Movie:'Welcome To Sajjanpur'

Producer: Ronnie Screwvala
Director: Shyam Benegal
Cast: Shreyas Talpade, Amrita Rao, Ravi Kishan, Rajeshwari Sachdeva, Ravi Jhankal, Ila Arun, Divya Dutta, Yashpal Sharma
Music: Shantanu Moitra

Welcome to Shyam Benegal's world of enchanting social comment. Every character in this village of the damned, the doomed and remarkably redeemed is a stereotype. And yet, miraculously, every character is an individual, eccentric, quirky, blemished and yet so full of vitality vigour and energy that you wonder which came first...life, or life as seen through the eyes of Benegal's camera of innocence, candour and credibility.

This isn't Benegal's first broadly-designed, warmly-panoramic ensemble film. Earlier, the prolific director excelled in depicting the life of a specific community in 'Mandi' and 'Suraj Ka Satwan Ghoda' as a microcosm of a larger reality.

Bad karma nudges delicious satire in 'Welome To Sajjanpur' as a closet-author whiles away his time writing letters for the illiterate, misguided villagers in a sleepy village that comes alive only at election time when a spirited eunuch takes on a local gangster at the elections.

The spirit of the missives, some sad, some satirical, others a bewildering Benegalesque blend of both, comes across in episodic overtures that lead us gently but persuasively from one issue - of widow remarriage (Ravi Kissan giving coy glances to Rajeswahri Sachdeva is a paisa-vasool sight) to another issue of rural migration.

Amrita Rao, in loud parrot-coloured saris and mannerisms suggesting an unspoilt naivete, is the bride-in-waiting whose husband has been gone to Mumbai for four years.

Shreyas Talpade is the letter writer given the task of informing Amrita's husband that the bride can wait no more. In a spurt of blinding self-interest, Talpade goes from detached letter-writer to attached Romeo and then to the penitent martyr with an ease, fluency and sauciness that the actor seems to muster up with a magician's flourish.

In a film flush with accomplished performances, Talpade holds the plot together like a voluminous book's spine - giving his bucolic character heart, charm and chutzpah.

This is Talpade's coming-of-age film. You really can't imagine any other leading man achieving the same level of connectivity with the character, plot and audience.

All the Benegal regulars - from Ila Arun to Rajit Kapur - show up in Sajjanpur with gratifying humility and warmth. Ravi Jhankal as the election-contesting eunuch and Yashpal Sharma as the eunuch's uncouth opponent stand out, if 'stand out' is the right term for a film where the actors become one with the characters in a seamless design celebrating life's most recognisable and basic emotions.

The costumes (Pia Benegal) tend to get a little touristy at times. And the dialogues (Ashok Mishra again) sometimes lean towards the lewd to salute the boorish rustic ambience. These are not traits you would expect in Benegal's film. But then he needs to keep up with the times. A fact that seems to have bypassed the soporific slumber-dwellers of Sajjanpur as they battle between hand-written postcards and sms communications, finally allowing the former to rule the roost until further notification.

This is a film where every character - big or small - stands tall in his or her naive insularity from forces of corruptibility that threaten to break down their doors.

Sajjanpur echoes a 1977 film 'Palkon Ki Chaon Mein' where Rajesh Khanna played the village postman trying not to get too involved with the local people's domestic problems. Talpade doesn't try that hard.

This is not Benegal's most subtle work of his prolific career. But it is one of his warmest, funniest and raunchiest pieces of cinema - where every character is a human being you'd bump into if you visit a Sajjanpur. Not too many films do that these days.

Movie:'Saas Bahu Aur Sensex'

Producer: Jayshri Makhija
Director: Shona Urvashi
Cast: Tanushree Datta, Ankur Khanna, Kirron Kher, Farooq Sheikh, Masumi Makhija, Lilette Dubey
Music: Randolph Correa, Bipin Panchal, Blaaze

To be fair, putting together saas-bahu sagas and the sensex seems a good concept, but director Shona Urvashi fails to use it effectively in her film.

In recent years, Bollywood has been generous to directors who experimented with novel concepts and the audiences too accepted their films. 'Saas Bahu Aur Sensex' dares to be different as it tells the story of middle-class housewives playing the stock market.

The director inter-weaves a love triangle into the main plot.

Nitya (Tanushree Dutta), Binita's daughter, shifts to Mumbai with her mother and meets Ritesh (Ankur Khanna) who helps her in getting a job at a call centre. Ritesh is in love with Kirti (Masumeh Makhija) who lives in the same society. But Kirti has other plans, she wants to marry a millionaire.

Despite the presence of the two veteran actors, Kirron and Farooque, the film fails to hold the audiences' attention. The reason being that the director fails to execute the story deftly and characters aren't properly etched.

Farooque, who had almost disappeared from the big screen, chose a wrong movie to make his comeback. As far as Kirron goes, in the recent past she has chosen all the wrong films and her talent is not utilised in this film either.

Movie:'1920'

Producer: Amita Bishnoi, Bhagwati Gabrani, Surendra Sharma
Director: Vikram Bhatt
Cast: Adah Sharma, Raj Zutshi, Rajneesh Duggal, Vallab Vyas, Vipin Sharma
Music: Adnan Sami

After 'Phoonk', you'd think the possessed woman was a thing of the past. But wait, it's time for another lady to elevate far beyond her bed in a horizontal high that gives you a crick in the neck.

