Dus Kahaaniyan: Bas… Stop stealing, Mr.Gupta
Genre: Drama
Director: Sanjay Gupta, Hansal Mehta, Rohit Roy, Meghna Gulzar, Apoorva Lakhia, Jasmeet Dhodi
Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Suniel Shetty, Arbaaz Khan, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah
Storyline: Ten short stories – stolen, adapted and some credited – with a twist in the tale.
Bottomline: Film students make more original films.
Sanjay Gupta is a thief and an obsessive, compulsive kleptomaniac at that.
After recycling Reservoir Dogs (Kaante), modifying U-Turn (Musafir), plagiarising ‘Old Boy’ (Zinda), he turns to books this time. Thanks to Shilpa for letting me know about the source stories.
For the first short story, Sanjay Gupta rips off Roald Dahl’s ‘Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat,’ calls it ‘Matrimony’ and takes the writing credits for the story about cheaters.
The eccentric cinematography, crisp editing and the grainy grading once again proves that Gupta is technically competent, so much that you are hooked to the story-telling than what his actors Mandira Bedi and Arbaaz Khan can do by way of histrionics.
Hansal Mehta’s ‘High on the Highway’ too is stylistically shot to suit the mood, with a non-linear narrative that seemed intelligent until you learn that Jimmy Shergill is supposed to be passing out of college. Masumeh’s presence more than makes up for the casting mistake and the silly plot.
Meghna Gulzar’s ‘Pooranmasi,’ is also about sexual choices. Set in a rural milieu, this short has very little going for it and makes you understand why Minissha Lamba jumped into the well. I switched off halfway watching a middle-aged Amrita Singh wake up in the fields in the arms of her half-naked lover.
Sanjay Gupta then returns with ‘Strangers in the night,’ an excuse to Neha Dhupia strut her stuff, with suggestively phallic imagery. Erotic no doubt, by why these porn-movie metaphors if the story was not about lust but about nobility? Oh, okay, that’s the twist.
His ‘Zahir’ that follows next, credited to Rajeev Gopalakrishnan, packed a nice twist towards the end – the only story to have actually caught the fancy of the audience. Manoj Bajpai acquits himself pretty well too. This short story made in Tamil, I’m told, played on Doordarshan many years ago, with what seems to be a much better twist.
After five stories woven around different excuses to set up sex scenes, Jasmeet Dhodi’s ‘Lovedale’ post Interval, tries a supernatural spin bordering on incest. With Aftab doing the chunk of acting, this is as boring as it gets.
Apoorva Lakhia’s ‘Sex on the beach’ is just a showcase for Tarina Patel’s golden bikini. Dino Morea evokes a few laughs but this is seriously the kind of fare you don’t mind from film students.
Rohit Roy’s ‘Rice Plate,’ a reworking of Jeffrey Archer’s ‘Broken Routine’ (again, uncredited) has Shabana struggle with a Tamil accent but this is clearly among the more watchable stories of the lot, especially with her facing off Naseeruddin Shah. A pretty decent debut for Rohit Roy.
‘Gubbare,’ written by Gulzaar is a beautiful tale, completely misdirected by Sanjay Gupta. What should have been a well-concealed twist that tugs at your heart-strings turns predictable half-way in spite of Nana Patekar’s heart-breaking performance.
Sanjay Gupta’s ‘Rise and Fall’ is spectacularly shot, highly stylised and inspired by Matrix Revolutions with Sanjay Dutt and Suniel Shetty doing what they do best: fight in slow-mos.
With no common thread running through the films (no, different excuses for sex and violence cannot qualify as a theme for an anthology film), nothing original about these stories, ‘Dus Kahaaniyan’ is not half as good as shorts made by film students with much lesser budgets.
Wait for a cheap DVD copy.
Khoya Khoya Chand: A voyeur’s take on the lost world
Take a sneak peak of what went in behind the scenes of the Hindi cinema of the fifties and the sixties, from a voyeuristic, insider point-of-view.
Right from the moment Vinay Pathak as Shyamal, an assistant director, takes the spotlight to tell us how a struggling writer Zafar (Shiney Ahuja) first met the central lady of the piece, the emerging starlet Nikhat (Soha Ali Khan), we know this is going to be an insider’s account of the love story.
Though the narrator disappears, the quirky, restless hand-held camerawork suggests that this thirty-party account is possibly as much we would know about the truth. After all, we are not being told the story from Nikhat’s or Zafar’s point of view.
