Bhootnath

Casts: Amitabh Bachchan, Juhi Chawla, Aman Siddiqui, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Satish Shah, Rajpal Yadav
Guest appearance: Shahrukh Khan, Nouhid Sairesi, Ashish Chowdhury, Neena Kulkarni
Music: Vishal Shekhar, Salim Sulaiman
Lyrics: Javed Akhtar
Producer: Ravi Chopra
Director-Writer: Vivek Sharma
Ratings: **1/2

Nath Villa. Night. A couple enters the villa with an intention of spending the night. But unfortunate for them, it’s the house where Kailash Nath (Amitabh Bachchan), oops, the spirit of Kailash Nath enjoys his days and nights in his airy appearance. Predictably enough, the couple, intimidated with Kailash, zooms away from the house.

Next incident. Mr. Sharma (Shah Rukh Khan), a marine driver by profession, comes to Kailash’s den, with his family. He leaves his family behind at the Nath Villa and plods back to join his job.

While residing in the Nath Villa, Mr. Sharma’s wife Anjali (Juhi Chawla) and son Banku (Aman Siddiqui) experiences strange incidents. In the mean time Banku befriends the spirit of Kailash Nath and names him as “Bhootnath”.

Banku’s presence eliminates all the hazardous factors that polluted Bhootnath’s mind against human beings. One day, Anjali comes to know about Bhootnath being the angel in Banku’s life.

At the same time Anjali comes to know from Bhootnath about the painful incident that made him a spirit. So, to let Bhootnath’s spirit free from the bondage with the earth, Sharma family arranges for a shradh, a Hindu tradition that Bhootnath’s son, Priyanshu Chatterjee, avoided in past.

Ultimately, it’s through Banku that Bhootnath gets his desired freedom from the earthly bondage.

But it’s because of Banku’s love for Bhootnath that the amicable ghost leaves Banku with an option of appearing in front of Banku whenever he wishes from the core of his heart.

Even god changes his mind for the sake of true and honest love. This film is not about the triumph of a child but the success of true love and faith.

It’s the second time where Amitabh is posing as a ghost and his look in “Bhootnath”, though unintentionally, reminds of his look of Gabbar Singh in “Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag”. If that is some bad news, the good part is that his acting always sweeps away the feeling of looking alike.

At the same time his intimidated being with the presence of his son lets audience recap his character in “Baghban”.

Aman Siddiqui has depicted Banku’s character very well. Juhi Chawla and Shah Rukh’s couple still reminds the same freshness that they show in their very first film.

Writer-director Vivek Sharma has proved his prowess in his

job. His beautifully mingled presentation of entertainment and spirit has started a new vogue in Bollywood. If “Bhootnath” is not so well a children film as “Taare Zamin Par” was, it definitely helps spending few hours in the air conditioned theaters while summer is blazing outside.

At last, if not the least, children may well accept the line of Amitabh saying, “Zindegi me jadoo nehi, mehnat se safalta pai jaati hai” (success is all about hard work, not magic). Bingo Bhootnath! – Rajnee Gupta

Jannat

Cast: Emran Hashmi, Sonal Chauhan, Samir Kochar, Javed Shaikh, Vishal Malhotra
Director: Kunal Deshmukh
Ratings: ***

More, more, more…The motto of motorised materialism seems to have overtaken contemporary life. Everyone wants the good things in life in the shortest time possible. The acquisitive spirit has seldom been defined with such economy of storytelling as in “Jannat”.

Not surprisingly, a lot of Mahesh Bhatt’s latest exposition on the excesses of materialism is shot in shopping malls, expensive restaurants and posh stadiums where money flows like unadulterated honey.

And when our hero sees the love of his life staring at a diamond ring he walks into the showroom and breaks the display window.

Get what you want by force and forget those homilies that papa preached at the dinner table about the virtues of honesty. “Honest money means hard work and little reward,” says a wry character in “Jannat”. He’s obviously not read Ayn Rand.

Sanjay Masoom’s scathing dialogues scamper across the film’s lush skyline to create a language of wannabes who would stop at nothing to get that new villa on the Gold Coast.

Let’s then applaud one more moral fable from Bhatt’s sensible stable.

“Jannat” tells us to waste not, want ‘nought’…By all means covet the zeroes on that pay cheque. But don’t forget that if you run after the zeroes your life ends up in the zero zone.

Forty years ago in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s “Satyakam” Dharmendra had refused to succumb to all the temptations of materialism that were strewn in his path to salvation. Lying dying of cancer, he’s asked by his wife: “Finally what do you have to say about your life of integrity?”

“I’ve lived,” Dharmendra says at the end of “Satyakam”.

Can Emran Hashmi (playing the small-time wheeler dealer who turns into a cricket match-fixer, criminal and moral transgressor) turn around before his gruesome death to say he has lived?

