Archive for February, 2012
Movie Review: Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya (2012)
3 Stars (out of 4)
Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya (“I’m in Love with You”) is a funny romantic comedy with quality performances. It took careful planning by director Mandeep Kumar and writer Abhijeet Sandhu to make a movie that seems so effortlessly enjoyable.
Take the efficient and effective opening scene, a song featuring the male lead, Viren (Ritesh Deshmukh). As “Jeene De” plays, Viren smiles and sings along as he goes through his day: rising early to drive his auto-rickshaw, playing with the kids he picks up from school, gratefully stashing his days’ earnings underneath the rickshaw’s seat.
In the span of a few minutes — and while the necessary opening credits roll — the audience learns that Viren is a good guy. He’s happy, polite, thrifty, a hard worker, and he can dance. By the end of the song, we know who the main character is, and we like him.
Viren loses his life savings when Bhatti (Tinnu Anand), the man from whom Viren leases his rickshaw, sells the fleet and upgrades to cars. In an uncharacteristic drunken stupor, Viren crashes the engagement party for Bhatti’s daughter, Mini (Genelia D’Souza).
Mini doesn’t want to marry the rich oaf her father has chosen for her, so she tricks Viren into kidnapping her. He reluctantly agrees to participate when Mini promises to get his money back from her father in the form of ransom. But Viren is so inept at pretending to be a criminal that Mini has to make the ransom demand herself.
Mini’s dynamic personality is irresistible. D’Souza imbues the character with charm, as Mini gets her way without being bossy. Mini takes charge of the phony kidnapping plan to make up for the fact that she has no say in the biggest decision of her life: who she’s going to marry.
Viren isn’t cowed by Mini so much as he is out of his depth. He’s a principled guy who has deliberately chosen to avoid any activities remotely criminal. Since he doesn’t know what he’s doing — and faces prison if he’s caught — he lets Mini run the show. The characters have a nice rapport, undoubtedly helped by the fact that Deshmukh and D’Souza are married in real life.
The fun continues into the second half of the film, as Viren and Mini grow closer and we meet Viren’s family. The story is well-balanced, and dance numbers are spaced appropriately. A wedding number in which Viren and Mini get drunk is a highlight thanks to D’Souza’s overly enthusiastic dancing.
The scenery is gorgeous throughout, whether the action takes place in the fields or in the mountains. Costumes are likewise vibrant and beautiful.
Overall, Tere Naal Ho Love Gaya is a really well-made film and a great example of its genre.
Links
Movie Review: Jodi Breakers (2012)
2.5 Stars (out of 4)
Fine. Nice. Okay. Those are probably the best words to describe Jodi Breakers (“Couple Breakers”), a pleasant but unremarkable romantic comedy about a pair of divorce facilitators.
Fresh off his own financially disastrous divorce, Sid (R. Madhavan) hires himself out to men looking to entrap their cheating wives, thereby avoiding costly alimony payments. Sid hires Sonali (Bipasha Basu) as his partner, which allows them to expand their client base to include women looking to divorce their wayward husbands.
Sid meets privately with the wife of a wealthy businessman with a mistress, who arranges for Sid and Sonali to travel to Greece. There, the duo successfully plants evidence to frame the mistress, Maggie (Dipannita Sharma), who’s tossed out by the businessman, Mark (Milind Soman).
Sonali and Sid get drunk and sleep together while in Greece. Only after they return to India does Sonali discover that Sid lied about the identity of the woman who hired them to break up Mark and Maggie.
As a romantic comedy, Jodi Breakers isn’t particularly romantic or comical. Director Ashwini Chaudhary strikes an uneasy balance between wackiness and more straightforward comedy. Direct-to-camera speeches by Sid’s best friend, Nano (Omi Vaidya), periodically ruin the flow of the film. The leads are instructed to overact in scenes that don’t require it.
Madhavan and Basu have a friendly rapport with each other, but their chemistry doesn’t go further than that. Even though their love scenes are racy by Bollywood standards, they lack sizzle. Mark and Maggie convey more passion and longing in their glances, upstaging the lead couple.
The screenplay hits the necessary plot points and generally makes sense, but scenes drag on too long at the expense of character development elsewhere. Chaudhary, who also wrote the screenplay, spends too much time showing Sid and Sonali getting drunk, without showing why they fell for each other in the first place.
Also missing from the script are scenes of Sid and Sonali executing the jobs they are hired to do. Sid’s first solo job and the duo’s takedown of Mark and Maggie in Greece are the only time we see them at work, other than some brief, humorous client interviews. Scenes of Sid and Sonali successfully entrapping cheaters could’ve set up their inevitable romance while providing laughs.
Other elements of the film are similarly okay, but uninspiring. The music is catchy and the dance numbers are fine, apart from one that’s memorable for the wrong reasons. Someone needs to have a word about appropriate fringe placement with whomever designed the costumes for the female backup dancers in “Bipasha” (below).
Links
- Jodi Breakers Official Website
- Jodi Breakers at Wikipedia
- Jodi Breakers at IMDb
Movie Review: Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012)
3 Stars (out of 4)
It’s a bad sign when the words “The Beginning” appear on screen at the end of a movie, just before the closing credits roll. If this is only “the beginning,” what was I watching for the last two hours? It’s a cop-out.
Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (“One of Me and One of You”) ends with “The Beginning.” It’s disappointing because the first 95% of the movie is really, really good. I enjoyed myself so much while watching it that the lame way the story concludes made it feel like I had the rug pulled out from under me.
Let me focus on the good first, which is nearly every part of the movie. The protagonist in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (EMAET, henceforth) is Rahul (Imran Khan), the average son of snobby parents who routinely make it clear that he is a disappointment. When he loses his job at a Las Vegas architecture firm, he elects not to tell them.
