After long journey, Saif gets his due in Bollywood

After long journey, Saif gets his due in Bollywood

Mumbai, What a long journey it has been for Saif Ali Khan! From the over-pampered scion of a nawab family to one of Bollywood's most versatile actors and a serious contender for the No.1 spot, he has truly emerged triumphant at the turnstiles.

One still remembers the harsh comments that accompanied Saif's debut in Umesh Mehra's "Aashiq Awara" in 1993. Acidic comments about his looks and appearance were the order of the Friday. A well-known columnist wrote, "Put a dupatta on Saif's head and he looks like Sharmila Tagore."

Such comments hurt all right. But they hit home, bang-on. As Saif said recently, "My detractors and their harsh comments have been my greatest incentive to prove myself."

And then, in typical Saif fashion, he leaned back for some serious self-praise. "Actually that's a good quote, don't you think?"

Saif almost always ends every observation tentatively. No wonder it took him so long to realise his worth. "But do I really know my worth today?"

The to-be-or-not-to-be debate was invented for Saif. Or so it seems. Saif never says an outright yes or no. Maybe is his clearest option and safest zone.

No wonder he remained in the zone of the probable for so many years. Looking gawky, ill at ease and out of sorts in a series of post-debut films, Saif all but finished off his career.

He was and remains to a large extent a Khan from the outside. Aamir Khan and Salman Khan belong to film families. And despite being a Delhi dude Shah Rukh Khan is more of an insider in the industry today than any other actor.

Yes, Saif has his mother Sharmila Tagore. But moms, as experience tells us, don't count in Bollywood. If they did, Nutan's son Mohnish Behl would've been the hugest superstar on the block.

"Mom had actually agreed to play my mother in 'Aashiq Awara'. That was sweet of her," Saif reminisced about the "good" old days when columnists took pot shots at him for everything, from his girlie looks to alleged sexuality.

There're stories about how insecure he would get on the sets of Karan Johar's "Kal Ho Naa Ho". But Saif denies them.

He said: "You know I get paranoid about every movie. I knew from the start that Shah Rukh would be the pivot of the film. But I knew I had great lines and a great role. I was never made to feel Shah Rukh was more important to the project. I went with very clear expectations. It was a civilised unit. Everyone was young and fun. I didn't feel like an outsider at all. I never did, though I was from outside Mumbai."

He says he never felt any need to be a part of any particular camp.

"I was always warned about camps and groups. But I always felt there was some strength to be gained from standing alone, and not being part of any camp. But at the same time if you look at it I'm quite a Yash Raj boy, in many ways.

"I started my career with Yashji in 'Parampara'. He saw my first screen test. My first hit 'Yeh Dillagi' was also connected with Yash Raj Films. The way they work suits me. I'm not expected to socialise with them. So the whole 'camp' thing is quite a myth for me. Really, Karan Johar and Yash Raj Films have spoilt me."

Saif's makeover has been as remarkable as that of Karisma Kapoor, who came accompanied by a truckload of flak and left at her peak as a screen queen.

The actor seems to be enjoying his newfound status as a leading man to the hilt.

"Omkara" was definitely a new beginning. When Vishal Bahradwaj zeroed in on him to play the Indian Iago, Saif was, as usual, unsure. He never says an outright yes to any role, not even when it comes to a film like Farhan Akhtar's "Dil Chahta Hai". That film clearly was the turning point in his career.

Farhan was sure he wanted only Saif to play the confused, naïve and confounded Sameer. As usual Saif wasn't convinced. Four years later, Saif was the same indecisive entity when Bharadwaj offered him Langda Tyagi.

"I was in Jaipur. And I began to think about how Vishal came down here to narrate 'Omkara' to me. One morning I was sitting on a beautiful lawn in Jaipur's Rambagh Palace with no work to do. Vishal was sitting in front of me. At that point of time I was wondering why I was being offered a negative role. Vishal really pushed me. He told me he was worried because it was an important part. From getting me to cut my hair to delivering my lines properly... he was quite paranoid.

"Initially, I read my character's lines with a bit of an English accent. Looking back, I could've taken it even further. But it was correct timing. Everything fell into place."

Siddharth Anand, who's a close buddy, gave Saif's career as a leading man a further boost with "Salaam Namaste". Siddharth thinks Saif is constantly doing roles that challenge him to make his presence felt.

Saif admits he's incapable of enjoying the gift of the present. "Perhaps. But at least I'm conscious of it. I'm always anxious about the future."

At the moment he's more relaxed than ever before and hogging the limelight for his alleged affair with Kareena Kapoor.

"On the sets of 'Omkara' people would say there were four National Award winners. My first impulse would be to wonder who was the fourth after Vishal, Ajay Devgan and Konkona Sen. Then I'd realise, 'Oh shit, the fourth National Award winner is actually me!'"

