Thank You Movie Review

Film: Thank You

Starring: Akshay Kumar, Sonam Kapoor, Bobby Deol, Suniel Shetty

Director: Anees Bazmee

Producer: Ronnie Screwvala,Twinkle Khanna

Banner: UTV Motion Pictures,Hari Om Productions

Music: Pritam Chakraborty

RATING:1.75/5

Produced by UTV Motion Pictures and Akshay’s home production, Hari Om Productions, “Thank You” is about three married men trying to have some fun outside their marriages. Apart from Akshay the film stars Bobby Deol, Irrfan Khan, Suniel Shetty, Rimi Sen, Celina Jaitly and Sonam Kapoor.

In the film, three best friends and business partners - Raj (Bobby), Yogi (Suniel) and Vikram (Irrfan) - are portrayed as womanizers. Their wives are clueless about their husbands cheating on them with every pretty girl they lay their eyes on.

However, their supposedly happening world is rocked when Raj's wife Sanjana (Sonam) begins to suspect her husband and hires a private detective, Kishan (Akshay) to keep an eye on him.

Kishan has built his reputation as a man who saves marriages by getting philandering husbands to mend their ways. However, in this particular case, Kishan gets into trouble when he falls in love with Sanjana, which means he may not be acting in her best interest. Soon follows a crazy cat and mouse game, where Kishan tries to catch the husbands red-handed.

The problem with thank you is the same type of genre that director Anees Bazmee has chosen provided he had earlier directed No Entry. Thank You though has some resemblances with No Entry fails flat when it comes to having the comic moments that No Entry had.

The film begins well with moments that one can enjoy for the first hour but as the story progresses it’s difficult to imagine is this the same film that we watched for the first one hour. Unnecessary characters, uninteresting jokes, songs which are not woven to the story form a major backdrop of Thank You.

Kumar’s plan of setting up the marriages straight with regards to the womanizers has its ups and downs, more downs we can say. The problem with making these types of comic capers is that the writing should be as tight as its gets but the writer makes number of lapses over here resulting in screenplay turning wayward.

Performances by female leads in the film are as awkward as their marriages. Sonam Kapoor has her scenes but she is seen sobbing her eyes out trough out the film. I guess lack of films under her kitty made her to do this role if not the director’s proximity with her dad Anil Kapoor .

Rimi Sen looks tight in her scenes and can be said that she is the only lady in the film who performs according to the circumstances demand. Wondered where Celina Jaitley went in the second half as she is hardly seen. Guess the director must have had enough of her in the first half.

Bobby looked below par in the film while Irrfan and Suniel add some masala to the film with their comic timings. It is both of them who make the film have its flashes especially in the boring/dragged second half with their weird expressions and the cheesy lines that were meted out to them.

In the end “thank you’s” saving grace is Khiladi Kumar. No one can ever doubt his comedy timings and he proves a fact with this film once again but the sad part is the film fails on the whole. Add to it, Vidya Balan, a towering performer is wasted in a miniscule role.

Ravi Yadav’s cinematography is a treat to eyes. The scene between Akshay and Sonam at Niagara Falls is worth a picture. Pritam’s compositions as now a days are ok, that’s it. Background score by Sandeep Shirodkar is patchy at times.

Eventually “thank you” can be only watched by Akshay’s die hard comedy fans. Overall it fails and never matches up to the expectations that were laid on it especially it being Bazmee’s and Kumar’s third venture after Singh Is King and Welcome.

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Memories In March Movie Review

Film: Memories In March

Starring: Deepti Naval, Rituparno Ghosh, Raima Sen and others

Director: Sanjay Nag

Producer: Debajyoti Mishra

Banner: Shree Venkatesh Films

Music: Debojyoti Mishra

Rating:3.5/5

Strangely, it is women who render themselves effectively to the cinema of loss and bereavement. Don't men suffer when they lose someone precious? In a subtle sly way, debutant director Sanjay Nag's "Memories In March" poses this question on gender attitude towards loss and tragedy.

