short kut' is a wise-cracking comedy about two strugglers – Raju (Arshad Warsi), a bad actor, and Shekhar (Akshaye Khanna), a wannabe film maker.
In their chase for success, Raju and Shekhar face a series of wacky situations which put them at the onset of scam, deceit, super stardom and the subsequent fall. Once they discover each others’ ambitious streak, Raju takes a shortcut: he steals Shekhar’s prized script and is shot to fame overnight. Shekhar plunges into depression and tries to save himself from shame by splitting with his wife, reigning actress Mansi (Amrita Rao), who goes on to share the sets with her new hero Raju. To add to his misery, Shekhar must also return the advance he received for his script before it was stolen. Now, Shekhar is left with only one motive in life – to get even with Raju.
While Raju runs the high hurdles with the help of his acting coach Guru Kapoor (Chunkey Pandey), Shekhar plots against him when they are reunited on the sets of Shekhar’s directorial debut, which stars Raju. At first, Shekhar refuses to cast Raju in the lead, but when the producer gives Shekhar a chance to direct, Shekhar takes advantage of his only opportunity to sideline Raju. As the film progresses, comical act of con, trickery and clashing egos reveal the ultimate plight of Raju and Shekhar.
the cast:Akshaye Khanna as Shekhar – sincere and hardworking, Shekhar is an aspiring assistant director who believes there are no short cuts to success. He is extremely gifted and confident, but his naïve character only makes him a victim in the cut-throat filmy world.
Arshad Warsi as Raju – a struggling actor who thinks he is Bollywood’s most prized possession and is willing to take all shortcuts to stardom. He betrays his friend Shekhar by stealing his script and becomes an overnight sensation. What he really is, is an over-confident, good for nothing actor.
Amrita Rao as Mansi – a highly successful actress with lots of sex appeal who has a heart of steel and will do everything it takes to stay on top. She marries Shekhar but later leaves him when his depression kicks in.
Chunky Pandey as Guru Kapoor – he partners up with Raju as his acting coach and cringes at Raju’s poor acting skills, but never discourages him.
Siddharth Randeria as Kantibhai – he is the landlord who backs Shekhar in all of his dreams.
the crew
Director: Neeraj Vora, Roshan Andrews
Producer: Anil Kapoor
Production House: Anil Kapoor Films Company
Distributor: Studio 18
Music Label: T-Series
Screenplay: Anees Bazmee
Story: Anees Bazmee
Cinematography: Ashok Mehta, Johny Lall, Arvind Soni
Choreography: Bosco-Caesar
Music Director: Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy
Lyricist: Javed Akhtar
Cast: Akshaye Khanna, Arshad Warsi, Amrita Rao, Simi Garewal, Chunkey Pandey
Special Appearance by:anil kapur Sanjay Dutt
The Soundtrack:
Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy produce an upbeat sound track with strong audio value. There’s a variety of foot-tapping numbers including the very filmy spoof ‘Pal Pal’ (‘Kyun Hota Hai Dil Deewana’), which is shot on the beach with a qawwali twist, the hot item number ‘Mareeze Mohabbat’ and the romantic song ‘Kal Nau Baje.’ The title track ‘Patli Galli’ is catchy with strong Indian flavour yet contemporary orchestrisation.
What Works:
If anything can save a disaster in Bollywood, it’s the song and dance! The choreography by Bosco-Caesar is superb. The colorful picturisation of the songs and special appearances by Anil Kapoor and Sanjay Dutt are the only high points of the film.
What Doesn't:
Director Neeraj Vora and writer Anees Bazmee have tried too hard to make viewers laugh and all of the jokes seem to fall flat. Funny enough, the only thing viewers will be laughing at is how the writers went against their own motto – ‘there is no short cut to success.’ The script suffers, the plot remains outdated and the overall look of the film is artificial.
Amrita’s unlimited cleavage display does nothing for her acting career.
Arshad Warsi’s role seems repeated and Akshaye Khanna’s loud dialogue delivery can cause migraines.
Slated or Rated:
Don’t let the glam sham promos fool you. Anil Kapoor has taken a shortcut to filmmaking and ends up producing exactly what he preaches against. It’s far from being the hottest comedy of the summer and nothing more than a one-time watch!
Let’s play a mind game. What was Sushmita Sen thinking when she decided to work in this tableau of titillating possibilities on man-woman relationships all gone to utter and irrevevocable waste?
“Karma Aur Holi” with huge dollops of confession thrown in with the jerky suddenness of a car that decides to gather speed when the highway has ended, is one of those filmed fiascos that should’ve never been attempted. It’s like a Woody Allen ensemble cast about an angst-filled soiree that comes to a sorry state of spluttering incoherence.
