#BhootPartOneTheHauntedShip #BollywoodHindiFilmMovieReview #PicksAndPiques #JohnsonThomas

Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

Complicated but unconvincing haunting



Film: Bhoot Chapter One: The Haunted Ship

Cast: Vicky Kaushal, Bhumi Pednekar, Akash Dhar, Meher Vij, Ashutosh Rana, Siddhant Kapoor, Sara Gesawat

Director: Bhanu Pratap Singh

Rating: * *

Runtime: 114 mins

Hype Media - Niloufer Quereshi



Hoping to create a new urban legend surrounding the beaching of a stray ship unhinged from its tow, Dharma and team fashion a story about possible paranormal events surrounding the unique occurrence that was seen on Juhu beach last year. An accident at best, the unsalvageable beached ship meant for the breaking yard ends up being grist for a horror movie. That’s really creative I must say and a rare thing for Bollywood. But first -timer Bhanu Pratap Singh’s ( also credited with story) writing and direction fails to drum by hysteria or tension and the fabricated horror intent fails to incite fear or terror in the hearts and minds of the audience. Unfortunately, the complicated turns in the convoluted narrative only make it seem unbelievable and incredible to the logical mind. But then the paranormal is never logical is it?



The movie begins with Prithvi( Vicky Kaushal) investigating a container ship for human trafficked cargo, finds it, rescues the contingent of young women only to be found out and get embroiled in a struggle. It’s a clumsy scene meant to establish Prithvi, the Shipping investigator’s vigilante zeal and ends up exposing him as stupid and careless instead. Cut back to memories of another time when Prithvi and Esha(Bhumi Pednekar) establish their love, get married and have a little girl. They go for a river rafting adventure holiday and Prithvi is the only one who survives the misadventure. Obviously, he is having nightmares about that traumatic past. And then the ghost ship, Seabird, gets beached and Prithvi and his bestie,( also his colleague) Riyaaz (Akash Dhar who appears to be the only actor invested in this story) are tasked with the job of removing the high -risk eyesore ( which also contains a tank load of diesel) from the always over-populated beach.



Before we get to the ship part, we already get the hint that there’s some connection between Prithvi and a possible future haunting. The rest is so convoluted that its laughable. A large part of the audience at my show were tittering away at the incredulousness of it all. While Bhanu Pratap Singh may have taken pains to construct the narrative, he fails to invest it with the energy, tension or conviction that is required to make such high-faulting ideas seem plausible. Most of the actors appear to be sleep-walking through their roles here. The absolute lack of conviction on their part makes it a thankless exercise altogether. Production design is workable and the cinematography does help create some amount of creepiness but the CGI lacks detailing and the overall direction fails to generate either chills or thrills to make this pithy ghost story, convincing.



Johnsont307@gmail.com

#LoveAajKal2 #BollywoodHindiFilmMovieReview #PicksAndPiques #JohnsonThomas

Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

This ain’t LOVE



Film: Love Aaj Kal (2.0) (Reboot)



Cast: Karthik Aryan, Sara Ali Khan, Aarushi Sharma, Simone Singh, Randeep Hooda

Director: Imtiaz Ali

Rating: * * ½

Runtime: 142 mins



Imtiaz Ali’s reboot of his hit romance ‘Love Aaj Kal’ is plagued by sameness and ennui. There’s nothing new to look forward to here. The romantic allusions, the wanton wilfulness of the heroine, the back and forth from past to present, and an unnecessarily protracted stalemate, only adds up to tedium. It’s Zoe’s film and she is allowed to run her rule and thankfully Sara Ali Khan is so assured and confident in that skin that we are willing to empathise with the illogical, almost obstinate turns her life takes.