Saif has the final word. "I may seem like a bundle of contradictions most of the time. But there's a method to my madness which is apparent only to me a lot of times."

Urmila Matondkar now back in "Speed"

Speed

Cast: Zayed Khan, Urmila Matondkar, Aashish Chaudhary, Aftab Shivdasani, Sanjay Suri, Sophie Chaudhary, Tanushree Datta, Amrita Arora and Raj Zutshi
Director: Sanjay Suri
Rating: *

In the recent past, Vikram Bhatt has churned out flops after flops and his latest offering "Speed", a mishmash of Hollywood films, is also a disappointment. It is, in fact, the biggest turkey he has made so far.

A few flaws may have been understandable but this movie has too many bloopers - bad script filled with meaningless dialogues, tepid romantic subplot, tacky performances and loose direction. The film succumbs to these errors even before it can pick up the desired speed.

Using London as the backdrop, the film has three tracks. One involves Urmila Matondkar, a science teacher, being kidnapped. The kidnappers blackmail her husband Sanjay Suri, a MI5 (British counter-intelligence) agent, to kill the Indian prime minister played by Suhasini Mulay.

The second track is a love story. Zayed Khan, a spoiled brat, comes all the way to London to convince his girlfriend that he is serious about her and wants to marry her but before he can prove it, he embarks on a rescue mission after he gets a call from Urmila. Zayed and Tanushree don't look like a couple and have nil on screen chemistry.

The third track about a plot to kill the prime minister by her son (Raj Zutshi) with the help of a secret agent-turned-terrorist (Aftab Shivdasani) and his mole at a public function in London is well narrated but fails to give the film any boost.

None of the actors, except for Sanjay Suri who deserves a much better part than the one he got, manage to impress. They all seem to badly need a crash course in acting.

"Speed", mainly inspired by the Hollywood film "Cellular", is just one more reminder of how hopeless Bhatt's filmmaking has become. It has some praiseworthy action sequences but it can't fix the movie's fundamental flaws. Bhatt's hi-voltage drama looks ends up looking like a comedy film.

John Abraham in "No Smoking"

"No Smoking"
Cast: John Abraham, Ayesha Takiya, Ranvir Shorey
Director: Anurag Kashyap

I tried very hard to like "No Smoking". But at the end of the ordeal it seemed a nation of smokers was preferable to a film that preaches no smoking with such opaque wisdom.

Initially one can giggle at the spousal banter between the chain smoker (John Abraham) and his rather disgruntled wife (Ayesha Takiya). They make a kinetic pair and director Kashyap is good at portraying spousal conflict.

"What do you want for our anniversary?" asks the arrogant husband who looks at the mirror as though it was his crystal ball while she looks at him as though he was a self-absorbed oddball.

"Divorce", she suggests. Cure to divorce? Quit smoking.

The trick was to base the satire on barbs about the whole killing cult of cigarettes. Regrettably, "No Smoking" is as amusing and entertaining as a root-canal job done by a dentist hell-bent on causing pain.

The smoke gets so thick and the parallels to "Kafka", Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List", Bob Fosse, Guru Dutt and Vishal Bharadwaj's art get so condensed that we're left groping in a smog of swirling ambiguities.

Hallucinogenic images swim to the surface in a tidal wave of cryptic dialogues.

Why the utter lack of transparency in the storytelling? What is Kashyap hiding in the folds of defiant symbolism?

The narrative plays a dismaying mind-game where the smoker-hero gets trapped in a sewage underbelly, an infernal underground borrowed from Dante's Hell...or is it Ram Gopal Varma's cinema? It also has a sinister Baba (Paresh Rawal) presiding over a planet of freaks and oddballs, all photographed in sleets of sepia-toned colours.

The conflicts in Kashyap's scheme of things come not from the heart but the intellect. And there lies the problem with this innovative piece of eccentric cinema. The lines between truth and subterfuge, nightmare and reality get completely blurred in Russia where gun-toting comrades take potshots at poor John.

If anything holds the film together it's the panoramic shots of Mumbai's traffic and John's vain but sensitive performance as a man more sinning than sinned against.

Ayesha Takia is as always watchable and empathetic, though why she shows up in a double role as her husband's secretary is one of the many mysteries.

The film come across as a troubling rubble of dreams, nightmares, illusions and delusions that take the protagonist from chain smoking to a Hitlerian gas chamber where he's suffocated to death.

And after sitting through "No Smoking", one is sure to know that feeling.

JAB WE MET AT CINEMA HALL

Jab We Met

Cast: Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapur
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Rating: *** 1/2

The main reason why "Jab We Met" must be seen is Kareena, and the sparks that fly between her and Shahid.

