MOVIE REVIEW LUNCH BOX
'The Lunchbox', is a savory must have cine
Starcast : Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Nawazuddin Siddhiqui, Nakul Vaid, Bharti Achrekar
Director: Ritesh Batra
Rating : ***1/2
Now that's what I call something out of the box or rather "Lunchbox." In the current age of Indian cinema where Gen-X kind of love stories are the spice of the season, "The Lunchbox" seems to be a story with a difference, which can definitely leave you under the mesmerizing spell of awe. And why I am calling ,"The Lunchbox", a story with a difference, because in the era where emails, instant messaging and numerous other social media platforms are considered to be the backbone of romanticism, the author, Ritiesh Batra has tried his hands on something entirely unimaginable, "a lunchbox", where scribble notes placed in the the lunchbox emerge as a mean of communication between two strangers who just have three things in common, "desolation, loneliness and a need for love".
To some of the gen-next cine buffs the idea may seem something outdated and stodgy, but it's this simplicity of the movie which envelops your "heart and brain" within no time. "The Lunchbox" is a placid yet spellbinding narration of a relationship which dawns by the wrong delivery of a lunchbox and subsequently unfurls the various shades of human life and desires.
"The Lunchbox" showcases the life of a neglected housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur) who in order to make her her love life happening and to defeat the gloominess prevailing in her life, due to the neglectful attitude of her husband (Nakul Vaid), goes by the advice of neighborhood aunt (Bharti Achrekar) of pleasing her husband by her culinary skills.
But the destiny had something different in its womb for, Ila and her Lunchbox of affection lands up on the desk of grouchy widower accountant, Saajan Fernandes, who is on the verge of his retirement. Soon after having a rendezvous with what has happened as her husband returns in the evening, Ila tucks in a note in the lunch box the following day, to which Saajan responds and from there takes-off a pen-friend sort of a charming relationship, where two strangers start sharing their memories, dreams and agonies of their solitary lives.
As said earlier the plot may look stodgy to a few but believe me the premise of "The Lunchbox" is literally something belonging to the genre of "never seen before" kind of cine flicks. With such a simple yet poignant story-line it's the warmth of this heart-touching tale which mesmerizes you till the core of your conscious. And as far as writing dexterity of of its author, Ritesh Batra, is concerned then surely the man has picked a very innovative and tender theme to adorn an intriguing cine saga around it.
Be it any perspective pertaining to narration of "The Lunchbox" everything seems to be so much in accordance with the spirit of the movie, that you never feel like pausing your attention from dabbling into the onscreen proceedings.
Even in the direction department, Ritesh has never looked like a debutant, be it it sentiments, warmth of a relationship, latent agonies of the protagonists, human factor or milieu of a metropolis, Ritiesh has painted everything on the celluloid with so much of finesse, that you literally fall in love with this warm and soothing sensory experience. So special kudos for him.
Well as far as performances are concerned then, probably it's very hard to put the performances of all the characters of "The Lunchbox" in words. As usual Irrfan is once again seems to be in his best form. After "Paan Singh Tomar" this is another path breaking performances by this powerhouse of talent. Besides Irrfan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui is another accomplished performer of the movie who had been flawless throughout.
At last but not the least it's Nimrat who despite the presence of two of the most talented actors in the movie, never gets overshadowed and quite conveniently succeeds in making her presence feel. While portraying Ila, Nimrat looks completely effortless in bringing alive the latent feelings of a lonely housewife and up-till great extent succeeds in making her character a believable one.
There are certain movie which are made to thrash the existing BO collection benchmarks, but "The Lunchbox" is certainly not one of them. It seems to be something "made from heart and made for heart", so probably the BO collection of "The Lunchbox" may not touch some astonishing figure but in-spite of that it has got all the ingredients to make people fall for it.
To sum up, the movies like "The Lunchbox" are not the ones which can be gauged on the rating gauge, because what they offer to their audience is something like "once in a life time experience" and besides that they confer you with an altogether new outlook towards life. So with huge bunch of accolades for the entire "The Lunchbox" team for such a praiseworthy effort, all I can say is "The Lunchbox" is savory and a must have cine delight for cine buffs.
MOVIE REVIEW GRAND MASTI
The Grand Masti' Boys Are All Groin Up
Starring: Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani, Riteish Deshmukh, plus 6 starlets who are game.
