Movie Reviews - Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara

Its been a while since I wrote a review for a Bollywood movie. But inspite of the thunder and lightning here in Glasgow today, I went out for Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and guess the name and message of the movie itself deserved a review.

In a simple sense, the movie had traces of Dil Chahta Hai but definitely filled with loads of fresh ideas and tomatoes. It sure is a desi version of the Hangover but totally unlike it, so I guess its safe to say that the movie has found a sweet spot between DCH and Hangover. But when you think of it, its actually hard to imagine such a combination.

The movie is all about 3 friends and a 3 week long bachelors' party in Spain. Its filled with the usual fun and games with expected fights and "hug and make up" between friends. I personally felt that Farhan Akhtar's acting was the best of the lot and Kat looks her glamorous best in the movie. But a special mention has to go out to the mind boggling camera work and the selection of locations. These are the two things that add a whole new dimension to the movie.

I wonder why nobody had thought of Spain earlier. Its always Amsterdam or London or handful of other European destinations usually. Ever since my dissertation on product placements, I watch movies from a different perspective. Its usually quite easy to spot those blatant placements in Hollywood movies but ZNMD scores well here also. Hrithik has done justice endorsing John Players. If JP hasn't already started a special ZNMD range, then they are surely missing out on a trick.

Along with John Players, Mountain Dew has been forced into a couple of scenes. But I guess its a safe pardon when you consider the freebies or financial support a brand provides a movie. Abhay Deol's character could have probably been played by any actor, so nothing special there but he actually holds the other characters together. 

The 3 adventure sports chosen for the movie are perfect and the final one places the icing on the cake even though the last scene is the only scene that has been made very "filmy".  Bhag D.K. Bose would have been a tailor made song for this scene. The movie gets a negative mark for using a stunt woman who doesn't resemble Kat at all. For some reason I feel that Farhan actually performed his own stunts with sky diving. 

The soundtracks are brilliant so some new ear worms for me. I would totally recommend this movie to anyone who wants to enjoy a feel good bollywood movie without much of unwanted masala.

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Sreesanth Upset About His Name "Appam Chutiya" Not Used As A Song #FakingNews

It started with Kaminey, Saale and the baton is currently with Bose D.K. Going by this trend, the next logical word has to be Gandu. Oh wait, there is already a movie by this name expected to release this year. 

If the same algorithm is applied to Kannada movies, we can can expect the trend to start with atleast Boli Maga. Thinking about it now I realize that all the major flavorsome words have already been used by our very own Sai Kumar, ShivRaj Kumar, Upendra and co in their movies but none of them have used them in any of the songs like their big brother Bollywood has done.

Coming to the main story of the day, our very own Sreesanth has burst out in flames after cheta Priyadarshan declined his offer to include Sreesanth's name in one of the songs for his next flick. It was a regular Monday morning and Sreesanth had applied a good load of coconut oil and headed off into the woods to dispose some natural waste. As he was busy polishing off his duties while listening to Bhag D.K Bose on his iPod, Sreesanth got this "Eureka" like idea to  cast his name in a movie song. 

He kissed his chains, calmed himself until everything dried out and held his chest upright and started his run up. Only this time, he wasn't put away but a batsman but was so by Priyadarshan's watchman. The watchman even called the nearest asylum to book a case of an eloping patient after seeing Sreesanth's orange hair and Jogi like appearance. Sreesanth finally had to do his jig and crate a tantrum by slamming the ground and throwing mud in the air to convince him that he was infact the cricketer Sreesanth.

After all of this unscripted drama, cricketer Sreesanth finally met Priyadarshan and told him about his "Eureka" idea. He explained how the fake IPL player christened him with the name "Appam Chutiya" and how that name can finally be made to sound nice. Sree had also thought about the lyrics of the song and said it goes something like this.

" Take me to the cleaners,

   Whack me all over the park,

   Slap me baby one more time,

   Kuch bhi karo, main phir bhi hoon Appam Chutiya"  

Priyadarshan couldn't help but remind Sree what Neha Dhupiya had said long back "In India, only sex and SRK sell." Pri added one more S to it saying, "In India, only sex, SRK and Samskruta sell. If at all I want the mallu effect in my movies, I'll be more than happy to cast the pride of Kerala, Shakeela and not you". 

