Bumm Bumm Bole

Majid Majidi’s Children Of Heaven comes down to earth in an endearing spiral of the spellbinding and the sensitive.

Let’s not get unnecessarily and unjustly nostalgic about the original Iranian film. This remake, done up in shades of terrorism in the idyllic North-east (region unspecified) is so lyrically lush in its visuals and so gently evocative in treatment that the original material is forgotten ten minutes into the narrative.

A great deal of the credit for the film’s immense intense but toned-down impact must go to the children, Darsheel Safary no longer the pouty buck-teethed moppet from Taare Zameen Par, and little Ziyah Vastani who’s quite easily the most delightful new discovery of the year.

Ziyah in fact steals many scenes from under her brilliant co-star’s nose. If he minds it, he doesn’t show it.

Darsheel and little Ziyah create an intangible and secret world of hushed wonderment and discovery that takes the narrative far beyond the precincts of the original fable about an impoverished pair of siblings’s desperate but disarming attempt to share a pair of shoes.

Yup, Bumm Bumm Bole is quite a ‘shoe’ stopper. The fable is expanded to accommodate a world filled with pain pleasure and other emotions that emerge in the journey from innocence to awareness.

Unlike Vishal Bhardwaj’s The Blue Umbrella or Majid Majidi’s Children Of Heaven, Bumm Bumm…. doesn’t try to be wise at the children’s expense.

Frequently you feel Priyadarshan allowed the children to instinctively empathize with if not fully understand the political complications underlining the social issues of poverty and socio-communal solidarity in times of stress and longing.

Unlike other recent parables on children, innocence and violence set in idyllic sports like Santosh Sivan’s Tahaan and Piyush Jha’s Sikandar, Bumm Bumm Bole doesn’t forget to be an entertaining story.

Priyadrashan, fresh from the triumph of his other socially relevant drama Kanchivaram imbues the pale but passionate dusky light of the mountainous locales with oodles of warmth and emotion.

The kids don’t take over the show. They just slip into the proceedings like two scoops of icecream into a ready steady cone. Darsheel shows a definite and reassuring progress as an actor since his debut.

His rapport with his screen –sister jumps out of the screen and pervades our senses unconditionally. You just want to steal little Ziyah from the screen and take her home.

The two kids are amazingly good. The ever-dependable Atul Kulkarni puts in a supremely credible turn as the harried father who doesn’t forget to smile when the kids are around.

Like other fabulous or farcical creations by Priyadarshan, this one too is shot on picture-postcard locations with the cinematographer (Selvi) and the art director (Sabu Cyril) adding that extra bit of lyricism to every frame without showing off.

Bumm Bumm Bole is a gentle but persuasive piece of work, not just for children though certainly about children who learn fast about the harsh realities of life.

The film follows their trail without getting bitter cynical or hysterical. The constantly even tone is a boon. The kids are a blessing. This film is a soft-spoken and delicate piece of cinema. Not to be missed.

IRON MAN-2

He may be out of the closet as a superhero and cheered around the world as a peacekeeper, but in Iron Man 2, former weapons mogul Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) can still be a cocky SOB. The man with a battery where his heart ought to be is restless, driven, glib, grandiose — which is to say, the billionaire industrialist still exhibits all the self-absorbed, antiheroic qualities with which Downey first delighted us in the role two years ago. So if this sequel doesn't glow with the same charm as the original, and if Iron Man's face-offs against evil lack edge, the diminished satisfaction has less to do with the quality of the star's trademark catch-me-if-you-can energy than it does with a performance anxiety that now pervades the whole shebang.

Are returning director Jon Favreau and the Marvel Studios producing team buckling under pressure to give the people more of what they think the people want, and make it bigger, too? That's the only reason I can think of for the time and money devoted to loud, long, escalating battle scenes, waged among inconsequential war machines (there's nothing duller) that are themselves merely the products of CG artists — undifferentiated action sequences that stall long stretches of the story and threaten to stomp out the quotient of fun. Which is an odd choice, since people who loved the original are exactly the people who don't want clang for clang's sake: We want zingy repartee, we want characters, we want attitude to spice up the further adventures of a superhero still getting used to the demands and perks of the job, and drinking too much under stress. We want what Downey had in mind when he pushed for Justin Theroux to write the screenplay: quick-thinking wit from the hip writer-actor who co-wrote Tropic Thunder.

Naturally, we also want a few juicy bad guys. Here, we're given a choice of villainous types. Mickey Rourke goes for Slavic-psycho stylings as a grimy Russki creep named Ivan Vanko who's been nursing a long-festering complaint against Stark's late dad (John Slattery, in a nice touch, is seen in '60s-style film-reel flashback living the Mad Men life). In a contrasting star turn of virtuoso smarm, enhanced by the telling detail of self-tanning dye stuck to his palms, Sam Rockwell struts and preens as arms manufacturer Justin Hammer, always ready to cut a corner to fill a military contract.