Directed by Indra Kumar
Rating: *1/2
Is that Farhan Akhtar's Lucky 3 from Dil Chahta Hai standing under Indra Kumar's lucky tree from Dil?
We can re-christen Grand Masti as Dildo Chahta Hai. And if that sounds crude then wait till you see and hear what Indra Kumar's new cocksure comedy has in store for you. There is no pulling back from the black hole of luridness this time. The horny trio of boys from Indra Kumar's Masti are all groin up now.
They still continue to be obsessed with one part of their anatomy and two parts of the other gender's.
I remember many of Indra Kumar's film featured a particular tree which the director considers lucky. There is a tree here in Grand Masti too, where a rigid college principal hangs any student who looks with lascivious intent at the girls on the campus.
A spot of Agneepath in a film where life, strictly below the waist is not just hard. It's hard-to-get.
The three leering...sorry leading men who, ummmm, come together represent the spirit of defiant devil-may-care let's-just-stand-erect-and-stare skirt-chasing that seems at odds with the current save-women-from-rape mood of the country. If you feel movies that objectify women must be discouraged then you are advised to stay as far away from this horny farce as possible.
Lekin horny ko kaun taal sakta hai?
There are the comedies. Then there are the SEX comedies. Filled with innuendos, suggestive leery double-meaning dialogues that make us chuckle and giggle even if we are not the sort who like to exchange dirty jokes in the sms, Grand Masti has itself a ball at the expense of basic good taste.
The gags in Grand Masti unabashedly celebrate the puerile spirit of sms forwards. You know those jokes about women's breasts and men in a perpetual state of arousal that are exchanged among 12-year old boys who have just discovered the birds and the bees?
If you packaged those pssst-pssst jokes from your puberty in plenty of loud aggressive dialogues loaded with double meanings and oodles of close-ups of breasts of all shapes and sizes you'd get into the spirit of Grand Masti.
To their credit the three, er, boys Aftab Shivdasani, Vivek Oberoi and Ritesh Deshmukh, now in their mid-30s, get into the spirit of the sex-comedy full-on. Oh, they love talking dirty!
The one thing that works fully in this film's favour is it unabashed homage to horniness. Our three heroes are perpetually aroused. To prove it they emanate moans groans and sighs constantly.
They smack their lips and roll their eyes as though to remind us that some things in life, like skirt-chasing in films about men on the prowl, never change, even if you have a wife at home that you can't change.
Director Indra Kumar has never been a slave to subtlety. Here he pulls out all stops. He also pulls out other ummentionable objects that are defiantly pointed into our faces. Phallic objects abound. They come in all shapes and sizes.Take it or leave it.For the climactic eruption the director has all the male protagonists hanging by a ledge where the women must strip to create a rescue rope.
One really can't complain about the film's remarkably steep level of innuendos. Not a single member of the audience for Grand Masti expects anything but coarse humour borrowed from low-brow Gujarati plays.
Writer Milap Milan Jhaveri's wickedly wanton word-play leaves no space for subtlety in the script. There is repeated humour about a woman with over-sized breasts repeatedly offering the guys a `free darsha of her `dono doodh ki factory.
Stand-up comedian Suresh Menon shows up as a mock-villain wearing a golden underwear whose roominess keep inflating and deflating according to the mood.Early on in this pubescent homage to hard-ons Menon gets the privilege of walking up to a woman and sheathing her umbrella with a condom.
The obscenity flows out unstopped, unchecked, uncaring of rudimentary rules of decency. Having declared this to be irreverent territory director Indra Kumar doesn't really care how lowbrow the humour gets. And the jokes happily really plumb to unimaginable depths. In one sequence the writing crackles and hisses with pleasure as Shivadsani gets his private parts bitten by a cat called, hold your breath, Pussy.
What can be said about the writing when the three ladies whom the married heroes make out with are named Rose, Mary and Marlow, only so that their names can together sound like `roz-meri-mar-lo, meaning, very crudely, bang me every day.
Ha ha ha, to that.
If mammary...sorry, memory serves me correctly the same Rose-Mary,joke was used in that other recent tribute to lewdness Kya Super-Cool Hain Hum.
I guess the smut society is smitten by the same sms jokes.
More than the boys I salute the three pairs of ladies playing the trio of gharwallis and baaharwallis for surrendering to the sexually suggestive spirit of the proceedings. A woman really needs to have nerves of steel to refer to her breasts as, `doodh ki factory.`
The writing and direction in a film such as this is either a sign of absolute innocence about political correctness or indicative of an obstinate disregard for all good taste.