Sree was visibly very upset with this and he finally did a booty shake to show his disappointment. As a last resort, he has decided to prove to the MTV guys that he is a true roadie and hence approached them with a new idea for the next season of Roadies, after all even the kitchen sink wasn't good enough to increase the TRPs. Sree's proposal mainly involves replacing Raghu with himself in both auditions and the show to bring the "unpredictability" factor back into the show.

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Movie Reviews - Udaan

Once in a way you stumble onto a movie, start watching it without any expectations, with hardly any known actors in it and in the end get totally blown away by it. I'm sure everyone of us has experienced this atleast once. I was talking to silent the other day and she happened to mention to me about this non commercial movie called Udaan winning lots of awards.

Like always, I downloaded the movie for free and started watching it on a late evening with a drink in one hand and a bowl with some good ol homemade peanut masala in the other. I promise you that the story will not be revealed here. So this post is rated PG with no spoiler alerts.

The movie starts with four guys in a residential school trying to sneak out in the night to watch a late night screening of a  desi soft-core movie. Yeah yeah I know, all of us have been there and done that. The boys get caught by their teacher in the same theatre who would have come there with some company to get some action. As a result of this, they get expelled and so is the laughter from the rest of the movie. The movie then concentrates on one of the guys who is an aspiring writer and his relationship with his father, whom he hasn't seen for the past 8 years.

The boy named Rohan is forced to call his father 'Sir' and is stripped of all forms of freedom. While he has no say infront of his father, he is also strictly ordered to put his pen down and start working in a factory. Amidst all this, he also has a 6 year old step brother as well whose acting is one of the cutest. While the boy Rohan gets abused by his father both verbally and physically, he secretly tries to pursue his passion and indulge in drinking and smoking. For all we know, he is a typical teenager with more things to hide than show.

The movie becomes even more gripping when the father's anger becomes responsible for a tragic event in the family and Rohan finds out about the actual truth. If you really want to know as to what happens next, go and buy a DVD and watch the movie or just download it, like I did. Ronit Roy delivers the performance of a lifetime as the father (totally unexpected from his 'K' series nonsense) and the debutant youngster Rajat Barmecha is absolutely brilliant. The story isn't the greatest but the new director Vikramaditya Motwane has brought some real spark and life into the art of film making. 

The movie's name 'Udaan' translates to 'Flight'  and does it take off or what. There are subtitles if you cannot understand Hindi and I really recommend everyone to watch this underrated movie. If you still don't believe me, IMDb has rated it 8.7. It had been quite sometime since I had enjoyed the brilliance of a Bollywood movie to this extent. It kind of reminded me of the time when I watched Khuda Ke Liye which is another must watch.

I give it a 10/10 rating without any second thoughts. Do watch it and let me know, if you haven't yet.

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Lights Camera Auction

After being riddled with numerous controversies ever since its last edition, the IPL players' auction finally took place in Bengaluru over the weekend. I was more eager to listen to Arun Lal's stupid comments than to actually watch the auction. The weekend sprung a lot of surprises with the media cashing in on the event more than anyone. Probably the auction got more coverage than any of the election results. A William Hill in India would have probably made millions over the weekend with an substantial number of farmer suicides.

To start off, the Bollywood bimbos were back showing off more booty than brains. One cant help but wonder if they even know the names of all the players in their team. Preity Zinta who has finally shelved her flab really needed to read the book "Auction rules for dummies". Somebody had to tell her that once a player has been bought, the bidding ends there and raising money and even her top after this wouldn't help her.

It was great to see Chennai retaining around 8 players from their original team thus emphasizing the fact that its a real team. RCB has a totally new look but then again to go through the phases of forming, storming, norming and performing will probably take atleast 1 edition of IPL. The funny thing is that all the teams have managed to find atleast one self destructor or suicide bomber for themselves. KKR has Brett Lee, RCB has Mohammad Kaif, KXIP has Piyush Chawla, DD has the stallion Ajit Agarkar, DC has Ishant Sharma, MI has Munaf Patel, CSK has S.Badrinath,  RR has Shaun Tait, PW has Ashish Nehra and Kochi has a brigade of suicide bombers with the likes of Jadeja, Sreesanth, R.P Singh,VVS and Vinay Kumar. These are the kind of players who can single handedly win the match for the opponents.