Having gotten beyond her effervescent image in this ode to love, Kareena is brilliant. In a tailor-made role, she plays a boisterous Sikh girl on her way to tell her parents about her boyfriend, but meets up with a brooding, suicidal, jilted entrepreneur.

The sparks fly instantaneously ... and infinitely between them.

A chance encounter between two people on a train is not the most novel of cinematic ideas, but the sparks that fly between Kareena and Shahid seem so genuine that you just sit back and watch the characters go through a series of brilliantly conceived and energised incidents that bring them together.

Surprisingly, there are no surprise elements in "Jab We Met". Director Imtiaz Ali, displaying a deft and lucid command over his material and actors, lets the boy-meets-girl story take its own course without pushing for effect.

The vignettes on the trains and off them look so lived-in you could reach your hand and touch Aditya (Shahid) and Geet's (Kareena) glowing relationship in the small towns of Punjab and other parts of north India.

The dialogues flow in a steady stream of vocalised thoughts and not a single shot strives for effect.

In the first-half Kareena talks and Shahid listens. His is the tougher, less ostentatious performance characterised by pain and anguish as opposed to the Kareena's impetuous exuberance.

Kareena's insouciant warmth just bathes the screen in voluble splendour. She proves once again that when she puts her heart to it, she's quite simply the best. In the second-half, she beautifully depicts the ruins of a broken heart.

The director invests a whole lot of quiet moments between the couple. These are handled with a mellow maturity that defies the overall lightness of the romantic-comedy genre.

The songs composed by Pritam are a pleasure to hear. In "Yeh ishq haye", Kareena's unconditional surrender to joie de vivre reminds one of Waheeda Rehman in the song "Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai" in "Guide".

Kareena has a dozen or so expressions flitting across her restless face at any given time. And the director harnesses these to take the romance to a new high.

Shahid is right up there, furnishing restraint to his role of a man just waiting to come out of his shell.

There are many reasons apart from Kareena and Shahid why "Jab We Met" is a special film. The narrative moves with serene swiftness through several cities and towns, giving the lead couple a chance to get to know each other.

The never-ending festivities in the heroine's bustling Sikh household do get oppressive beyond a point, and the imminent 'yes' to the romantic mess is unnecessarily delayed.

But by the time Shahid and Kareena get into a clasp for a farewell kiss we are just left cheering the couple.

Heart-warming in its sincerity and utterly wedded to the feeling of romantic integrity, "Jab We Met" is the kind of cinematic experience that is hard to come by in this day and age of smoky cynicism and borrowed rage.

Kareena pleased about leap from brim to grin

Kareena pleased about leap from grim to grin
Mumbai, Critics are raving about her new film "Jab We Met", a full-on comedy, but Kareena Kapoor is looking forward to another laughathon "Phir Golmaal".

Sharing her joy, Kareena told IANS: "Although there're lots of comic moments in 'Jab We Met', I've never done a full-on comedy before. Even when I worked with Priyadarshan, who's known for his comedies, I starred in his only serious film, 'Chup Chup Ke', in recent times. And when we did a comedy together ('Hulchul'), I was the only serious character around.

"I guess I didn't have the chance to have fun with my roles before 'Jab We Met'. That's why I'm looking forward to 'Phir Golmaal'. It's my chance to pull out all stops."

After playing the free-spirited sardarni (Sikh woman) from Bathinda, Punjab, in "Jab We Met", she's all set to do a comedy in the "Golmaal - Fun Unlimited" sequel entitled "Phir Golmaal" where she teams up with Ajay Devgan after the very serious Shakespearean tragedy "Omkara"

The response to her performance in Imtiaz Ali's romantic comedy "Jab We Met" has been phenomenal.

"The only other film I've felt so good about in recent times is 'Omkara'. The director Imtiaz Ali has brought out the playful, extroverted side of me. While I was quiet, subdued and withdrawn in 'Omkara', in 'Jab We Met' I'm in my full elements. This character is really close to my heart. I think from my heart and like to speak my mind openly. And what I liked about this role was the amount of fun we had while travelling and shooting."

The fun quotient shows up in the film.

"I think that enjoyment during shooting has shown up on screen. Everyone who has seen 'Jab We Met' has been appreciative," said Kareena.

Tell her she looks different these days and she seems surprised. "Do I look different? It's just that I've become thinner. And I'm happy being myself."

Bhool Bhulaiya

Introducing Bhool Bhulaiya
First of all let me make it clear, Bhool Bhulaiyaa is NOT an out-n-out comedy movie as its trailers suggest. It’s a thriller narrated in a very entertaining way.