A wilful, so-called self-professed career woman, Zoe(Sara Ali Khan) bumps into Veer(Kathik Aryan) at a nightclub and cupid strikes. She is willing to further the relationship and he is sappily overwhelmed but the reckoning comes when she has to chose between going to Dubai on a career move or staying back for togetherness. Not a compelling catch 22 situation because she is an aspiring event manager and its not as if the event in Dubai would have lasted forever. And sappy Veer was only too willing to accommodate her every whim… Interspersed into this narrative is the yesterday romance of Raghu rechristened Raj (Randeep) who in his younger school going days (played by Karthik Aryan again) jauntily romanced Leena(Arushi Sharma). Their romance encounters several hurdles along the way and that experience is what Raj is hoping Zoe will learn from when he confides in her at the co-working space that he runs.



Its Sara’s perkiness and Karthik’s sincerity that keeps you engrossed for at least the first hour of the film. After that the procrastinations by Zoe and sacrificing, idealistic mentality of Veer gets on your nerves. Randeep’s Raj is merely a father confidant and Randeep does an assured act, Arushi Sharma does well to imprint her presence given the rather sketchy role she is saddled with while Simone Singh as Zoe’s mom makes her all-too-brief presence felt with a strikingly emotive performance. There’s nothing novel here. What happened in 2010 film at least had novelty, this one talks about contemporary love and romance in a rather dysfunctional way. The heroine Zoe, comes across as someone who is unable to make up her mind about what she wants and her shrill deliberations border on the psychotic. The process of arriving at a conclusion is not interesting enough to keep us glued to our seats either. There’s so much talk (much of it rather banal) that you want to just tune off. Imtiaz believes in putting it all out there but it’s not poetry when conversations don’t feel organic. The craft is similar to the earlier film, the plotting has nothing new to impart and the locations don’t matter much either. The main Zoe-Veer romance track is so silly that you lose interest in their love much before they are shown as having broken-up. The songs and background score lend some soul but it’s never really enough to keep you engrossed throughout. ‘Jab We Met’ was Imtiaz’s most emotionally charged film, the ones that came after that were merely trying hard to keep up and failed. The 2010 ‘Love Aaj Kal’ had good songs and a construct that came at the cusp of a trend and therefore managed to catch the public eye, this redux or 2.0 doesn’t even have that!



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#Shikara #BollywoodHindiFilmMovieReview #PicksAndPiques #JohnsonThomas

Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

An eye-pleasing, sentimental love story



Film: Shikara

Cast: Aadil Kahn, Sadia, Faisal Simon, Priyanshu Chatterjee

Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra

Rating: * * *

Runtime: 120 mins



Tripping all through on Bollywood tropes made memorable by the likes of Yash Chopra, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s latest directorial, that markets itself as a refugee story is anything but. Inspired by Rahul Pandita’s ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots,’ the film has its pivotal characters coming from that Kashmiri Pandit refugee space but the central over-riding theme here is one of abiding, enduring love - the ‘Buniyaad’ kind. So from the early 1980 right up to 2018 Chopra takes us to Kashmir and Jammu, as Shiv Kumar Dhar( Aadil Khan) and Shanti(Sadia) meet up as happenstance extras on a film set, progress to falling in love, getting married and setting up home and hearth in the valley once eulogised as Paradise on earth. While their love for each other remains unstinted, their displacement from the known to the unknown becomes a cause for unmitigated grief. The two are forced to flee Kashmir as part of the exodus of Pandits from the valley in 1980, live in refugee camps for a while and then move to a small but more permanent refugee quarter. Woven into their love story are the tragedies of Lateef( Faisal Simon), Dr Navin Zutshi (Priyanshu Sharma) and Aarti whose lives are tossed asunder by the passions unleashed by communal strife.



Chopra’s mellow narrative briefly lets in some well-chosen news stories, documentary footage and sloganeering as emblematic representations of that period. But for those unaware of the true nature or reason for that violence, it is quite unlikely that they will become better aware after watching this film. And it’s never made clear as to why Kashmiri pandits never chose to visit their homeland (post the displacement) - even when local and foreign tourists were visiting the state, albeit in smaller numbers. The loving couple, are shown as doing quite well for themselves eventually. Shiv takes on the job of a Professor with a decent salary -enough to fulfil his wife’s only wish.