On the other hand there have been some great picks for the money paid for Davy Jacobs, V.D Merwe, KP, N.McCullum and Randiv. Most of these players will turn out to be the dark horses and it was nice to see that many uncapped international players were also in demand. The teams had done their research and were trying to form their teams based on some strategy. CSK for example, wanted to retain the old team as much as they could and RCB wanted to build a solid fielding unit and Kochi for that matter, looked like they wanted a team full of coconut pickers.

The best part about the auction was that the true quality of players came out. People have always been hypocritical and scared to play down the veterans even though deep down they also knew the hard reality. There was a time when Ganguly was a great player and ever since his weakness to the short ball was exposed, his decline started. For the kind of stubborn person he is, he refused to work on his weakness and was confident that his reputation was more than enough to continue his career. He probably wouldn't have been picked by any teams even in the first IPL if he hadn't been an icon player. Its high time that he put his pads down for good and grace us all with the good news of not becoming a commentator. I also felt that Lara should have opted out of the IPL. At his age, none of the teams would be interested in making an investment. It just reminded me of Schumacher making a return and failing terribly. 

I guess time will bring out the true colors of the teams and with the World Cup just around the corner, it promises to be a cricket feast for 3 months starting in mid February. Bring on the good stuff. As Mallya would say, "a small quarter for cricket, a great kick of mankind".

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Mind Molestation

I have been reading a lot of different versions of the abbreviated term CWG and all of them are right in their own way. I can totally understand the outrage against the organizers, the planning committee and the country on the whole. The British media has come out strongly exposing the lapse in preparations and basic infrastructure. The Delhi CWG mess up has currently taken up the pole position in the top stories listed on even the BBC website. I can imagine news channels back home like Times Now, Headlines Today and the most disgusting of them all, TV9 covering this issue for at least 23 hours in a day. To be frank this is the kind of news that the media tends to hunt for like a bloodhound. But when such a news is actually served on a platter with an option to "eat all you want", the situation looks more messed up than it actually is. I still remember a day when TV9 ran the news of a stray dog biting a man for the whole day. Can it get more lame than that? Doesn't it raise the question of credibility and the quality of a news channel? Or does it also imply that we derive pleasure in not only watching something as worthless as this but also in bitching about it being played over and over and over with a caption of breaking news?

The media has always been criticized for being irresponsible. Lets face the facts. One needs money to run a channel or newspaper and the funding for which is provided by the wealthy politicians, celebrities and businessmen. At the end of the day, media ends up being run by money. So people with money have the power to manipulate the news that comes out. So, if one channel run by political party  X says that a dog bit a man, its rival channel run by a  political party Y says that the man bit the dog, speaking of which Man Bites Dog(1992) is an amazing movie, not for the fainthearted though. So the media is actually used to boost their PR activities using the news as a medium. So to summarize, the grief of the common man is used as a medium to boost a party's image in an intention to ultimately get on the good books of the common man. To quote another such example, the recent attempt to burn Quran by a Pastor in Florida was classic example of a highly renowned channel like CNN lowering its standards. If such an incident had not been covered at all, it would have not encouraged any unwanted publicity. Things people do to be on TV...Uffff. If anyone from any of the famous news channels are reading this, I'm planning to use the pages of Mein Kamph as toilet paper next week. Would surely appreciate some airtime but I have to do this before zee Germans get here. The quality of news has stooped so low that news channels are nowadays running special programmes on all the different reality shows in that country, giving viewers of the summary of events that happened in that week. Very soon we might even see special news reports summarizing the attire and the hot quotient of the newsreaders inviting viewers to vote for their favorite one.

Have you ever watched something on a news channel for an hour and felt like you wasted that whole hour? Well, its called as mind molestation and in the extreme cases might lead to mind "the act of having sex"ing. The media thrives on its ability to carry out such hideous crimes, show the grief of the public after molesting them and gets to walk away with a rise in TRP and revenue. Why wouldn't someone want to get involved in such a business? After all you will be the puppet master, but in this case you get an added added advantage of having control over the mental state of your puppets. Ultimately, we end up eating whatever is fed by media and our thinking will be influenced by the channels that we favor. Gone are those days of having old men and fully covered women reading out news. I guess the only upside of this is one gets to see young female newsreaders with provoking necklines and their insatiable thirst to talk about bikini clad Bollywood heroines making you fantasize about some girl on girl action. You have been mind molested yet again. 

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