For a change, we're given a choice of pertinent dames, too, as Stark interacts with two very different female employees. His loyal, spunky former assistant, Pepper Potts (reprised by radiant, ponytailed Gwyneth Paltrow, bright as a penny), has been promoted to CEO of his company, allowing the boss to go all hound-dog around her curvy, purring (and, as it turns out, secretly busy) replacement, Natasha, played in full come-hither mode by Scarlett Johansson. (Natasha, you may have heard, reveals her true identity soon enough, and does a passable superheroine martial-arts crouch in a skintight bodysuit.)

The Iron Man 2 story expands from a lot to a whole lot. Along the way, Stark becomes obsessed with reviving his father's plans for a showcase for the humanitarian uses of cutting-edge technology. Stark broods (as only a Downey character can) over the progressive corrosion of his substitute heart. And there's a dispensable detour involving Stark's military buddy, Rhodey (played by Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard in a thankless role).

With all that heavy payload, Iron Man 2 begins to burst at its own galvanized seams as the Marvel instinct for faceless warfare among comic-book characters bangs up against the Downey-Favreau-Theroux instinct for goofitude. (Qualifying as goofy, comedian Garry Shandling plays a U.S. senator, Bill O'Reilly plays himself, and at one point Iron Man, resting curled within the curve of a famous Southern California food-sculpture landmark, is told, ''Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to exit the doughnut.'') Downey's head and heart are in the right place, but the movie is more in pieces than whole, and more about iron than about men.

Kuchh Kariye

First thing that immediately comes to your mind after watching popular singer Sukhwinder Singh deliver his first scene as an actor in this acting debut film of his is that acting is just not his cup of tea and the film ahead is going to be one helluva torture ride having to bear him as the main lead of the film.

Rishi (Sukhwinder Singh), a simple and honest musician in love with Alpna (Shreya), who is forced by the people of his city to leave his home town and move to Mumbai.

Here he meets two other boys Javed Khan (Vikrum Kumar) and Shani (Rufy Khan) who have also come to Mumbai in search of their destiny and fortune. Together, they realise, that all of them share same passion for films. They are also an idealistic lot and want to bring a change in the society.

They believe that a positive thought can change the course of life. If one is able to rise above the personal selfish needs, one can bring a change is what they believe in. With stroke of luck, they do begin their film. They meet Roza (Khuahhish) and Pappu Halva (Mustaque Khan) and with her support their plans start falling in place.

However, destiny has planned something else. There is terror and loss. Rishi is overcome with grief and disillusion. Will he choose the right path? Will Rishi and his friends manage to achieve their goal?

Will Rishi be able to change the thinking of law and outlaws? Does disillusion wait for Rishi at the end of the journey? You get all your answers if you manage to stay awake till the climax.

Debutante director Jagbir Dahiya’s Kuchh Kariye tries hard to deal with the current socio political scenario and tries to incorporate certain contemporary and relevant issues.

But despite such good intentions the film falls flat on its face mainly due to its amateurish direction, unintentionally hilarious acting by its main lead Sukhwinder Singh and a confusing script that keeps jumping genres.

It keeps going off tangent in various directions and then suddenly comes together for what plot it began with. What further irritates is the shoddy treatment. Production values are poor and none of the technical departments impress.

Sukhwinder Singh should understand he is no Salman Khan by going shirtless many times! We wish to advice him to stick to singing which he is very good at and don’t ever try acting again. Shriya is good though especially in emotional scenes. Rest all are competing with each other as to who shall irritate you the most!

For a film with one of country’s best singer as its main lead, the music should have been good atleast but well that one area alls bags a big zero!

Kuchh Kariya is apt for you if you are seeking solace and want to have a good nap in the cool comforts of an AC cinema hall in this sweltering heat

Mother and Child

The hothouse drama Mother and Child is organized like a femme-friendly spa that specializes in treatments for the psyche rather than the skin. Soft New Agey music tinkles intrusively. Sore spots are prodded and massaged. Clients pass one another in the changing room. The ritual is exquisite to some, and excruciating to others.

I'm one of those saying Ouch, stop poking me. That's not to say that Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington aren't lovely playing women who must deal with the life-altering consequences of adoption. Just that the characters in Rodrigo García's movie never rise above being sample clientele. Bening, in a forceful, barefaced performance, is fiftysomething Karen, who, as a teenager, gave an infant daughter up for adoption and has wept ever since, masking her sadness with a sour, spinster veneer. Watts is Elizabeth, an adoptee in her 30s who has turned the loneliness of having never known her own mother into a sexualized hardness she likes to think of as independence. Young, married, and infertile Lucy, played by Washington, longs for a child of her own. Woe, by the way, unto the good, decent men — played by Jimmy Smits, Samuel L. Jackson, and David Ramsey — who cross these women's paths. In the ovarian jungle of Mother and Child, each gent is undervalued in his own way.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money

I don't know about you, but the moment I hear the word lobbyist, my brain glazes over. Casino Jack and the United States of Money woke my brain, and my outrage, right up. The latest documentary from Alex Gibney, who has set the gold standard for muckraking nonfiction in films like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the movie explores how Jack Abramoff, king of the Washington, D.C., lobbyists, built a system of cash for favors into a new-style government machine.

