With stereotypical characters, Two Night Stand is a twitchy tale of romance between two down and out souls seeking sexual gratification on a blind date.
The narration starts off in a simple, uncomplicated manner with the lead pair meeting on the premise of a casual no-strings attached one-night stand. The story gradually stretches to a two-night stand packed with under-currents of tension regarding sexuality that leads to a conventional ending.Though contrived, Nichols' maiden directorial venture is pleasingly charming that rolls on directly into the subject. Megan (Tipton) has recently been dumped by her boyfriend. In order to get her out of the blues, her roommate Fazia (Szohr) suggests she go on a blind date by hooking someone on a dating site.A quick chat with Alec (Teller) which includes an in-camera inspection of his room, leads her to his place. After spending the night with him, an unintentional diatribe early morning, leads her barging to the main door of the apartment only to find it jammed by the piled up snow that has been accumulated due to the blizzard which hit the city.What follows is a plot packed with debatable revelations of the characters, where ego and emotions with below the belt punches keep you hooked. The graph shifts gear as the characters swing emotions. When she is casual, he is formal and when she is uptight and demanding, he is cool, hassle free and ever obliging.After many deliberations they agree for a second round of sex in order to give each other tips on how to become better lovers in future. Soon, the equation changes and the end is predictable.Both characters are well-etched and performed to perfection. Tipton comfortably slips into Megan's shoe as the inexplicably harried character always edgy and anxious. Her demeanour initially is irritably cartoonish, when she is overburdened with guilt. Gradually she loosens up and is adorable. Teller as Alec is affable. His character hardly has any grey shades, making him the perfect Mr. Right.Szohr as Fazia and her ever horny lover Cedric rendered by rapper Scott Mescudi, play the mushy couple in love. Fortunately, they do not get to your nerves, simply because they aren't offered much screen time. Similarly, the others too are hardly noticeable.First time writer Mark Hammer manages to provide us with a tight screenplay, which is funny and engaging. Some of the exchanges between the lead pair are sharp and well written. Given the setting and the number of characters, the output at times seems theatrical. With dialogues like: "I am sexiled by my roommate", "I am like Teflon, nothing sticks to me" or the squeaky, "Oh my god, you are giving me those googly eyes!", the writing is snappy and fresh.The production quality of the film is good and visually, cinematographer Bobby Bukowski manages to give us some good shots of the snow filled streets.Overall, Two Night Stand is a perfectly enjoyable film that portrays a candid picture of the contemporary hook-up culture.
Actor-filmmaker Ramesh Aravind says he isn't against the idea of a movie's remake as long as it doesn't end up being a "carbon copy" of the original. He prefers remaking a story with a touch of creativity."I like remaking a story, but not a film in its entirety. When you remake a story, you can make changes to it to suit the local sensibilities. There's some creativity involved in that. I like that process instead of doing a carbon copy of a film," Ramesh told IANS.His debuted as a director with Kannada film Rama Shama Bhama, which was the remake of Kamal Haasan's Tamil hit Sathi Leelavathi."It's one of my favourite films. When I decided to wield the megaphone, I wanted to remake Sathi Leelavathi from a modern-day perspective. The remake came out extremely well," he said.Ramesh's most cherished compliment for the film came from late writer Sujatha."After Sujatha sir saw my film, he asked how I could make it so differently from the original. It was a very satisfying compliment because the remake was not a carbon copy of the original," he said.Ramesh supports the idea of remakes because "it's tested and proven"."The stars prefer doing remakes because they usually do big-budget films and the risk of losing money is high. They do remakes because they want guaranteed returns and I don't see anything wrong in it," he said.Ramesh is currently awaiting the release of Uttama Villain his maiden Tamil release as a director.
Actress Kajol, who was set to return to the silver screen after a gap of four years, has now opted out of her comeback project which was to be co-produced by her husband, actor Ajay Devgn. The makers have reportedly approached Ajay's Singham Returns leading lady Kareena Kapoor for the lead role.Kajol, who has made her presence felt by her social sightings and humanitarian work, opted out of the film, leading newspaper Meanwhile, Kajol was also offered Rensil D'Silva's TV show.The film based on Dutch TV series Penoza will be directed by Ram Madhvani. Penoza is the story of Carmen who steps into the world of crime after her husband is murdered, to protect her children.Kareena, who has worked with Kajol in Karan Johar's We Are Family, has liked the script but further details are yet to be finalised.
More masala-heavy bhelpuri than saffron-tinged biryani, Daawat-e-Ishq is a smorgasbord of conflicting genres that do not mix particularly well.
