James - Watch it for style

The punchline is that you'd have seen all the scenes in James at least 4-5 times before. Despite that, the treatment is so different, you don't feel like yawning and taking a walk outside the theater to make a call on your cell or have a smoke.

There is no story. Of course, there is the small town simpleton in big bad Mumbai, with small town idealism, will to fight and super human strength liberating the city from the tentacles of the devil personified bit in lieu of the story. Don't watch James if you want to see realistic cinema or a story.

Watch James if you want entertainment 80's style - thrill, adventure and rough and tumble - tough guys and hot women, idealistic hero and lascivious villain, helpless police and corrupt cops. Watch James if you want to see the raw intensity of a fresh face and some fine performances. Watch James if you want to watch some very well executed sequences.

Apart from the narrative and the message, the success of the movie (and we are not talking about box office success) is determined by its ability to evoke the kind of emotions that it intends to evoke in the audience. On that count, James scores high. You identify with the protagonist's fearlessness, though you may feel he does things that you may never do in real life, you feel the intense hatred and anger aganist the villain, you feel the warmth of camaradeire between the hero and his friend, you feel the helplessness of the heroine's father and you feel the self righteous zeal of a puny servant to protect the modesty of his accidental guest.

The Verma factory seems to have mastered a lot of aspects of film making - though all of their movies are not great, some are even outright bad. Two of the things they have perfected are cinematography and background music.

Camera work is superb. The deft use of black and white frames, the interplay of light and shade and exciting camera angles enhance the impact of scenes to high levels of intensity.

Background music is also great. A variation that works really well is the theme music for the villain and the hero - so whenever we have the villain in action, we have a specific kind of eerie music filling the scene and whenever the hero moves, its a different guitar tune.

Dialogues are interesting. The reticent hero, at places, mouths sharp one-liners. The intro sequence of the hero, with his half amused, "Maar padegi.." is cool. The villain does mouth some crude lines but thats in line with his persona.


Performance wise, Shereveer, who plays Radhe Narayan is impressive. The slight twinkle in his eyes, the twitch of his lips and the obscene movement of his tongue bring the cruel, lecherous and manic character live. Zakir Hussain, as a corrupt politico-criminal excels. Mohan Agashe is wasted. Rajpal Yadav does well in his short role. The rest of the side cast also pulls off well.

In the lead pair, Nisha doesn't have to do anything apart from baring her midriff and trying to do Urmila-esque dances a la Rangeela. She fails miserably in that. Dialogue delivery is not great, but that doesn't hurt as her main job here is to look hot and sexy and at times vulnerable which she pulls off well.

Mohit Ahlawat has got intensity but he has to work on his dialogue delivery. He shows that he can emote and is much better than a lot of Bikram Salujas and Himanshu Maliks and even Fardeen Khans but thats an area he would do well to improve.

At the end, Ramu may have his own opinion about the movie, but its still laudable, more so because the movie takes a beaten to death plot and (also, is quite eloquent about it) makes it interesting on the strength of its treatment.

You won't get bored and and you won't curse me.

Elaan - the worst ever climax

At the end of the movie, while you come out pulling your hair, there are a couple of things you don't comprehend:

1)Vikram Bhatt's direction:

a) Baba Sikandar is a dreaded baddy – though he doesn’t do anything dreadful in the movie, scores of his goons, professional shooters cant hit one shot on target - at five of the amateur fighters trapped in a hotel lobby, gets caught without resistance like a sheep, brought to courts like a lamb and then hanged like a dead chicken.

b) Amisha Patel has a software on her laptop which, given a mobile number, locates its whereabouts. Now, International Killer Baba Sikandar is poor and naïve enough to use only one cell phone and the police of three countries is naïve enough not to have this “miracle software”.

c) Shooting and firing automatic rifles is as easy as wearing navel and shoulder baring tops. Wonder why do police men and army people have to go through the rigmarole of weapon training.

2)Vikram Bhatt’s Cast selection

a) Rahul Khanna may look good as a heir to a tycoon – he doesn’t have the intensity to carry off a vengeance driven man ready to take on the feared killer who has his tentacles spread practically everywhere.