Casino Jack starts off as a fascinating portrait of the college-campus Republicans who came up in the 1980s — men like Abramoff and the clean-cut, fire-breathing Ralph Reed, who saw themselves as radicals out to remake America. And here's the thing: They did. It was the glad-handing, backroom-savvy Abramoff, however, who crossed the line into illegality, inviting a series of eager dupes — Malaysian dictators, Native American casino operators — to funnel millions of dollars to him and his cronies in what was, in effect, a protection racket. In the end, Abramoff went to prison, but the ethos he created didn't go away. Casino Jack is really a look at how the culture of Washington was rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.

Phoonk 2

In one of his multitudinous interviews to promote this intended shiver giver Ram Gopal Varma said the scariest film he had seen in recent times was Karan Johar’s Kabhie Alvida Na Kehna.

Now that’s a scary thought. Because Johar’s film didn’t belong to the horror genre. Phoonk 2 does.And it is definitely NOT the scariest film we’ve seen. Varma’s terror theme has clearly run its course. What we see here are the remanents of another Friday. And definitely not Friday The 13th.

Perched somewhere between crowing (ahem ahem) about the supernatural and crying over the nerve-wracking disruption of domestic harmony by a ghost which just won’t go away Phoonk 2 is like that promised rollercoaster ride which gets aborted in the first lap because of a short circuit.

It’s not really Varma or his director Milind Gadkar’s fault. It’s the nature of the material.

Ram Gopal Varma’s love for horror has never extended beyond the there’s-something-under-the-bed kind of unwarranted foreboding that we all feel in a new environment.

In a majority of his horror films a family moves into a new haunted home and experiences the eerie.

Ironically Varma’s best effort in the horror genre was Kaun where the victim of terror (Urmila Matondkar) was stalked by unseen forces in her own familiar home. The terror, it turned out was not under the bed, but in the mentally disturbed girl’s head.

There wasn’t much terror let alone horror in Phoonk. Under the bed, or in the head.

In Phoonk 2 the characters’ screeching plea to have us believe they are under immediate peril is sadly not communicated to the viewers . We remain tragically detached from the trauma of Kannada star Sudeep’s family.

Haven’t we seen it all?

By now the trademark Varma camera movements, here manoeuvred with emphatic energy by cinematographer Charles Meher, and the intricate cluttured but effective sound design (Jayesh Dhakkan, Jayant Vajpayee) do nothing to suck us into the plot.

The technique remains unfastened to the characters.Their desperate attempts to get away from the supernatural remain desperately detached from the audience.

At the end of the 2-hours into the zone of error-terror we are left wondering why Varma threw open a contest inviting any viewer to undergo an ECG to check his heartbeats.

It is this film that needs a respiratory system. Varma’s last horror outing Agyaat with its spooky ominous wide-open jungles was far more gripping.

In Phoonk 2 you wonder what the fuss is about. These people have nothing to fear except fear itself.

And yes, Ramu was right. The crow does come up with the best performance. And that’s nothing to crow about.

Badmaash Company

There’s a longish sequence in an American eatery in the second-half of this deeply flawed and yet refreshingly cool urbane casual and yet highly cinematic work where Shahid Kapoor’s Karan, by now on the road to seemingly irredeemable moral degeneration is told by his partner, played by newcomer Vir Das, that he wants out.

The way that sequence progresses and the manner in which the two actors play out a conventional friends-falling-apart moment, just makes you forgive all the excesses of inflated self-worth that the script suffers from in the last 90 minutes of this endearing though exasperating experience.

Badmaash Company is a film that is too smart for its own good. The main characters, four friends bonded by the collective will to grow rich overnight, go through a series of caper experiences.

Not all of it is either convincing or even interesting. After a point, we know exactly where this quartet is hurling to. And the slide out of moral degeneration is never touching enough to make us shed a tear for these misguided over-reachers.

The doom comes none too soon, and then the narrative proceeds without a proper graph.

By the time Karan (Shahid Kapoor)’s spunky girl Bulbul (Anushka Sharma) leaves him the script begins to look like one of those subverted morality tales from the house of the Bhatts where the heroes talk with clenched fists and heroines weep in their pillows as their companions come home in a drunken stupor.

We’ve been here before. But wait. There is a sense of intuitive cockiness about the narrative which just sees the film’s improbable mixture of the trendy and the trite (in how many ways will the upright father ask the devil-may-care son to leave home as the mother bites her lips and wrings her hands???) to the final stretch of predictable moral redemption.

