Review: Raavan

The low-caste Beera rules the forest in Raavan, Mani Ratnam’s richly atmospheric adaptation of the Indian epic The Ramayana.
Though the film takes place in the present, Mr Ratnam’s forest remains an appropriately primeval place for mythic doings, full of fog and mists and rain and Beera’s mud-painted followers (shades of “Apocalypse Now”).

Raavan (Ravana in Sanskrit), as every Indian knows, is the demon in The Ramayana who kidnaps Sita, the wife of Rama: king, deity and model husband (as Sita is the model wife).
Early on in Ratnam’s film the question is asked: Is Beera (a gleefully hammy Abhishek Bachchan) Robin Hood or Raavan? He’s both — and more a hero in this telling, set on his turf, than is the Rama character, a cop called Dev (Vikram), who matches Beera in brutality and cunning, but not in heart.

Raavan has Bollywood glamour aplenty, with the lovely if occasionally dramatically challenged Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek’s wife, playing the Sita stand-in.

The real star, though, is Ratnam, a talented visual storyteller who directs action crisply and fills the screen with striking images. (One, of Bachchan’s falling body landing gracefully on a tree branch, is so good he uses it three times.)

Artful but not arty, Ratnam, whose films include Dil Se and Guru delivers the goods: There are songs and dances (A R Rahman of Slumdog Millionaire fame did the excellent score), and an eye-popping climactic battle, between the bad-good Beera and the good-bad Dev, on a teetering suspension bridge. And that, folks, is entertainment.

Read more »

Review: I Hate Luv Storys

You will not hate this love story, a spoof on ace director Karan Johar from his own production house. Hats off to Karan for daring to produce a film that makes fun of his kind of cinema. Samir Soni steps into his shoes with great ease in the film.
Director Punit Malhotra takes a pot shot at everything - designer sets, boy meets girl sagas, actresses singing in chiffon saris in the Alps - that made directors like Karan, Aditya Chopra and Kunal Kohli a name to reckon with in the industry.

In terms of content, nothing is new. But the treatment is fresh, the backdrop is interesting and it's fun watching the romance brew between the lead pair Simran and Jay on the sets of a movie. Yes, the film is about the making of a love story where Simran works as an art designer and Jay as an assistant to highly successful director Vir Kapoor (Samir), known for his candy floss romantic sagas.

Imran Khan as Jay Dhingra and Sonam Kapoor as Simran fit the bill quite perfectly.

First time director Punit Malhotra proves his mettle by narrating a predictable story in such an interesting manner that you are hooked till the end.

A romantic by heart, Simran is contented with life. She is engaged to banker Raj, played by Sammir Dattani, and loves her job. But her life turns topsy turvy when the weird but funny, bratty but lovable Jay walks into her life as her assistant.

They have nothing in common. While Simran is highly disciplined, organised, professional and takes her work seriously, Jay is laid back and always late on the sets.

Yes, opposites attract here too, and they eventually fall in love.

The first half is pacy and director infuses enough energy in this otherwise predictable love story. But some scenes in the second half drag.

Another flaw in the film is that Imran is given too many dialogues to speak, but then he delivers them with just the right expressions. He suits the role of a spoilt brat perfectly and keeps tickling your funny bone. Especially when he breaks down like a girl while talking to his mom (Anju Mahendru) on phone.

Editing could have been better, but never mind.

In sum, the witty dialogues, on screen chemistry of the lead pair and performances of the supporting cast - Kavin Dave, Bruna Abdullah Aamir Ali and Pooja Ghai - make it a good watch.
Sonam may not have hits in her kitty so far, but this film should change things. In every scene, she complements Imran.

In terms of music, Vishal-Shekhar's pacy numbers add zing to the narrative and background music adds a nice flavour to this predictable love story.

I Hate Luv Storys proves that one can make good film without lavish sets, foreign locales and mega budgets. In short, a commendable effort by the first time director.

You may not be a great fan of candy floss cinema, but do watch I Hate Luv Storys... it's refreshing.

Read more »

Review: Toy Story 3

Toy Story 3 begins with a rattling, exuberant set piece that has nothing to do with the tale that follows but that nonetheless sums up the ingenuity, and some of the paradoxes, that have made this Pixar franchise so marvelous and so successful. The major toys — Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), the Potato Heads (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Jessie (Joan Cusack), Rex (Wallace Shawn) and the others — are in a setting at once wholly unfamiliar and instantly recognisable. They’re in a western, albeit one made in the amped-up modern action style, rather than the more stately idiom of old-time oaters.

A train is hurtling down the tracks; a bridge explodes; stuff is falling out of the sky. There are force fields and laser beams and a big noisy surprise every time you blink.

At first glance your heart may sink a little. Can it be that Toy Story, built over 15 years and two previous movies out of the unlikely bonds that flourished among a band of beautifully animated inanimate characters (and Andy, the mostly unseen boy who collects them), has succumbed to flashy commercial blockbuster imperatives? Or would we be fooling ourselves to suppose that it has ever been anything else?

