Sarkar Raj

Cast – Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Tanisha Mukherji, Govind Namdeo, Upendra Limaye, Dilip Prabhawalkar, Sayaji Shinde
Director- Ram Gopal Varma
Rating-**1/2

Looks like Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘one of a kind’ cinematic sensibilities have flown out of the window. ‘Sarkar Raj’ is laden with star power and some good characterizations, yet it’s not impressive enough.

‘Sarkar’ was a landmark film of the year 2005. But the sequel can hardly be considered an apt follow-up. Maybe making the sequel wasn’t a very great idea after all (is that why creatively crazy Ramu has been telling the world that the film’s not a sequel?).

Now no one’s yet doubting his capabilities as a filmmaker though! He was an avant-garde filmmaker of his times with movies like ‘Satya’ and ‘Company’ to his credit!

Untill creative diarrhea happened to him and he decided to churn out stuff like ‘Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag’ and ‘Shiva.’

‘Sarkar Raj’ takes off where the earlier movie ended and has similar half lit settings (which becomes irritating after a point)!

Shubhash Nagre (Amitabh Bachchan)’s power regime in Maharashtra has happily continued. His Bal Thackrey inspired ‘father of Maharasthra’ character has come to terms with the death of his elder son (Kay Kay in the earlier film) and is satisfactorily doing his duties towards the people.

Abhishek’s Shankar Nagre has aptly taken over his father’s mantle (as shown towards the end of the earlier film) and is married to the homely Avanatika (Tanisha).

The family rules the hearts of happily citizens.

Until Aishwarya Rai’s power woman character enters! She is Anita Rajan whose multinational company is looking at building a huge power project which would cover some rural areas of Maharashtra.

The problem is that the project would make a million families in the surrounding villages homeless. That leaves the ground open for the start of a struggle for supremacy between the Nagre family, the various power brokers and political pawns.

The actual condition of people and the environment in Mumbai and Maharashtra’s villages has been explored well in the story and a whole lot of things appear very very authentic!

Wish Ramu hadn’t loaded the story with unrealistic things like the abrupt beginning to the Abhi Ash dosti. Just after the first meeting, Abhi is mighty impressed by Ash’s project and Ash of course. So much so that she joins him as he tours a dozen villages of Maharashtra.

Looks like Ramu was seriously trying to cash in on the miya biwi real life pyaar.

Also unrealistic are the murders happening left, right and center. Wonder what happened to the law of the land!

In the Godfather, The Corleones were a mafia family, so the bloodshed was kind of justified. But for God’s sake, this is a political family based in the heart of Mumbai!

The way the wife gets killed by the car bomb (which was meant to be for the hubby) again reminds one of the ‘The Godfather’ effect!

Amitabh Bachchan yet again delivers a flawless performance and Ramu quite literally gets what he expects from an actor like him. Abhishek essays the Shankar part pretty well, as well as in the previous film.

Their chemistry of the father–son jodi is heartwarming and excellent.

Same can’t be said of the Abhi-Ash chemistry though, which comes across as superficial. Ash looks the sophisticated corporate women’s part and her beauty shines through here, too.

Only the characters looks jumbled up as from a steely foreign bred business woman, she turns into a big sympathizer and ‘too close a friend’ of the Nagre family. As a whole, she doesn’t really come across as a strong character (the way it was portrayed in the media by Mr. Varma!)

Tanisha looks the Maharashtrian wife’s part but as guessed by many she has very little to do. Supriya Pathak is amiable as in the earlier film. Rukhsar (the elder bahu)’s and her little son’s characters just get mentioned here. But the mention of their names very well leave the option for another sequel open!

There is a gamut of good character roles written in the film and the character actors from Upendra Limaye (Vora), Dilip Prabhawalkar (Rao Sahab) to Bala (Sumeet Nijhawan), Sayaji Shinde (Karunesh Kaanga) and the Raj Thackrey kind of character stand out. They make the otherwise confusing proceedings quite interesting.

The entire premise of the movie is mighty dark and depressing and there’s a hell lot of violence happening around. If you’re a fan of feel good movies, this ain’t your cup of tea.

The cinematography (by Amit Roy) is again Ramuish (you can almost categorize it as that, after all these years, especially post ‘Sarkar’) but there are a lot of haphazard and out of focus shots (must be all for the sake of Ramu’s ‘over’ creativity).

The music doesn’t have a great role in a film like this one, so that way, it’s alright. They try to cash in on the ‘Govinda Govinda’ track here too. Though the effect isn’t the same this time around! The background score is decent (and almost similar to the earlier film).

If you are a huge fan of the Bachchans and intricacies of a political power struggle interests you, this movie sure is a one time watch!

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.