Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Review

You seldom get period dramas in Bollywood which are not about historical characters. This year that way has been very lucky that way. Couple of months ago we had Badmaash Company and now we have Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai. Of course both are completely different from each other, the first being set in the fast 90s and the latter being set in colourful 70s. And director Milan Luthria makes enough efforts to make OUATIM look very authentic and worth a watch for its settings.
Settings apart the film has its pluses with some superb performances and great dialogues. However the problem with the film is the not so new storyline and the very slow screenplay. Though the characters are well established and well rounded the writer takes the entire first half to do that without much movement in the story. And then as you expect fireworks in the second half it fizzles out too fast.
OUATIM is the story of two gangsters. While one was ethical the other was reckless. It has inspirations of the characters of infamous smuggler Haji Mastan and now infamous don Dawood Ibrahim. The film is about Sultan (Ajay Devgn) who labored through his childhood and became a smuggler as he grew up completely ruling the sea routes. He however always preferred keeping the city clean and never smuggles which was against his conscience. Shoaib (Emraan Hashmi) is inspired by Sultan’s life as a child and wants to it as big. He is a son of a police officer but has no inclination towards the law. As he grows up he makes his way to Sultan’s gang and proves himself good enough to go up the ladder fast. However his reckless ambitions soon outgrew Sultan and he decided to take over the city on his own.
The story is built on the line – ‘behind the myth is the city’s greatest betrayal story’. The screenplay does not give much importance to the betrayal. The slow pace of the first half could be a put off. Also funnily Sultan and his girlfriend Rehana never seem to age as they continue to look the same even as Shoaib grows from a child to rustic young crook.

The Divide Movie Review

In Xavier Gens's The Divide, the revolution will not be televised, only the degradation of human civility—and in a mire of clichés more toxic to the mind than the radioactive dust that causes everyone's hair to fall out in the wake of a nuclear explosion. Following the goofy, almost anime-looking blast, a bunch of stock types pile into the basement of their very un-New York City apartment building, where handyman Mickey (Michael Biehn) seems to have holed himself up since at least the day after 9/11 as if in anticipation of this very day. The participants in what quickly reveals itself as an amateur hour that would make even Lamberto Bava blush include a splitsville-bound couple, a frazzled mom and her young daughter, the obligatory black dude, a crotch-obsessed punk type, and two half-brothers whose shared destiny is to go out not only with a bang but with their pectorals exposed. More than the radioactivity that seemingly leaks into the characters' underground prison, man is depicted as his own worst enemy, but for the audience there is perhaps no greater threat than Gens's overripe artistry.
This horror/sci-fi hybrid is a hodgepodge of plot holes and pointless divergences. From the second they enter Mickey's shelter, the characters already seem to be suffering from cabin fever, insulting each other as if they've known each other for years and trying to claw their way outside in spite of knowing what awaits them beyond the basement's steel door. Just as there's no sense, no patience even, of how time frays the mind in moments of crisis, how to explain the means by which a Hazmat team manages to reach this ground zero, entering the basement and nabbing Marilyn's (Rosanna Arquette) daughter in order to submit the girl to a series of tests in a lab set up immediately outside the premises? When Josh (Milo Ventimiglia), wearing the suit of one of the men his group dispatches in grisly fashion, takes a peak outside and discovers the girl's fate, he returns to his fellow survivors and merely shakes his head in Marilyn's direction, implying that the girl is a goner when the truth is…she's bald!
Gens's stylistic choices range from the purple to the incomprehensible: every can of beans is opened in Aronofsky-O-Vision; a Steadicam repeatedly and gracelessly soars into the ceiling and through the network of pipes of grates above the characters' heads; and when Marilyn lunges for her daughter as the men in Hazmat suits pull her out of the basement, she does so in homage toThe Matrix's bullet time. Gens shoots his basement location as if it were Marilyn Manson's playroom from the '90s, one dark and grimy corner after another, with special repeated appearances by the bug that crawled into Tyler, the Creator's mouth last year. Relentlessly over-scored and incoherently spliced together, The Divide settles into a nasty, redundant, largely hilarious funk once the characters accept their fates, behaving badly and aggressively toward one another, and in the case of a game Arquette, overzealously giving expression to the film's title by smearing lipstick, perhaps in homage to Holly Woodlawn, past the border that separates her mouth from the rest of her face.

Beauty And The Beast Movie Review

Better remembered than seen, Beauty and the Beasthas been treated unkindly not just by the years that have passed since it was released to enormous acclaim in 1991 (so enormous it became the first animated film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), but by a faddish 3D conversion; thus it stands a disaster in four dimensions, rather than the three we've grown accustomed to in the wake of Avatar. In terms of resurrecting Walt Disney Animation Studios, which had been in a slump since the 1960s, and had only just began to show signs of life (with the success of Oliver & Company and, on a different cloud entirely, The Little Mermaid),Beauty and the Beast obviously serves as some kind of keystone. In retrospect, however, it was so thoroughly outclassed in subsequent years not only by Pixar's masterpiece machine, but by traditional Disney features like Aladdin and The Lion King, that the heaping of praise and accolades upon its head now seems a little embarrassing, a premature ejaculation of sorts, as if Hollywood and the media had crossed a desert so arid, any bucket of dirty water might have looked like champagne.