There is a sense of the predictable and yet the unpredictable in the storytelling. Debutant director Parmeet Sethi’s screenplay is one of those things that you want to believe merely because it sounds so smart on paper.

But not all of this makes complete or even incomplete sense. The climax about colour-bleeding shirts being sold to America as the Next Best Thing is much too far-fetched to work even as a part of a con caper.

Nonetheless Badmaash Company has a lot going for itself. The first-half when Karan meets Bulbul, Chandu and Chang to create an instantly materialistic energy, gets you interested in these out-of-control lives.

You don’t quite empathize with their overweening goals. But at least they seem to know their minds, even if on occasions the plot doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing.

There’s something pitch-friendly about the four actors and the way they tackle the plot -material which never seems fully sure of itself. It’s sometimes cool sometimes over-reaching itself.

If the film holds together it’s because of the bonafide enthusiasm and unconditional surrender to the proceedings of the actors.

Shahid Kapoor pitches in another perfectly poised and subtle performance even though his character’s graph gets blurred towards the end. You can’t stop caring for Karan’s character because Shahid doesn’t let go of his centre even when the narrative gets shaky.

Anushka Sharma in a stunning makeover conveys her character’s spirit and spunk through her well-toned body language and that twinkle in the eye. Tragically a lot of her speech and morality, and this goes for a lot of film’s careless periodicity, is not 1990s (the film’s setting) at all.

Vir Das as the film buff with a roving eye negotiates his character with gentle care. Here’s one actor who knows what he’s doing even when his character doesn’t. And Meiyang Chang as the chinky-eyed alcohol guzzling Gangtok-guy seems made for his character.

Badmaash Company is an extremely smart and smart-looking film. But its sassy all-knowing tone cannot hide a certain bankruptcy of genuinely inventive ideas. This is a fatally-flawed film about seriously flawed characters. The packaging is glamorous but not over-done. The dialogues convey a ring of truth without bending backwards to be cool.

And though guilty of extravagant flights of fancy (the way our quartet of protagonists plunder the American Dream can only be called wishful thinking) Badmaash Company has enough going for itself to make it an experience worth our while.

And never mind the blind spots. Whoever said life in the movies was meant to be a bed of roses?

Babies

Even in movies, babies tend to have a very special effect — in fact, you might call them God's ultimate special effect. Whenever the face of an infant comes on screen, the coos and giggles and cuddly-sweet ''Awwww!''s from the audience tend to follow right on cue. And so an entire documentary called Babies should, by all rights, be a crowd-pleasing sugar rush of irresistible cute joy. It's to the credit of the film's French director, Thomas Balmès, that this 79-minute trifle, which tracks the budding lives of four wee ones from four dramatically different parts of the world (Japan, Mongolia, Namibia, and the United States), doesn't overdose on adorability. Balmès is a very, very passive documentarian: no narration, no talking heads, and not much editorial decisiveness, either. He just sets up the camera and lets the first year of life unfold, from birth to baby steps. Even the cultural differences aren't rubbed in our faces.

In the earthy, mud-hut village of Opuwo, Namibia, a baby lies around outside, with flies buzzing over him as part of the natural order; the rhythm of life is calm, quiet, anti-eventful. In Tokyo, by contrast, much of what we see happens in groups, with a baby girl bred to feel that she's part of a tightly 
 organized collective. In the hills of Mongolia, just outside Bayanchandmani, the baby we see gets wrapped up like a papoose right in the hospital, and he is often bound thusly; it's restriction as a built-in physical comfort zone, and as a lesson in discipline. The American baby, raised in touchy-feely San Francisco, gets exposed to the most technology (at birth) and also to the most hyperactive coddling. As a result, perhaps, she looks the most touchingly perplexed.

Crying, peeing, grinning, crawling (there's a brief crawling montage — the one such gimmick), the babies in Babies offer moments to cherish. Frankly, though, the film itself is kind of slack. I wish Balmès had found more scenes like the one in which the Japanese baby tries to shove a stick into a toy doughnut, falls on her back in wailing frustration, and then perseveres, and succeeds — it's like watching the dawn of consciousness in two minutes. As the movie goes on, these fleshy little beings turn into…well, people. And that's something to see. But Babies, without falsifying its subject, could have used a more soul-stirring sense of showbiz — that is, a riper display of infantile special effects.

Trash Humper

In Trash Humpers, the latest slovenly, haphazard, is-it-a-travesty-if-it's-bad-on-purpose avant doodle from director Harmony Korine, three figures in rubbery old-age makeup do indeed mimic intercourse with Dumpsters. They also dance, smash television sets, deliver nonsense monologues in redneck accents, cook and eat awful-looking pancakes, and chant the annoying mantra ''Make it, make it! Don't fake it!'' It's no accident that Korine's visual style mimics that of a scratchy old VHS tape. There's a name for the genre he's now working in — it's called glorified public-access TV.