The film kicks off in the manner of a social drama, turns into a mild crime caper, then takes on the dimensions of a culture clash comedy, and finally winds up like a love story with a happy ending.Multiple and not always completely logical narrative swerves all unleashed in the course of a runtime of two hours can only open up gaping holes in the plot that are difficult to plug.Good food and youthful amour do work well in tandem, but the principal trouble with Daawat-e-Ishq is that allows the two ingredients to recede to the background all too often in pursuit of larger issues of life. But notwithstanding its share of false garnishing, Daawat-e-Ishq, written and directed by Habib Faisal, is not a soulless film. In fact, it has its heart in the right place. This is Yash Raj Films’ second foray into social issue terrain within a month (after Mardaani). It delivers a statement about the scourge of dowry that, despite being sweeping and heavy-handed, is not without relevance.Daawat-e-Ishq is the story of an ambitious and feisty Hyderabad footwear salesgirl who turns the tables on dowry-seekers by pulling a fast one on Lucknow’s best biryani-maker and literally giving him a run for his money.The film opens on the terrace of the girl’s modest middle class home in the Charminar area of Hyderabad. A prospective groom has clocked in with his parents to check her out. Her ageing dad is all ears. But the girl summarily and quickly scuttles the match-making attempt. She has no patience for either the parents’ demand for dowry or the CV-fudging suitor who mispronounces both ‘blue’ and ‘film’ after having claimed that he is a proficient English speaker. Parineeti Chopra sparkles during this tone-setting sequence, and that is the vein that she carries on in all through the rest of Daawat-e-Ishq.The film is never less than watchable primarily because the always dependable actress puts her best foot forward. She nails the Hyderabadi accent to near-perfection and captures the character’s many interesting layers that reveal themselves as the film progresses.If only the screenplay hadn’t been quite as convoluted and the heroine’s changes of heart so frequent and inexplicable, Daawat-e-Ishq would have been a far smoother ride. Parineeti is Gulrez Qader, a girl who nurtures the dream of training as a shoe designer in the US. Her humble and upright high court clerk-father (Anupam Kher) does not have the means to fund her plans.The money that the old man has saved up diligently over the years for his only daughter’s marriage simply isn’t enough to satiate the greed of the families that knock on his door. Not that the Old Hyderabad girl is interested in the least bit in getting hitched to a man who needs her father’s “help” to set himself up in life.When the Jubilee Hills city slicker she loves, Amjad (big screen debutant Karan Wahi), turns out to be just another greedy oaf, Gulrez hatches a daring plot to get her own back. To execute her plan, Gulrez on a random impulse travels with her dad all the way to Lucknow, where Tariq Haidar (Aditya Roy Kapoor), who owns a popular hundred-year-old kabab joint, walks into her well-laid trap.But Tariq’s culinary skills are so impressive that Gulrez is floored and something akin to love begins to blossom. The two have nothing in common. Gulrez is an English-speaking MBA. Tariq is a high school dropout who is good only at rustling up the greatest biryani in town. Yet she agrees to spend three days with him so that the twosome can get to know each other before they exchange nuptial vows.Daawat-e-Ishq tosses and turns its way through a series of facile twists as complications triggered by Gulrez’s outrageous playacting get worse with each move she makes.All this makes sense only up to a point. But thanks to the likeable lead pair, the good-natured banter between them and the eventual intent of the film prevent Daawat-e-Ishq from slipping into total futility.It might not be the grand feast that it promises to be, but some its flavours are alluring enough for the film to be a reasonably appetizing one-time watch.
For most part of this film, a bunch of fantastic actors are together in a frame, sitting in a blue beaten car, presumably to find Fanny but largely to give us a delightful dollop of entertainment.
Set in a sleepy village Pocolim tucked somewhere in the interiors of Goa, Finding Fanny lazes and lingers like a cat under the warm sun , as its inhabitants saunter about their unhurried, monotonous days in the most casual manner. Naseeruddin Shah is Ferdie, the emotional sucker, the trustworthy friend and the man who's lost the only woman he loved. Dimple Kapadia is Rosie, the bossy woman with ample assets, who successfully manages to hide her helplessness and disappointment with life by her stand offish ways. Pankaj Kapur is Don Pedro, an original painter with fake charm. Could you ask for more? Well, giving them company is the gorgeous widow Angie (Deepika Padukone) and the irritable, emotionally drawn out but endearing Savio Da Gama (Arjun Kapoor).The journey begins after Ferdie finds out that the letter that he had written to Fanny (Anjali Patil) 46 years ago, professing his love to her never really got delivered to her. His best friend Angie wants him to find Fanny. And thus the journey begins which slowly unravels the plot and in the process, revealing the true personalities of the characters involved.Pankaj Kapur, the brilliant actor that he is, makes the best use of the deliciously wicked lines given to him as he brings polished Pedro to life. But it is Naseer’s timid Ferdie who grows on you slowly and finds a tiny place in your heart. Dimple Kapadia as the feisty Rosie tended to go overboard at places, but is charming nevertheless. Deepika Padukone shines as she plays it cool and casual to suit the mood of the film. Arjun Kapoor, plays his 'boy lost in the woods' character with surprising ease and competence. This is undoubtedly his best performance till date.Anil Mehta's beautiful cinematography adds to the film. The best thing about this screwball comedy is that Homi Adajania has evidently made it purely for the fun of it and not as a desperate bid to play to the gallery. Imagine spending a night in a shack on a beach in Goa, drinking your poison and sharing mad jokes with friends all night. Watch this one for a slice of that kind of experience
True to its utterly unimaginative title, Bang Bang makes a hell of a lot of ear-splitting noise. By the end of it all, it manages to produce no more than a croaky, barely palatable whimper.
