http://www.filmitown.com/forums/ en Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:53:00 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.filmitown.com/forums/images/misc/rss.png http://www.filmitown.com/forums/ http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/90284-ankur-arora-murder-case-movie-review-2013-a.html Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:53:58 GMT Image: http://www.filmitown.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ankur-arora-murder-case-movie-review-2013-kay-kay-menon-208x300.jpg *Movie Review...

Movie Review (2013)
Film: “Ankur Arora Murder Case”
Cast: Kay Kay Menon, Arjun Mathur, Vishakha Singh, Paoli Dam, Tisca Chopra and Manish Chaudhary
Writer: Vikram Bhatt
Director: Suhail Tattari


Picture this. A mother watches her young son being wheeled into the operation theatre for a minor operation. The child never returns.

Medical negligence is passe. Medical arrogance is the new menace. Enter a high-end seven-star hospital and you’re bound to run into the incredibly arrogant Dr. Asthana .................................................. ........



Click here to read Full Movie Review ]]> Movie Reviews Lehar http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/90284-ankur-arora-murder-case-movie-review-2013-a.html http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/89899-yamla-pagla-deewana-2-movie-review-2013-a.html Sun, 09 Jun 2013 08:49:03 GMT Movie Review (2013)
Film: “Yamla Pagla Deewana 2”
Cast: Dharmendra, Sunny Deol and Bobby Deol
Director: Sangeeth Sivan
Rating: ★★☆☆☆


Can the orangutan act? This particular primate is obviously a trained animal, but it has a hard time trying to keep pace with the human members of the loony cast.

Need one say more? But since a movie review cannot be just 20 words or thereabouts, here we go.

Those that have been through the first round of the Yamla Pagla Deewana shock treatment might be forgiven for thinking that it couldn’t get any worse. Think again. The sequel is double the pain. It scrapes the very bottom of the barrel.

Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 is much worse than brain-numbing. The screenplay jumbles up a few songs, some action scenes and a string of vapid comic gags and then dumps it all into a messy mix that makes about as much sense as Garam Dharam’s pow-wows with the mute ape.

You’ve got to be yamla, pagla or deewana, preferably all three, to grasp what is going on.

The Deol trio is joined by a bespectacled ape named Einstein in unleashing unbridled bunkum, some of it in a place that is passed off as Varanasi, and then a whole lot more of it in good ol’ Blighty.

Conman Dharam Singh Dhillon (Dharmendra) and his son Gajodhar Singh Dhillon (Bobby Deol) are up to their old tricks in Varanasi.

Dharam masquerades first as Yamla Baba on the bank of a river and then as a moneybag in a palatial mansion where the butler is supposedly a number cruncher from the London School of Economics.

Father and son are out to con a wealthy Indian nightclub-owner from London, Sir Yograj Khanna (Annu Kapoor), who has come down to the holy city in search of peace, his daughter, Suman (Neha Sharma), in tow.

The girl is a flighty bimbo who gets into a bitter squabble with Gajodhar over a Salman Khan cutout. But when Gajodhar learns that she is Sir Yograj’s daughter, he woos her in true Dabangg style, singing, dancing and fighting – not in that order – with gay abandon.

The conmen have no clue that Sir Yograj is on the verge of bankruptcy and is struggling to repay a ten million pound-sterling bank loan.

Dharam’s elder son, Paramveer Singh Dhillon, is a recovery officer with the bank in question and is entrusted with the task of discreetly figuring why a man as moneyed as Sir Yograj is a defaulter.

Needless to say, Paramveer is a Super Sardar who, all in a day’s work, saves Sir Yograj’s nightclub from being taken over by a crazed builder Joginder Armstrong (Anupam Kher).

The promoter wants the space and the entire street on which the club stands vacated so that he can build the world’s largest mall, so big that patrons would need mini spaceships to get around.

