While it has become fashionable for filmmakers like Mahesh Bhatt and Sanjay Leela Bhansali to hold press shows of their new films either on the day of release or just the evening before to avoid an early onslaught of negative reviews, Anurag Basu and UTV went the other way and confidently showed their latest film Barfi! to the media two days before release. The Bhatts and others make films like Raaz 3 which attract viewers with their scare-and-seduce quotient but are lambasted by critics. In order to let the audience decide for itself on Friday before the bad reviews pop up, the Bhatts don’t show their film to the press until almost the last minute. If I saw Raaz 3 much earlier, it was only because it was a special screening where no other press person was invited. The box office acceptance of Raaz 3 and the contradictory pile of cynical reviews affirmed the filmmakers’ belief that it’s best to keep the press out of their screenings until release day.

However, with Barfi! it was a completely different story. Anurag Basu has taken Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani route of setting his film in Darjeeling and Calcutta with a bunch of Bengali actors, including Roopa Ganguly and Jishu Sengupta. However, while Kahaani throbbed with noise and a thriller pace, Anurag ’s leisurely, sweet Barfi! seems to be more confident of great reviews (and perhaps a slew of awards early next year) than of the box office. Barfi! is the kind of film that needs healthy reviews to cajole people to go and watch something that has none of the overtly commercial flavour of Ek Tha Tiger or Raaz. Therefore, UTV and Basu wisely held the press show on Wednesday afternoon itself. The show was so jam-packed that the normal PVR screen No. 5 was not enough to accommodate everyone and the venue was shifted to a larger auditorium next door. If the response in numbers was overwhelming, so was the acceptance of the film as the press broke into spontaneous applause both at the interval and at the end of the film. It’s a gesture of appreciation that the press rarely accords to a film.

And so, with yet another film that will fetch him and its makers a round of rave reviews, Ranbir Kapoor once more displayed that he intends to take the long, arduous route to success where applause for his daring choices matters far more than instant and wholehearted box office acceptance. Barfi! is a film that will find a more appreciative audience than the curious Rockstar, Ranbir’s last outing. However, Ranbir still has to find that one perfect film which will elevate him as a performer and break box office records.

When there’s talk of breaking records, never mind the lack of substance, films made by Sajid Khan (like the awful Housefull series) are a perfect case in point. Busy shooting an updated version of the old Jeetendra-Sridevi potboiler Himmatwala in Hyderabad with Ajay Devgn, Sajid himself told me that it would be a blockbuster film but won’t be a good film. I told him, I don’t doubt it, to both points.

Giving Ajay company is his partner in crime Sanjay Dutt who is shooting in the same city in Andhra Pradesh for the remake of a 2003 Tamil film called Saamy. Sanju plays a tough cop in it. Ironic because there’s talk of him being incarcerated again if the appeal in the Supreme Court does not go in his favour.

Meanwhile, what was Sanjay doing in Hyderabad two Sundays ago? He had a date with a doctor who was flown in from Mumbai. The whisper is that after Dutt went to Europe to get rid of the bags under his eyes and did liposuction too, there was water retention in the stomach and he needed medical intervention for it. As most doctors here are saying, you can go anywhere in the world to surgically get into shape but for how long? The mindset and the lifestyle have to change for a lasting effect. That way, the only actor from that era who is fit as a fiddle without surgery is Anil Kapoor. Anil is a few years older than Sanju but he has always had such a disciplined lifestyle that he seems years younger... and pretends to be younger too. But take it from me. Anil was born in December 1956 and don’t believe the misinformation on the Net.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is editor, The Film Street Journal