Rahul meets fun-loving Riana (Kareena Kapoor), a similarly unemployed hairstylist. Since they are both alone on Christmas Eve, Rahul reluctantly agrees to let Riana take him out on the town. They get drunk and get married.
The next morning, they amicably agree to get their marriage annulled. Again reluctantly, Rahul lets broke, disorganized Riana stay in his meticulously clean apartment. Friendship blossoms as Rahul finally finds in Riana someone who does not think he’s a failure.
There’s little conflict in Rahul and Riana’s relationship, but that’s a good thing. They are both nice people, their only faults being that Rahul is overly fearful of making mistakes and Riana a bit oblivious to her more annoying habits. From Raina, Rahul gets the validation he’s never gotten from his parents, and Raina is happy to make him happy.
Khan and Kapoor are completely charming and succeed in making Rahul and Riana realistic characters. Their restraint adds to the movie’s humor: Khan gets more laughs out of a single raised eyebrow than any of the frantic, screaming characters in the Housefull 2 promo that preceded EMAET. Debutant director Shakun Batra gets the tone exactly right for a romantic comedy.
As much as I appreciate a movie that resists the urge to force conflict into a story, about three-fourths of the way into EMAET, I started to wonder, “What’s the catch?” Rahul and Raina can’t just stroll into their happily ever after, can they? Is she hiding something? Will he compromise his new self-confidence to placate his parents?
When the hiccup in Rahul & Riana’s otherwise perfect relationship finally arises, it does so without enough time left in the film to adequately deal with it. Hence “The Beginning.” It’s a profoundly unsatisfying conclusion, especially since all of the signs pointed to the adorable couple getting their tidy “happily ever after.”
I admire filmmakers who take risks with their storytelling — though audiences do have certain expectations of rom-coms released in time for Valentine’s Day — but the risks have to feel warranted. The ultimate resolution to Rahul & Riana’s story feels unrealistic and unfair. I wanted a better ending for characters I’d come to like so much.
Links
- Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu Official Website
- Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu at Wikipedia
- Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu at IMDb
Movie Review: Ghost (2012)
Zero Stars (out of 4)
Rare is the movie that manages to get everything wrong, lacking a single attribute of a successful film. Ghost is that movie: a film so pathetically executed as to be an object lesson in how not to make a movie.
Ghost is a horror movie (not a remake of the American film), though what kind of horror movie is unclear. Supernatural thriller? Monster movie? Spiritual lesson? Torture porn?
Of course a single film can use elements of all the above horror sub-genres, but debutant writer-director Puja Jatinder Bedi is so unfocused in her storytelling style that I’m not even sure she knows what kind of movie she’s making. There’s no consistency of theme or message, no continuity, and it’s not even clear who the main character is.
Ghost opens with the grisly murders of a doctor and a nurse initially seen having sex in a hospital lavatory. When they are discovered by pious Dr. Suhani (Sayali Bhagat), it seems likely that the film is meant to be a spiritual parable about the dangers of sin.
In case that message isn’t clear enough, the opening credits are subtitled with the following text: “Christ represents the divine life power that illuminates and liberates the soul from the evil powers of Satan. O SONS OF ADAM AWAKEN AND EMBODY CHRIST WITHIN YOU.”
The divine punishment angle quickly falls apart, as it becomes clear that the two deaths (and the ones to follow) are the work of a vengeful spirit, not acts of divine judgment.
Freelance detective Vijay (Shiney Ahuja) investigates the murders and discovers that the spirit is likely that of a murdered hospital intern, the subtly-named Mary Magdallen (Julia Bliss).
Mary is Vijay’s wife, of whom he has no memory thanks to a mild head injury, of which he also has no memory. In fact, he seems unaware of having a memory gap of however long it took him to fall in love, get married, and have his wife die. Apparently, he has no friends either, because I’d wager that one of them might have let slip at some point that Vijay has (or had) a wife.
Since everything about Ghost stinks, I’m going to focus on a few of its worst offenses. First is a pet peeve of mine: casting actors with inappropriate accents. Mary is supposed to be Australian, but Bliss is Russian and sounds it. Either make the character Russian, or cast a different actress.
Next is the way the movie fetishizes violence against women. The whole movie is gory, but flashbacks of Mary’s murder-by-torture and her body’s subsequent dismembering are shown in almost loving detail. As a woman, director Bedi should have exercised better judgement and not pandered to the base desires of misogynists.
The most egregious offense in Ghost is its silly perversion of religion for tawdry thrills. Christian imagery pervades the film: Mary’s name and the details of her murder (hint: a cross is involved), “plagues” of frogs and locusts at various crime scenes, a computerized artist’s rendering of Hell, etc. The imagery symbolizes nothing and makes little sense in the context of the film. I think it’s just there to show that the filmmakers have read the Bible — or, more likely, stopped by a Sunday School class once or twice.
At the scenes of two murders, Monster Mary is accompanied by a cryptic figure, whose left half resembles Jesus and right half resembles a devil. The figure’s significance is unclear and is never discussed. The film ends with a shot of Mary in her appealing mortal form, hugging Jesus (regular Jesus, that is; not the half-Jesus-half-devil guy).
Are we supposed to believe that Jesus — Mr. Forgiveness — is cool with one of his acolytes exacting bloody revenge from beyond the grave? Wasn’t one of the whole points of Jesus’ existence to convey that revenge is God’s domain and that forgiveness is a path to salvation?
If I were a Christian, I might be offended. But Ghost is so stupid and inept that taking its offenses seriously gives it more credit than it deserves.
Links