In order to highlight the disregard shown for the Pandits by the Political class and the International community, Chopra has Shiv writing regular letters to the President of America – in the hope that he would one day arouse the conscience of the world and be the harbinger of justice for the aggrieved Pandits. That unbelievable conceit doesn’t sit well within the narrative and seems a little too preposterous to be believable. Chopra could have dreamed up a more potent construct to frame his narrative around. The screenplay by Chopra, Pandita and Abhijat Joshi doesn’t do enough justice to the Pandits’s story – focused as it is on syrupy romance. Some of the ‘nazms’ especially ‘Umr Guzri’ recited as part of Shiv’s poetry are particularly poignant and does more to bring home the aching loss of displacement from home and Kashmir with far more potency than the actors or the mushy romance that superimposes itself on the narrative here. Rangarajan Ranabadran’s vivid cinematography, Aadil, Sadia, Faisal Simon’s heart-touchingly sincere performances, Priyanshu’s riding-on-flamboyance presence, the motley mix of classical and folk in the background orchestrations and the haunting melancholy of ‘Jo ek pal tumko…Mar Jaayein hum’ rendered beautifully by Shradha Mishra and Papon leave the most lasting impression here.



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#Malang #BollywoodHindiFilmMovieReview #PicksAndPiques #JohnsonThomas

Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

Knotty, Twisty, shrill, Illogical Thriller



Film: Malang

Cast: Aditya Roy Kapur, Disha Patani, Anil Kapoor, Kunal Khemu, Elli Avrram, Keith Sequeira, Shaad Randhawa, Vatsal Seth, Amruta Khanvilkar

Director: Mohit Suri

Rating: * *

Runtime: 134 mins



Mohit Suri’s latest seems to have jumped out of a drug induced haze…else, why would the plotting lose its biggest gambit by twisting the narrative out of all the sense it hoped to make? There are twists and there are turns here but they appear to be an attempt to cover-up scriptural malfunctions rather than tell a logical story.



The film begins with a fight sequence in a prison. A buffed-up Aditya Roy Kapur, whose back is facing the camera throughout the longest fight sequence in the film, beats up, punches, whacks, bludgeons and picks up and drops guys twice his size, in an effort to establish his fighting dominance. But the fact that his back is turned to the camera indicates something else altogether (if you get my point). Then comes the flashes into a past littered with drugs, parties and self-indulgences. In a silly show of independence two young people Advait (Roy Kapur) and Sara(Disha) break away from their steady lives to visit Goa and live like free spirits. That’s where they bump into each other, experience free love and go their separate ways. Sara finds she is pregnant but Advait runs away from the responsibility. By the time he comes to his senses, he is too late to prevent a tragedy from happening. The narrative intersperses past and present in a bid to keep the viewer on tender-hooks trying to guess a reason that’s all-too-obvious. The weirdest constructs play out here. While Advait goes all out on a vengeance spiel trying to eliminate all those he holds responsible- including a group of cops Michael(Khemu) and his buddies, Inspector Anjaney Agashe ( Anil Kapoor hamming it all the way) goes haywire gripped in a grief of his own making. To top it all the very reasoning for the vengeance spiel ceases to exist. Everything goes south from there.



The action choreography is crisp with sound accompaniments that add crispy punch but it is not realistic. The attempt to make winter solstice a sort of code word for the vengeance spiel falls flat because for most of the film the audience is clueless about its meaning. The dialogues are the inanest I’ve ever heard in a film in a long time. While Aditya manages to insert some feeling into his performance, Disha just manages to look pretty and clueless. Khemu’s role takes an unbelievable U turn so his performance, despite the effort, looks silly. Shaad, Keith, Amruta and others are mere window dressing in a script( by Aniruddha Guha) that forces damaging action and vengeance on your senses without any cogent, plausible reasoning. It’s like getting away with murder by merely claiming innocence!