The film does gross disservice to all concerned, including the poor debutant director Manish Gupta who probably thought he was doing a diasporic version of Woody Allen’s cinema but instead ended making up an extended episode of a Doordarshan serial on the vagaries of the Page 3 crowds.
Sushmita and Randeep try hard to look like a couple with serious marital problems. He takes business calls while making love to her. Maybe he likes the phone better than sex. That’s the least of our worries in trying to make sense of the characters’ dissociated sensitivities.
The film is about an outwardly well-to-do couple played by Sushmita and Randeep who are either showering together or shouting at each other, depending on which way their marital mood swings. One fine day the couple invites home a group of people, including a self-absorbed Pakistani filmmaker (Armin Amiri) and his pregnant girlfriend (Naomi Campbell), a bickering couple (Suresh Oberoi, Rati Agnihotri) and their porn-fixated teenage son, a repressed wife (Suchitra Krishnamurthy) and her bullying husband. By the time the day is done the lid is blown off the facade of suburban marriages in the land of dreams.
Sushmita playing a wife who dances with her maid in the kitchen while cooking (menu rab da vasta!) is more bothered about her swanky new dress being crumpled under sexual pressure than the fact that her husband might be having an affair with his over-sized secretary (Maya Lily).
Sushmita shrugs off her sister warning: “Do you think they look like they’re up to anything?”
Frankly no one looks like he or she is up to anything. That’s the saddest part of a film which wants to say so much. But the words perpetually get in the way.
A few minutes into this mish-mash of Woody Allen, George Bernard Shaw, Govind Nihalani and Keshu Ramsay (the horror of course creeps in unintentionally) and you know the narrative is in trouble. The characters who come to Sushmita-Randeep’s home in New York for an afternoon of heavy duty gossiping, bitching introspection and confession seem to be speaking dialogues borrowed from a cheap American soap opera.
The feelings and thoughts are not only assumed they are also devoid of any coherent pattern. The script tries to be sassy without the basic source material to carry off its ambitions.
The narration is tragically chaotic. The characters seem to be let loose in a room constructed for conflict, and left to their own devices. Ideas of communal disharmony (Rati Agnihotri playing Suresh Oberoi’s sourpuss wife refuses to accept a glass of water from a Muslim filmmaker) and inter-racial coupling (the Muslim director has Naomi Campbell as his girlfriend and punching bag) jostle for screen space with musings on a marriage of convenience in a foreign cultural location where opportunities to f…k-up are limitless.
Ironically the film itself becomes one messy f…k-up with the characters unaware of where to go next or what to do with the dubious responsibility of acting like people who care about the goings-on.
There’s a pubescent horny teenager who’s hounded by a nosy girl (Depal Shaw) with a video camera, a buxom single women who confesses she’s more into women than men and a caricatural pair of American boss-and-bimbo cutting a shady deal with Hooda as wife Sushmita makes her displeasure more than clear. She even shuts the door in her guests’ face. So much for reciprocating the American hospitality.
Somewhere along the dreadful and droll storytelling a gangster pops up in the backyard pool with two floozies bouncing by his side as though they had just discovered the reason why they are part of this film.
We of course remain clueless as to why “Karma Aur Holi” was made. Or why the actors who should’ve known better lent their presence to the film.
While the international cast, including Robert de Niro’s daughter Drena, remain supremely oblivious of their utility in the plot, Sushmita tries hard to lend some grace and humour to a character hellbent on self-destruction. Another engaging performance comes from Suchitra Krishnamurthy as a repressed wife trying to make herself heard above her husband’s bullying.
Randeep Hooda carries his American accent and demeanour with a flair that scoffs at the film’s cheerless efforts to portray the Indian diaspora as a chamber piece done on a pitchless offkey scale.
Nearly flawless, almost pitched perfectly to show the trauma of those who lose limbs, lives, love and faith in a communal carnage, Nandita Das’ directorial debut leaves you speechless. This is what cinema was always meant to be. But somewhere in its chequered course from information to entertainment, our movies began to feel like vaudeville entertainment meant more for diversion than intellectual stimulation.
“Firaaq” doesn’t aim to be a cerebral treatise on communalism. Nor does it suffuse the narrative with what one may call intellectual masturbation for the sake of creating an aura of socio-political importance.
Non-judgemental and utterly bereft of stylistic affections, “Firaaq” is a graceful and glorious homage to the human spirit. Much of its visual power comes from Ravi Chandran’s articulate but restrained camera work, Sreekar Prasad’s seamless but trenchant editing that leaves nothing (not even destiny) to chance, and Gautam Sen’s artwork which makes the city’s riot-torn colours emblematic of the red anger and the blue despair felt by the characters.
Set in those turbulent tension-filled days right after the Godhra incident in Gujarat, “Firaaq” depicts the loss of human faith and the complete absence of the rules of civilised conduct in the day-to-day working of the administration vis-୶is civilians.
