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Dasavatharam-review

Dasavatharam

Language: Tamil
Actors: Kamal Haasan, Mallika Sherawat, Asin, Jayaprada, KR Vijaya, Napolean
Director: KS Ravikumar
Producer: Oscar Ravichandran
Story: Kamal Haasan
Screenplay: Kamal Haasan
Dialogs: Kamal Haasan
Music: Himesh Reshammiya
Lyrics: Vaali, Vairamuthu

Its along awaited come back by the great actor Kamal Haasan, but the movie Dasavatharam is not up to the expectation. Kamal has done a very good job with his 10 different role but the movie as a whole is little bit boring. The movie actually starts from the 12^th century incident, this part of the movie has been taken superbly, but script is not been consistently good as the movie continues.

Technical part of the movie is very good, especially graphics in the last part and the tsunami at the end are all awesome. The actress Asin also did a fair good job in the movie. She also does 2 roles ,one role in the past 12^th century as kamals wife and next role as an innocent village girl. So to conclude about the movie , its good to see kamal’s 10 roles which he has done really well but the movie as a whole is boring.

Sarkar Raj

Sequel to the 2005 superhit Sarkar, Sarkar Raj features Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai in lead roles. The sequel is directed by Ram Gopal Varma after two debacles in the form of AAG and Darling.

Sarkar Raj is an intense political drama and is essentially a study of power; it explores the politics of development and takes a fresh look at the tradition versus modernity debate.

When Anita Rajan (Aishwarya Rai - Bachchan), CEO of Sheppard power plant, an international Company, brings a power plant proposal to set up in rural Maharashtra before the Nagres, insightful Shankar (Abhishek Bachchan) is quick to realize the benefits the power plant can bring to the people. After convincing Sarkar (Amitabh Bachchan) who is against it for various reasons, Shankar undertakes a journey along with Anita to the villages of Maharashtra to mobilize support from the masses.

However, things are not what they seem to be and Shankar's dream project gradually becomes a political minefield. It is in this backdrop the evil forces mightier than ever, mushroom and gang up to bring down the regime of Sarkar and obliterate Shankar's name from the political horizon.

Ram Gopal Varma is back! After a few disaster the director of movies like Satya, Rangeela, Company, Sarkar, Bhoot is in full form. If Sarkar was inspired by Godfather, Sarkar Raj is a complete original. The script is brilliant and Ram Gopal Varma has executed it to perfected. The plot is more complicated this time around, and it sure needs a master director at the helm to pull it off.

Sarkar Raj is not without its share of flaws. The character of Aishwarya Rai is unconvincing, ditto to the love angle between Abhishek and Aishwarya. Also during the last few reels, the director seems to have hurried into the climax.

RGV has also managed to extract good performances from the lead cast as well as the character actors. Amitabh Bachchan stands out with a powerful performances. His performance, dialogue delivery and they way he expresses through his eyes is superb. Abhishek Bachchan is good, nothing great. Aishwarya Rai manages to emote well and she is good, by her standards, in a few sequences.

Amongst the supporting actors, Govind Namdev is good. Dilip Prabhawalkar is superb. The rest of the actors perform ably.

To sum things up, Sarkar Raj is a good intense thriller with brilliant performance by Amitabh Bachchan.

Woodstock Villa

Imagine a near-empty movie hall. A few people sat shifting in their seats at the back of the theatre- muttering and sulking, waiting for Woodstock Villa to end. Away in the front rows sat I, howling with laughter.

Movies like Woodstock Villa have the ability to make you go on an emotional and cerebral roller-coaster ride. For the first half of the film I was getting bored to death, wondering if the movie would ever really take off. Then, having lost hope for the film and its possible redemption, I sat feeling depressed and confounded, wondering how such a poor script actually manages to find its way to the multiplex. Do the producers actually expect people to pay to watch this?

But towards the end I was so amused by the sheer inanity and of it all that I couldn't help but crack up. The way the film ends seems to suggest that the makers think they have actually pulled off a stunning twist, a genuine revelation on the audience. If they do, they are sorely mistaken.

Woodstock Villa is quite a terrible film- not really in the most obviously obnoxious or offensive way, but worse- so indifferently made and so uninvolving, that the only parts that might surprise you do so only because they are so amazingly ridiculous.

The story follows a good-for-nothing cad Sameer (Sikandar Kher) who desperately needs money to pay off his debts accumulated with his lavish all-play-no-work lifestyle while Arbaaz Khan and Neha Uberoi play an unhappily married couple. When Zara (Uberoi) asks Sameer to 'kidnap' her and ask her husband for ransom to 'test if he still loves her', he jumps on the offer. What follows is a plodding tale of lies, deceit and murder.