Yes, Arjun (Emran) has loved. At heart “Jannat” is a dark tragic love story. While the girl’s innocence and the man’s corruptible countenance resembles “Kalyug”, the whole dilemma of the beloved being instrumental in destroying the criminal hero echoes “Gangster”.

Both “Kalyug” and “Gangster” were superior in content and treatment.

Debutant director Kunal Deshmukh cannot escape the clichés on existentialism that have come to surround Bhatt’s cinema…the morally conflicted Shakespeare-meets-James Hadley Chase hero, the independent-minded strong and value-based heroine, the hero’s trusted and loyal friend (Purab Kohli in “Woh Lamhe”, Shaad Randhawa in “Awaarapan”, and now Vishal Malhotra), the ideologue father whose principles are held up to ridicule until the hero discovers the hard way that dad’s remedies are the best to deal with ethical ambivalence.

These lingering leitmotifs get a renewed, if not luminous, life in every Bhatt production. But “Jannat” lacks the resonance and staying power of some of Bhatt’s earlier films about crime and punishment from “Naam” to “Gangster”.

Cleverly and cautiously Deshmukh’s film brings in the cricket element, which has audiences ignoring the pitfalls of rejuvenating Bhatt’s age-old iconoclasm.

The stock footage of real-life cricket matches are used well and sparingly in the plot. The stress, as ever in Bhatt’s saga of our stressful times, is on the clashing colliding crisscross of human relationships.

Emran’s father’s sequence in his son’s luxurious bathroom where he comments on the basket of soaps is a whammer.

But the wheeling dealing in the greenroom and clubs with cricketers of indeterminate nationality behaving like debauched goblins smacks of amteurishness. The murder of the Australian coach turns the Bob Woolmer scandal into a climactic add-on. May his soul rest in peace.

But what stays is the protagonist’s passion for money as opposed to his love for Zoya (Sonal Chauhan). The end-game where the engagement ring is juxtaposed against the gun is arresting in more ways than one.

While Emran interprets the over-reaching get-rich-quick schemer’s part with a native cunning, one misses that suave and smooth transitions in the character that perhaps a Naseeruddin Shah or even a Shahid Kapoor would bring on the table.

But Emran is charming enough to let the protagonist’s journey from a chawl to Cape Town look interesting. He’s constantly getting author-backed roles of the angst-ridden social outcast (a garage-sale version of Amitabh Bachchan) which he plays with a fair amount of sensitivity.

Debutant Sonal has much more to do than be the decorative doll she seems equipped to be.

She’s the weakest link in the powerplay where the politics of the playing field is extended to an engrossing exposition of greed atonement.

Some of the supporting cast, especially Jawed Shaikh as the cricketing don and Abhimanyu as his silent henchman, come to grips with their characters better than you would expect in a film that has scant space for anyone except the man who would be king.

Dhoom Dhadakka

Starring Sammir Dattani, Shama Sikandar, Shaad Randhawa, Arati Chabria, Anupam Khe, Satish Kaushik, Gulshan Grover
Rating: super-atrocious

By the time Sammir Dattani and Shaad Randhawa get into drag, this criminally unfunny comedy has dragged on way past ‘bad’-time.

Maybe it’s in the air. Everyone uniformly hams through this acutely painful piece of cinematic travesty.

There’s so much screaming and ranting across the length and breadth of this outrageous ode to idiocy that you wonder if the producer-director intended to provide earplugs for all those bravehearts who would sit to the end of this slapdash hectic and haphazard comedy of terrors.

No earplugs, what we get are shrill banshee ring-tones of risqué ragas sung at a ear-splitting pitch, and phallic jokes about not a single danda in the cellphone.

Chee chee.

If lately you’ve been wondering where the Bollywood comedy has been heading here’s the answer.

Comedies can’t get any baser or brainless than Dhoom Dadakka. The gags make you gag. The items and innuendoes are embarrassing not because they TRY so hard to be vulgar but because they fail miserably to be sexy.

Vulgarity in this comedy of disembodied context depends completely on how many of the characters are crammed in one line of vision in every scene. They all stand making faces and gesticulating as though trying to attract the lifeguard’s attention from a sinking boat.

The double meanings flow in unstoppered abundance mostly from the moist painted trembling lips of Deepshikha who keeps referring to the size of ‘bada’ things every time she spots a male member of the cast in her vicinity.

Yup, as one character winks, size does matter.

Dhoom Dadakka is a jumbo-sized non-event.

Ha ha ho ho. Before you fall of your creaky bed in comic splendour, let’s move on to the main ‘coarse’ in this pickled over-spiced thaali in a hotel that’s probably named Romp Teri Giggle Maili..

The two guys, Sammir Dattani and Shaad Randhawa grimace and giggle, roll their eyes and suck in their cheeks to indicate lies buried too deep for jeers.