In a script tenderly crafted by Rituparno Ghosh, Nag has a woman and a man locked together in the chamber of shared grief.

Memory and its deeply-reflective recollection after death are a recurrent leitmotif in Ghosh's films. In the Ghosh-directed "Sob Charitro Kalponik ", Bipasha Basu fell in love with her husband Prosenjeet after his death. In "Memories In March", which Ghosh has scripted, the mother discovers the dark side of her son who she thought she was very close to after his death.

Aarti Mishra (Deepti Naval), a no-nonsense divorcee from Delhi, arrives in Kolkata after her only son's sudden death in a car accident, to close the account of her son's life and pick up the son's remnants that would, perhaps, serve to sustain her for the rest of her life.

In Kolkata, Aarti meets a gentle middle-aged man Arnab (Ghosh) who turns out to be a close friend of her son...much closer than she, the mother, would have liked him to be.

The sequence on a steep staircase where the mother is told by her dead son's affable colleague (Raima Sen) that her son was in a gay relationship with Arnab, is expertly executed to eschew tears while milking the situation for its insinuated poignancy.

"Memories In March" is excellent at building individual moments of crisis and catharsis between characters during a time that's stressful beyond imagination for all concerned. However, the sum-total of the moments does not quite add up to that tremendous eruption of emotions that one would accept in a film about a mother's journey into her dead son's secret life.

Often the narrative holds back emotions, more to appear European in spirit than to be in character with the script. As played by Deepti, the mother is a portrait of restraint breaking down just once when no one is looking in an open refrigerator and that too with such furtive fury, you wonder if she's holding back the tears for a time when the camera doesn't pry.

The narrative's structure and its journey from crisis to reconciliation is so tentative that you wonder if this moving portrait of a mother coming-to-terms with her son's death and dark secret about his sexuality doesn't lose out on something vital in its effort to imbue a cosmopolitan hue to the emotions.

Having said this, the detailing of the emotions and the nuances inherent in the ambience cannot be faulted. The film creates a scintillating synthesis of suburban sounds and the intangible sound of hearts shattered by unforeseen tragedy. Incidental sounds, such as children running down the stairs of the dead son's apartment block, or the old-fashioned rickety lift creaking to a start at a decisive moment in the plot, lend a workaday grace to the poignant proceedings.

The time passages seem cramped, uneven and, lamentably unconvincing. The narrative crams in the mother's bereavement, acceptance of her son's homosexuality and her bonding with his gay lover in a fashionably condensed one-brief-moment-of-grief weekend, again, a European habit.

Soumik Haldar's cinematography and Debojyoti Mishra's music invite attention to themselves slightly more insistently than the characters who remain suspended in muted melancholy. At times you wish to push the proceedings to a higher octave, if for no other reason then to see if these internally-suffering characters can express their pain more forcefully.

"Memories In March" is a ball of impenetrable anguish that implodes once in while. When it does, the little shards of pain and hurt pierce your soul. The bond between two unlikely mourners, who become one in their collective grief, remains with you long after the last shot of a fish tank lying bereft and a voice message unattended after an irreversible tragedy.

This is a work of bridled pathos made remarkable by Deepti and Ghosh's delicately-drawn performances. If you enjoy cinema that provides emotional catharsis, this one is for you.

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Game Movie Review

Film: Game

Starring: Abhishek Bachchan, Soniya Jehan, Jimmy Sheirgill,

Director: Abhinay Deo

Producer: Farhan Akhtar, Ritesh Sidhwani

Banner: Excel Entertainment

Music: Loy Mendonsa, Ehsaan Noorani, Shankar Mahadevan

RATING:1.5/5

The film is a story of four strangers who are invited by Kabir Malhotra to an island in Greece only to discover that they should have never went there. The four strangers over here are Neil Menon [Abhishek Bachchan], O.P. Ramsay [Boman Irani], Tisha Khanna [Shahana Goswami] and Vikram Kapoor [Jimmy Sheirgill].