Even at my kind and lenient best, I have failed to find a single redeeming point about the film. Bunty Nagi's editing is plain annoying and tries to treat every scene as a sensation, with incessant dissolves, split frames, flash cuts, jump cuts, slow motion, the works; Vikash Nowlakha's camerawork just passes muster while giving your eyeballs a lot of painful exercise. And the best thing I can say about Anu Malik's music is that maybe it's not as horrendous as it sounds.

The dialogues by Milap Zaveri are an embarrassment, and the screenplay by Sanjay Gupta, Rajiv Gopal and S. Farhan is totally bankrupt of logic. Songs are arbitrarily and unnecessarily placed in the film- after a seriously dull credit sequence, we are subjected to Sikander Kher singing in Mika's lecherous sounding voice, and a crucial point of the story is interrupted by Sanjay Dutt pretending to play the drums and guitar through another nerve-wracking song.

Sikandar makes a debut that is just about okay, while Arbaaz Khan and Neha Uberoi desperately seem to be vying for the title of the most wooden actor in this enterprise. Meanwhile we have Gulshan Grover doing his typical cartoony bad-man act, while Shakti Kapoor does a bit role, playing an over-the-top (what else?) Sardar.

The makers have obviously wasted a decent lot of time and money on this sheer farce. My solemn and obvious advice to you is to avoid committing the same mistake.

Jannat

Jannat presented by Vishesh Films (Mukesh and Mahesh Bhatt) and directed by Kunal Deshmukh has Emraan Hashmi and Sonal Chauhan in lead roles. Emraan delivered a great performance in Mohit Suri's Awarapan. Jannat revolves around cricket, match-fixing and even Bob Woolmer's case. But the core of Jannat is the love story between Emraan and Sonal.

Jannat is the story of a man caught in a quagmire of crime and consumerism as he struggles to find heaven on earth.

Arjun is a reckless young man with an obsession for making money at card games. A chance meeting with a girl in a mall, Zoya gives him the reasons he was looking for to move out of his ordinary life. He steps up from playing small-time card games to becoming a bookie. Stuck in a triangle of sorts between the woman he loves and his addiction to make a quick buck, Arjun moves on from being a bookie to a runner for the mafia. He steps into the world of match fixing. Arjun switches on the limelight to bigger, better, faster, more, until his dizzying rise attracts the attention of the police. Arjun has to now choose between the love of his life, Zoya, and this new found success and power. As Arjun struggles to choose between the two, the Don offers the forbidden apple of limitless wealth in exchange of his soul and draws him into his core entourage of money spinners.

How far will the horizon of reality stretch as Arjun and Zoya tread a fine, fast-blurring line between right and wrong to find the heaven they have been looking for?
Cricket is a religion in India and that's one of the biggest advantages of Jannat. Cricket will help pull the crowds in. The story is different, interesting which makes it an engrossing watch. The match-fixing and betting world has been scripted and executed quite well too. But unfortunately after a great first half, the movie starts to fall apart in the second. The pace is slow and a few songs just worsen things, they need to be edited off. Music of Jannat rocks!

But it's in the performance department that Jannat scores. Emraan Hashmi delivers a brilliant performance yet again; it's really high time the bigger banners start considering him. He is the soul of Jannat and carries the movie on his shoulders. It's actually Emraan who makes Jannat work to a certain extent. Sonal Chauhan is good for a newcomer, looks gorgeous. Vishal Malhotra is just ok. Javed Sheikh is good. Samir Kochar is excellent.

To sum things up, Jannat is an above average movie. Is it worth a watch in theatre? Not quite. Wait for the DVD.

Rating 2.5 / 5

Aamir

If you are one of those super-selective moviegoers who watches only three films a year then make sure "Aamir" figures on your list.

This is by far one of the finest attempts in recent times to explore the psyche of a modern 'foreign-returned' Indian as he's plunged headlong into the Kafkaesque nightmare of crime, grime, extremism and fanaticism in the underbelly of the big, bright and bewildering city of Mumbai. It is a "Swades" on skids, hurtling down into an abyss of unpatriotic instigations.

From the moment Aamir (Rajeev Khandelwal) touches down on Mumbai's international airport, what assails you is that overpowering sense of an individual's struggle to survive in a pitiless and often unforgiving city.

That debutant director Rajkumar Gupta is able to muster a fair amount of smiles and chuckles in this tale of one day in the life of a man caught in a nightmare that even Franz Kafka would have fond hard to create, let alone condone, is entirely providential.

