Zindagi Na Milegi Dobarah

India’s yuppie film genre is coming of age. It has been a ten year long trek from Dil Chahta Hai to Zindagi Na Milegi Dobarah while the film going populace became economically empowered with BPO jobs, nano (as in the size) cars, cellphones and ‘phoren’ vacations. All those cars and vacations have increasingly led to the development of a new breed of Indian – a road-tripper with an indulgent wallet.

Bromance movies are no strangers to Bollywood – the original woods where the bromantic saga Sholay played out for years in front of generations of changing audience. Today’s crowd will still lap up the bromance, but they know ‘zindagi na milegi dobarah’, so please make sure to delete Gabbar and all the related blood and crime. Keep the motorcycle and the chicks. Better still let’s change the Enfield into a convertible and a SUV, in tune with the changing times. Since everyone Rampur is an NRI, let’s go to Spain.




Road trip + Bromance in an exotic locale and we have Zindagi Na Milegi Dobarah. It is a bachelor-party road trip through a Spain tourism commercial. We have the San Fermin running of the bulls festival and Tomatina festival in Bunol. Had the characters really stayed in Spain and went to Tomatina festival first and then to San Fermin as it is shown in the film they’d have road-tripped thru’ Spain for a year for the Tomatino festival happens in August and San Fermin bull run in July.

Since our director Abhinay Deo is not training to be Ken Jenkins or Watson, only trying to achieve a minor task of scoring a Bollywood hit which I believe he does succeed in doing, I will not engage in a trivial pursuit . Farhaan Akhtar, Hrithik Roshan, Abhay Deol, Kalki and Katrina Kaif supports Deo in his efforts. Although Javed Akhtar’s poetry is nice, had it not been there it’d not have made any difference to the viewing experience (atleast not to mine) or the box office bucks.

Read More

Aisha

Aisha is Jane Austen on Janpath. I was never a big fan of Jane Austen's novels, though I do understand they filled social and literary vacuum in nineteenth century chick-lit. To me Austen's novels gave a thru-the-looking-glass view into the world of 19th century English ladies, their frivolous concerns and travails, in the end everything boiled to one(or many) "man"-hunt. I didn't know Aisha was an adaptation of Emma, not that it'd have made any difference to me since at this late age I'd not be able to distinguish one Austen heroine from another even if they came with name tags.

In Aisha, Sonam Kapoor has been offered a generous role and she does make use of it perfectly, so does all the name-brands with over-the-top brand placement. The movie looks like a fashion magazine, which taunts their middle class readers with glossy ads of unattainable yet coveted bric-brac like say a Versace scarf for $5000 or a Hermes purse for $8000. It always makes you wonder about the kind of people who'd own such a thing, Carly Simon once wrote and performed a hit single about this particular sub-species: Here it is, take it as a unisex message.

The rest of the cast is well chosen, from Abhay Deol to Ira Dubey to Cyrus Sahukar, everyone plays the stereotypes they have been entrusted with quite convincingly. The film is a chick flick and has to be taken lightly if your wife insists that you watch it with her.It is well shot and executed(thumbs up to the director, Rajashree Ojha) and has a decent sound track by Amit Trivedi and lyrics by Javed Akhtar.

Read More

Dev D

Dev D is a pioneer. From now on movies will be made like it, but Dev D owns the mold. In that aspect it is much like Satya which in 1998 started a trend of exploring India’s dark under-belly thru’ guns, gaalis and galis.

Director Anurag Kashyap is said to have given the lead actor Abhay Deol to create his own interpretation of the famed Hindi novel, Devdas. Dev D is the modern version of Devdas fraught with contemporary imagery - MMS, rich babas in their BMWs, sex industry which has gone high-tech and such. In the background there is the fast, crowded and rapidly transforming urban India and also the colorful and rustic India of the country-side which is not averse to change either.

The choice of actors who play the three main roles have been fitting. Both the female actresses - Mahi Gill and Kalki Koechlin could be considered true discoveries. But what makes Dev D stand apart in the crowd is its visual aesthetics and the incredible sound track that holds it together. It is a visual poem with a sound to match, irreverent to tradition, a rebel with a cause - for making bolder and better movies.