Add two girls (Chabria and Sikandar) trying so hard to be glamorous it’s pathetic, and you get a brew that’s more eek than greek.

The characterizations take the cult of one-upmanship down to the level of a nukkad nautanki, what with every actor getting lost in the confusion of their mistaken identities.

In no time at all, the plot suffers from an identity crisis.

Director Shashi Ranjan who earlier made us laugh with his supposedly serious study of marital stress in Dobara, doesn’t know whether to indulge tongue-in-cheek comedy of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee variety (Ab ke sajan sawan mein aal lagey aisi filmon mein) or just do the out-and-out no -fools-stops comedy of the David Dhawan-Anees Bazmi variety.

Eventually the confusions that dominate the plot overpower every sense of aesthetic decency.

In the end-game where the entire cast runs around an amusement part looking for amusement, the two heroes get into drag to tease laughter out of an audience that’s long since ceased to be entertained or amused and is down to feeling utterly embrassed on behalf of the cast and crew of this weird brew.

In one chase sequence Shaad Randhawa pees copiously on a street of Bangkok.

You get jailed for dirtying the streets of Bangkok. Alas, there are no laws for desecrating the rules of aesthetics in cinema.

Mr White Mr Black

Starring Suniel Shetty, Ashad Warsi
Directed by Deepak Shivdasani
Rating: *

Hours before I saw white-and-all-black I asked a colleague what kind of a review she was going to give the film. “I’m not going waste any space on this one,” she retorted.

Frankly even for a diehard movie buff like yours truly sticking through this piece of risible rap (give or take a ‘c’) was an ordeal akin to a visit to the dentist.

No, I take that back. I any day prefer molar surgery to watching white black and red-faced farces.

First the positive comments.

Suniel Shetty as the boor from Hoshiarpur chasing poor Arshad Warsi all over Goa in the effort to bring him back to the village for a barren stretch of land, safeguarding a spoilt heiress from debauchery is obviously inspired by Akshay Kumar in Sabse Bada Khiladi.

Suniel does the innocent-abroad act with a warmth and compassion that this project doesn’t deserve.

The land of the bland stretches from the first frame to the last. The first-half does have a few funny moments, like Suniel’s dhoti being pulled off by a dour doggie (ha ha) and a roguish Warsi hoodwinking an innocent Goa ki gori (newcomer Rashmi Nigam) into believing his double is doing all the gadbad (Jewel Thief, anyone?).

The second half is based entirely on a series of improvised gags with the Warsi-Shetty duo trying hard to breathe life into a dead script.

Once director Shivdasani takes the characters to Goa he seems to have gone on a holiday. And he seems to have taken the scriptwriter (if he ever existed) with him. What we are left with is an amateurish clumsy parade of skits masquerading as spurts of satire.

But acute exasperation is all this furiously frigid wannbe-funny-film gets out of us. Tediously structured to echo the manipulative manoeuvres of a monstrously mediocre man of mirth who can’t tell the difference between cheers and jeers Mr White… makes you think only black thoughts about the future of comedy.

Arguably Mr White & Mr Black is the worst comedy to have come out of Mumbai’s dream factory in recent times, lower down on the scale of pale laughter than even the horrendous Rama Rama Kya Hai Drama.

It’s not the quality of performances (Shetty good, Warsi very good, and some of the supporting cast more tolerable than the material allows them to be). It isn’t even the fault of the production values (Thomas Xavier’s cinematography gets Goa going on a ’slight’-seeing spree).

Dammit, so who’s to blame for the roya-all mess of, ha ha, a comedy about a lovable charlatan who poses as a diamond robber and hotel owner and gawd-knows-what-else in this you me and ho-hum laugathon which thinks jokes about skin colour (Ashish Vidyarthi is called koyle ki khan) and humour about a dead mother (Shashikala in a guest appearance) being relived through old Hindi movies could keep the spirit of a modernday satire alive.

Sorry, Mr White and Mr Black is as amusing as a dog peeing on a kashmiri carpet.

Who just urinated on our sense of humour? Could it be the makers of this ghastly travesty of a film?

What was the gifted Sandhya Mridul thinking doing Charlie’s Angels with two chinky chicks who think flying through the air in clumsy f-x scenes is akin to touching paradise?

There are a couple debutante leading ladies hoping to become stars after this film.One of them looks like Preity Zinta on a bad-hair day and Bobby Darling on a good-hair day. And that’s a funnier joke than anything you’ll see.

Oh, I forgot. There IS actually a funny joke in this film. And it’s to do with a hugely gifted comic actor called Jameel Khan who was a laugh riot as a music-contest organizer in Manish Acharya’s Loins Of Punjab Presents.