"Aamir" could've easily slipped into being a heavy-handed polemical study of the isolation and persecution of the Indian muslim and his constant battle to remain part of the mainstream even as he's provoked and instigated from both ends to keel over and surrender to the forces of chaos, anarchy and annihilation.

Ironically, a work of art like "Aamir" embraces the chaos to create a universe that is in a strange way the opposite of destruction.

Persistently, "Aamir" repeatedly invokes images of ominous doom as we see the protagonist wind his way through a dreadful day that would end in abject tragedy.

The taut and tense narration finds supreme sustenance from its outdoors. Indeed, apart from Rajeev and his portrayal of the reluctant hero, the real protagonist of "Aamir" is Mumbai.

The crowded, congested 'chawls' and 'gullies', the reek of deprivation, and the stench and sweat of anxiety assail your senses in a way that we last saw in Anurag Kashyap's "Black Friday".

Squalor seldom seemed so splendidly evocative. As the protagonist winds his way through a day in the city that would lead to his inevitable doom, the camera captures crowds of bored bystanders and curious passersby looking at our man on the run with a tell-tale red briefcase in his sweaty hands.

First-time cinematographer Alphons Roy has done to Mumbai what most movies set in the city have not. He has made Mumbai at once the perpetrator and victim of a socio-political perversity that goes beyond crime and punishment.

Editor Aarti Bajaj cuts the film with a ruthlessness that echoes the film's subliminal mood. There's no room in the narration for question marks. Every shot is punctuated by an exclamation mark, every moment means a move forward to an unknown destination. Every glance on the road seems to suggest danger. Every peep is a peril. It's an amazingly constructed labyrinth of crime and commitment.

The narrative harnesses faces on the streets with the expertise of an unrehearsed trapeze artiste's walk across a ragged rope. There's very little to keep the plot from going over the precipice. And yet director Raj Kumar Gupta pulls it off with a full-throttle drama that leaves us gasping for breath.

Indeed, we've never seen a screen hero run so fast and so relentlessly. Rajeev chases fugitive taxis and petty criminals through highways and which stretch into acres of aching squalor. Physically and emotional taxing, the role gives Rajeev a chance to make the kind of debut actors dream about in their worst nightmare.

The debutant doesn't let go of his character for even a split second. From those skilful long-shots of him running on the highways to those tight close-ups expressing hurt, anger, anguish, desperation and occasional gratitude (watch him when the prostitute helps him out or towards the finale on the bus when looking out of the window he thinks his ordeal has ended) Rajeev knows his job thoroughly.

There are hoards of smaller actors, like Gajraj Rao barking orders into poor Aamir's burning ears through a cellphone that has no outgoing calls. Only incoming fanaticism.

"Aamir" is a rare film, which provides us food for thought without burdening us with sermons on the quality of existence. The thrill element presides over the message. The disturbing undercurrents just flow out of the story with a virile fluency.

At the end you aren't watching a film about extremism but a rare take on life at the edge that doesn't topple over into the abyss.

Iron Man

The success of everything from Spiderman to Hanuman, has made it clear that superhero flicks are a sure-fire way to make big bucks. Paramount Pictures have tried to continue the same trend with their special effects- extravaganza, Iron Man.

Though it may have not matched Spiderman and Batman in pre-release hype, it certainly is at par with them in all other departments, if not better. Like most ‘part ones’ the story line educates the audiences about the superhero’s origins, his subsequent evolution and ends with his first major face-off with a villain.

However, Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the playboyish super-rich, super-genius Tony Stark definitely sets this movie apart from the others. His rendering of the role can be best described as a blend of Jack Sparrow’s eccentricity with Bruce Wayne’s slick persona.

What works for this movie (apart from the grand special effects, which in all probability will leave you open-mouthed) is the fact that Tony Stark does not lose his sense of humor after becoming Iron Man, unlike Spiderman and Batman.

Gwyneth Paltrow, playing Tony Stark’s assistant and love-interest, Pepper Potts is thoroughly wasted, yet manages to do a better job than most other leading ladies in Superhero movies. Though it must be said that Jeff Bridges as the villainous Obadiah Stane delivers a fine performance even within the limitations of his role. Ramin Djawadi’s heavy-guitars soundtrack goes nicely with the movie as well.

However, the fact that the movie has a token black character and that the Afghani terrorists for some reason converse in Hindi may offend a discerning viewer’s sensibilities.

All in all, Iron Man is slick, futuristic, action-packed and thoroughly entertaining. There’s no reason why this one shouldn’t be a box-office success