When the action shifts to the foreign location, Varanasi is left far behind, but the mindlessness that was on display in the first Yamla Pagla Deewana three years ago remains intact.

The debt-ridden magnate has another daughter, Reet (Kristina Akheeva), who works in an art gallery. Paramveer falls head over heels in love with her but complications arise when Gajodhar, too, starts eyeing her as his engagement with Suman turns out to be a damp squib.

Parts of Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 are so outrageously silly that they can actually be unintentionally funny. One gag is piled upon another without any concession to logic.

So there is Kher hamming it up as a greedy land-grabber. Johnny Lever, playing the former’s bumbling henchman, apes Shahrukh Khan’s Don, aided and abetted by a Junglee Billee. In the end, the joke is entirely on the film.

Anupam Kher’s character cracks a corny joke. Nobody around him reacts. So he hollers: “That was a joke. Clap!” His minions applaud.

Sangeeth Sivan, who steps into the director’s shoes and into a minefield of tedious capers, has no way of seeking similar compliance from the audience.

Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 runs for 155 minutes and its attempts to pass off lunacy as a humour simply do not have the force to hold such a long film together.

Even Salman Khan, who hangs over the film like a mascot, cannot help.

However, in absentia, Salman could actually turn out to be this film’s biggest crowd-puller provided the masses can get past the deadly Deols.

On the acting front, subtlety and refinement are consistently kept at an arm’s length. It is sad to see a septuagenarian Dharmendra chase cheap thrills.

Sunny Deol cannot live down his action-hero persona, while Bobby Deol tries his best to pass off as a dashing lover boy.

The two girls, too, are forgettable. But why blame them when the film they are in is likely to be relegated to Bollywood’s footnotes as soon as it is out of the theatres, no matter how much it manages to mop up at the box office?

If you adore the Deols, get a move on. Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 is likely to be shown the door at most multiplexes by the time the second week dawns.

One happy fallout of that would be that even the Deols would need loads of courage to contemplate a third installment. Surely, Dharmendra doesn’t deserve any more of this indignity.

Like all Indian films these days, Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 starts with a disclaimer asserting that no animals were hurt during the shoot. Isn’t the poor orangutan an animal? It must be terribly ‘hurt’ at being treated with such disdain by mankind! ]]> Movie Reviews Lehar http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/89899-yamla-pagla-deewana-2-movie-review-2013-a.html http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/89795-yeh-jawaani-hai-deewani-movie-review-2013-a.html Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:16:34 GMT Movie Review (2013)
Film: “Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani”
Cast:Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Kalki Koechlin, Aditya Roy Kapur
Director: Ayan Mukherji
Rating: ★★★☆☆


Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is a bright, breezy and brassy film designed for easy consumption. What it certainly is not is ballsy. For all the big ideas about life and the dilemmas of youth that it tosses up in the air over a runtime that’s 20 minutes shy of three hours, it always opts to play safe, vacillating between thoughts of rebellion and acts of conformity.

The characters spout familiar platitudes to each other: live your dream, get a life and move on, stop pitying yourself and learn to love thyself…We have seen and heard it all before.

In the first half of the film, four happy-go-lucky school buddies with superficially defined traits reunite to go on a trekking trip to Manali and beyond.

Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor) is footloose and dreams of exploring the world. Aditi (Kalki Koechlin) is wild and fancy-free. Avi (Aditya Roy Kapur) is a drifter happy to blow up his cash on cricket bets.

Naina (Deepika Padukone) is the odd one out. She is a bespectacled and sedate medical student. She joins the gang in an act of impulsive defiance but cannot break away from her neuro-immunology textbook even as the rest of the traveling party live it up on the road.

By the end of the adventure-filled sojourn through the ups and downs of the undulating landscape, each of the four is transformed a little, but only to go his/her way.

Eight years later, one of the two girls in the group, Aditi, decides to marry a straight-laced engineer (Kunaal Roy Kapur) and her old friends descend on a resort in Udaipur for the grand betrothal.

