bitten, or buried alive, or shot point blank, not once does a yawning viewer see a scrap of ingenuity so expected of a Bhardwaj film.
Of course, the bleakly-lit frames and Susanna’s own darkening complexion serve as metaphors to the dark side of her personality, and Bhardwaj does throw in time-references in the tale -- from the falling of the Berlin wall to the Mumbai terror attacks -- but come on, a viewer expects more than such customary symbolism. Even the film’s music gives the impression that its composer (Bhardwaj) was battling a creative block.
A little heart can be taken from the fact that the actors don’t disappoint. Priyanka sinks her teeth into the complex character of Susanna and delivers a performance that makes you forget the film’s flaws for a while. Ditto for Neil, Anu Irrfan and Naseer. Vivaan Shah, who is Susanna’s protégé and the story’s narrator, makes a confident debut.
After hitting the peak with Blood Brothers (a short film I consider Bhardwaj’s best work to date), Vishal has been on a downslide, first marked by the utterly ordinary Kaminey and now cemented by 7 Khoon Maaf. Is the genius of the maverick careening into mediocrity? Was the dream of a bold new Hindi cinema just a chimera?
One thing is for sure. There’s much worthwhile to do with your time than to watch the gloomy tale of an unscrupulous hubby-slaying woman whom you see whirling like a dervish with no less than the Redeemer in the end.
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
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