The four characters have no contacts with each other till they come to the Samos island, Greece. Beginning of the movie, Anupam Kher tells out why they are invited to the island and what they should do. As a part of the mission Neil travels from Istanbul to Turkey and then immediately lands in Mumbai. Though the action episodes are picturised taking into the account of action genre, Neil does his set out work with so ease that one wonders where’s the reality quotient in it considering Game coming from Farhan Akhtar.

Neil’s true identity is revealed later. God knows what was the writer upto in revealing it. Immediately after this all of the four land in the same place where they began on hearing some mishap to Tisha. As the story progresses one can usually identify the mystery, so what’s the point of being a murder drama/thriller, can’t understand?

Director Abhinay Deo, a familiar face in the ad world was more on capturing the locales beautifully than making the story more engrossing. In locations such as Greece, Istanbul, London, and Bangkok apart from Mumbai, Game’s story unfolds. Even though Deo was given a weak subject to deal with, he hardly matches up to the expectations that Farhan and Ritesh have bestowed on him.

Though the first half of the film is full of twists and turns, the second half is placid. Writing is at its weakest in Game and the film fails only with regards to it. Wonder whether Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy are behind the music of the film as no song grabs one’s attention.

Abhishek is given a character which hardly has any scope to perform. Sarah does an ok job with her debut. She looks gorgeous in the film. Boman as the Thai politician over acts. Shergill and Sahana do there best in miniscule roles. Kangana as the police officer is a saving grace to the film though there are some problems with her diction.

Special mention for the Cinematographer Kartik Vijay Thyagarajan who does an excellent job. One of the best camerawork’s that one can associate off late. Farhan Akhtar’s dialogues are good. Ram Sampath’s background is laudable compromising the defects of music trio.

The chase sequence on the roof-tops of Turkey is pulsating to watch. Moments like these are very minimal in Game when they should have been more.

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Faltu Movie Review

Film: Faltu

Starring: Jackky Bhagnani,Pooja Gupta,Angad Bedi, Arsha Warsi etc

Director: Remo D’ Souza

Producer: Vashu Bhagnani

Banner: Puja Entertainment (India) Ltd

RATING:2.25/5

Directed by choreographer turned director Remo D’ Souza, Faltu is a coming of age story. It is loosely taken from English flick Accepted [2006].

Faltu revolves around a group of friends who are considered an utter disaster. Add to it, these backbenchers take pride in being called useless. Thanks to their low grades, Jacky Bhagnani, Angad Bedi and Pooja Gupta hardly get a seat in a college.

Then Jacky gets an idea of starting a college and with the help of Arshad Warsi he does it by setting up Fakirchand And Lakirchand Trust University [F.A.L.T.U.]. Arshad brings inn Riteish to Faltu to be the principal. Riteish works as a school teacher before called upon by Arshad. The film progresses as many rejected students turn upto Faltu. The second half deals with Jacky’s take on education in India and the prominence of alternation education to youth instead of following the regular format.

Faltu is without doubt catered to the youth of the country. Songs like 'Chaar Baj Gaye, 'Bhoot Aaya', 'Fully Faltu' and 'Le Ja Tu Mujhe' are composed keeping in mind of youth and they strike right chords with the youth.  Performances from the leads are refreshing as Jacky, Angad and Pooja slip into their roles with ease. Arshad Warsi, Riteish Deshmukh alongwith Boman Irani are bankable actors and they live upto their standards.

The problem with Faltu is the cinematic liberties that it took. Writing is very weak and at times very childish. Senseless humors, logic less characterizations are seen though out the film. Arshad warsi is named as Google in the film and there isn’t an explanation to it. Arshad has money for every problems, can’t understand from where it comes. Setting up the university by renovating it, its permission, accommodation for students etc etc happens in 24 hours, wonder how?

Even though there are too many loop-holes in the film, on the whole Faltu says one thing to youth, follow your heart. Keeping heart in perspective, Faltu can be viewed only when you leave your brains at home because it is an out and out complete masala flick. Not a must watch but can risk it after all there are no Bollywood releases for a long time.

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VIRAT KOHLI

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