And like they did the first time around, they come and go talking about love, friendship and the need to grow up even as they consume a whole lot of liquor.

Between the swigs, love and friendship do happen, but the quartet does not quite grow up.

The high-flying Bunny, after several years of globe-trotting as a television cameraman, talks of the pleasure of watching Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. In response, the more rooted Naina extols the joy of seeing Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge with a tub of popcorn at Maratha Mandir.

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is clearly more of the latter than the former although it does occasionally betray the ambition to be larger in scope than what it is capable of.

It is a mildly diverting film at best. Its musical set pieces are robustly staged and with Ranbir Kapoor at the centre of them all, they are fun while they last.

The characters are rather sketchily etched and the psychological bends that they encounter on the way to self-realization are far too simplistic to catch the audience by surprise.

Neither the romance nor the drama that the film seeks to whip up can salvage it from being just another harmless romp aimed at an undemanding audience that is comfortable with swimming at the shallow end of life.

There is no denying, however, that Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is gorgeously filmed, the locations are eye-popping, and the guys and dolls that people the tale are a bunch of attractive people.

The two lead actors, Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone, do make a fetching onscreen pair. And they are well complemented by Aditya Roy Kapur and Kalki Koechlin.

It is the erratic narrative arc that is a letdown. Overlong, sluggish and fluffy, it meanders through varied locations as the young lovers/friends seek to reconnect with each other after a few years of being apart.

The song and dance routines, no matter how foot-tapping they are, do not quite possess the kind of infectious energy that can offset the clichés around which they are wrapped and turn the film into something more than just superficially enjoyable.

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is a mix of Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, with dollops of 3 Idiots thrown in for good measure. It is all served up in a Karan Johar-style concoction where the backdrops – both indoors and the locations – are infinitely more expressive than the inner worlds of the young characters.

The impulses of the quartet of friends, who predictably include one couple that is on the verge of a lifelong relationship but are either unable or not keen enough to express their love for each other, are hardly explained in logical and convincing terms. As a result, the fragmented storyline hurtles forward only in fits and starts.

The heroine is head over heels in love. The boy she is smitten with is averse to making a commitment. The girl is unable to communicate her true feelings. So you know exactly what the outcome is going to be. They will keep crossing each other’s path until true love is found.

Director Ayan Mukherji, who gave an impressive account of himself in his debut film, Wake Up Sid, appears to have allowed the skills that he displayed the first time around to go into deep slumber.

Not that Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is a sleeping pill. It is not. But it could certainly have done with a little more narrative verve.

Do make it a point to get into your seat before the show begins. Madhuri Dixit’s item song plays out ten minutes into the film. Watch Ranbir Kapoor match steps with the still-lustrous diva and you know why this guy is special. Watch Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani for him. ]]> Movie Reviews Lehar http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/89795-yeh-jawaani-hai-deewani-movie-review-2013-a.html http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/88949-ishkq-paris-movie-review-2013-a.html Fri, 24 May 2013 06:57:11 GMT Image: http://www.filmitown.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ishkq-in-paris-movie-review-2013-preity-zinta-prem-raj-207x300.jpg *Movie Review...

Movie Review (2013)
Film: “Ishkq In Paris”
Cast: Preity Zinta, Rhehan Malliek, and Isabelle Adjani
Director: Prem Raj



Love, as the sages say, is a many-splendoured thing. You can look at it as an occasion for stress and heartbreak (which is why we fall, never rise, in love). Or love can be a celebration of life.

Director Prem Raj’s debut film “Main Aur Mrs Khanna” took a quaint capricious look at love during times of adultery. On this occasion (‘Ishkq In Paris’) he takes flight ........................................


Click here to read Full Review ]]> Movie Reviews Lehar http://www.filmitown.com/forums/movie-reviews/88949-ishkq-paris-movie-review-2013-a.html