MOVIE REVIEW PHATA POSTER NIKLA HERO
'Phata Poster Nikla Hero'
Starring: Shahid Kapoor, Ileana D'Cruz, Padmini Kolhapure
Written & Directed by Raj Kumar Santoshi
Ratiing:** 1/2
Let's get one thing straight. This isn't what you want to see a super-gifted filmmaker like Raj Kumar Santoshi do when he gets together with a talented star-actor like Shahid Kapoor.
But what to do! Everyone wants a good laugh.It makes us forget about the troubles outside. Never mind the trouble that humour seems to encounter on screen each time someone makes a comedy.
To his credit, Santoshi deftly delivers the dynamics of drollery . No two ways about it. Unlike last weeks lewd laughter in Grand Masti , Phata Poster Nikla Hero(PPNH) avoids vulgarity like the plague.
Dirty word-plague....sorry word play is firmly eschewed.What we get is an earthy robust over-accentuated tribute to Salman Khan's Chulbul Pandey act from Dabangg, with Shahid Kapoor stepping into the khaki uniform with the same wonky elan as our dear Chulbul Khan.
Shahid has confessed it is easy playing a Salman Khan fan. The young actor who has so far not revealed his comic chops and has in fact shown dramatic synergy to be his forte, pulls out all stops to play an imposter cop, a role that makes him a Chulbul Pandey twice-over because Salman's cop-act was underlined as a spoof in the first place.
So what we get in PPNH is a khaki-clad clown impersonating a cop who is actually impersonating Salman Khan in Dabangg.
Does that make sense? Even if it doesn't, it's just fine. Don't sweat over it.This is not one of Santoshi's seriously-intended films. For that, please refer to this wonderful director's Lajja or Halla Bol.And if you are looking for hardcore gut-spilling action go to Santoshi's Deol-driven juggernauts Ghayal and Ghatak.
Come to think of it, PPNH is not even an all-out zany comedy of errors like Santoshi's Andaz Apna Apna. So what is it? After painful pondering over the over-punctuated parodic material in PPNH I'd say it's a mongrelized mirth machine.A sort of Dabangg mated with Santoshi's last very successful comedy Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani which evidently taught Santoshi a lesson: farcical frivolity and lengthy titles translate into big bucks.
Phata Poster... gives poster-boy Shahid Kapoor a custom-built opportunity to get seriously comic. He digs deep into the very slim plot , ferreting out meager meat from the skimpy material. I must Shahid has a ball doing the droll act for the doll Ileana d'Cruz who abandons her serious saree-clad audacious wife's role in Barfi to play the kind of `social worker` who brings a bad name to all charity work.
Didn't Katrina play a similar busybee's role in Santoshi's Ajab Prem...? Didn't Ranbir do the goofy Chaplin-meets-Kondke act for the commodious camera in that film? Shahid seems comfortable doing the irrepressible comic impresario. But he's far more at home in the more sensible sober scenes he shares with his screen-mom Padmini Kolhapure who looks too young to play Shahid's mom. But then at least her talent is being aired.
Come to think of it everyone in this over-the-top comedy(ha ha) seems to be in it for the sake of getting into a massy mode. The art direction is kitschy. The camera wallows in the carnival mood.In the endeavour to enroll enthusiasm into the rom-com the film succeeds. But be warned: the writing is repetitive. The scenes all end in exclamation marks and italics.like an essay by a schoolboy who is out to impress his favourite teacher. The humour jumps out of the screen like an eager 5-year old brat which must get your attention at any cost.
If you think Shahid is one of the more interesting star-actor's of the current generation then PPNH is a frenetically fashioned farce fest with excessive energy oozing out of every saturated pore. Shhaid's songs and dances specially the zanily unpredictable Agal-bagal number are the highlight of the humour-hamper . And that's not such a good thing. Shahid gets to share camera space with some accomplished actors like Saurabh Shukla,Mukesh Tiwari, Darshan Jariwala and Sanjay Mishra. And that's a good thing.
At least we are ensured that the slender pretext for laughter is bolstered by hefty actors.
Oh yes, the real Salman Khan shows up. Devta khud prakat hote hain bhakton ke beech. But God doesn't seem much interested in the goings-on.
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