Credits : indianexpress

Credits : indianexpress

Credits : indianexpress

Credits : indianexpress

Mr Chaubey, who wanted to make an anti-drug movie, said the Censor Board of Film Certification’s version of his film was so different that he even thought of removing his name from the credits.

“I am just happy and relieved that we could release the film on June 17 considering all that happened. The version that was cut was so different that I thought if this is the film that is going to come out then should I even give my name to it?” Mr Chaubey told PTI in an interview.

The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) had demanded 89 cuts from the drug drama that is set in Punjab. The producers had to finally move the Bombay High Court where it was cleared with just one cut and a revised disclaimer.

“Despite the court’s verdict, we were not sure till the afternoon of June 15 whether our film was going to release on time or not. Things were being thrown at us and we were just responding to it. We went through lots of ups and downs. I really want to leave that behind me and I hope that it never happens to any of my films or anyone’s film,” said Mr Chaubey.

The movie was also leaked online just a day before its release.

“It was really disheartening because it was not the final film. It needs to be experienced with the final sound and everything. We worked so hard on the film and some people will not even see the real film. It has also affected our numbers. It is very heart breaking. I hope the person responsible for it is brought to book,” Mr Chaubey added. Such was the uncertainty around the release of the film that Mr Chaubey did not even think about the post-release reaction of the audience that normally leaves filmmakers sleepless.

“I was not thinking about how the audience is going to react to the film. It just did not occur to me. From what I hear, people have really liked the film and have responded to it and that’s very satisfying. I worked on the movie for three year. I just want to go on a holiday now,” Mr Chaubey concluded.

Credits:- Ndtv.com

The film might, however, have yielded decidedly more than just superficial delights had the director not resorted to standard means to wrap up his tale of an obsessed movie fan run amok.

The besotted admirer of the title is Gaurav Chandna (Shah Rukh Khan, with protruding teeth and looking years younger than he is), a West Delhi boy who is a lookalike of a fictional matinee idol, Aryan Khanna (Khan again).

Gaurav is unabashedly obsessed with everything that Aryan Khanna does. The walls of his room are plastered with cutouts of the actor in his various movie roles.

Even the cyber cafe that Gaurav runs is named after his favourite actor: AK Cyber Chat.

The fact that he resembles the showbiz icon makes Gaurav a bit of a star in his own right in the neighbourhood.

He impersonates Aryan Khanna at the annual Dussehra mela organized by Inder Vihar’s DDA Colony and walks away with the best performer trophy every year.

Trouble is Gaurav takes his ardour beyond acceptable limits. When slighted by the object of his fantasies, he engineers a bitter confrontation between fan and idol that plays out in London, Dubrovnik (Croatia) and Mumbai.

Fan is a rather odd admixture of the real and the make-believe. The former works quite well; the latter not so much.

In the first half, the fact that Gaurav bears an uncanny likeness to Aryan Khanna does not invite any public gasps of surprise from those who run into him in the street and elsewhere.

Neither the guards manning the entrance of Aryan Khanna’s Mumbai bungalow nor the hundreds of other fans milling around the place take any notice of Gaurav.

But in the second half, visitors at Madame Tussauds as well as the London police are taken in by his visage and believe him to be the movie star the world knows.

The repeated identity switcheroos that Gaurav pulls off are contrived to the point that even Aryan Khanna’s wife falls for the ruse.

When Gaurav is on his Aryan Khanna trip – which is almost always – he is egged on by his parents despite the mother occasionally fretting over his college grades.

These portions of Fan are largely believable. But when one fine day, Gaurav decides to undertake a ticketless rail trip to Mumbai to meet Aryan Khanna in person, the film begins to stretch credulity.

The travelling ticket examiner and the railway police force men give Gaurav a long rope and he makes it to Mumbai instead of ending up in jail.

The film comes close to careening completely out of control after the hounded movie star decides to take matters into his own hands and confront his rogue fan head-on.

If it doesn’t, it is solely because of the flair SRK brings to the film, especially in the guise of the misguided fan.

It is difficult to fathom why a Bollywood star who has a retinue of men (and women) at his beck and call would go gunning for his tormentor all by himself, chasing him through Delhi’s chaotic traffic.

These liberties dim the impact of what is otherwise a screenplay that has enough going for it.

Also, for a songless Hindi film, Fan needed to be much shorter than it is. At its nearly two-and-a-half-hour length, it overstays its welcome by at least 30 minutes.