Johnsont307@gmail.com

#JaiMummyDi #BollywoodHindiFilmReview #PicksAndPiques #JohnsonThomas Rating: * 1/2

Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

Mummy-fied Indignity



Film: Jai Mummy Di

Cast: Supriya Pathak, Poonam Dhillon, Sunny Singh, Sonnali Seyggal, Nushrat Bharucha, Varun Sharma

Director: Navjot Gulati

Rating: * 1/2

Runtime: 103 mins



This clunker from the Luv Ranjan stable of misogynistic ‘man’ loving, crusading cinema was not expected for sure. This time he has Navjot Gulati helming (his debut film) a supposed comedy romance that fails to drum up interest in either departments.



The central conceit about two fast friends, Pinki(Poonam Dhillon) and Laali(Supriya Pathak) having a falling out in college and subsequently living their lives in ‘opposition’ to each other while still next door neighbors is a little too far-fetched and difficult to comprehend. They even end up wearing duplicate outfits and reading the riot act to their respective children Saanjh Bhalla(Sonnalli Seyygall) and Puneet Khanna(Sunny SIngh) for fear they might fall in love (inevitable) with each other. The youngsters play pretend, the mothers end up at the same functions in similar garish outfits and have a go at each other while the fathers/husbands dutifully allow their wives to to make ‘noise’ over silly matters.



Considering this film comes from Luv Ranjan’s production house, methinks its an effort to curry favor with the female audience alienated by his previous male-centred attempts at cinema.Unfortunately, there’s neither logic, intriguing moments or humor to make this tedious, truculent and totally meaningless effort worthy of a pricey cinema ticket. The writing is totally pedestrian. The reason for the estrangement between the titular Mummies is silly ( Imagine Varun Sharma as the bone of contention) enough to make you want to stay away. The actors ham ( there’s really no one in the film who is brave enough to stand clear of that contagion) it all the way and the Director just couldn’t make this effort light enough to be forgivable. Take a break from the cinemas this week. This one is only likely to leave you colder than the weather...and just as bothered!



Johnsont307@gmail.com

#Chhapaak #HindiBollywoodFilmMovieReview #PicksAndPiques #JohnsonThomas Rating * * * 1/2

Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

An Empowering Experience

Film: Chhapaak

Cast: Deepika Padukone, Vikrant Massey, Madhurjeet Sarghi, Ankit Bisht, Delzad Hiwale, Devas Dixit

Director: Meghna Gulzar

Rating: * * * 1/2

Runtime: 138 mins



Chhapaak, based on true incidents, revolves around the trials and tribulations of 19 year old Malti (played by Deepika Padukone who models her post acid attack look on real life victim Laxmi). The wannabe singer, Malti’s, trauma begins when stalker/family friend Bashir Khan and aide, throw acid on her face, in broad daylight on the streets of Delhi. And her trials don’t end there. Her brother’s illness and father’s death compound her problems and it is Malti’s lawyer Archana (Madhurjeet Sarghi), who stands by her through this impressive journey of courage and true grit. And moving forward, Amol(Vikrant Massey), the head of the NGO she eventually works for, helps Malti file a PIL to ban the sale of acid and suggest amendments to make the acid violence legislation more effective.



