Sunday, September 27, 2009

Today’s Special - A Food Comedy





‘Today’s Special’ is a new movie, inspired by Aasif Mandvi’s play ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’. The movie, a comedy directed by David Kaplan and written by Aasif Mandvi and Jonathan Bines is to be premiered on Nov 11th at MAHINDRA INDO-AMERICAN ARTS COUNCIL FILM FESTIVAL- MIAAC 09 Opening Night Film. The story is about a sous chef, who has larger dreams of becoming a head chef in NY restaurant or becoming an understudy of a legendry chef. But circumstances lead him to run his family’s restaurant -Tandoori Palace. This movie stars Aasif Mandvi, from ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’, renowned bollywood actor Naseeruddin Shah and author and actress Madhur Jafferey.
Sakinas Restaurant was written and performed by Aasif Mandvi and directed and developed by Kim Hughes as a play at the American Place Theater.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Dil Bole Hadippa- Mish-mash Fiasco






Cast: Shahid kapoor,Rani Mukerjee, Anupam Kher, Dilip Tahil,Poonam Dilhon, Rakhi Sawant
Producer: Aditya Chopra- Yashraj Films
Director: Anurag Singh
Story, Sceenplay, Dialogs: Jaya, Aparajita
Lyrics: Jaideep Sahni
Music: Pritam
Website: http://www.yashrajfilms.com/microsites/dbh/dbhwebsite.html
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Rating: *
Review: Birjis Adeni Rashed

"Yeh to Bardasht ke bahar hai" - this is beyond tolerance... is a statement we voiced every few minutes in the movie, sitting as the minuscule audience in the empty theatre. Not being the type who walk out of movies, we tolerated this boring, cheesy, predictable, clichéd, stereotype, formula for 2.5 hrs.


If Yash Raj Films, India’s top production company starts making movies like this, it’s a signal that creativity and intelligence is dying in bollywood! The poor screenplay and flimsy story is about a girl who acts like a guy to achieve her dream of playing cricket. To support this underdeveloped story, are mish-mashed and clichéd formulations, inferior quality dialogs, awful songs with worse lyrics and horrible direction.

The Yashraj films, either have stopped caring about overkill of locations and settings and clichés or don’t want to venture into newer pastures of creative imagination. The setting in DBH are the same old mustard and green fields of Punjab, used in umpteen Yashraj movies; has the same lorry’s and same roads and same lorry rides…; has run of the mill patriotic and nationalistic dialogs about India and Pakistan, peace , aman, etc ….; has a ton of hackneyed and clichéd Punjabi dialogs; has many rehashed scenes, references, dialogs and music from other successful movies like - Dilwale Dulhani Ley Jayenge, Veer-Zaara, Hum Apke Hai Kaun…..; has main protagonist coming from London, England like so many other Yashraj films; …. And the clichés go on.


To list the sorry factors in the movie-
If DBH is to be considered a sports movie, it lacks any thrills and excitement. Unlike Chak de India or Lagan, it has shoddy direction and lack of focus of subject . The Indian village cricket team is shown pathetic, before and after the supposed coaching for 6 months by England county cricket player, the story doesn’t take cues from previous links. Bad Captaincy is displayed, where a captain de-motivates players due to his romantic mistrusts. The game is not separated from the love-angle;

Dil bole..Hadippa can’t be called a love story either, since the screenplay doesn’t build up the love angle, hence reflecting lack of chemistry between Shahid and Rani.
As a comedy, it’s tragically stale. The Director Anurag Singh seems lost, with no understanding and focus on any one thing; All the characters seem undeveloped and weak. Screenplay and dialog writers need to know cutting and pasting dialogs from other movies is not writing. Hinglish trend which started from ‘Jab we Met’ is poorly imitated here with bad English and Hindi mix. The lyricist seems to have weird taste of words in the songs like beer, bater, pressure cooker, motor pump etc…; the presence of irrelevant characters like Rakhi Sawant and Sherlyn chopra is ridiculous and makes it a very cheesy movie. The psychedelic colorful costumes and backgrounds in the movie have nothing eye catching, seemed inspiration from the bright Bunty Babli costumes of Rani….. It seems like the list here can be endless too.

The story’s only positive if any is, Rani Mukerjee, looks slim and sexy, and Shahid Kapoor shows off his well built muscles. Acting wise they didn’t do very well. A good actress like Rani does borderline overacting, may be the role/character required it! While Shahid does shades of good and bad acting. Anupam Kher too acted as if he was sorry to have acted in this movie. There are not many actors or characters in the movie, hence more of a low budget category.

The people who tragically suffer are the audience, who spent time and money on this movie. This movie is not for intelligent audiences or any audience.



Promo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhWIG-ufZ0A&feature=PlayList&p=770FCAB01D9DED90&index=6

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qcCmxcGsk&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=770FCAB01D9DED90&index=19







Monday, September 14, 2009

Bollywood Influence on Fashion





Bollywood and Fashion have been related since time in memorial. Any fashion introduced in bollywood movies catches on without even a ‘trickledown effect’ into mainstream population. Any outfit worn by a bollywood actor or actress in a successful movie is instantly referred as example for the tailors around India to reproduce. The Readymade industry too immediately reproduces this outfits in bulk in variations of color and designs with the movie or character name; anarkali, jodha akbar, masakali are the latest few.

Well the fashion industry and designers of clothes and jewelry being aware of this phenomenon launch many of their fashions in movies. And many an actor and actress is a brand ambassador, advertising for many of the popular products of the fashion industry.

Now designers have moved on from the success of bollywood to independently designing products with bollywood and pop culture influence in their designs to western brand names and products.

Check out the bollywood influence on Swatch watches in the Manish Arora collections. Manish Arora known for wild palette of colors, strong contrasts, psychedelic art and kitsch motifs, has now created new line of bling-bling swatch watches!

check out the links


http://www.swatch.com/us_en/manisharora.html

Manish Arora's Swatch Watch Vedio