Dangal  :

In an entertainment market where cheap goods are dispensed every Friday to exploit the lack of options of the Junta, Dangal surely does an honest job. It is not a movie with the sole purpose of fleecing the people off their entertainment budget but to give them their money's worth of genuine entertainment.

But to be sure, it does just that. It is not a statement against women's exploitation or female foeticide. It is a film primarily about wrestling, and if you are a sports lover, who liked soccer, tennis or cricket earlier, there is a good chance you will acquire love for a new sport here.

The movie brings out the nuances of a sport that comes across to the uninitiated as people pushing , pulling and throwing each other around. But this film shows that wrestling can be a a skilled sport. The wrestling scenes are indeed the crowning glory of this film. The way these scenes capture the skill involved in wrestling as the players hold the opponent, position themselves or move their body around strategically is truly remarkable.

The raw animal appeal of the sport really comes through in these scenes as the players resist being toppled by the other or avoid being captured, or contort themselves in certain ways to toss the opponent on her back.

That then is the central focus of the film although there is an overlay of a father child relationship in which the child starts outgrowing the parent only to realise later that Dad is always right. There are miscellaneous other entertaining elements like the elder cousin brother who gives more than a single occasion for a genuine laugh.

However Dangal does not live upto anything close to its billing of being a radically new and different film. It is a sports movie, which has been done well, a la Chak de India, which I think was surely better than this. In fact when I heard the movie title, I thought it is about a social uprising of sorts. But I was a bit disappointed when I discovered it has nothing to do with broad sweeping social changes but about a theme that is relatively mundane i.e about how two girls are groomed into wrestling in a social setting where women generally do not play such sports.

For me the film was a good one time watch. A bit about the acting now. I have no hesitation in saying that Amir Khan is one the most overrated actors around after having watched Dangal.

He does not merge quite as much into the character as one would like given that he is the central character in the film. By comparison the youngest Gita and Babita have done a good job. The young Gita, Zaira Wasim is quite a natural. Both while playing the shy hesitant village girl or the wrestler who just made her first mark in the sport by winning the local tournament, Zaira plays her part to the T. The young Babita is not quite given enough screen time, but whatever little she gets, she plays it well. Coming now to Sakshi Tanwar, the familiar face of Saas Bahu serials. I did not expect much from Saskhi, but I must say I have been pleasantly surprised with her acting skills. She plays the Haryanvi housewife who is circumspect about the antics of her Husband really well. She has got the Haryanvi accent perfectly as well. The nephew both young and the elder one are both good actors, with good comic timing. I would say the track of the nephew is the most entertaining element in the film. If acting like a Haryanvi simpleton is hard, making people laugh by doing so is even harder. I don't know the names of both the young and the older cousin, but both actors deserve a pat on the back for successfully making us laugh. Lastly amongst the other big winners in the film is the casting, other than the older Gita, who looks too urbane to play a village wrestling woman, the rest of the cast is perfect. I wish Amir would have done a better job, and got rid of his signature head cocking, and other intonational gestures and the film had more about the situation of women in a backward state like Haryana, and it would have been a far more entertaining film than it has turned out to be.

Befikre :

Show biz is another type of business and with Befikre, it is business as usual at the Chopra movie manufacturing company as it comes out with yet another mass produced product(ion). But even those, die cast, template products have to look different from time to time or they will not make a mark in the market. Just like your age old tomato ketchup has to become the all new tomato ketchup every few years, so too the maudlin movie manufacturers have to come up with an all new maudlin movie masala mix every once in a a while.

And what is new about this iteration of the standard, age old, palaeolithic romantic movie formula is that this time love has been mixed with oodles of lust. That however does not stop the basic ingredient of Yash-Chopra-Raj instant movie mix to surface towards the end. More about that later.

Cut to the chase now and we have a Delhiite stand up comic in Ranveer Singh trying to eke out a niche in apna global pind, Paris. Does this make sense to you ? It did not to me. I mean Indian comics have just about started to find an audience in their home ground, and expecting an Indian comic to try to make it big in Paris, which to my knowledge has a very meagre Indian population is not a strong plot point to start from. Besides Ranvir's jokes as a comic in the film are completely insipid and barely draw a smile from you.Anyway lets cut the film maker some slack here and move on. So here we have this loud mouth Punjab da puttar with panache in picturesque Paris with protruding biceps employed on a trial basis as a stand up comic in his friends restaurant in Paris.

Even if you imagined such a character existed, not one bit of it looks real in the one played by Ranvir as he exaggerates each and every mundane expression giving Shah Rukh Khan a severe complex. Ranvir's excessive expressionating gets on your nerves very quickly but as a relief you are introduced to the staid stolid character of the female protagonist in Vaani Kapoor. Vaani has indeed done a good job in the film. Her acting skills are far better than any of the new girls out there. Her expressions are understated while conveying the character properly. Its a pity she too gets a very fake character to essay in the film. I mean the director / writer duo has really not done their home work well in sketching out the character of a girl born as a punjabi but raised as a Parisian.

I would not expect a woman like that to speak nearly as much or as fluent Hindi as she does in the film. Also her entire persona and body language would be very different from an urban punjabi girl.