The action hero at the centre of the film’s inane plot periodically plunges off buildings, cliffs and bridges, besides sundry other launching pads, and almost always emerges in one unharmed piece, not a strand of hair out of place. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t.Bang Bang is a slickly mounted but maddeningly muddled thriller that does not quite know how to negotiate the spills that inevitably come with the territory.The makers have clearly invested a great deal of effort in mindless pyrotechnics. All very well. If only they had devoted a fraction of that attention to the screenplay, this overlong film would have been infinitely less tedious. The heroine makes a confession early in the second half. I’ll never know who you are and what you do, she complains to the man who has literally swept her off her feet. Honestly, large parts of the audience are likely to find themselves in a similar quandary. Not that you need to be a super whiz kid to figure out who this mysterious and unstoppable man of action is and what he is trying to achieve. A proud and patriotic Indian military intelligence man (Jimmy Shergill) is done to death by a brutal gang lord (Danny Denzongpa) and his liberally tattooed hitman (Javed Jaffrey).After the credits have rolled, the hero (Hrithik Roshan) makes his grand entry and goes hell for leather. But he quickly loses his way around as a beautiful hick town bank receptionist who has never been kissed crosses his path and gets embroiled in a global conspiracy she cannot make head or tail of.Bang Bang heads downhill from there on. It wilts under the weight of a clunky screenplay that makes a lot of ground in geographical terms, moving from London and Prague to Shimla and Dehradun.But the narrative goes nowhere. It gets bogged down in a string of confrontation and chase sequences involving the hero and the drifter lass on the one hand and the duo’s ruthless pursuers on the other. The protagonist filches the Kohinoor, no less. The act rattles an international crime syndicate and India’s secret service, which believes that the daring heist could endanger a proposed extradition treaty with the UK.The term “extradition treaty” is uttered a few times in the first half of the film and those two are the only meaningful words you will hear all through the two and a half hours that Bang Bang takes to get wherever it is trying to get.Needless to say, the hero is always a step ahead of his adversaries and every time he seems to be cornered, he pulls out a crazy trick from his well-worn bag.The action movie tropes that Bang Bang employs are so clichéd that they never take the audience by surprise. Everyone but the characters on the screen knows what is coming next – and when it does, it invariably falls well short of expectations.The climax is especially tiresome. It goes on forever and is too outlandish to make genuine impact Hrithik’s beefy presence cannot compensate for the unbearable lightness of the character that he is called upon to make some sense of.He gives it his best shot, but at the best of times it is a losing battle.As for Katrina, she appears to be doing pretty much what she has done all these years – pout, preen and look pretty. If Bang Bang is a reliable enough pointer, it is apparent that there is little bang left in her dwindling buck.But do look out for brief appearances by Deepti Naval and Kanwaljit Singh and a solid-as-ever performance from Pavan Malhotra as a wily government agent who keeps getting in the hero’s way when the latter thinks he’s got things neatly wrapped up. Bang Bang is strictly for Hrithik Roshan fans and for those that do not want an action flick to be anything more than just that.