It's A Wonderful Afterlife

Gurinder Chaddha who gave us the wonderful Bend It Like Beckham (2002) seems to have got it all wrong this time. Well at least where humour is concerned. Designed as a black comedy, her latest release It’s Wonderful Afterlife fails to evoke neither any laughter nor any emotions.

The film is about the widowed Mrs Sethi (Azmi) who is worried that her slightly overweight daughter Roopi (Notay) will never find a husband.

Every match Mrs Sethi arranges turns Roopi down, which leads Mrs Sethi to react murderously. She ends up killing them with Indian food. Smothered with naan, fed curry until a stomach explodes, hit with a rolling pin, stabbed with a kebab stick, these four ghosts (Shaheen Khan, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Adlyn Ross and Ash Varrez) come back to Mrs. Sethi to haunt her until she's ready to die.

Now because she won't die until her daughter Roopi gets married, she and the ghosts set out on a matchmaking expedition. Fortunately, Roopi's childhood friend Murthy (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is back in town and hugely eligible.

But unfortunately, he's a detective looking for the ‘Curry killer’. Problems further arise when Roopi’s best friend Linda (Sally Hawkins) comes back in town with a sudden fiance (Jimi Mistri) after a mind-opening stint in an ashram. What it all leads to forms the rest of the plot.

The premise of the film is such that it doesn’t demand to be taken seriously. But with absurdities galore, the film fails to work.

The one liners fall flat and this takes the graph of the film further down. You are expected to laugh at a guy getting killed with his tummy exploding after having being fed too much curry.

Also the problem with the film is it tries to pack in too many things at once with relentless speed. The completely over the top climax is a mega downer as well.

Where it works is in the acting department. With Shabana Azmi (who has specially put on weight for her role) leading the pack followed by Sanjeev Bhaskar.

Sendhil Ramamurthy of Heroes TV series fame has screen presence. Goldy Notay is cute. Sally Hawkins is hilarious in the take off on the famous prom scene from Carrie.

Watch this one if you literally have nothing else to do and are a big Gurinder Chaddha fan or else stay cleer!

In The Good Heart

In The Good Heart, Brian Cox plays a cantankerous cusser who owns a downtown NYC dive bar and a bad ticker. Paul Dano is the suicidal homeless waif-hipster he takes on as a protégé and business heir. The Big Apple of this evanescent tone poem is an invented nocturnal landscape featuring speechifying eccentrics and absurdist moments that feel northern European in sensibility. That may be because Iceland-bred writer-director Dagur Kári shot most of the picture in his homeland, loading a lot of distinctly Nordic seriocomic melancholy onto a study of two characters in a city that never sleeps.

:::::: C h a s e ::::::

t was just last week, with the release of Jagmohan Mundhra’s Apartment we spoke about Bollywood filmmakers destroying the thriller genre by only coming out with blatant rip offs of foreign flicks or non exciting plotlines.

After watching this week’s new release Chase yet another misdirected venture by Mundhra, we wish to plead to the makers that stop murdering this genre! A couple of pathetic twists and sleazy sequences don’t necessarily make a thriller.

Justifying its title, the film begins with a chase. Cops are chasing a terrorist, one Sohail Ansari (Anuuj Saxena). Though they eventually capture him, he gets injured in the proceedings.

He is diagnosed with an illness called locked in syndrome and is sent to a neurological research centre so that he gets cured and spews out the names. An attractive nurse Nupur (Udita Goswami) wants to prove that Sohail is faking his illness and acting.

She therefore tries to wake him up with her strip tease act. She even pushes him into the river which results in Sohail finally waking up. The rest of the film is all about what truth Sohail is carrying about a political murder and how he manages to prove his innocence to everyone.

If Jagmohan Mundhra’s direction is pure bad, the script of the film is plain ridiculous.

Anuuj Saxena’s hard work is noticeable and he succeeds in impressing. One just wishes he gets a good script to justify his talent. Udita Goswami yet again exposes (apart from her body) her limited acting range.

Playing Anuuj’s journalist girlfriend in the film, Tarina Patel’s cleavage gets more scope than her acting prowess. Samir Kochhar and Rajesh Khattar provide adequate support. Gulshan Grover despite getting limited scope leaves his mark.

Shammi Kapoor’s son Aditya Raj Kapoor doesn’t share the acting talent his rest family members have.

None of the technical departments impress much. Vijay Verma’s music too has no recall value. The title song seems to be lifted from BEP’s Pump It.

Chase is one of those utterly forgettable films that keep releasing at regular intervals in Bollywood and are the reason why the flop ratio in the industry is so high. So just don’t even bother to waste your efforts of going to the cinema hall for this one.