Language, in fact, is an amazing tool of unhampered eloquence in “Firaaq”. The characters in the riot-torn city speak in three languages Hindi, English and Gujarati. They do so without design or selfconscious purpose.
The outstanding words do not stand outside the characters’ ambit of everyday expression (sometimes colloquial, otherwise poetic). Even when the narrative pauses to debate the polemics of communal politics among the characters, we the audience are one with the pause. This is excellence without the silent sound of applause. The spoken words are not designed for the camera. They are said because they have to be expressed.
“Firaaq” first and foremost deserves the highest praise for the remarkably even-pitched writing by Nandita Das and Shuchi Kothari. No character jumps out of the screen in trying to make its presence felt. The people who live in Nandita’s film are the people we know in one way or another.
And yet they are here, special in a very unobtrusive way. The narrative episodes, written with finesse and passion, are constructed to accentuate the post-communal friction among people who till the other day were neighbours. There is a mixed-married Hindu-Muslim couple. Before the day is done the husband (played with silent sincerity by Sanjay Suri) has made peace with his environment and the fact that his name is Sameer Sheikh, not Sameer Desai.
Sameer in the context of the film’s volatile communal statement becomes a metaphor for the Hindu-Muslim divide which is now a looming reality in middle class lives. The tact and grace with which “Firaaq” weaves through the communal tensions of unrelated characters all joined by their collective fear of a communal backlash are signs of a time when cinema and society at large need to do a serious rethink on their responsibilities.
“Firaaq” throws forward an assortment of unrelated characters zigzagging across a domain of doomed conscientiousness. Nandita Das’s narrative doesn’t attempt to unravel the enigma of a disaster-borne civilisation. It looks at the people, even the lowest and scummiest of them (including Paresh Rawal who bravely plays a middle class businessman who happily looted a Muslim shop and shared in his brother’s participative glee in a gang rape) with a kind of reined-in empathy that makes even the seeming perpetrators look like victims.
The villains, if any, are the administrative personnel shown to be running around abetting the violence. If this is a simplification in storytelling then it can’t be helped. Celluloid depictions of troubled times have to somewhere find tangible figures to blame for the injustice. Otherwise we would come away from a certifiable masterpiece like “Firaaq” wondering if there’s any sense of justice left in this chaotic world of self-serving brutality.
Das’ narrative is propelled forward by powerful characters played by actors who not only know their job but also know how to make their jobs look like anything but professional hazard.
It would be criminal to pick performances. Deepti Naval (looking like a ravaged guilt-ridden avatar of the nurturing foster-mom Sharmila Tagore in Shakti Samanta’s “Amar Prem”), Paresh Rawal (as a trashy unscrupulous bourgeois broker) and of course the redoubtable Naseeruddin Shah (as an aged classical singer caught in a sublime time-warp) deliver performances that glisten with glory and sensitivity.
But there are dozens of other known and unknown actors furnishing Das’ gripping drama with an inner voice that screams in protest without overstatement. The interactive drama bringing together people during crises never lapses into hysteria and homilies. The beauty of the drama of the disinherited is never diluted by clinging on to the inherent drama of any given situation.
Like life, Nandita Das’ narrative moves on with confident steps creating for itself a kind of compelling circumstance when crises are a given, compromise a compulsion and surrender to fate the only means of survival.
Haunting and powerful in its depiction of a time when humanity is frozen in anguish and terror, “Firaaq” draws its tremendous strength from the screenplay and characters which seem to observe life’s keenest and meanest blows without flinching.
Here’s a film that must be seen not because it tells a story that touches every life. But because it touches our lives with such persuasiveness without resorting to overstatement.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Aftab Shivdasani, dimpling with mischievous intent, asks his prospective bride. “Neither do I!”. Ha ha…
“We could go out at least two evenings every week after marriage,” Aftab promises. “You could go on Saturdays, I on Sundays.”
Ha ha ho ho…
Robbie Grewal’s first cinematic outing “Samay” featured Sushmita Sen as a tough cop and his second feature was a mushy ode to first - “Mera Pehla Pehla Pyar”. This time Grewal falls as flat as a cold chapati while attempting this groom meets bride tale in a Punjabi household bustling with uncles, aunts and other relatives.
Trouble is, we don’t see much of the domestic action jumping out of the screen to claim our attention. The characters including the ever-dependable Kulbhushan Kharbanda behave like a crew from a long-running serial straying into a film about life in a family serial.
Every actor behaves as though he’s playing a part for the camera. The talented Manoj Pahwa playing a tawdry sexologist talks directly into the camera.
Is he the narrator or just the excitable orator? Are we watching a film on contemporary mores as opposed to conventional attitudes? Or is this a script that Basu Chatterjee decided to throw away for its lack of punch?