3)Leading Men and Women

a) Arjun Rampal is the saving grace. He pulls off the tough ex-cop with a calculating brain with ease.

b) John Abraham disappoints – his recent releases gave an impression that probably, he was not one of those sweet faced models fit only to shoot ads for underwears – but here, he forces one to think again. Particulrly in the sequence when he is trying to resuscitate Arjun Rampal, he looks irritating at best.

c) Rahul Khanna is bland. He can probably do rich NRI, young tycoon etc but his expressionless face kills the lead character of a dynamic man driven by revenge.

d) Ladies shed clothes and look good. Lara Dutta still saves some grace as a gun totting woman.

e) Mithun Da acts well in a half baked character. More on this later.

f) Chunkey Pandey and Milind Gunaji are as dumb and as hilarious as any of the villain’s cronies from any of the 80’s movies. Have got nothing to act in the movie.

4) Mithun Da as Baba Sikandar

a) You can not comprehend this character with any semblance of logic.

b) Probably Vikram Bhatt thought that if he has 50 characters in the movie saying that Baba Sikandar is the Devil himself, the audience will be afraid in their seats. Infact you start feeling the dichotomy after a little while – all the characters mouth dialogues presenting Baba as some kind of an Osama Bin Laden while everytime you see him, he turns out to be a wimp.

c) He kills his brother because he doesn’t want him to die like a dog in Indian prisons while not firing a single shot at his tormentors.

d) While fierce shootout is going on, he quietly walks inside a roadside room, sits and meditates as if asking Gods for Divyastras, which of course never come. Later you realize he was not even asking Gods for Divyastras. What the hell was he doing…..Mystery…..mystery..

All in all a major disappointment to all those who expected a slick stylish vendetta movie with a powerful villain – all we get is an illogical hotchpotch with half cooked characters and a confused and wimpy lead negative character. And come to think of it, Vikram Bhatt seems to have suggested it to be a modern rehash of Sholay…………Cummon now……respect some of the audiences’ intelligence too…

Watchability: 0 (Can’t even watch it once)
Rating: *

Rog - Can watch it twice

In a nutshell, a nice, tight movie which could have easily done with
slightly better casting.

First of all, those who expect a skin fest a la Murder or Jism will be
disappointed. The skin show is limited to the promos only.

The script is tight and much better executed than a lot of movies we
see these days. A murder mystery which actually manages to keep you
glued and guessing till the last shot. The director has done well to
resist the temptation of throwing in dream sequences and fantasy songs
and that helps the pace of the script.

Irrfan Khan as an intense supercop is as usual, superb. The disdain
for the society life, P3 crowd is aptly brought out and so is his
immense focus on his job. You fear that the character may lose itself
when he starts getting infatuated with the leading lady but the
director has done well by not getting carried away and that saves the day for the tough Cop Uday Rathore.

The firang actress looks distinctly out of place. The only
justification of why she is there may be that the producers wanted a
firang bimbo instead of an Indian.

Himanshu Malik does well as a P3 party hopper, a good looking himbo.

But the surprise package is Suhel Seth. He starts with irritating you
with his affected speech giving you the impression of trying too hard to act.
However, towards the end of the movie, he actually comes good and
manages a couple of good sequences.

Manish Makhija is irritating though he looks realistic and mouths some
interesting lines.

All in all, a well executed project which could have been better.

Watchability Index: 1+ (# of times one can watch this movie in a short
interval without pulling his hair out)
Rating: **1/2

Salaam Namaste - ok...now where do I puke ???

Lets start with the good things about Salaam Namaste. The best thing about the movie starts after the movie ends- yes you read it right. The director, in a seemingly-innovative-but-plagiriased-from-"Rush Hour"-twist, has put up an assortment of behind the screens scenes during the closing credits - so a couple of hilarious mis-shots during shooting and some leg pulling amongst the cast that he places at the end do invoke some genuine laughter. Also, Javed Jaffery pulls off his comic character with elan generating some well deserved laughs. Arshad Warsi creates some nice moments with his sharp one-liners which, though hilarious, are nowhere a patch on the fabulous job he did in MunnaBhai.

Apart from that, this movie expects you to laugh and cry by creating such situations at which any person with even very modest sensibilities would wonder as to what did he do to the director to make him treat his intelligence with such disdain.

