Movies to look out for this week

Love Aaj Kal [IMDB]


Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone, Rishi Kapoor, Rahul Khanna

Direction: Imtiaz Ali




Red Cliff [IMDB]


Cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Wei Zhao

Direction: John Woo Read More!

Night At The Museum : Battle of The Smithsonian

If it were not for Kahmunrah, the crazy lisping Egyptian pharaoh, Night at The Museum : The Battle of The Smithsonian would be a killer movie – it would bore us all to death !!

The second edition of Night at the Museum features Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) and all his old pals – Jedediah (Owen Wilson), Octavius, Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), the monkey etc. And some new characters – the aforementioned Kahmunrah, Ivan the Terrible, Napolean Bonaparte, Al Capone, General Custer, Amelia Earhart & Abraham Lincoln. If it seems like a who’s who from history – its exactly that, and nothing more.

The plot – well there is not much of it – is that Larry Daley has moved on in life and not much in touch with his museum buddies, till one day when he finds out that they are being shipped off to the Federal Archives in the Smithsonian and being replaced by 3D holographic thingies. However, the tablet also goes with them and they awaken some not-so-nice historical characters and so begins a grand good-vs-evil battle utilizing all of Smithsonian museum exhibits. And I didn’t mean it in any good way

You’d think having all great historical characters come back to life would be quite amusing – however they are as boring and one-dimensional as possible ! The acts are very insipid, with not an ounce of creativity. Particularly irritating is Amelia Earhart, played by Amy Adams. Too much time is given to her and her romance with Larry – it almost squeezes out life from this movie. From time to time, oxygen is administered in form of Kahmunrah, who is the only genuinely funny guy in the entire movie (and gets this movie an extra 0.5 stars). However with an average of one joke every half an hour, this movie is never quite recovers from its weaknesses.

Performances are again nothing much to write about. Ben Stiller does the slightly-bemused/befuddled look very easily and doesn’t look like he is trying hard at all. All the others hardly have any worthwhile screentime. Owen Wilson has nothing else to do apart from being trapped in a hourglass by Kahmunrah.

Unless you want to be half bored to death, avoid Night at The Museum 2. Catch all of five jokes on youtube if you want, but do not pay to fall asleep in the cinema.


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Sankat City

Although you might not have heard about it at all, Sankat city is a delightful surprise. First time director Pankaj Advani delivers a very enjoyable two hours – on what must have been a very tight budget. The cost cutting is visible in the opening scenes, where the Chunkey Pandey scenes look quite … handycam-ish. But the distraction is not for long and you soon adjust to the cinematography. The opening credits of the movie themselves look very 70s-ish, a-la Johnny Gaddar.

In a movie such as this, its is best not to talk about the story-line. Lets talk about the nuts instead.

• Faujdar bhai – Bhai-cum-money lender. Devoted follower of Swamiji. Uses a pair of dice to decide how many days to grant to a defaulting borrower and has a hitman named Lovely.
• Swamiji – Compulsive carnivore without too much spirituality and a liking of hot tub baths
• Gogi – Film director who is ready to hang up his boots and open a film studio out of the city. And to make his last film a hit, he wants to kill off his flop hero on the movie sets itself.
• Lingam – Gogi’s assistant director. Devoted to his boss, but has only one wish – Aishwarya Rai must come for the studio opening, minus Abhishek
• Paschisia – Builder. Owes Faujdar bhai 2 crores and is about to default. Loves popcorn and the ladies, but stomach is a problem
• Guru – Small time car thief. Along with his senile chacha Ganpat, runs a well oiled carjacking business.
• Mona – street-smart con artist who doesn’t mind using her feminine charms to lure the likes of Paschisia. But cant stop spouting Bengali
• Philip Phattu – Faujdar’s driver and Mona's erstwhile partner-in-crime. Apropos to his name, doesn’t have any cojones at all. Dreams of marrying a prostitute
• Suleiman Supari – hitman without any scruples, with a liking of shiny gold shirt buttons

If some of the characters appear familiar to you, it is because such madcap gangster movies have recently started appearing with regularity. The closest I can come to describing Sankat City is as a sort of mixture of 99 and Ek Chalis Ki Last Local. While the story appears madcap, the entire flow is very seamless and the situations are genuinely laugh out loud. And the entire madness resolves neatly at the end.

Performance is top notch all across – Chunkey Pandey is probably the only weak link, but he hardly has a role. Biggest surprise was Rimi Sen – her acting was much better than I remember. Kay Kay Menon plays a lighter role with aplomb and Lingam, Ganpat etc are a hoot.