Although Vaani has done her part well, she has not been given a good part to start with. It seems the director has not made her understand or even let her try to portray the character of a French-Punjabi girl properly. It seems that the element of Paris / France was like the “isme kuch naya hai” element of the tomato ketchup I mentioned in the beginning. Paris seems to offer only a visual backdrop to the same old story than anything else. Given how much the Johar's and Chopras love foreign locations for the sake of it, it looks like it is precisely the case.

The whole film is as fake as it could get and none of the scenes feel believable. It is the same old fare of friends with benefits realising that they are made for each other as their respective marriage dates come closer. This has been done so many times in so many different movies and is so stale that the only word that comes to mind for it is Rotten. Again, there is just so much skin show in the movie that it could pass muster in some of the adult internet sites. Sample some of the fakes in the film, a French Punjabi girl eating aloo parathas alone in the night in the kitchen as her friend with benefits is about to get married, making a rather puerile implication her purer punjabi self is coming out as she realizes she has feelings for her FWB. Please give me a break, either make a movie that is adult, and by adult I do not mean showing skin, or make a movie that has the mind of a teenager. Why try to mix both ? You cannot have a few Mikey Mouse scenes in a Fight club , or a Tom and Jerry scenes in the Matrix. Among all the fake scenes in the whole film there is only one , solitary scene that is real, the one in which Vaani rescues Ranvir from the cops. This was possibly the only scene in which Ranvir did not over expressionate and Vaani looked perfectly poised and carried herself most naturally.

One note about Vaani Kapoor here. This is one actress who seems (at least going by the film) to get the character she is playing and does not look as if she is acting. Alia Bhatt, Priyanka Chopra, and all of those girls seem to be having a hard time thinking about how to smile, when to smile, how to frown, when to frown and end up doing too much of it. Vaani on the other hand seems perfectly natural in her smiles , in her anger and in almost all her expressions. Will like to see more of her. And Ranvir, seeing him in Bajirao was a welcome change. He is capable of acting, but I think he needs a good mentor in the director to get the best out of him. In Befikre however, we see his worst.

The attacks of 26 /11

Any film that is based on a story as worth telling as the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November of 2008 only just needs to do a decent enough job to make a movie completely worth watching.

Just for a quick recap of the incidents of the fateful day , a bunch of heavily armed terrorists swooped in on the shores of Mumbai, and opened fire on unsuspecting denizens in amongst other places one of the most densely packed places in one of the most densely packed cities of the world. The sanctum sanctorum of people congestion as it were.

The terrorists spared none, and had come with one and only one purpose on their indoctrinated minds, a no holds barred massacre of the people of Mumbai with a special focus on expats from the west and Jews living in a Mumbai Jew Haven.

The story makes for a really good base from where a movie can take off . Just imagine the emotional intensity generated in a setting where people are having a nice dinner in one of the 5-stars, or having a nice evening at Leopolds, exchanging notes on culture and getting soaked in inebriated levity. And suddenly out of nowhere without an inkling or slightest foreboding, a pack of heavily armed zealots descend and unleash indiscriminate mayhem.

To be fair the film does enough justice at the start, when the terrorists capture the fishing boat. The tension in the initial stretch is palpable and one expects that it will only intensify as the film goes along.

But the film loses its fizz immediately after that and the scenes that follow come across as non-sequitur to the opening. One more thing that does not help in the storytelling effort is Nana Patekar's heavily Marathi laced speech in the track when he testifies before the inquiry panel. Nana's Marathi accent and diction is highly discordant and one wonders the reasons behind the choice of an actor who does not have his Hindi diction right for a role that involves dialogues to be delivered in chaste Hindi. Though no big fan of the big B, I think he would have made for a much better choice here, but in fact the best choice for such a scene would be KK menon. Who can forget his poignant speech at the end of the Movie Shaurya, where each word he spoke had a certain gravity to it.

Nana's almost Marathi speech is hard on the ears and at one point when he pronounces bees as biss, I was literally bissed ooops pissed.

The Hotel and Cafe Leopold scenes never really touch you, and it feels as if you are watching journalistic coverage of the events. The contrast between the general mood in the Hotel and the feeling of Horror after the attacks is never really colored well.

On the other hand the Hospital scene again does some justice to the plot and you really feel shocked at the doctor and the old patient's killing.

The way the terrorists are shown to be moving around the hospital, they do come across as a sinister and dark force to be afraid of. When they come face to face with the doctor, the feeling of shock comes through nicely indeed.

Also at one point when the assistant commissioner, played by Nana, looks helpless as his subordinates seek guidance from him is well portrayed , is poignant and conveys the scale of the terror attack.

But other than that there not much worth writing home about in the film. I was not expecting some important incidents to be omitted, like the events of Nariman House where a Rabi and his family were killed and the action taken by the NSG commandos, or the terrorists' hold up and eventual extermination at the Taj Hotel.

Indeed there was a lot of material to be put into a 2.5 hr long film or even a 3 hr film, but that is where good film making is different from the average. A good film picks up the most important pearls from the ocean of incidents of a story and weaves it in skillfully to make a necklace that is seamless, and never disproportionate .

Unfortunately the choice of pearls here seems rather random, only a few of them shine and only a little at that and they are weaved into a story in a way that the whole is neither seamless nor proportionate.