Coming to the specifics, you are expected to laugh when:

1. A fat, dark guy with a big white tikka on his forehead hams "Hambar...Hambar" mimicking the Bollywood stereotype of a south Indian.

2. Saif hams,"Hambar...Hambar" and Preity hams, "Nikhil Arora.....Nikhil Arora..." heyy, havent you already fallen off your chair with laughter ??

3. Saif drinks milk on a commode toilet seat.

4. Preity pukes in his cap.

5. Abhishek Bachhan peeps between Preity's legs where he is a doctor and Preity is the pregnant lady about to deliver.

6. Preity tries hard to "push" the babies off her womb...while everybody around the bed cheers as they'd have done to the Sachin of yore tearing apart Shane Warne.

7. Preity gives crude orgasmic moans on finally managing to eat some Belgian chocolate ice-cream - the background is that she is pregnant and has uncontrollable cravings for this particular brand of chocolate, which, Saif and Preity somehow manage to find in the middle of the night.

8. You see stickers saying, "No fart zone" pasted at the doors of the house that Preity and Saif share.

The list is endless, I bet your patience would not be.

Ok, now moving on to the senti stuff. You are supposed to gather all your sensitivity and be moved to tears when:

1. Saif, who had initially refused to take the responsibility of the child he fathered, gets so moved to own up his child that he undergoes a blood test to find out if he is thalasemic. Gosh, can you imagine, a blood test - now, ain't that the biggest sacrifice ever made by a father for his son - undergoing a blood test. Its a sacrifice because our man (ok, metrosexual) is scared of blood and blood tests, whatever that means.

2. Whenever you look at Preity in the second half in dresses which invariably leave the lower 27% of her ridiculously inflated belly bare. Guess the director thought the bigger the belly is, the more sensitized would the audience be of the trauma that Preity's character is going through. This, combined with bare lower one fourth of the belly would evoke extra large sympathy and empathy in the audience.

A couple of things that I failed to comprehend were:

1. Saif, who's an architect by qualification, an immigrant to Australia and such a successful chef that he qualifies for the tag of "Successful Indians in Australia" is ohhhhh so innocently unaware of the consequences of having sex. (ok, we do get the "Protection not being 100% safe" stuff but that scene is too far from being credible)

2. Indians in Melbourne have nothing better to do in life than listening to the love story of a god forsaken RJ in a god forsaken radio station. Can't say about Melbourne because I've never been there but while in Delhi, I am as bothered about some RJ of 93.5 FM falling in love with a chef as Preity Zinta is bothered about my wearing brown socks instead of black.

3. Drinking in the pub with a girl, bringing her home and sleeping with her through the night is not infidelity - and if you didn't "do anything" with her, you are absolved and "Ganga ki tarah pavitra". I wish my girl friend was this magnanimous.

Actors wise, Preity, though looking slightly old in close-ups, looks beautiful and is very likeable with her high energy levels.

Saif Ali Khan, it seems, has perfected the art of playing the pussilanimous, spineless male protagonist. He did it in Kya Kehna, he did it in Parineeta and he does it in Salaam Namaste now. One nice piece of thinking displayed by the director is the white and pink ladies top worn by Saif throughout the climax with "Girl Power" writen on it with glitters. Nothing fits Saif's character better. Saif is a reasonably decent actor and he pulled it off well, but he couldn't rise above what his director gave him and that's fair enough.

Arshad Warsi and Javed Jaffery are good actors and pull off all their scenes with panache.

Abhishek Bachhan, in the guest appearance, breaks many hearts. After admiring him in LoC, Yuva, Bunty Aur Babli and Sarkar, I couldn't help but wonder at his selection of roles. He is painful at best and disgusting at worst. What made him take up this role is beyond comprehension.

The crib is not at not having been given an exquisite piece of cinematic brilliance, given the trademark Karan-Johar look of the movie and a cast containing Saif Ali Khan (yes, I know he got a National Award for Hum Tum). No body expected that. All one is asking is, "Please don't treat us like completely moronic, vacuum headed sub-humanoids, esp. when we did pay for the ticket".

The issue is just basic respect for the other guy.

-SVLS