Mixed feelings

Mixed Doubles

Director: Rajat Kapoor Cast: Konkona Sensharma, Ranvir Shorey, Rajat Kapoor, Koel Purie, Saurabh Shukla, Vinay Pathak

6/10

Shaayad meetha, shaayad khatta? Na re na na, 50-50. Starts off promisingly with a couple that is quite happily married for 10 years, quite in love, but going through a few sexual problems. Not something you get to see in every other film. So you slide a little lower in your seat and make yourself comfortable, thinking this is going to be 97 minutes that’s more than worth your money. And that’s when the juvenile side of the husband pops up like jack from the box.

Performances by Konkona and Rajat are quite realistic. Koel and Vinay seem larger than life. Ranvir’s character seems half-sketched. Someone who could have saved a thousand bucks but doesn’t, because it would get a poor man into trouble, cannot be the sleazeball who would force his wife into sleeping with another man. But, maybe, that’s where the catch is. That wife swappers are not necessarily sleazeballs but regular middleclass people who lead perfectly normal lives and have their good side and their bad side.

The director’s indecision in making light of and seriously addressing this dark in-the-closet issue has translated into drama that is intriguing but inconsistent. The funny and tragic scenes are individually rather superb. But put together they appear fragmented. Like taking alternate bites of your favourite and your most hated dish. You can’t exactly relish the meal, but you can’t leave it either.

Pooja Tolani

They should be taking one...

Holiday

Director: Pooja Bhatt Cast: Dino Morea, Onjolee Nair, Kashmera Shah, Nauheed Cyrusi, Gulshan Grover

3/10

Mmmmmm. Will give anything to frolic on Goa’s lovely beaches with Dino Morea. At night, he’ll teach me salsa. But there’s a condition: Dino will not open his mouth to speak.

Taking several reels out of the Patrick Swayze-starrer, 1987 Oscar-winner Dirty Dancing, Pooja adds her own special touch ? a slightly dumb leading lady. Having failed in maths (the way she was drooling over a Goan wedding and a wedding gown, thought she was nursing a broken heart), Onjolee comes to Goa with her family to get over her multiple “failures”. A Jassi-type fashion disaster, a nervous wreck but with a golden heart, Onjolee finds her calling in Dino and salsa.

Pooja, buck up. A copy is a copy. Nothing is original about either the script or the direction ? the denoument is a frame by frame lift from Dirty Dancing ? only half as good. Kashmera as the wronged woman looks like a tart and is utterly unconvincing when she says: “Main waisi ladki nahin hoon.” Gulshan Grover as Onjolee’s dad comes across as dim-witted.

Holiday is watchable only when Dino and Onjolee are practising or actually dancing. All three should really take a holiday ? Pooja from direction and Dino and Onjolee from acting. But a six-pack silent Dino riding a bike?. Well?

Pallabi Biswas

‘Last season’ fun

Fun with dick and jane

Director: Dean Parisot Cast: Jim Carrey, Tea Leoni, Alec Baldwin, Richard Jenkins, Gloria Garayua

6/10

A 1977 film starring George Segal and Jane Fonda satirically exposed the great American Dream sham, poking fun at picture-perfect US suburbia. Where a successful couple’s world suddenly collapses when their highflying careers crashland.

Director Dean Parisot remakes the delightful light-hearted comedy Fun With Dick And Jane and updates it with clever references of recent corporate corruption scandal, in a screenplay full of witty situational humour and irony.

Dick (Jim) and Jane (Tea) have a wonderful life. Great jobs, beautiful house, cute kid, adorable dog, loyal Hispanic maid, big car and bigger aspirations. Until? upwardly mobile Jim’s corporate-ladder climb ends with the elevator taking him to his office building’s top floor as newly promoted Vize-prez. But on his way down he discovers his company’s actually tanked with huge financial scam and heaps of shredded paper documents. (ENRON, anyone?).

Deceived, disillusioned and desperate, he resorts to what any red-blooded white-collar guy would do under the circumstances ? go totally over the top! And you bet Jim Carrey does it with precise comic timing, disguised in masks carrying out farcical con-jobs and robberies which are actually stylised scenes designed for him to do his trademark slapstick stuff. And with Tea as his partner-in-crime, it’s prime amusement time for the audience.

Except, after original first-couple of con Bonnie and Clyde and our Bunty Aur Babli, Dick and Jane may seem just a little ‘last season’.

Mandira Mitra

The grind once again

ekai eksho

Director: Babu Roy Cast: Prosenjit, Rachana Banerjee, Deepankar De, Sandhya Roy

3/10

Poor Prosenjit is literally being forced to live up to the title of the film, Ekai Eksho, by almost single handedly having to keep afloat the Bengali film industry. To do that if he has to be part of films like this Babu Roy film just to pull in the crowds, he seems to be willing to go through the martyr act.

Though the dialogues do excite the audiences into the jiyo jiyo reaction, the rest of the film is hardly the stuff worthy of our nayak. Rachana, thankfully for her and everyone, is spared the agony of too many scenes. With forgettable music by Bappi Lahiri, it’s perhaps understandable why she didn’t even insist on more dance numbers at least.

Deepali Singh