Read More

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!

Abhay Deol strikes again. My favorite actor to come up in Bollywood in recent years, this Deol is a bit different from his brood (comprising of his uncle Dharmendra, his cousins Sunny and Bobby Deol & Esha(?!)) and so are his films. They are quite a distinct genre in itself and cannot be pigeon-holed into hitherto known categories of Bollywood movies.

In Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye, Abhay Deol plays a street smart thief, who steals big(Mercs, beamers and the like), lives big and does it primarily for fun. Set in Delhi, it is the every man's view of India's capital city. As someone who has lived there I realize that this is the first real Dilli movie of modern times (of course there had been eighties movies like Chashme Buddoor)which portray the middle class man's Delhi. From costume to places and the typical Delhi-ite lingo, this movie has Delhi written all over it without one shot of Edwin Lutyen's Delhi.

The characters are quirky yet common, beautiful yet ordinary. Paresh Rawal plays three different roles in the movie without being repetitive. This movie has more in common with off-beat international movies than the run-of-the-mill Bollywood movies. Review: Excellent

Read More

Manorama Six Feet Under

A quirky black thriller from Navdeep Singh. The movie, Singh’s first directorial venture establishes him as one of the latest breed of talented film-makers who are crawling out of the Bollywood wood-work with their original and offbeat creations. Abhay Deol is a Deol of a different breed (after Sunny, Bobby, Esha and Papa Deol), this cousin Deol is the proverbial everyman yet handsome and talented.

The movie is set in a Rajasthani desert town, beat up by heat and overlooked by rain clouds for years. Nothing is going anywhere, life languidly flows with what is at its disposal, which is to say not much. This is not the Rajasthan of typical Bollywood movies or tourist brochures. The colorful village belles and the multi-tasking singer-dancer camel herders are noticeable by their absence, so is the thakur-thakurayin duo and the big haveli where it is always the wedding or the infighting season. This is the small town Rajasthan of everyday India – hot, parched, corrupt, Hinduized, politicized and middle-class.

Abhay Deol plays a PWD engineer who moonlights as an author, albeit a failed one at that. The novel which was supposed to make him a household name ‘Manorama’, sold just 200 copies, but it plays an important role in the movie. Gul Panag(a former Miss India) is Deol’s wife in the movie, a role which she carries off with natural panache. Vinay Pathak, ex-Channel V VJ has a very distinct role in the movie as the local police officer and Deol’s brother-in-law. Raima Sen plays her usual role as a guy-trap. Sarika and Kulbhushan Kharbanda plays other important roles.

What is interesting is that unlike in the usual Hindi movies, there is no easily readable black and white as such in this movie, it covers a lot of grey zones. Gold fishes are used to expound life’s big lessons since people keep on making the same mistakes you and me would make and are no good. Natural, darkly comic and a lot like real life.

Read More

Ek Chalis ki Last Local

This is one of the best movies to have come out of Bollywood recently. From the debutante director Sanjay Khanduri comes the most under-estimated flick which will endear you with its all pervading quirkiness, its original story line(that’s something that’s hard to come by in Bollywood movies) and believable characters. The movie reminds me of the dark humor in Tarantino’s films, quirky and unpredictable, but delightfully watchable.


Abhay Deol is a perfect fit for the protagonist who misses the last train to his home in Vikhroli. Mumbaiites know how important trains are in their lives and missing one changes the life of this young man forever. The story, the dialog, the camera, the perfect characterization and the general ambiance of the film in the hands of a director who knows what he is talking about delivers a winner. Khanduri tells that the story(he is the story writer and the script writer of the movie) is inspired by a night he was forced to spend in Mumbai’s under belly after having missed the local train himself. Well then, nobody could have made it better, right?

Another bit of trivia about 1:4O ki last local: 'Ek Chalis Ki Last Local' created a record by selling 1.18 lac DVDs in just first 14 days of its release. Its surprising for such a small film to do such a good business. Moser Bayer had launched its first commercial feature film DVD in Indian market by this film. It has sold more than any DVD VCD combined of any Indian film in first 2 weeks of its release.

Read More