The story isn't much more complicated than the 18th-century stock fable on which it's based, but somehow what makes it a post-Bluth/pre-Shrek Disney confection has everything to do with reducing every aspect of its source material to the level a kindergartener would understand; remember, this was before 1992, when Robin Williams's performance as the genie in Aladdinmade rapid-fire, adult-safe comic relief mandatory for all professional-grade kiddie films out of Hollywood. Whenever we see the dopey, mega-toothy Lefou, the hulking, self-involved monstrosity Gaston, or Belle's crackpot inventor father, you can practically hear the germ of something like Titey, the 1998 "Saturday TV Funhouse" spoof of Disney (and Bluth) animation and Titanic, form in the brains of smart-aleck viewers the world over.
If the film has any redemptive value, it comes in the form of a trio of showbiz pros who provide the voices of three anthropomorphized household appliances: Angela Lansbury, whose Broadway career continues to flourish, delivers the film's title tune, gooey treacle that it is, like nobody's business; David Ogden Stiers is the comical timepiece Cogsworth; and as the candlestick Lumiere, Jerry Orbach, one of the stage and screen's most brilliant and underrated performers, channels Maurice Chevalier with such perfect precision you'd never guess his iconic role was playing a grizzled cop for 13 years on Law & Order.
Save for some artful backdrops, the furtively CGI versions of which are all the more impressive given how primitive those software tools were in 1991, Beauty and the Beast looks surprisingly ghastly. Partly that's the fault of the 3D retrofit and its over-clear, high-definition presentation. It's not likely you'll be able to see this in 35mm, but if you have to see it at all, you really need the film projector's blur to give the hand-drawn cells some sort of alibi; think of the way makeup artists had to throw out their whole kit when sportscasters and anchor people were being broadcast in HD. Mostly, though, it's just strikingly lousy work in almost every frame, to the point where you realize that, at that point in its timeline, Disney's dark days weren't yet fully in the rear-view mirror.

Red Alert Movie Review

With a hard hitting realistic film Red Alert – The War Within actor turned filmmaker Anant Narayan Mahedevan has finally found his calling after directing a good number of average movies distinctively belonging to a diverse genre. The film based on a true story manages to strike a chord with the manner Mahadevan has narrated the subject without taking sides and has been ably supported by his ensemble cast.
The film narrates the tale of Narsimha (Suniel Shetty) a farm laborer, who desperately needed money to fund the education of his children. But he ends up finding himself in the midst of Naxalites where his mission becomes a mere subset of a greater cause that the militant’s pursue. From being a mere cook to actually training in weapons to being involved in shootouts and kidnapping, Narsimha himself in the thick of life he had never bargained for. A confrontation with the group leader (Ashish Vidyarthi) however turns his life upside down which leads him on the run from both law and the militants. But then comes a crucial time for Narsimha to take one vital decision that can either make or break him. But the decision ends in creating a conflicting situation that has him torn between conscience and survival.
The film’s situations are straight out of newspaper headlines and Mahadevan has handled the subject maturely. He has given a treatment to the film like a thriller rather than resorting to a boring documentary style. Much credit also goes to writer Aruna Raje. However, the climax could have been better. The happy ending though might please audience but in reality the situations portrayed in the climax appear a bit implausible.
The film’s another big strength however are the performances. Suniel Shetty has delivered his career-best act. Bhagyashree playing his wife is good. Sameera Reddy is almost unrecognizable in her non-glam act and is impressive. Ayesha Dharkar and Seema Biswas barely get any scope to justify their talent. Ashish Vidyarthi is very good. Gulshan Grover is fair. Amongst the veterans, Vinod Khanna in his short act and Naseer in his one scene role are super impressive. Zakir Hussain and Makarand Deshpande leave an impact too.

Aisha Movie Review

The thing about shallow people from the beau monde is that they shouldn’t be played shallowly when brought to the screen.
Sonam Kapoor in a ‘tailor’-made role(where more moolah seems to have been spent on tailoring her chic outfits than on exploring the locations , sound sights scents and , yes, sense of this embarrassing world of excessive self-preening) gets the Jane Austen character right. Quite a leap for the actress!
When she had played the confused lover-girl in Saawariya, Sonam had imposed her own natural-born confusions on the character rendering it shaky and disembodied.
In Aisha, Sonam is far more in control of her character’s misguided emotional compulsions. The fact that the young actress knows this label-centric designer world of chic shenanigans so well helps Sonam master and contour her character’s art of self-deception in a way the original author of the character would have approved.
Sonam’s world harks back to Jane Austen’s giddy-headed British gentry class where match-making was not idle chatter. It was religion. When placed in the neo-rich spiced-up politically-charged atmosphere of Delhi, Jane Austen’s characters seem to come alive in unexpected spurts of sassy splendor and unbridled joie de vivre. You can’t help laugh at these young often-aimless people’s self-importance.
Aisha is a 2-hour celebration of pre-nuptial rituals. Though no one says it, every girl in the picture wants only one thing. And it isn’t necessarily love, but somewhere close. The bristle and bustle of Delhi come alive through the slender intellectual faculties of the protagonists.
Let’s not forget Jane Austen had applied great intellectual strength to her frail and shallow people. Aisha converts Austen’s world into a frail feisty frolicsome fashion fiesta shot with an empowering affection for the natural light that bathes these somewhat affected people. The cinematography by Diego Rodriguez and specially the songs and background music by Amit Trivedi create a multi-hued skyline in this saga of sophomore socialites, their loves, lovers and love tattle.
Debutant director Rajshree Ojha gets into this world of titillating trivia and designer dreams with a wink and smile that go a long way in building a showcase around these metropolitan mannequins on a single minded match-making prowl. The casting is as dead-on as it can get. While the guys Abhay Deol, Cyrus Sahukar and Arunoday Singh play the Brain, Nerd and Hunk respectively with absolute relish it’s the girls who keep you chuckling and tch-tch-ing.