After Gaurav is left disillusioned by Aryan Khanna’s refusal to grant him the five minutes that he seeks with him, the former vows to ensure that it will be the star who will now do all the running.

The film takes that line literally and Aryan Khanna is actually reduced to shed his starry cloak and chase the seriously bothersome Gaurav.

Fan does have several redeeming features, not the least of which are the flashes of intelligence in Habib Faisal’s screenplay.

As with many a recent SRK vehicle, there is no dearth of self-deprecatory humour here.

On a chartered flight from London to Dubrovnik, Aryan’s assistant (Sayani Gupta, making a mark despite limited scope) advises him to ignore Gaurav. “He is neurotic,” she tells him. The star retorts rhetorically: “What, am I?”

At a flashy wedding where Aryan is slated to perform, the wealthy host berates him for arriving late. “Mr Bhutiani, I will make it up to you,” he says.

“You better do, I am paying you a bomb,” Bhutiani says.

Especially commendable is the manner in which the writer and the director imagine the spaces that the deceptively vicious anti-hero occupies: they are tangible and easy to relate to.

For the record, any similarities that Fan might have with Tony Scott’s 1996 film, The Fan, seems only superficial and incidental.

The Hollywood psychological thriller was set in the world of baseball and the fan, played by Robert De Niro, wasn’t a lookalike.

Fan works for the most part because it has the fabulous SRK act as a ‘young’ star-struck boy. His energetic performance is worth the price of the ticket – if not more.

It is fascinating to watch the actor making the transition from a gawky movie-crazy youngster to a swaggering Bollywood star mimic on stage to a psychologically unhinged stalker who pulls out the stops.

Fan is proof that even if SRK isn’t 25 years old, he certainly has the kind of enthusiasm that might put many 25-year-old actors to shame.

Watch

When India Questioned SRK: NDTV and Students Interviewed the Superstar

Credits:-Ndtv.com

Directed by Shakun Batra, the movie starts as a comedy of family dysfunction. Dadu, who enjoys playacting his death, has a real heart attack. That brings home – to Coonoor, a hill station in the Tamil Nadu state of India – his diasporic grandsons: Rahul, a successful novelist from London, and Arjun, an aspiring novelist from New Jersey. Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra), angry at his brother for stealing his ideas, feels like a chronic also-ran, and with good reason. Rahul (Fawad Khan) is frequently proclaimed the perfect son by his mother.

That older generation has its own agita. Papa (Rajat Kapoor, but not one of those Kapoors) has money trouble, and all signs point to him having an affair. Mama (Ratna Pathak) is restless and angry.

Batra, whose previous films include Ek Main aur Ekk Tu, has a naturalist’s feel for character and situations that’s unusual in mainstream Bollywood. Even though Kapoor & Sons goes from lightly comic to more darkly dramatic to pretty overtly melodramatic, it never loses its lived-in quality or plunges into the absurd.

That’s a tribute to its actors, who make their characters’ wounds palpable but don’t play them too broadly. (Rishi Kapoor, though, has a high old hammy time as the pot-smoking, porn-approving, a-little-too-cute Dadu.) It’s also a tribute to Batra and Ayesha Devitre Dhillon, with whom he wrote the script. They know how to press the story without pressing it too hard.

It helps that the movie plays against expectations, if gently. The foreign-returned grandsons here aren’t swaggering wheeler-dealers in need of lessons about humility and home. They’re writers who need to repair relations with their family. Rahul’s secret is also a bit unusual for Hindi movies, and though you may guess it early, it plays out in a mostly satisfying way. When I saw the movie, the audience rewarded it with Bollywood’s gold standard of approval: tears, and a few hoots.

Film Notes:

Kapoor & Sons – Since 1921 is not rated. It is in Hindi, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes.

Credits:- Ndtv.com

It rolls along smoothly, but so facile are its placid twists and pat resolutions that they cause nary an emotional ripple.

It is a pretty film, thanks to cinematographer S Ravi Varman’s lighting and camerawork.

Every frame is picture-perfect. And Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone are on top of their game.

Added to that are an intelligently elliptical narrative, imaginative use of songs and occasional bright spots. Yet, Tamasha is disappointingly inert and unexciting.

Its overly simplistic fairy-tale construct – creative and free-spirited son versus pragmatic and domineering dad – is given a gender-reversal spin.

Tamasha isn’t the story of a Prince Charming who rides in on a handsome steed to rescue a beautiful princess in captivity in a towering turret.