This is the film’s biggest plus and biggest minus point. Plus, because, it does gives us a more or less objective account of how flawed, human and vulnerable they were.
The lack of specifics makes this story applicable to the closely-knit film industry of the period that used to comprise of starry-eyed Nikhats, who, seduced by promises of stardom by the Prem Kumars, were unable to balance their passion and idealism, represented by emotionally turbulent writers like Zafars and the populist demands of the Khosas (producers), only to end up becoming the suicidal Ratan Balas of the tale.
In many ways, Nikhat’s story is more or less the same as her senior, Ratan Balas. In many ways, the Zafars, the Prem Kumars, the Khosas and the Shyamals of the era would have used the Nikhats and the Ratan Balas to further their interests and yet have come together at some point, to make a film that immortalised all of them forever.
This bird’s eye view of the era also is the film’s minus because, the filmmaker stops just short of giving us a peek into their individual minds, fears and dreams. Exactly, what would have made us feel the pangs of filmdom and the angst of incompleteness each of these characters faced.
Something, which a flawed ‘Factory Girl’ did brilliantly by sucking you into all that Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) went through. Edie and Nikhat are not too different. But Factory Girl was hard-hitting, intimate, voyeuristic and gut-wrenchingly depressing.
Khoya Khoya Chand fails to do that in spite of the potential presented and the role sexual politics played during the tumultuous times the film industry went through.
Soha Ali Khan, though an exciting promising actress who turns in her best role of her career, in spite of the time the movie spans, continues to look like a girl, hardly the battered woman Nikhat would have been in her self-destructive last phase of life. Sonya Jehan (who plays Ratan Bala), on the other hand, is pure magic.
Shiney Ahuja’s intensity sees him through as Zafar and it is impossible to believe that he’s the same guy who began his career as a wooden porn-star (Sins) and the ever-reliable Rajat Kapoor manages it with a wig, like a natural.
The writing in the film is top class, a true homage to the era, just like Shantanu Moitra’s haunting music that transports you almost instantly to the era of mujhras, pianos and cabarets.
Vintage cinema like this needs your patience for it is no easy task to set the mood, make a completely constructed era breathe life, and have characters spouting lines of great literary value in staged settings, with archaic music and yet, never look like a spoof.
Sudhir Mishraji, your passion for cinema shows.
Beowulf: Angelina gets Golden Globes!
Cast: Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, John Malcovich
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Genre: Drama
Storyline: A warrior comes to the rescue of a town traumatised by a monster, only to find himself succumbing to temptation.
Bottomline: Take the train to Hyderabad, catch it on 3D IMAX
First, dear parents, this is not a movie to take your kids to unless you want to expose them to Angelina Jolie’s animated Golden Globes-worthy performance in all its glory and all other things gory. Imagine the ugliest of monsters and dragons spilling their guts out, not to forget the effects of debauchery and alcoholism of yore.
Beowulf is for wicked adults who like their movies playful. Beowulf (pronounced to rhyme with Werewolf) is full of edge-of-the-seat thrills and cliffhangers but unfortunately, those of us in Chennai, do not get to experience half the action because this is a film best enjoyed in 3D IMAX, like Zemeckis’s last trip via ‘The Polar Express.’
Zemeckis once again employs the miracle of motion capture to bring to life characters created by hours and hours of painstaking animation. For a large part of the movie, you are never sure how much is animation and how much the actors have contributed to the shapes and speech of the characters they are playing. Like his previous works, Zemeckis intentionally exaggerates the animation so that it is not too life-like, just to keep your willing suspension of disbelief intact.
Like most fairytales, Beowulf is about the titular warrior who has come to Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) kingdom to slay the monster Grendel, who often gatecrashes the meat-house parties for his fill of human meat. The scenes of gore are delightfully wicked and keeps the child in you thoroughly entertained, especially when Grendel chews the head of one of the warriors.
But there’s a twist to the tale. Beowulf is not just about the hero in human form, it is also about the vulnerability of being human no matter how big a hero. All it takes is Angelina to seduce your sanity.
We forgive you Beowulf. Even the Gods couldn’t have resisted such a beautiful monster.
By all means, make your trip to the cinemas.
Better still, book tickets to Hyderabad to get your glimpse of the marvel that Angelina Jolie is, in 3D IMAX.