In White Black and Purple Jameel is reduced to a un-funny non-entity. While everyone else is trying hard to be comic the film’s biggest comicd talent stands apart.

What was Jameel thinking? A a good question for everyone involved except the director.

It’s easy to see he wasn’t thinking at all.

Hope And A Little Sugar Movie Review

Director : Music : Starring :	Tanuja Chandra Rick Baitz, Wayne Sharp Mahima Choudhary, Anupam Kher, Suhasini Mulay.

The introduction of the character central to the theme of the film is feeble. Even after the movie ends, you cannot make sense of why Ali Siddiqui (Amit Sial) had to be introduced in the manner he was. Saloni (Mahima Chaudhary) mistakes him for one Sukhbir, and after some brief talking of how he looks different without his turban and beard, she invites him over to her house for a party the next day. Of course, Ali is not Sukhbir but he is smitten by her beauty and asks her where she stays. She says the same place and leaves. He gives chase on a bicycle, collides with a car and lands at the party in the same clothes he was giving chase. So, was the party the day he was invited or the next day?

Also, at the party everyone thinks he is Sukhbir and he continues as Sukhbir for a few days visiting Saloni’s house where she lives with her husband Harry (Vikram Chatwal) and in-laws Colonel Oberoi (Anupam Kher) and Mrs Oberoi (Suhasini Mullay). Not one of them knows that he is not Sukhbir. Strange. Nor do any of us know who this Sukhbir really is! Fiction is stranger than fact!

Anyways to cut the long story short, after a few days, Ali tells Saloni and Harry that he is not Sukhbir to which they both reply that they knew because if he was Sukhbir he would have been drunk by 8pm and Ali does not drink! Phew! Talk of a silly premise to move the film forward. Better was expected from director Tanuja Chandra. Once you shake this irritant off you try and settle to watch what is a decent attempt set in New York, touching on the 9/11 incident which changed the lives of Colonel Oberoi’s family.

Visually, the film is good; acting-wise it stands out but for this one major flaw. Because Ali then ends up wooing Saloni after she loses Harry in the 9/11 attack. In between, there are scenes of how Colonel Oberoi blames Ali calling him a killer because he is a Muslim and how Ali wins him over. You see, even he (Ali) has witnessed the 1992 riots in Bombay as a child.

he introduction of the character central to the theme of the film is feeble. Even after the movie ends, you cannot make sense of why Ali Siddiqui (Amit Sial) had to be introduced in the manner he was. Saloni (Mahima Chaudhary) mistakes him for one Sukhbir, and after some brief talking of how he looks different without his turban and beard, she invites him over to her house for a party the next day. Of course, Ali is not Sukhbir but he is smitten by her beauty and asks her where she stays. She says the same place and leaves. He gives chase on a bicycle, collides with a car and lands at the party in the same clothes he was giving chase. So, was the party the day he was invited or the next day?

Also, at the party everyone thinks he is Sukhbir and he continues as Sukhbir for a few days visiting Saloni’s house where she lives with her husband Harry (Vikram Chatwal) and in-laws Colonel Oberoi (Anupam Kher) and Mrs Oberoi (Suhasini Mullay). Not one of them knows that he is not Sukhbir. Strange. Nor do any of us know who this Sukhbir really is! Fiction is stranger than fact!

Anyways to cut the long story short, after a few days, Ali tells Saloni and Harry that he is not Sukhbir to which they both reply that they knew because if he was Sukhbir he would have been drunk by 8pm and Ali does not drink! Phew! Talk of a silly premise to move the film forward. Better was expected from director Tanuja Chandra. Once you shake this irritant off you try and settle to watch what is a decent attempt set in New York, touching on the 9/11 incident which changed the lives of Colonel Oberoi’s family.

Visually, the film is good; acting-wise it stands out but for this one major flaw. Because Ali then ends up wooing Saloni after she loses Harry in the 9/11 attack. In between, there are scenes of how Colonel Oberoi blames Ali calling him a killer because he is a Muslim and how Ali wins him over. You see, even he (Ali) has witnessed the 1992 riots in Bombay as a child.

Mahima Chaudhary scores in all departments; looks, dialogue, diction and acting. She is first rate as the young wife who has lost her husband and fighting her father-in-law to keep her friendship alive with Ali. Anupam Kher as the father so in love with his son, hoping he will come back some day and finally breaking down when he allows reason to sink in is very convincing. Suhasini Mullay as the wife bearing the brunt of her husband’s ‘lunacy’ and wanting to let Saloni free is believable. Amit Sial does a decent job while Vikram Chatwal gives one the impression that he is still playing his real father’s son even on screen.

PS: A few multiplexes had to strike off the morning show because the print had not reached them. Talk off marketing in times when good movies last a few weeks and small budget ones just a few days! Also, most multiplexes have just two shows. Is Tanuja expecting a lukewarm response to her film?