Bhool Bhulaiyaa is the remake of a 14 year old Malayalam movie, Manichitrathazhu. The movie was also remade in Kannada and Tamil. It a script that has always worked! So is Bhool Bhulaiyaa in the same league?

Bhool Bhulaiyaa Story
Badrinarayan Chaturvedi (Manoj Josi) is the head of the Brahmin family living in a small town were the people are very conventional and superstitious. His elder brother’s son Siddharth (Shiney Ahuja) and his wife Avni (Vidya Balan) return to their ancestral village after living in US for many years. Siddharth insists in staying in his ancestral palace which for long has been uninhabited as it’s considered to be haunted. Despite opposition the newly wed couple shifts to their ancestral mansion. Avni an adventurous girl breaks the ground rules to explore the room considered to be the devil’s home. What follows is a series of life threatening incidents. Siddharth instinctively invites his vibrant Doctor friend Aditya (Akshay Kumar) to solve the mystery behind the mansion and the mysterious events.

Who is behind all the baffling activities? Is it really ghastly or just a human trick? Watch Bhool Bhulaiyaa to uncover the mystery, for the movie ventures into one of the most confusing yet interesting study of human psychology.

Bhool Bhulaiyaa Movie Review
Priyadarshan has handled the complicated script extremely well. A few changes have been made to the original, to make it funnier and more convincing. The first half is a light comic thriller and completely revolves around the supporting characters. The lead character (Akshay Kumar) enters 45 mins into the movie and takes it to a completely different level. The second half is more of a psychological thriller.

Bhool Bhulaiya has just the right ingredients of a successful movie - adequate amount of comedy, suspense and thrill to keep you at the edge of your seats throughout. Music is never really great in Priyadarshan movies but Bhool Bhulaiyaa is an exception. Two songs titled ‘Allah Hafiz’ and ‘Hare Krishna Hare Ram’ standout. The background score is outstanding.

The performances are top-notch. The second half belongs to Vidya Balan. She has done complete justice to a role that demanded great onscreen histrionics. Watch out as she sets the screen ablaze with a mind blowing performance in the last 20 mins. Undoubtedly her best performance to date! Akshay Kumar is surprisingly good in emotional scenes and as always brilliant with his comic timing.

Shiney Ahuja is good. Amisha Patel should stop acting, the sooner the better. Paresh Rawal, Rajpal Yadav, Asrani are great in providing comic relief.

Indicine.com Bhool Bhulaiyaa Verdict
Overall, Bhool Bhulaiyaa is a great movie. History should repeat itself for a script that has always created history in every single language that it was made in. You would have never watched something like this before in a Bollywood movie. At the box-office, the advance booking is huge. With positive word of mouth, Bhool Bhulaiyaa could well be the 3rd blockbuster of the year!

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I'm too good-looking to be a politician: Shah Rukh

New Delhi, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan says he is not cut out for politics and he is "too materialistic and too good-looking" to play the role.

"I really appreciate the youngsters who make a decision to join politics because it is a very self-sacrificing job. I'm too selfish and too materialistic to be a politician. I can't sacrifice my personal gains. I'm also too good-looking to be a politician," King Khan said at the HT Leadership Summit held here.

"I would also take this opportunity to apologise on behalf of the entire industry that caricatured politicians in their films. They are not as self-centred as shown in our films," he added.

Talking about his vision for future India, he said: "I would like see a more educated India because I feel there is no alternative to education. I would like to contribute to education of children."

The superstar is touched by the pitiable condition of Indian women who can't afford even the basic amenities.

"I respect women a lot and I feel ashamed when I am driving down in a remote area and see women don't have their privacy. I would like to build the basic utilities for them," said Shah Rukh.

He is quite media savvy. And unlike many, he doesn't think that media have been prying too much into celebrities' personal lives.

Shah Rukh said: "Sometimes media exaggerate things like my so-called rivalry with Mr. Amitabh Bachchan. But I cannot deny that I use media for my gains time and again. So, I cannot complain when they use me.

"We have a synergy here. I respect media, as it is a huge marketing device. For example, I don't have the Rs.300-400 million like Sony Pictures (who is producing and marketing 'Saawariya') to market my film, so I depend on the media for that."

When asked about things he is not comfortable doing on screen, SRK said: "The ban on on-screen smoking and drinking was narrow-minded. I don't like dark films, I don't feel comfortable playing a mean guy and using abusive language, especially after (I have had) my children."

The actor, who has starred in this year's biggest hits and does a lot of endorsements, has become one of the super brands of India. However, he says that he never worked consciously to achieve that.

"Brands are made by the conventional way of working hard. I never worked in a special manner to build my brand. I just worked hard."

Asked how difficult it is to maintain the brand image, he said: "Getting somewhere is easy but holding it is very difficult. Brands work if you think positively."

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