Kyaa kool hai hum
Director: Sangeeth Sivan Cast: Tusshar, Riteish, Ishaa Koppikar, Neha Dhupia, Anupam Kher, Shoma Anand, Raj Zutshi, Avtaar Gill, Bobby Darling (Rajpal Yadav, Sushmita Mukherjee)
4.5/10
Good thing about a spoofy teen flick like KKHH is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. A sex-comedy-of-errors, with umpteen mistaken identities, reduced to fatuous farce. Where caricatured characters rise to the occasion with heightened slapstick. Throw in risque item numbers, adolescent humour and sexual innuendos and you’ve got your Indian-flavoured American Pie. How highsc’ool is that?
Smalltimers Riteish and Tusshar day-dream of hitting it big. One seeks out rich babes, the other checks out girls with ‘dil pe til’ who will change his fortunes according to astrology. But lady-luck eludes. Riteish who gets manhandled by women he hits on with “Mera time-pass banogey?’. Tusshar gets into big trouble with the cops. In comes tough-talking, ‘time-pass’-chewing inspector Urmila Maar-torkar (Ishaa) as undercover mole (on chest!). Outcome? Well, love.
With a one-track mind, the director resorts to double entendres, like ‘backdoor-frontdoor’ insinuating ‘gay-straight’. And willy-nilly one contends with his juvenile obsession with Freudian phallic symbols (cigars, police batons, etc). But like laughing at bad jokes, KKHH is good timepass.
Mandira Mitra
Kingdom of heaven
Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons
3/10
So now that we’ve all patted one another on the back over how accurately the Crusades have been shown, and everyone’s gone home happy, fed on soda-pop and Eva Green’s charms ? can we talk about the movie, please? Not that there’s much in it to go to war over. Except for the fact that Ridley Scott, flush with the success of Gladiator, cooks up a super turkey which will last the Yanks till next Thanksgiving. And that Orlando Bloom, trying hard to live down his effeminate Paris (Troy) and Legolas (The Lord of the Rings), does a wonderful job of emulating a block of reinforced concrete.
The storyline, set in the 12th century, is supposedly about one man’s mission to find his way to peace and forgiveness in Jerusalem. Balian (Orlando) does reach Jerusalem, but bad editing and an uninspired screenplay ? more than Saladin’s armies ? play havoc with his journey. There’s no dearth of rhetoric (truth, freedom, conscience ? take your pick) and swordplay, but it’s hardly good enough to give the movie an epic dimension. And by the time the Christian King stands up and says, “I am Jerusalem,” you can almost hear Balian replying, “And I am Orlando Bloom. But what am I doing in this film!?”
Satadru Ojha
dadar aadesh
Director: Anup Sengupta Cast: Prosenjit, Anu Chowdhury, Ranjit Mallick, Abhishek Chatterjee, Piya Sengupta, Joy Badlani, Shankar Chakraborty, Sonali Chakraborty, Lokesh Ghosh, Ramen Roy Chowdhury, Anamika Saha
4/10
Sometimes how a film comes to be made merits more attention than what it is made of. The way Anup Sengupta has directed Dadar Aadesh with a seriously fractured vertebra is a proof of the triumph of heroic spirit. And the Dada ? the indispensable Bumbada of Tollygunge ? has done his bit offscreen, helping Anup get through his trauma. Now with his onscreen show, he promises to see him through the trial at the box-office as well. In this, Dadar Aadesh sets a unique example of Dadar kirti.
If that is one tearful story, another is there for the taking within the film with a surplus of sibling sentiments and emotionally surcharged father-and-son (Ranjit-Prosenjit) sequences which are value for money stuff for sniffle-happy mashimas. But the younger section of viewers may be a touch dissapointed with Anu Choudhury who, for all her coquetry, looks a weak proxy for Rachana, the patent Anup Sengupta female lead opposite Prosenjit.
Will all these tears convert to smiles in terms of BO returns? Dada hopes so. So do all his bhais.
Arnab Bhattacharya