Dirty Dancing:Limited Keepsake Edition

Granted, it's only been three short years since a loaded 20th-anniversary edition of the cha-cha coming-of-age classic hit stores, but Dirty Dancing fans — and they are legion — are an obsessive tribe with deep memories and deeper pockets. For them, this even more loaded two-disc box set (in Hello Kitty pink) will be pure Catskills catnip. In addition to a crisp, newly restored print of the film and a chintzy, hard-backed commemorative book, there's more than an hour of new EXTRAS, including a touching tribute to Swayze, whose sweaty, smoldering, swivel-hipped rebel Johnny Castle still comes across as James Dean in snug slacks. Never more so than when he struts up to overprotective dad Jerry Orbach and utters the most quotable line in a film lousy with quotable lines: ''Nobody puts Baby in a corner.'' Nobody, indeed. All in all, a tasty slice of processed cheese.

Apartment

Long before Director invented Perversity, Billy Wilder made that tender film The Apartment…not knowing that some day far away in that madness on the look-out for method called Bollywood Jagmohan Mundhra would use that title and little else from Wilder’s gentle movie.

Mundhra’s Apartment reads like a frighteningly disembodied episod, neither passionate nor bloody enough to qualify as a genuine slasher flick, of a television mini-series built around the theme of suburban loneliness.

We’ve seen many films on the theme of what Mumbai does to the outsider.

This one, by its own subverted logic, shows the outsider, a mentally disturbed girl from rural Maharshtra, creating havoc in a neatly-arrange spick-and-span apartment block somewhere in downtown Mumbai.

Neetu Chandra is the life and death of this surprisely-relaxed almost inert suspense thriller. She acts strange and with reason.Her character suffers from acute insecurities. Neetu Chandra makes her home in chic air-hostess Tanushree Dutta’s home and resents the city girl’s debonair boyfriend (Rohit Roy, seeming to enjoy his part).

The build-up is a little too slow for a slasher-movie (apartment gone to the devil!).

By the time the payback is on, we are much too distracted by the trivial atmospherics and incidental characters played by guys and women who seem to have been rejected in fashion shows in the first round itself. These are people probably pronounce ‘champagne’ with the gee.

The four principal characters hold together the unhurried plot. Anupam Kher as Tanushree’s poet neighbour is an engaging diversion. Other distractions like a tacky item song and intermittent song breaks choreographed like a high-school function, are a huge impediment.

It’s Neetu’s show all the way. The girl knows how to hold an expression without looking like she was doing it for effect. Wish there was more to hold up her performance. Most of the time she performs in a vacuum.

Lately Jagmohan Mundhra made film like Provoked and Shoot On Sight which had a point to make. In Apartment he strolls back into the province of the pointless.

Edge of Darkness

In front of the camera for the first time in seven years, Mel Gibson knew exactly what his fans were itching for in the payback thriller Edge of Darkness: Mad Mel in vengeance mode. Gibson delivers that and more as a hotheaded Boston police detective whose scientist daughter is gunned down by a hooded killer on his doorstep. Was the bullet intended for him, or did Daddy's little girl have a secret? Take a wild guess. The plot twists are predictable, but Gibson's the king of the haunted, thousand-yard stare, especially when it's accompanied by a knuckle sandwich. His Cockney costar, Ray Winstone, is aces too, as a shadowy government fixer of indeterminate allegiance. The lone EXTRAS are a few unremarkable deleted scenes.

City of Gold

Move aside. There is no room for artifice in Mahesh Manjrekar’s latest work. A raw guttural gritty intense edgy mordant and finally devastating look at the world of the damaged and the ravaged, City Of Gold is as powerful in portraying a bereft working class as Molly Maguires was about Irish mine-workers. Except for the fact that there is no room for pretty visuals in City Of Gold.

Manjrekar portrays the opposite of the beau monde. That murky end of the spectrum where the shenanigans of the IPL brigade seem as distant as the promise of that pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow.

Manjrekar’s chawl-life, captured on camera with merciless frankness by Ajit Reddy, is a bleak world of dreamers and losers who are often the one and the same.

His heroes (if we may call the young characters that) are offered no hope of solace or redemption. This is the side of the slum that Danny Boyle missed when he made that clever adrenaline rush of splendid squalor in Slumdog Millionaire.

City Of Gold is neither stylish nor swanky enough to attract elitist readings of poverty. Fiercely radical in thought and intensely socialistic in execution the film plunges beneath the poverty line to emerge with characters whose despair is not an act for the camera.

The sweat and grime, the corruption and crime are characters of their own in Manjrekar’s teeming jostling chaotic world of abysmal nullity.

Mumbai never looked murkier and less inviting.

Taking a panoramic look at the lives of thousands of mill-workers in Mumbai who went on an indefinite strike in 1982 is like trying to hold the ocean in a teacup.

Manjrekar in what could easily be rated as his finest most cogent work to date, does just that.He holds a universe in the eye of the camera. It’s world of the doomed and damned, no frills attached.

