Jannat all comes down to the romance. It's the kind of simplistic storyline that could have been wrapped up in half the time.
In sum, Bhoothnath is more than a bit of a drag, despite the lead players trying hard to make it stick. The rest are just okay: Satish Shah makes white-bread sandwiches look yummy, Rajpal Yadav appears to be playing himself, a simpering Shah Rukh Khan looks like he's just bid Knight Riders players Brandon McCullum and Ricky Ponting goodbye, but it is Juhi Chawla whose performance ends up as the most laboured.
It's been a disastrous year for Hindi cinema, what with us in Month 5 and not one unanimously loved film among the lot. What we do have, however, are films of unparallelled idiocy, comedies each more harebrained than the other, thrillers that plumb the depths of low farce.
As said, Tashan works in fits and starts. There are some genuinely creative moments, a few fantastic lines of dialogue, and some shots that make you go wow. And while the film starts off blissfully cheeky, it gets more and more serious as it goes along, suddenly mistaking itself for a ridiculous action film.
Raja Sen rants against the unending ads that spoil our cricket games.
It really hurts that the very act of writing the Friday reviews has been reduced to a sort of pattern these days. We talk about the stars, the director, sum up the effort in a few brief lines, and then, almost inevitably, go on to discuss exactly which DVDs the spanking new film has been filched from. It's disgraceful, and, frankly, rather tiresome.
You can watch the film without cringing, and indulgently smile at where what is going wrong and, figuring out how the real joke might have sounded as intended, chuckle a bit. And honestly, this isn't a film we're trying to make sense of, or nitpicking about plot detail: make it loony, for god's sake, go wild but try and make it funny, instead of hoping Irrfan's and Rajpal's faces do the trick.
Devgan decidedly has some way to go as a director, especially visually. There is no consistency to the basic style of the film as split-screens and transitions happen at will, as do suddenly stylised establishing shots. Yet look at the content: this is a sensitively handled film, using actors with well-herded restraint. And if a director can make you tear up with this much sincerity, he must be on the right track.
Felipe Massa and Ferrari won the race and deservedly so but we were clapping for India. And it felt incredible.
Rob Reiner's superbly written A Few Good Men gets a Bollywood treatment. That is what Samar Khan's Shaurya -- a watered-down, over-dramatised version of Reiner's 1992 film is all about.
American television today, thanks to edgy networks like Showtime and HBO, is producing intelligent, mature, adult content that is far superior, especially in both character development and consistency, to most anything out there on the big screen. This week, then, we'll take a look at a few shows you should hunt out DVDs for, or use your broadband connections to acquire.
Ashwini Dheer and his gang decided to play the old mistaken-identity game, and placed three diverse characters together in the same hotel and waited for obvious chaos to ensue. Unfortunately, beyond a weak two-para summation of the premise, not much else seems to have been written -- which is why the pained gags set up in the first few scenes by narrator Irrfan Khan continue to play out, again and again, right to the very climax.
Ever since it was published on Friday, the 1.5-star review for Abbas-Mustan's Race has generated considerable curiousity in terms of my revealing the film's ending. The film's makers have been constantly hounding me since late Saturday night, demanding that I take off the spoiler, simply because they just don't see the point.
Watch it if you must; it's not objectionably bad. But there really is nothing at all good about this Race either. Heck, even the horses seem sleepy.
This is a film of urgency, make no mistake, and both protagonist and screenplay talk only as much as is required. As for the director himself, he doesn't even make the obligatory cameo. It is the sentiment that plays hero.
It's been the best Oscar year in ages, and here's why we should be toasting the golden boy.
Vishal Bhardwaj comes up with a modest, lovely soundtrack for Ajay Devgan's directorial debut.
Ashutosh Gowariker's new film has a nice romance, but the history seems to get in the way.
Mithya is an unpredictable ride, a rare film that authentically extracts most of its pleasure from all that you don't know just yet.
In a show of solidarity with the striking writers, Vanity Fair has withdrawn its annual bash.