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Right now, Arjun Rampal is squirming under the spotlight and it has nothing to do with aborted walks on the ramp. (Headlines about how Arjun and Dino Morea were to be Delhi designer Rohit Bal’s show stoppers but were upstaged by Ranbir-Katrina are the only way to keep fashion shows in the news — how pathetic for designers and their creations.)
Arjun’s dilemma is about keeping up with the divas. He’s pitted opposite two firebrands, Kajol and Kareena in Karan Johar’s remake of Stepmom, directed by first timer Siddharth Malhotra, son of Prem Kishen. That everybody calls the original a Julia Roberts-Susan Sarandon film shows how little impact was made by a fine actor like Ed Harris, the man the two women shared in Stepmom. This fact was not lost on non-actor John Abraham who smartly dropped out of the Dharma Productions drama and left it to Arjun to brave it out with the two substantial women.
It took Siddharth more than two years of patience to get this Stepmom remake off the ground. Forty per cent of the film has already been canned in Mumbai. By the time you read this, the whole action would’ve shifted to Sydney where another 40 per cent will be filmed.
Someone who saw the film being shot in Mumbai, in a schedule that went on until November 4, swears that if anybody’s aware of how Arjun Rampal has to match up to the intense histrionics of Kajol and Kareena, it is the actor himself. His determination to hold his own is showing before the camera. The sad truth is, the two women have such strong roles that irrespective of how well he acquits himself the debate will ultimately only be, who was better — Kajol or Kareena? At the same time, Arjun daren’t slip up and come out a loser. Phew, no wonder the man is sweating!
Karan Johar has been asking all and sundry to come up with a suitable title for his version of Stepmom. In fact, in a recent poll on the one must-do thing before the year is out, Karan swore that he had to get a title for this film.
What would you call a Hindi remake of Stepmom? After the hearty reception to his urbane Wake Up Sid, the whisper is that Karan is seriously thinking of freezing the title Love You Ma, unless they can quickly come up with something more Hindustani.
More than two years may have been expended on finalising the right script for Siddharth’s Love You Ma but you can’t beat the meticulous Rajkumar Hirani who wrote 28 drafts before he was satisfied with the final script of 3 Idiots.
Last Thursday, Aamir Khan was late by an hour and a half for the screening of the first song of 3 Idiots but he had the media eating out of his hands instantly on arrival. Write this down — the song All the best (pronounced ‘Aal’ in a cute hostel room sequence by Aamir Khan), which captures campus antics with exuberance, is going to be a huge hit. At the first screening of this song for the media, producer Vinod Chopra and director Raju Hirani stayed away, leaving the spotlight solely on the 3 Idiots (Aamir, R. Madhavan, Sharman Joshi). The colourful 3 Idiots (bum shaped) chairs were also present, of course.
There’s a scene in the All the best song where Aamir, fascinated with aero-modelling, happily gets a model plane off the ground. But in real life it is Madhavan who is an aero-model buff. He loves his collection of small remote-controlled planes.
All the best seem to be the three best words of the day — on Thursday Ajay Devgn and wife Kajol hosted a party for the success of their home production All The Best. Hmm, from Aamir to Ajay, they’ve all become media savvy.
Hey, psst!
Om Puri is shooting for a sequel to his BAFTA-winning film East Is East where he played George Khan, a befuddled Pakistani married to a white Brit, who can’t reconcile the growing cultural differences between him and his UK-born-and-bred brood of half-a-dozen kids.
For the sequel, which comes 12 years after the original made waves, Om Puri has been shooting in Punjab, somewhere near Chandigarh. And this is going to be passed off as Pakistan since the sequel, titled West Is West, is an emotional story about George Khan visiting his homeland after 35 years. With the terror attacks, the Taliban’s strong presence and the growing political unrest in Pakistan, it is obviously more expedient to quietly shoot in India than to go for authenticity and face the insecurity of working on that side of the border!