His return to fine form and the enraputuring energy level that sweeps across a multitude of lives without trivializing or sidelining any of the characters who come into camera range, are reasons enough to celebrate the joys of neo-realistic cinema. This cinema in all its grime and glory.

But wait wait…City Of Gold not only marks the return of a storyteller who tells it like it is, without the comfort of shortcuts and shallow shindigs.

It’s also a macroscopic look at people who populate the fringes. Their silent screams of protest are seldom heard in cinema without their sounds being converted into some kind of vicarious relief and comfort for the audience.

Not for a second do we feel any comforting distance from the misery of Manjrekar’s characters. The smells of scant cooking in the kitchen and the soundless noise of hearts and ribs breaking at given intervals swamp our senses creating an overpowering and riveting world of inequality and resentment.

Manjrekar shoots his characters’ emotions in tight comprehensive close-ups but wastes no time shedding excessive tears over their lives. The editor (Sarvesh Parab) cuts the raw material with ruthless economy, leaving no room for humbug and certainly no space for commercial embellishments.

So the question, what happened to those thousands of mill workers who were overnight rendered bankrupt after the mills closed down?

You will find some uncomfortable answers in City Of Gold. But most of the time you will be faced with questions about the quality of life we choose to hand over to those who are economically and emotionally weak.

Welcome back, Mr Manjrekar.

Would this film have worked without the actors who don’t look like they are facing a camera? The whole batallion of characters flicker to life as though they were a part of an extended family shot by hidden cameras for a reality show to be aired at ‘grime’ time.

Television actor Karan Patel as the youngest scion of Manjrekar’s troubled family is a revelation. He portrays pain hurt humiliation angst compromise and anger with complete authority.

Walkout

Usually when a movie's described as a ''visual tone poem,'' it's code 
 for ''boring.'' But Nicolas Roeg's art-house adventure is lyrical and intoxicating thanks to Criterion's new digital transfer, which makes the case for it as one of the great films of the '70s. Jenny Agutter and Roeg's son Luc play a pair of city kids who are abandoned in the Australian outback by their father. Battling nature's harsh elements, they encounter a teenage aborigine (David Gulpilil) on his wandering rite of passage who takes them under his wing. Walkabout is a condemnation of the modern world, but its politics are subtle and unspoken. A gem. EXTRAS include a snoozy commentary from the director and Agutter and a far better documentary about Gulpilil.

Housefull

After a long painful drought (thanks to the exam season and IPL matches) of plain boring to irritating films arrives Sajid Khan’s Housefull. While in totality it does fall short of being the big great summer entertainer that it is been claiming to be, it however manages to bring many laughs for you. However, eventually it settles down in familiar territory.

Housefull narrates the tale of Aarush (Akshay), a perpetually unlucky bloke and a loser in life who moves into the house of his best buddy cum another loser, Bob (Ritesh) and his wife Hetal (Lara). But things continue to go wrong for Aarush.

Convinced that true love can fade away his bad luck jinx, a desperate Aarush enters into many complicated situations while seeking it. Thus enter Sandy (Deepika) and Devika (Jiah) in his life.

Things complicate further with the arrival of Sandy’s angry brother Major Krishna Rao (Arjun Rampal) and Hetal’s estranged dad Batuk Patel (Boman Irani).

How Aarush and Bob in an attempt to hoodwink Krishna Rao and Batuk go on creating more confusion leading to a mirthful chaos forms the rest of the plot.

Much was expected from Sajid Khan who has been literally claiming from rooftops for weeks now that he has made the year’s biggest blockbuster. Though he has not entirely let us down, you do wish he could have opted for a more innovative plot.

The second half ends up being more of an Anees Bazmee film what with characters trying to hide identities and going on a lying spree.

Sajid Khan also seems to have taken the slap stick humour bit quiet seriously what with so many slaps happening within the film. A ‘slapathon’ sequence reminding of his Heyy Babyy takes place too.

The film loses its tempo with the introduction of Jiah’s character. But thankfully gets it back right in the second half where Akshay and Ritesh’s histrionics to hide the truth from Arjun Rampal and Boman Irani.

To give Sajid due credit, he has created many rip roaringly funny situations that are further elevated by his actors. Amongst the most hilarious sequences are most of the scenes featuring Akshay and Ritesh together. They share terrific chemistry.

The climax set in the Queen of England’s Buckingham Palace is a laugh riot (literally). The film is high on glamour quotient what with three attractive bodied heroines (Deepika, Lara and Jiah) parading in skimpy outfits most of the time.

Akshay Kumar is back in terrific form, evoking huge laughter with his poker faced humour. Ritesh Deshmukh is another great comic talent who often gets his timing right. Arjun Rampal suits the part and looks dapper.