Its still playing a couple of shows at most multiplexes and given the state of this week’s releases (Luck & Night at The Museum 2), you are better off catching this gangster caper.


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Movies to look out for this week

Luck [IMDB]


Cast: Imran Khan, Shruthi Haasan, Mithun Chakraborty, Ravi Kissen, Sanjay Dutt

Direction: Soham Shah



Night At The Museum : Battle of the Smithsonian [IMDB]


Cast: Ben Stiller

Direction: Shawn Levy




Perfect Mismatch [IMDB]


Cast: Anupam Kher, Boman Irani, Nandana Sen

Direction: Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad
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Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince

After numerous helpful suggestions and mentions in previous posts, the missus finally makes her official debut on the blog ...


Harry Potter & the Half Blood Prince happens to be my favorite book of the series and I just had to catch this movie on the first day. And was I disappointed or what! I still can’t believe how the scriptwriters managed to screw up the plot when they had one of the best-selling books ever as the basis for the screenplay! Really, there’s only so much that great cinematography and good acting can do for a movie. What’s really important is the story and when you screw that up there’s nothing much you can do.

I knew before I went to watch it, that the movie deviated quite a bit from the book, but I was still not prepared for what they had actually done. In all the Harry Potter movies some parts from the book are cut and granted that the film makers have the creative liberty to alter certain things. But that is not why this movie is bad. Its because they somehow managed to take a really engrossing tale and make it BORING and POINTLESS!

Coming to the actual story in the movie, you know something is wrong when in the first scene itself as Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is sitting thinking about the dark terror being spread by Lord Voldemort’s supporters and he sees a pretty waitress and decides to ask her out! In an attempt to make the characters seem real and human (ok, as human as wizards can get), the film makers just lost it completely.

It seemed like everything that was important to take the main story forward, like Harry’s increasing involvement with the Half Blood Prince’s book and his insight into Voldemort’s early life, were all just secondary happenstance to the several budding romances between the teenage protagonists. The Ron-Lavender love story is funny for a while but it takes just much too unwanted space in the movie. And even Prof. Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) seemed to be more interested in discussing Harry’s love interests rather than Lord Voldemort with Harry. They miss out so many crucial points that you can’t figure out what’s happening if you haven’t read the book. Around me I could constantly hear those who had read the book whispering to their companions what was happening.

The pace does improve somewhat in the second half, and the scene in the dark cave when Harry & Dumbledore retrieve one of the “Horcruxes” is especially riveting and the highpoint of the movie. And just when I started thinking “finally something is happening”, the movie just ended in the next 5 minutes with what is arguably the most anti-climatic finishes ever!! I still can’t believe how big a letdown the ending was!

Performance-wise all the actors are competent, with Daniel Radcliffe putting in his best performance so far. And Helena Carter appears in a great cameo as Bellatrix Lestrange (btw she has done a similar scary & weird role before in Sweeney Todd). The Harry Potter movies usually have brilliant special effects and picturization and this installment is also not lacking in that aspect. But like I said before they are not enough to redeem the movie.

If you aren’t a Harry potter fan, stay as far away as possible from this movie because you’ll just come out confused and bored. If you are in the mood for some teenage high school romance, you are better off watching High School Musical or reading Archies Double Digest. And if you have read the books and are a Harry Potter fan like me, I guess you will want to watch it irrespective of what the reviews say, so go ahead, but you have been warned - There’s no magic in this movie, dark or otherwise.


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Movies to look out for this week

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince [IMDB]


Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Direction: David Yates




Jashnn

Cast: Adhyayan Suman, Anjana Sukhani, Shahana Goswami

Direction: Raksha Mistry, Hasnain S Hyderabadwala




Dekh Bhai Dekh


Cast: Siddharth Koirala, Gracy Singh, Raghuveer Yadav, Vijay Raaz

Direction: Rahat Kazmi





The Brothers Bloom [IMDB]

Cast: Adrian Brody, Rachael Weisz, Mark Ruffalo

Direction: Rian Johnson
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The Proposal

If you ask me, what was the one scene that stood out a couple of days after watching ‘The Proposal’, I honestly cant pick up anything. Ok, maybe the beautiful Alaskan landscape, but that’s it. Its not a bad movie at all – it is a feel-good happy movie shot in beautiful locales – but you come out of the theatre thinking “Hey, haven’t we seen all this before?”

