Raavan (2010)

Trailer 1 Alice in Wonderland: For a second, I thought that I had entered into the past only to realize that this movie is yet to be released in Hyderabad. By the way, Alice in Wonderland was the 1st post in this blog.

Trailer 2 The Last Airbender: Manoj N Shyamalan (Sixth Sense fame) was once considered to be the most gifted story teller of his generation. That appears to be a distant past now. The Last Airbender is his latest movie. The trailer showed some great visual effects. But I'm not very impressed with it as a whole. Considering his recent track record this is a very important movie for him.

Coming to Raavan, from the trailer and the general talk, you might have guessed the basic premise. Raavan (Abhishek Bacchhan) kidnaps Sita (Aish). Ram (Vikram), with the help of Hanuman (Govinda) tries to get Sita back and kill Raavan. Ofcourse, the motivation for Raavan's abduction of Sita is the insult of Surpanaka (Priyamani). What if this basic premise constitutes the entire movie with nothing else? The movie is going to suck & that is what Raavan is. What makes the original Ramayan interesting is the many many interesting characters and subplots without which even it would be uninteresting. This is where Raavan fails.

Kites (2010)

Kites is directed by Anurag Basu, produced by Rakesh Roshan & stars Hrithik Roshan, Barbara Mori, Kangana Ranaut, and Kabir Bedi amongst others. Story by Rakesh Roshan, Screenplay by Anurag Basu, Robin Bhatt and Akarsh Khurana, Music by Rajesh Roshan, Cinematography by Ayananka Bose.

My review is for the 130 minute Indian version. For your info, next week a 90 minute international remix version of Kites is going to be released which was re-edited under the supervision of Brett Ratner (director of Rush Hour series and X-Men:The Last Stand).  

Some of the reactions that I observed in the theater. At the 80 minute mark, the person adjacent to me is whispering in a tired voice "Oh my God! how much more time is the movie going to last?" At the end of the movie, I saw a group of friends waking one of their friends. There are uniform sighs of disappointment from the audience by the time end credits started rolling. You may guess now in which direction this review is going to be.

I saw the trailer of Kites a couple of months ago and was not at all impressed by it. So I went to the screening with a bit of low expectations. But the movie was worse than my already lower expectations.

Love, Sex aur Dhokha (2010)

Verdict:  9/10

Love, Sex aur Dhokha (LSD) is the 3rd movie directed by Dibakar Banerjee after the hit comedy Khosla ka Ghosla & the entertaining Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. All the actors were newcomers. The movie is produced by Ekta Kapoor ((who, if you are an Indian you would know, is responsible for the daily psychological torture of millions of Indians (mostly males)).

The movie has 3 stories each representing a part of the title. All the 3 stories are shot in a voyeuristic manner. The first story deals with a richgirl-poorboy love story & is shot from the perspective of a handheld amateur video camera. Most of the humour in LSD is in the first story. The base for the second story is MMS sex clips & is shot from a CCTV camera angle. The third one is about the casting couch & is filmed mainly through the view point of a sting/hidden camera. Although the 3 stories are independent of each other, the characters in the 3 stories are connected. The film itself is non linear in nature as the three stories are running simultaneously.