The resolution of the opening scene in the latest episode shows this to be a false choice.
The action is taking place in Andy’s head as he plays with his toys. All those crazy effects are the products of his restless and inexhaustible imagination, which is no less his for having been formed and fed by movies, television shows and the cheap merchandise spun out of them.
And how many real kids who have grown up with Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody have unspooled their own improvised movies on the rec room floor?

Perhaps no series of movies has so brilliantly grasped the emotional logic that binds the innate creativity of children at play to the machinery of mass entertainment. Each one feeds, and colonises, the other. And perhaps only Pixar, a company Utopian in its faith in technological progress, artisanal in its devotion to quality and nearly unbeatable in its marketing savvy, could have engineered a sweeping capitalist narrative of such grandeur and charm as the Toy Story features.

Toy Story 3 is as sweet, as touching, as humane a movie as you are likely to see this summer, and yet it is all about doodads stamped and molded out of plastic and polyester.

Therein lies its genius, and its uncanny authenticity. A tale that captured the romance and pathos of the consumer economy, the sorrows and pleasures that dwell at the heart of our materialist way of life, could only be told from the standpoint of the commodities themselves, those accretions of synthetic substance and alienated labor we somehow endow with souls.

Cars, appliances, laptops, iPads: we love them, and we profess that love daily.
Its purest, most innocent expression — but also its most vulnerable and perishable — is the attachment formed between children and the toys we buy them.

“I want that!” “That’s mine!” Slogans of acquisitive selfishness, to be sure, but also articulations of desire and loyalty.

The first Toy Story acknowledged this bond, and Toy Story 2 turned it into a source of startlingly deep emotion.

When Woody chose life with Andy and the others over immortality with Stinky Pete at the museum, he was embracing a destiny built on his own disposability.

When we grow up, or just grow tired of last year’s cool stuff, we don’t just put away those childish things, we throw them out. “Face it, we’re just trash,” says a bitter pink teddy bear near the end of Toy Story 3. Though the movie, directed by Lee Unkrich from a script by Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine), labours to dispel the gloom of this statement, it can’t entirely disprove it.

As Andy prepares for college, Woody surveys the depleted ranks of his pals, noting that some have passed on (rest in peace, Wheezy) and reassuring the others that everything will be fine. They’ll live in the attic until the next generation comes along.

But instead they wind up at the Sunnyside Daycare Center, which at first seems like a paradise where the problem of obsolescence has been magically solved.

Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty), its seemingly jovial patriarch, explains that there, toys are played with every day, and when one group of youngsters outgrows them, another cohort arrives. It’s a perfect reversal of the single-owner predicament, and most of the toys are relieved and happy — especially Barbie, voiced by Jodi Benson, who finds a Ken with a fabulous wardrobe and the voice of Michael Keaton.

The change of scene, and Woody’s subsequent journey to the home of a little girl named Bonnie (Emily Hahn), allows the filmmakers to introduce a bevy of new toys, including a talking phone and a purple octopus who sounds a lot like one of the hosts of The View.
Toy Story 3, which makes remarkably subtle use of 3-D, also explores a range of cinematic techniques undreamed of in the first two chapters, and refined in recent Pixar films like Wall-E and Up.

There are swiftly edited action sequences worthy of a Bourne movie; low-angle compositions and nimble tracking shots; changes in the color saturation and the texture of the light — just like in a “real” movie! When the truth about Sunnyside is revealed, the movie has fun evoking prison escape pictures and horror films, darkening the Pixar palette to captivating (and, to some small children, possibly frightening) effect.

In providing sheer moviegoing satisfaction — plot, characters, verbal wit and visual delight, cheap laughs and honest sentiment — Toy Story 3 is wondrously generous and inventive. It is also, by the time it reaches a quiet denouement that balances its noisy beginning, moving in the way that parts of “Up” were. That is, this film — this whole three-part, 15-year epic — about the adventures of a bunch of silly plastic junk turns out also to be a long, melancholy meditation on loss, impermanence and that noble, stubborn, foolish thing called love. We all know money can’t buy it, except sometimes, for the price of a plastic figurine or a movie ticket.

Toy Story 3 is rated G (General audiences). Some of the mean toys might be a little scary, and the danger the nice toys face becomes pretty intense at times.

Read more »

Review: Milenge Milenge

There is a kind of subverted joy in watching Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor play a Valentinian romance with a full-throttle gusto.

Milenge Milenge took its time to come to the theatres. Yes, it is old fashioned in theme. But not dated. The material which must have been quite bulky by the time Kaushik was done with shooting has been cut and pasted with restrained enthusiasm. What we have is a paper-thin, sometimes cute at times annoying rom-com where Destiny plays a pivotal part. Kiss-mat, anyone? Yup, intimacy is fugitive between Shahid and Kareena. But they nonetheless look like a real pair.

The plot plods at a pace that suggests love is just about the only force that keeps the universe moving. Both the protagonists play professionals. But we hardly see them work except on their ever-palpitating hearts.