While Deepika looks sizzling hot, Lara manages to score over her in the comedy department. Jiah tries hard and ends up being just about passable.

Boman Irani goes over the top as usual. Making a come back on screen after a long gap, Randhir Kapoor playing Jiah’s Sindhi dad doesn’t get much scope. Chunky Pandey is plain irritating playing Akhiri Pasta an Italian hotelier. His fake Italiano accent grates on your nerves.

Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s music perfectly syncs in with the mood of the film. Mika sung foot tapping number Apni To Jaise Taise featuring Jacqueline Fernandez is a sure shot chartbuster and is fun to watch on screen.

The editing could have been tighter especially in the first half. Vikas Sivaraman’s camera work is good especially while capturing the Italy locales.

Finally, what makes Housefull a watchable film is the fact that it aims to entertain and succeeds in doing so irrespective of its negative points. Go watch Housefull if you seek pure no hassles entertainment.

Please Give

Kate, the Manhattanite wife and mother played by Catherine Keener in Nicole Holofcener's marvelously observed new domestic drama Please Give, is a vivid catalog of ambivalences familiar to millions of women of a certain boomer age and socioeconomic level. She's married to Alex (Oliver Platt), an amiable man with whom she shares a successful business selling vintage furniture, but she's prone to jags of dissatisfaction. She's the loving mother of a spunky teenage daughter (Sarah Steele), but she's given to flare-ups of insensitivity. She enjoys her city comforts, but she's afflicted with guilt for being a have while have-nots sleep on the street outside her door. Bound by peculiar NYC real estate circumstances to the elderly tenant next door — Kate and Alex own the old lady's apartment, and will be able be able to combine units and expand their own living space when she dies — the couple also crosses paths with Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet as the neighbor’s adult granddaughters.

Kate is a close relative of the complicated women who regularly populate Holofcener's smart, articulate, female-centric movies — women previously played by Keener in the filmmaker's Walking and Talking (1996); Lovely & Amazing (2001); and Friends With Money (2006). Indeed, with Keener's unique ability to portray characters who are simultaneously blunt (and even abrasive) but also soft and vulnerable, the actress has become the embodiment of a Holofcener woman. More than that, with their shared characteristics of sex, age, motherhood, and brunet hair, Keener has become Holofcener's artistic alter ego. In Please Give, the sharp-eyed filmmaker sends her vibrant representative out into the world to explore what it means for a woman to be lucky and still feel itchy. The report has the resonant ring of truth.

Paathshala

There are few films, a star does for friendship and some with the lure of working under a big banner, irrespective of their content.

An extremely choosy actor Shahid Kapoor after giving big hits like Vivaah, Jab We Met and Kaminey has been giving duds like Dil Bole Hadippa (Yash Raj Films), Chance Pe Dance (UTV) and an equally bad follow up with Paathshaala.

Shahid’s friendship with producer of the film, ace choreographer Ahmed Khan is well known. But still we wish, he should have not blindly trusted his buddy when it came to a film!

Shahid plays Rahul Prakash Udyawar the new English teacher joining Saraswati Vidya Mandir, a school established in 1941. Since the school doesn’t have a music teacher, he ends up being one as well.

He gets help in this from the school's nutritionist-cum-admin girl, Anjali Mathur (Ayesha Takia). School principal Aditya Sahay (Nana Patekar).

Anjali ends up falling for Rahul during this process. Sahay who has nurtured the school for 32 years, cannot see it going down financially. So, he gives in to the management's demands of generating more revenue by commercialising the operations of the school.

This is met with intense opposition from the teachers, but they eventually have to comply to save their respective jobs. The school management even decides t hired PR experts to change its image.

Thus began, film and ad shoots happen on campus wherein students are used as extras. And before they know it, all kids have to now keep aside studies for 10 days and prepare for a reality show audition.

The rest of the film is about how the reality show thing tortures the students and how Rahul stands against it.

Director Milind Ukey who gave us the very lovable animated film Hanuman has got a good topical subject on hand but falters big time in the script written by producer Ahmed Khan himself.

While it identifies the problems perfectly, a proper solution is not offered in the end. Also what happens to the school finally is also not made clear.

Bad dialogues are made only worse by loud acting by most of the cast. Certain emotional scenes leave you either bored or end up making you laugh. Hanif Sheikh’s music barring the Lucky Ali number Aye Khuda is nothing much to praise about.

In an attempt to showcase how education goes for a toss in private schools as the managements aims to earn the extra buck the makers also don’t lose out a chance to make a satire out of the media, shifting focus from his original aim.

The pathetic climax is unintentionally hilarious with no conclusion to what happened to the villains of commercialization and all suddenly become well!

Shahid Kapoor and Nana Patekar are the only saving graces of the film with their well nuanced performances. The rest including Ayesha Takia don’t really make a difference. The child stars are just about okay.

Avoid this Paathshaala if you are in no mood for a badly written gyan giving film.