I’ll try to keep this pretty straight forward. Rockstar is a mess of a plot, about a messed up character, and an equally messed up ensemble which tries to make sense throughout the length of the movie, but fails miserably. It is supposed to be a tale of a Jatt-boy who turns into this creative legend because of the pain and anguish that he’s been through. And his angst, pain, misery, and sheer bad luck in love gets channelled out in form of his lyrical lines and his heavy melodies. How grunge, rock n roll, metal..whatever <insert favourite sub-genre of rock>. The only catch here is that the chronology of the events in which all this happens is all wrong. Either that, or Janardhan Jakhar has access to a time machine, which allows him to suffer all these stuff which I mentioned, and then go back in time, to use that to write his songs. And even after I try to overlook this “minor” flaw that seems to have escaped the eye of most reviewers *cough Rediff cough*, I am hit by the wooden wall of the new Deepika Padukone on the block (as in a no-can-do-acting) – Fakhri, Nargis Fakhri.
Hit the jump, as I discuss The 4 things I did like about Rockstar,
And also the 4 major “baal-nochne waali” (hair-tearing) moments of Rockstar, that made my hair go – Born to be Wild.
[Continue Reading…]
Like the many reviews out there, my thoughts on Ra.One are also divided. On one hand, I have extremely strong complaints against the movie’s script and its many inconsistencies [ Check out my previous post - My 5 Complaints against Ra.One]. But on the other hand, there is no denying, that there is some amount of absolutely engaging good stuff here. This probably is a good thing for the movie’s future on BluRay or DVD, as we can straight away skip the shitty bits and watch the good ones. So in true Hollywood style, I present to you this sequel to my review – The Ying to the Yang ..the White to the Black..the..you get it.
If I were to be a crafty editor, this is what I’d suggest Ra.One to be – a coherent script which slickly travels through ..
**The 5 Things I Did Like About Ra.One**
[Continue Reading…]
I haven’t written a movie review in quite some time. Although I have seen quite a lot of films in between, I haven’t felt inspired or moved enough to break my realm of laziness and hit those keys. This all came to an end with Dhobi Ghat – the directorial debut of Kiran Rao. It took me a second viewing and hours of pondering upon as I rightfully wanted to justify this piece of art with the correct amount of praising adjectives it deserves. It doesn’t really take the eyes of the oracle to recognise a labour of love, and this my friend, is one helluva masterpiece. Told with a pace that embraces the chaos and hyper-speed of the city of Mumbai, and still managing to calm down our senses , that in itself is no mean feat. And whilst you enjoy the visuals of mad Mumbai, drenched in rain Mumbai and the hustle and bustle of Mumbai, Dhobi Ghat doesn’t get reduced to a mere travelogue. Instead, it is a heartfelt epilogue told through the lives of four people intertwined with each other in a way as strange and surprising as life itself.
You might have guessed from the promos by now that there’s Aamir Khan. Yes, there is Aamir Khan – no, not the superstar. Instead, here Aamir Khan is just a fraction of the whole pie. He is a character – Arun, a loner painter who makes a handsome living out of his art, and has a name to boast off in the social circle, but is intrinsically troubled by his own past and his own eccentricities. And he finds release in his paintings through which he expresses best. He stares at Mumbai with an eye of an outsider, even when he has been living here for quite sometime. He is insecure and almost seems like lacking an organ of communication. The character of Arun has been underplayed (thank God for that), and it could have been absolutely easy to give in to the stardom of Aamir Khan – the superstar. And I applaud Kiran Rao to have shown that she’s got the balls to have not done that.
[Continue Reading…]
I am not going to do any sort of gimmicky GIF magic to state how awful this movie is. Neither am I going to create smart lined Facebook memes for this one. This review of Action Replayy is going to be a full on verbal bashing in the very old school way of ‘gaaligaloch’. So for the overtly sensitive and the easily offended – stay the fuck out of this. For the rest who are still reading, thank you and I hope that you can relate to my utter frustration and disappointment at Vipul Amrutlal Shah’s abomination aka ‘Action Replayy’. Point to be noted – funny spellings of movie titles which are numerologically manipulated by the likes of Sunita Melon and Bejaan Pantiwallah do not always ensure success. Actually, they never do. And I hope these numerologists change their names to the ones I just suggested.
To begin with – the Director.
Vipul Amrutlal Shah’s filmography boasts of a smart thriller (Aankhen), a dumbed down comedy which works (Waqt), and an NRI movie which I found was above average (Namastey London). And then London Dreams happened. This was where 40 something uncles put on facelift cream, wore earrings, and sang Hindi pop songs and Hanuman Chalisa touring Europe to packed stadiums. There was a lady who believed in her cheerleading career, and well – if you want to know what I felt about the movie, you can read this.
When I got hold of the first publicity pictures of Action Replayy, it got me super excited for reasons more than one. Firstly, it was set in a retro era of Bollywood which I love the most. I had consciously kept myself distant from the music trailers and any of the movie’s plot details.But I couldn’t escape people discussing about how this was adapted from a Gujrati play, which is a shameless rip off from Back To The Future. All of these factors left me bamboozled, and I really did not know what to expect. The dude in the director’s chair is no stranger to the whole Bolywood blockbuster routine. How wrong was I? Only if the movie was half as good as the posters.
[Continue Reading…]