The plot invents various devices from missed flights to truant elevators to hero in drag and heroine in glycerine to keep the love birds apart for two hours. There are some heartwarming moments depicting random hearts pumping into a collective despair as time ticks by.

There's no attempt to pull punches, no over-clever dialogues and no effort to paint and gloss the feeling of love with sassy 'cool' lines. Director Satish Kaushik plays the romance on the straight and narrow path. And that's just about the most comforting aspect of this basic simple and predictable boy-meets-girl tale.

The principal performances range from precocious to authentic. Surprisingly Shahid tends to go overboard in the early comic sequences. But he makes up for the excesses in the second-half with expressions of a lover's anguish over Cupid's awry arrow.

Kareena looks gorgeous and slim in some scenes, gorgeous and relatively plump in other scenes. In totality the chemistry is quite palpable, much more so than in some of the other much-hyped love stories that arrived lately with a bang and fizzled out without the pang of love being palpable in a single frame.

In Milenge Milenge you do feel for the lovers. Maybe it has to do with the fact that we know what the film's lovers do not. That the actors playing them were involved not too long ago. But hush!

Read more »

Oscar nomination for Avatar team a surprise: Cameron

Filmmaker James Cameron says he never expected the stars of his sci-fi blockbuster Avatar to fetch Oscar nominations.

The 55-year-old director wasn't expecting the main actors, including Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver, to be nominated for the Academy Awards because of the use of computer graphics in the film, Empire magazine reported.
"Typically, young leading men don't get nominated until the 15th time they've done it.

Leonardo did not get nominated for 'Titanic'. Was Zoe's performance spectacular?" he said.
The 3-D blockbuster Avatar broke box office records by raking in $2.7 billion.

"Absolutely, but there were many great performances last year. But it is arguable that they would have been nominated if you take the computer generated imagery off the table. Put that back on the table - the CGI part of it - and where the acting community is, they are still low down on the educational curve of what this all means. I didn't expect it and I cautioned them not to expect it, so they'd therefore not be disappointed," Cameron said.

The Oscar-award-winning filmmaker admits that the mythical Na'vi aliens would have looked weird without using the graphics.

"Here's the thing, if it had been in live action, Zoe Saldana would have been in blue make-up and it would not have had the power. Her eyes would not have been those eyes.The blue make-up would have looked terrible.I know - every time I go to a convention or a place where someone decides they're going to be a Na'vi, I'm reminded why we did it the way we did," he said.

Read more »

Harry Potter debt jolts Hollywood

A supposed blockbuster, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix starring Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson has racked up huge debt, according to a profit statement leaked recently.
The fifth movie in the hit franchise reportedly lost 110 million pounds, despite making 619 million pounds at the box office and news that the 2007 film has suffered these debts has shocked Hollywood, Daily Star reported.

It is the ninth highest grossing film of all time, experts say the figures, leaked to film industry blog Deadline, proved Hollywood is in an even worse state than feared.

But others blamed "creative accounting" as the film was listed with costs of just 100 million pounds.

"If these figures are true, then Warner Brothers have turned this practice into a whole new ball game. If one of the most successful movie franchises in history cannot officially make money, what can?," an insider said.

Sources claimed it was a way of preventing huge payouts to stars on a percentage share of profits.

Read more »

Jessica Biel feels wrecked with rude criticisms

Actress Jessica Biel feels "completely wrecked" if she comes across rude criticisms and prevents herself from reading any news stories about her career and love life.

The 28-year-old beauty admits that she was flipping through an issue of fashion magazine Vogue when she stumbled on comments about her in the letters page, Daily Star reported.
"I was looking through a Vogue recently, and I came across the letters page and someone had written in about my recent Vogue cover. She thought I was so boring and awful and it was horrible and asked why they put me on the cover.That completely wrecked me for a day. You can't help but take it personally," Biel said.

The 'A-Team' star has featured in tabloids with singer Justin Timberlake and insists she avoids temptation to flip through them as she gets disturbed with hurtful comments.
"I'm strict about not doing it reading the gossips.I don't search it out, but when I stumble upon something, of course I read it," Biel said.

"I can understand the intrigue, but I would love for everyone to experience what it's like and then they'd have a real empathy," she added.

Read more »

Jessica Simpson dating ex-NFL player

Looks like Jessica Simpson is back in the dating game -- with another football player.

The singer, who dated Dallas Cowboys star Tony Romo for two years, is dipping back into the NFL dating pool, seeing former San Francisco 49ers tight end Eric Johnson.

"It's true," a source close to Simpson confirms to PEOPLE, adding that the pair have been dating since May.

Adds a friend of the singer: "She is happy that she found a great guy. She's really happy."
Simpson has been making other changes as well. On June 27, the pop star Tweeted: "[I] shocked my system with a vegan diet, special Pu-erh tea from China and cupping since Friday!"

The singer, who turns 30 on Saturday, has said that she's working on her self-esteem and feels hopeful about finding love.

"I think [30] is going to be a good year for me," the "Price of Beauty" star said in May. "I can find love anywhere."

TMZ.com was first to report on Simpson's new romance.

Read more »