The plot, if you want to know, is about a Punjabi NRI who, in order to convince his family to let him marry a Muslim girl, brings home a tourist as his girlfriend.
“Thank God he didn’t bring home a guy,” someone quips as this bargain basement version of “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge” chugs along at a dull though inoffensive pace.
“Aloo Chaat” is a Punjabi comedy that you’ve been seeing on television for years and is now being screened on a much larger screen and a far smaller intellectual level.
Aftab Shivdasani and Amna Sharif share some watchable moments together. But these moments are squandered in the wrong movie with the wrong plot.
Film: “Runway”When a filmmaker doesn’t have any story to tell, he tries to perk up the narrative by using jump cuts, freeze frames and other technical wizardry - last year it was seen in “Woodstock Villa”, this year it’s in “Runway”.
“Runway” sets the message right at the very beginning that it is an exercise in futility.
Amarjeet Shukla, the lead protagonist in the film, becomes a contract killer to save the life of his lady love Deepal Shaw, who is dying due to drug usage. He comes in touch with people like Sharat Saxena who plays underworld English speaking kingpin who wears dark shades, is surrounded by those 80s style left over blue-n-white drums and announces - ‘I am not interested in your love story; I want brave people’.
Amarjeet’s friend, who introduces him to the Don also warns him - ‘He is a man of commitment, so be careful.’
It’s just that the ‘man of commitment’ himself is nowhere to be seen in the entire second half as his henchman pairs up with Amarjeet to do rest of the killing. Worse, one doesn’t quite understand who is killing whom and what’s the purpose behind that?
So Amarjeet presses the trigger for the first time and just when he gets hold on a fake passport to fly back into India, courtesy Tulip, he decides to skip his flight and return to the mean streets.
By the way, Tulip plays a girl in a dance bar who ‘cannot be afforded’, as stated by one of her junior colleagues. She sings ‘bhojpuri’ songs, speaks English, lives in Mauritius, fears a Pakistani don and falls in love with an Indian. A true ambassador of globalisation.
Talking about Mauritius, one needs to give a rap on the knuckles of the person who created that fancy software that plays on Amarjeet’s laptop. Mauritius is spelt as ‘Muritus’ along with at least a couple of more English errors that is embarrassingly displayed on the big screen. Moreover, the film’s tagline ‘Love Among Gun Shots’ isn’t syntactically correct either! But then who would have cared about such minor things when there are bigger and far more glaring loopholes in the films.
So what one gets to see is biggest contract killer in the entire globe, Lucky Ali, driving a bike on the streets of Mauritus and firing openly on poor Amarjeet.
If that wasn’t heroic enough, he also removes his helmet, proudly flaunts his revolver and keeps searching him on foot even as the entire marketplace makes way for him. He enters people’s households and hotel rooms unannounced, kills them in quick successions, always leaves Tulip unscathed and misses his target whenever Amarjeet comes in sight.
However, one chance and Amarjeet shoots him in a split second motion. Quite a feat, especially with a Mauritian super cop, who announces that ‘he won’t allow gang war to break in his city’, is left hardly impressed that a ‘common Indian’ has managed to do what Interpol couldn’t for all these years.
At the end, he turns out to be even more powerful as he knocks down Amarjeet with three (or were they four?) bullets. Well, not bad.
Now if only he would have found him at the airport in the film’s beginning itself and done the honours there and then. That would have been some relief for a poor viewer who all this while was thinking of ‘running away’ from this trash affar
Let's discuss the mood within the industry before ‘New York’ happened. Several people I interacted with prior to the release of the film were of the opinion that the common man, perhaps, had lost the habit of visiting theatres/plexes in the past two months and only a real biggie, with solid reports, would draw the audiences out of their homes. A debatable point…
Agreed, the viewer was missing his staple diet of films every Friday, but it wasn't as if the industry had stopped making movies or things had come to a grinding halt. The viewer was well aware of the tiff between the two warring factions [thanks to the widespread coverage in the media] and that things had come to a halt, albeit temporarily.
But ‘New York’ did the trick. Yash Raj went out of its way to market the film. The film had to score in its opening week, else a major opposition next week would elbow it out of the ring. In fact, this is applicable for all films slated for release in the next few weeks. It's now or never!
‘New York’ is a moderately budgeted film and given its fantastic business over the weekend in India as also in the international markets, YRF, also its distributor, is sure to recover a substantial chunk of its investment from the theatrical business, while another big chunk is expected from non-theatrical avenues [given its good performance at the b.o.].
‘New York’ is aimed at the multiplex junta and I am confident, its business should remain steady in its second weekend [at plexes]. With ‘Kambakkht Ishq’ carrying excellent reports, let's hope it pours at the box-office this Friday as well. Fingers crossed