Shakespeare lives! Seldom if ever, has a Shakespearean tragedy been given such a magnificent treatment in cinema of any language. Sure, the narrative is fractured and fatally flawed at times, but like the hero's villainous uncle, who lies limbless writhing in pain in the Kashmiri snow pleading for death at the end, the narrative dares you to end the pain of a people who wear their brutal existence on their sleeves.Haider is a beast that just won't be tamed by regular cinematic definitions. There is flamboyance and subtlety, both at once in the treatment. Elegance and earthiness rub shoulders in the execution of what is regarded as one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies.And to place Hamlet in militant Kashmir, what a masterstroke! Haider is the kind of rarest of rare cinema that unfurls wave after wave of exquisite narrative fuel into the frames, providing a kind of compelling narration that is propelled as much by the passionate writing as the intuitive direction.Mr Bhardwaj understands his Shakespeare inside out. He transmutes "Hamlet" into Haider with an unbridled fearlessness, tempered by a restraint of treatment that goes a long way in imparting an urgent sense of beauty to the work.The basic idea is compelling to the core. Freeing his narrative from the fretful freedom of excessive self-indulgence seen in his last film Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola, Mr Bhardwaj's vision takes wings creating one of the most complex and compelling mother-son relationships seen before and after Yash Chopra's Deewaar.That Tabu and Shahid play the mother and son torn by the agonising disappearance of the man they both love (Narendra Jha, a surprisingly well cast actor in a role that is more about absence than presence) is a blessing for Mr Bhardwaj's Shakespeare. I don't think any other two actors could have better understood the political, cultural and emotional complexities of their characters.Tabu and Shahid get a firm grip on their characters and pitch their emotional compulsions into Kashmir's tormenting tale of terrorism during times of oedipal impulses. Their performing range hits the highest octaves without getting shrill. Tabu is the Lata Mangeshkar of the performing arts.The narrative - so supple and strong it defers any dispute regarding its raison d'être - opens on a fateful chilling night in Srinagar when a doctor accused of harbouring terrorists disappears. His wife shares a discernibly sexual relationship with her brother-in-law (Kay Kay Menon). And the son, who was forced to leave Kashmir by his militancy-paranoid mother, returns as an educated young man to see his mother's illicit relationship with his uncle (Kay Kay Menon).At times Mr Bhardwaj's vision turns playfully towards Shakespeare's plays. There is the comic relief in the form of two Salman Khan lookalikes running a video parlour in Mr Bhardwaj's Kashmir in 1995. Salman's films run playfully through the film like a prankish leitmotif, doing nothing to the main character’s pain-lashed lives. Towards the end three grave-diggers straight out of Shakespeare, sing and dance in and around the graves.Cinematographer Pankaj Kumar, who earlier shot the amazing Ship Of Theseus, penetrates and probes the brutal tragedy of Kashmir. Once there, the visuals insinuate a profound affinity between nature and man's cruelty. Who knows what goes on in the minds of politicians, poets and other nation builders?Haider looks at a grieving son's search for his missing father with languorous affection. There are bouts of tenderness and brutality in the narrative which sometimes overlap without warning.Above all, there are the performances - towering, luminous actors craning their collective creative necks into the director's vision, to give it mesmerising magical spin. While the supporting cast including Jha, Lalit Parimoo (remember him in Doordarshan's Kashmiri serial Gul Gulshan Gulfam?), Aamir Bashir and a host of actors illuminate the edges of this darkly ignited revenge saga, it is the three principal actors who pin Bhardwaj's Shakespearean drama down to a level of cinematic lyricism.Kay Kay as Haider's treacherous uncle is so wickedly subtle evil yet humane that you wonder where this brilliant actor got waylaid in his journey in cinema.As for Shahid's torn troubled tormented Haider, the actor brings out all the inner conflicts in a shimmering rush of Shakespearean angst. With this one performance, Shahid proves himself notches above all his contemporaries.But it's Tabu whose haunted face as the bereaved wife and the troubled mother that will stay with me for many years to come. To the role of the mysterious dramatic deceptive woman, Tabu brings a kind of inner illumination that lights up the darkest corners of her character's soul. Her scenes with her screen-son Shahid are smothered in unspoken words and recrimination.Bhardwaj shoots one lengthy dialogue between the two in one single shot...and why not when you have two actors who seem to have visited the soul of the Shakespearean play and transported it to the pain of Kashmir?As Haider's love interest Shraddha Kapoor struggles to create space for herself in the mother-son saga. She has her brilliant moments towards the end where we see her humming a Kashmiri folk tune in numbed grief oblivious to the world that gave her that grief.Irrfan, who has a capricious cameo, also gets the film's only funny line.But this is not a film about laughter and humour. Haider looks at the grim reality of the Valley through a Shakespearean prism. Shahid's Haider is one of Hindi cinema's most tragic heroes ever. He bleeds into the narrative's heart without allowing a drop of blood to stain the surface.Mr Bhardwaj's third Shakespearean sojourn is his best yet. Haider is like a painting viewed from the road inside an art gallery. The vision is distant yet vivid, layered life-like and yet exquisitely poetic. By the time Rekha Bhardwaj comes on to sing an evocative song at the end about all the loss of the Kashmiris, I couldn't move from my seat.And yes, Mr Bhardwaj's background score rises and falls in swelling tides of blood soaked undulations. Besides Hamlet/Haider, the other truly tragic hero in this cinematic marvel is Kashmir.Set in a fatally flawed paradise Haider screams silently to be recognised as a wondrous work of art.To see or not to see? That isn't a question at all. Rush to the movies and forget all the slam-bang-bang stuff that is beckoning in glamorous postures. The glamour of Haider lies in fold after fold of poetic statement on love, life and politics. You simply can't help being seduced into attentive submission