Instead, the yarn that it spins is about a gifted young man weighed down by the pressures of expectation.

His dreams of being a storyteller are cruelly crushed and he is pushed by his father (Jawed Sheikh) into the domain of mathematics and management.

A mystery woman emerges from nowhere to help the hopelessly trapped dreamer to escape from the morass of a life he did not choose.

The supporting characters stay in the background, making Tamasha essentially a two-hander that is well served by the lead pair and their crackling chemistry.

But while the male protagonist has a clear back story, the heroine doesn’t. As a result, this tale about the therapeutic power of love and the magic of dreams seems rather lopsided.

The tussle between a man and his mask might have been far more engaging had Tamasha focused more on the layers of a life gone awry, instead of staying rooted to just one facet of it.

Fleeing the drudgery of his corporate life, the boy (Ranbir Kapoor) meets the girl (Deepika Padukone) in faraway Corsica.

The girl has been drawn to the French territory by her fondness for the comic book Asterix in Corsica.

However, why the boy has chosen this exotic location for a getaway isn’t clear. He is in the middle of reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which of course reflects the current state of his mind: all jumbled up.

To make the most of the freedom that complete anonymity gives them, the duo playacts with each other, hiding their identities and backgrounds from each other.

On day one, they make two promises to themselves: no jumping into bed and no speaking the truth.

He introduces himself as Don on the trail of bad guy Teja. She responds by calling herself Mona Darling.

Movie allusions pop up all through their first encounter, leading to a long passage in which Don turns into an Interpol agent who talks and walks like Dev Anand.

It isn’t until much later in the film that the audience discovers who they really are – Ved Sahni from Shimla and Tara Maheshwari from Kolkata.

A week of aimless fun and frolic in the Corsican sun – during which the young couple keep their hands off each other – ends soon enough.

The lady, who is some sort of a tea company official, is summoned back to India and she leaves after a quick parting kiss.

As a group of singers belts out Heer Toh Badi Sad Hai, Tara lands in Kolkata.

Before the song ends, four years have elapsed and she heads to Delhi in search of the man who had swept her off her feet.

In Delhi, she is in for a huge setback. The guy she meets is a pale shadow of the footloose and fun-loving Corsican tourist.

Ved Vardhan Sahni, product manager in a telecom firm, is staid, chivalrous and accustomed to an unchanging regimen. He is a typical average man happy to achieve his targets.

The rest of the story revolves around a rejection of an engagement ring. It triggers heartburns and unseemly outbursts before culminating in introspection and course correction.

Tamasha is a spectacle all right, but many of the elements that constitute it strain credulity.

Why, for instance, would a guy whose ambition is to be a storyteller and who grows up on mythical tales from far and wide told by an old raconteur be so in awe of Bollywood dreamscapes?

And why on earth should the characterization of the winsome catalyst who walks into his life and pulls him out of a trough be left dangling in a haze?

If the idea was to enhance the enigma of the girl, it really doesn’t work? The figure of Tara Maheshwari deserved better.

Be that as it may, Deepika Padukone gives the role all she has and the result is salutary.

In a film that belongs essentially to a superb Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika does not let the screenplay shortchange her.

If Ranbir is exhilarating in scenes and situations that tap his versatility, Deepika is sure and steady even when the spotlight isn’t on her and she is reduced to playing second fiddle.

Tamasha is at best a one-time watch because of the sparkle the leads lend to it. It could have been so much more.

Credits:- Ndtv.com

Phantom, which is a screen adaptation of S Hussain Zaidi’s book Mumbai Avengers, stars Katrina Kaif and Saif Ali Khan in the lead roles, is set in the backdrop of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.

More than a week before the movie hit screens, Phantom was banned by a court in Pakistan on a plea filed by Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed, who is accused of masterminding 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai.

Credits:- Ndtv.com

Despite its inspiring subject matter, Manjhi – The Mountain Man made a little over Rs 6 cr. The film stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Dashrath Manjhi and Radhika Apte as the wife he moves a mountain for.

All three films may be in danger of stolen thunder with this Friday’s release, the much-discussed Phantom. Starring Saif Ali Khan and Katrina Kaif, Phantom deals with a post-26/11 Mumbai and has been banned in Pakistan. The director, Kabir Khan, just delivered the blockbuster of the year in the form of Salman Khan‘s Bajrangi Bhaijaan last month.

Credits: Ndtv.com