Plot-wise, it’s a combination of Devil Wears Prada and fake-marriage-couple-falling-in-love. Sandra Bullock stars as Margaret Tate, the terrorizing boss who has employees trembling at the sound of her footsteps and Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds) is her meek secretary/servant. Trouble erupts when she is informed that her visa application wasn’t processed in time and she is going to be deported back to Canada. She has the immediate solution – marry Andrew to get fiancé visa. And to make the marriage appear legit, she travels with him to his Gradma’s 90th birthday celebrations in Alaska. Where all the fun begins.

While the broader storyline is predictable, there are enough little surprises in the script so that you don’t get bored. The chemistry between Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds is terrific and I was especially impressed with Ryan Reynolds’ performance – he has got a great comic touch. And I have to mention the adorable little white dog as well – he is … well ... adorable !!

So that’s it – a happy romantic comedy to watch if you are in the mood for one ..


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Ice Age : Dawn of The Dinosaurs

Can’t help but compare the two – actually three - sequels running at your nearest multiplex. While both Terminator : Salvation and Transformers : Revenge of The Fallen have completely lost their bearings, Ice Age : Dawn of The Dinosaurs remains firmly grounded in its origins and delivers yet another really enjoyable experience at the theatre.

The plot is like this – Manny & Ellie have settled down and are expecting a baby mammoth. Diego is feeling out of shape as he can no longer chase down gazelles – he is considering quitting the herd. Sid is feeling left out with all this and he wants a family of his own too. Since he is hardly the perfect mating material, he does the next best thing - he finds three largish eggs in a cave and adopts them as his own.

Only, they hatch into baby dinosaurs !! And very soon an angry momma dinosaur emerges from a hole in the ground to take her three kids back into their world below. And she takes the hapless Sid with her as well. (The existence of the dinosaurs is explained by a Jurassic Park under the ice sheet - somewhat like Journey to The Center of The Earth).

Filled with uncharitable thoughts about Sid, the rest of the team – Manny, Ellie, Diego and the possums follow Sid’s trail to the dinosaur world to try and rescue him …
There are two new characters introduced in the movie – Scratte, a female flying squirrel who more than flutters her eyelashes at Scrat. The other is Buck, a one eyed swashbuckler of a weasel, who navigates the subterranean with aplomb while sounding like Captain Jack Sparrow. And it’s Buck that is the difference between a middling Ice Age 2 and a terrific Ice Age 3.

The movie is a delightful storehouse of gags and laugh-out-loud moments. They even manage to spoof one of the most cliché Hollywood sequences !! Animation quality is amazing and one has to wonder at these wizards of animation – they manage to make T-rex babies look cute and cuddly !!! I didn’t manage to watch the 3D version but I am sure it would enhance the viewing experience even more.

There are a few tacky sequences like Ellie going into labor in the middle of a fight etc, but even those are handled well enough not to distract you from the fun. The verdict is a definite thumbs up for Ice Age 3. Now bring on Ice Age 4 !!


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Transformers : Revenge of The Fallen

Take a hot chica Megan Fox and clothe her in really sexy clothes – and make her work on engines all day and a biker babe as well. So when she seductively says ‘camshaft’, the men just cant stop drooling over her. Then take a few giant robots and make them fight – with lot of slow-motion jumps and rollovers. And then fill in the gaps with explosions !! Big ones, even bigger ones and then some really big ones. Tadah – movie complete !!

Ok, I might have exaggerated a little, but Transformers : Revenge of The Fallen really feels like a script written by an 8-year-old. While movies without good scripts are dime-a-dozen, what sets this sequel apart is the singular disregard of everything that was right in the first Transformers movie. The transformers – neither the autobots nor the decepticons - are given any time for character development. The reason we were rooting for the autobots in the first Transformers movie was because each of them appeared to have a human soul – there werent just robotic machines. This time around, Michael Bay doesn’t give us any time to distinguish between the good and bad guys – its just fight on.

Valuable screen time, is instead wasted on the Sam (Shia LeBouf) and Mikaela (Megan Fox) love story – does it make ANY difference who says ‘I love you’ first in a relationship ?? There were too much time spent on the emotional relationship things – Sam and his parents, Sam and Mikaela and even Sam and Optimus Prime !! If only some of this time had been spent on the transformers or even smoothing out the jerky script ..

(And the ones who did get some screen time were the two stupid Mexican small bots who were almost completely irrelevant !!)

Even with allowance for plot holes (e.g. notice the security of the high-security facility, or the lack of self-safety instincts of the submarine crew), the scriptwriting cannot be condoned. Having no flow whatsoever, the movie seems almost episodic. There is no continuity between scenes, neither is there any time or device to allow intensity to build up before any big sequence. Consequently your involvement in the movie just doesn’t happen.