Meghna Gulzar’s matter-of-fact narrative trails the investigation of the attack, court proceedings, the harrowing medical reconstruction treatment and the eventual emotional healing. Even though the narrative seems choppy and uneven at times, through it all, the true grit, resilience and unstinting spirit of the lead character shines luminously bright. The non-linear narrative designed by Meghna and Atika Chohan’s screenplay, has Malti, already moving on from the traumatic experience, trying to land a job while her life revolves around multiple surgeries and court cases - not the singing she envisioned for herself. Director Meghna Gulzar steers clear of melodrama while drawing up strong enough sentiment to floor even the most hard-hearted viewer. Deepika’s performance lends acuity to Malti’s ( and other victims like her) experience. You can actually see the victim growing from strength to strength as the story progresses and she notches up hard-won victories. Vikrant Massey is effective and so are the other largely peripheral cast members. Massey’s Amol is endearingly flawed. His male condescension and privileged domineering gets pulled down pretty often yet he takes it all in like a sport. There’s an innate goodness in him that just cannot be budged. Madhurjeet Sarghi playing the Lawyer Archana, whose steadfast support gave Malti a chance to be able to rewrite her dreams, appears to have an innate affinity for the feminist contours of the character she essays with crafty elegance. In fact Anand Tiwari, as Archana’s husband presents an ideal of a modern marriage without so much as batting an eyelid. Gender stereotypes are deconstructed - Women in this film have all the powerful roles and why not…especially since this story is meant to evoke compassion.



This film is about Malti’s healing and how she challenges herself to use the spotlight to provoke social change. The protagonist’ lack of a victim complex is the most beautiful aspect of this filmed experience.Meghna Gulzar’s narrative provokes thought and questioning, allowing the audience to react to the played out drama, in their own time and pace. The songs (Chhapaak and Nok Jhok especially) have their own infective influence - sometimes relieving the heaviness and other times, lifting up dampening spirits. The makeup and prosthetics may look put on but there’s no doubting the authenticity of this experience. The minor surges in emotion experienced here are much more earth shattering than the pumped up factitious adrenaline rush of a big budget, period actioner… and I daresay, you won’t be unmoved!



Johnsont307@gmail.com

#BhangraPaaLe #BollywoodHindiFilmMovieReview #PicksAndPiques #JohnsonThomas

Bollywood Film Review

Johnson Thomas

Dancing up a murky entreaty

Film: Bhangra Paa Le



Cast: Sunny Kaushal, Rukhsar Dhillon, Shriya Pilgoankar, Balraj Singh Khehra, Himanshu Sharma

Director: Sneha Taurani

Rating: * *

Runtime: 130 mins



Bhangra Paa Le is a film revolving around a dance competition and is set within two distinct periods. The film has a sequence set during the World War II where a soldier Captaan (Sunny Kaushal) from the 1940’s, pulls out a dhol and beats up a discordant tune which energises a defeated company into a resurgent battle for survival. His Nimmo(Shriya Pilgoankar) is typically waiting for him in his hometown, Malwa Village, Punjab. This scenario cuts into another, set in contemporary Amritsar, a college where a dance audition for a bhangra troupe led by Jaggi Singh(Sunny Kaushal), is underway. The battle that’s about to rage is for a spot to perform on the world stage in London and Simi( Rukhsar) whom Jaggi hopes to pair up with, turns on the heat with her own individual aspirations. Dheeraj-Rattan’s inter-cutting story-screenplay fails to drum up enough interest or fire-up a fiery tempo despite the high-on-energy dancing by Jaggi and his Pendu Club dancers or the heavy beat and rhythm of the Bhangra.



Sneha Taurani’s film, marketed as a bridge between the traditional forms of Bhangra from Punjab and western dance forms from all across the world, doesn’t do justice to that high-faulting concept. Sunny Kaushal, Vicky Kaushal’s younger sibling makes his solo debut opposite Rukshar Dhillon here. But it’s neither a distinctive nor memorable one. The three film old actor is competent enough as a dancer from both ages but his lack of screen presence makes it all look unremarkable.



A plethora of songs and dances fail to raise-up enthusiasm for this energy sapping exercise that borders precariously on needlessly elongated tedium. Most of the songs are unremarkable, the liberal use of punjabi is rather off-putting and the performances never quite make it to assured. This is a rather ill-fitting attempt at dance/music tribute.



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