But aren’t the Transformer movies all about cool fight sequences between huge robots ? Yes, they are supposed to be – but even that isn’t a redeeming factor in this movie. First of all, there are just too many explosions in the movie. With director Michael Bay, huge onscreen explosions are a given – so lets not crib about that too much. But because of this explosions fascination, the transformers seem to prefer fighting firepower to a slugfest. So you don’t actually get to see too many hand-to-hand combats so to speak.

The second reason why even the slugfests aren’t impressive is that because so little time has been spent distinguishing the good bots from the bad bots, that its impossible to make out who is fighting whom. And because all the fights are captured in the same slow motion way, the fights appear a bit repetitive after sometime.
Not all is gloom and doom though – the franchise throws up a new tiny robot who is very amusing as well as an old surprise – Agent Simmons. He produces most of the laughs of the movie - though the roommate Leo is a waste. And some of the fight sequences with Optimus Prime are still a killer

This movie could easily have been as good as the first one – only if they had tweaked the script a little to introduce some flow – and done some character development for the autobots. In its current form, it’s not an recommened movie.


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Movies to look out for this week

Transformers : Revenge of The Fallen [IMDB]


Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox

Direction: Michael Bay




Short Kut [IMDB]


Cast: Arshad Warsi, Akshaye Khanna, Amrita Rao

Direction: Neeraj Vora




The Proposal [IMDB]


Cast: Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds

Direction: Anne Fletcher




Morning Walk


Cast: Anupam Kher, Sharmila Tagore, Rajat Kapoor, Divya Dutta, Avika Gor

Direction: Arup Dutta




Sankat City [IMDB]


Cast: Anupam Kher, Kay Kay Menon, Rimi Sen, Rahul Dev

Direction: Pankaj Advani
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Terminator Salvation

The first Terminator movie without Arnold Schwarzenegger. How will it be – especially since the last one with Arnold was pretty terrible ?

Well, Terminator Salvation manages to uphold the tradition of the third millennium Terminator movies – it is a disaster too (the first two good ones were made on the other side of 2000). If you want to cherish your memories of the ubercool Terminator, then better buy/rent/download T2-Judgement Day and watch it again. While Terminator 3 : Rise of The Machines might have somewhat sullied your Terminator memories, Terminator Salvation will change them forever.

That is because, unlike the first three movies which had our present day timeline and Terminators were sent back in time, Terminator Salvation is set in 2018, in a post apocalyptic world - after Judgement Day (where Skynet precipitates a nuclear holocaust and wipes out the majority of humanity). Some of the survivors organize themselves as The Resistance and fight Skynet – but Skynet unleashes an army of terminators to hunt and kill humans. Yes there are scores of different terminators, flying/swimming/motorcycle-like etc. And they all are very vicious, but they behave exactly like the dumb inanimate robots that they are – totally devoid of any character.

Terminator Salvation has Christian Bale playing John Connor – not the leader of the resistance yet, but revered by most of the Resistance as the guy who knows the future. Bale brings his enormous talent into play and his reading of John Connor is spot on – he looks like a man who knows that on his decisions depends the fate of mankind. However this very mood also makes the character very dry and devoid of charisma – making it difficult for the audience to connect with him,.The surprise package of the movie is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington). A new character, he is an unknown entity at the beginning of the movie – though by the end of the movie, he has had slightly more screentime than John Connor himself. Acting overall, is good all round.

The setting of the movie is the first thing that probably puts your off the movie. As you can imagine the world after a nuclear holocaust, its dry, dreary and completely devoid of life. Cities are in ruins and human survivors behave more like rats – hiding under the ground and scrapping around for food. And ofcourse, they have to evade the terminators who are programmed to kill any humans sighted.

The biggest disappointment was the terminators themselves. While they are bigger and badder – some of them are huge machines which resemble the transformers while others are flying Hunter’n’Killer units, there is just no wow factor in any of the battle scenes with these machines. The CGI is good, but there is just no involvement !

The plot isn’t much either. After giving us a good idea of what post-apocalypse life will be like, it tries to align itself with the Terminator franchise by focussing on the young Kyle Reese (the guy who fights the Terminator in T1). And tragically, it hinges everything on the last climax battle between the humans and the Terminators/Skynet. But that fails to excite us too. The ONLY time the audience was on its feet hooting was when the T900 Terminator is revealed – a CGI mockup of Schwarzenegger. It sort of shows what the movie lacked …

The problem with Terminator Salvation is that it’s a pretty ok post-apocalypse movie. It just isn’t a good Terminator movie …


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Movies to look out for this week

Kambakkht Ishq [IMDB]

Cast: Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor

Direction: Sabir Khan






Ice Age : Dawn of the Dinosaurs [IMDB]

Cast: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Dennis Leary

Direction: Carlos Saldanha, Mike Thurmeier Read More!

New York

After reading/hearing decidedly mixed reviews about New York, my curiosity got the better of me and I watched it last night. (The other option was the preview show of Kambakkht Ishq – thank god didn’t go for that. Looks like its an unmitigated disaster)

Going by our post-movie discussion (me and wife’s), this is surely not the final word on New York. Our usually convergent views were decidedly not so – wifey insisting it wasn’t a bad movie and I couldn’t find a more pithy description than ‘crap movie’. And now that you know my views about the movie, I will try to explain why I think the movie is not worth your time.

Let me list out the positive points of the movie first – it has three really good looking actors. Although Neil Nitin Mukesh comes across as rather pansy-looking compared to John Abraham in his rippling muscles, overall they make a very pretty trio. Much better looking than .. Dostana for example (Neil Nitin vs. Abhishek Bachhan is not even a contest and Katrina can more than match Priyanka Chopra)
The other positive is the depiction of the torture scenes – the sequence is very well shot and seems extremely realistic. It really involves you as a viewer, showing the claustrophobic dimensions of the cell – the crouching position that you are forced into …

And … well … er … that’s all the positives I can count for this movie. To be fair, the leading actors John and Neil exceeded my expectations in the acting department, but then my expectations were set a little low because some people had already criticized their performance in the movie. On absolute terms, none of the acting was stellar.

If you are wondering if I forgot Irfan Khan, I havent – I just don’t think his performance was laudable. The stoic police inspector role has become routine from him. While the Slumdog Millionaire role might be fresh in memory, if you think back a little, there was A Mighty Heart and then there was Rog. I am sure there were a couple of other movies where he plays a similar role too. Simply put, it was a humdrum performance. And it was made worse by his character, a typical Asian cop who is sent in to play the good cop while the firang officer plays the bad cop. His views about America’s high handedness on its Muslim citizens were also something that I couldn’t digest ..

Since we are on the topic of negatives, lets list some more. The plot had huge holes in it – if the FBI knows so-and-so is running a terrorist sleeper cell and is about to commit some terrorist activity, why not arrest him ?? Not detain, just legally arrest him !! They didn’t exactly hesitate to throw so many people illegally into Guantanamo, did they ? And if you are a terrorist who sole reason of existence is vengeance, why not explode the bomb when you are surrounded by the cops ?? Then there is Maya angle of keeping quiet even after knowing everything … things just wouldn’t make any sense to any logical person !!

The movie begins in New York State University in 1999, when a fresh faced Omar (Neil Nitin) has just arrived from Delhi after winning a scholarship. His first contact and then deep friendship begins with Maya (Katrina Kaif) and then Sam (John Abraham). Omar is the shy-silent type who has a major crush on Maya, unaware that she likes Sam. His heartbreak coincides with 9/11 and Omar withdraws from their life. Only to be rudely pushed back into Sam and Maya’s life 7 years later, because the FBI suspects that Sam might be a terrorist.

The entire sequence of Omar agreeing to be FBI’s undercover agent was unconvincing at best. The college sequence is the okay part of the movie – but then the second half just doesn’t cut it. There are just too many plot holes and allowances to be made. If you remember Kabir Khan’s first effort Kabul Express, it had a good idea at the core, but the implementation wasn’t tight. The movie was about a relevant topic, shot in authentic locations, but wasn’t gritty enough to be the real thing – it was too much of ‘bollywood film’. Similar is the failing with New York. It tries a serious contemporary topic, but cant manage to keep it realistic.

Throughout the movie, I kept on waiting for something in the movie, some sequence which would redeem it. After all, some people had liked the movie and there must be something that’s good about. But I kept on watching and the movie ended … and if anything, the end was more infuriating. In his bid to make a political statement about Islam and America in the end, director Kabir Khan strikes a unconvincing peace between Omar & Roshan (Irfan Khan). But if you take a minute to think about the relations between Omar, Sam and Maya after watching the movie, the idea of peace with Roshan seems downright ridiculous to me !! And can someone please explain why John Abraham and Katrina Kaif’s kid is a 100% firang ?

I guess this has become more of a rant than a review – but then all movies do not agitate me so. Not worth your money at the theatre. Wait for it to come on TV


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