'1920' is 'Phoonk' in Scotland (or whichever foreign scenic spot), where the devil catches hold of the leading lady as she rests her head on the rattling bed, moved back by almost a century.

Screenwriter Vikram Bhatt attempts to thrust a weight over the theme of exorcism by taking the supernatural theme to British India. So we have soldiers, mutineers, rebels and renegades popping into the Scottish scenario like random guests at a outdoor masquerade party.

And then we have a doctor mentioning a certain 'Dr Sigmund Fried' who is doing research somewhere far away from this film's horrific domestic tussles, researching on the human psychology.

There's something terribly artificial about implanting a historical element into a tale that essentially wants to tap the most primitive and primeval fears of the audience. Rather than going into a tale of betrayal during times of cruel colonialism, Bhatt's narrative should have just stuck to its gory guns.

Then maybe, just maybe, the B and C centre audiences who got the jitters watching 'Phoonk' would've trembled at the diabolic toss and turn that the love birds experience in a verdant castle that is supposed to be situated somewhere in India in the year 1920.

So panoramic and National Geographic is the view that we often want the lead pair (both wooden and uninspired even when the ghouls provoke them into animated retaliation) to just move out of camera range.

Alas, '1920' has a scary story to tell.

We are scared all right. Though for reasons other than the ones Bhatt would want us to be.

Movie:'Ru Ba Ru'

Producer: Percept Picture company
Director: Arjun Bali
Cast: Randeep Hooda, Shahana Goswami
Music: Sameeruddin, Satyadev Burman

The most unreliable thing in life is life itself. This, the protagonist of this sweet little concoction discovers when he wakes up one morning to find that his live-in girlfriend, perfect in manner and devotion, might have to die.

A simple premise based on the theory of deja vu, 'Ru-Ba-Ru' derives its slender strength from the conversational tone that the the debutant director brings to the romantic comedy, a genre that remains largely over-used and under-sensitised in Hindi cinema, thanks to the florid dialogues, over-the-top performances and incessant flow of song-dance.

Here the exuberance of the melodramatic melee that crowds the love in our (e)motion pictures is kept at a believable and urbane decibel. The couple, Randeep Hooda and Shahana Goswami look like a well-matched if strife-torn couple. Their chemistry is certainly not strained.

Randeep confers a casual colloquial sardonicism to the role of a man who has seen tomorrow and would rather enjoy today. Shahana, who gets to smile and giggle after frowning and complaining her way through 'Rock On', provides Randeep with ample scope to refurbish and revise the rituals of romance as they go from dream to a nightmarish reality where we know death is the evitable finale.

Though the plot and its negotiation through a labyrinth of well-charted courtship games are interesting enough, the film finally crumbles under the weight of lightness that comes from portraying love as excessively fleeting, fugitive and fragile.

And to believe that the man who knows he'll lose his beloved at the end of the day would go around joking, dancing ang playing the saxophone as the clock ticks away is stretching the frontiers of romance to the brink of parody.

Nonetheless the narration done in that wispy twinkle-eyed tone that suggests a deep bond between cinema and Elizabethan poetry does prod us gently into watching Randeep and Shahana portray a very contemporary couple bustling through a day of seduction and strife, eventually thrown into a situation that psychiatrists would enjoy analysing on the couch.

Borrowing generously from films like Peter Howitt's 'Sliding Doors', 'Ru-Ba-Ru' makes it a notch above mediocrity for its subtly superior performances and production design.

But the second half is too loose-limbed to qualify as compulsory deja vu. The nadir of storytelling occurs when Randeep and Shahana visit the former's estranged mom (Rati Agnihotri) and stepfather (Jayant Kriplani). In about 10 minutes of playing time here the director makes every father-son reconciliatory gesture prescribed in the book of social etiquette.

Still, the Thai locations and the generous display of stealth in the man-woman relationship redeem what would otherwise have been a film that never crosses the realm of sweet possibilities. While Randeep and Shahana hold up the lead with much casual realism, sturdy support comes from Jeneva Talwar as the heroine's best friend and Kulbhushan Kharbanda as a mysterious angel of death driving a taxi.

'Ru-Ba-Ru' has a delicious subtext to its romantic surface - don't leave the task of displaying emotions to a later time. You may never get there. 'Ru-Ba-Ru' barely does. It just about makes it through the 'Sliding Doors'.

Movie:'A Wednesday'

Producer: Ronnie Screwvala, Anjum Rizvi, Shital Bhatia
Director: Neeraj Pandey
Cast: Naseruddin Shah, Anupam Kher, Jimmy Shergill, Aamir Bashir, Deepal Shaw, Gaurav Kapoor, Chetan Pandit
Music: Sanjoy Chowdhary

First things first. "A Wednesday" is not about the train blasts that rocked Mumbai in 2005. It isn't so much to do about terrorism and counter-terrorism as it is about making these grim socio-political facts into digestible riveting cinema.

And that's where "A Wednesday" scores over "Mumbai Meri Jaan" and other recent films on the wrath of extremism.

Debutant director Neeraj Pandey turns the grim reality of terrorism into an engaging cat-and-mouse game played between a master blaster (Naseeruddin Shah) and a senior cop (Anupam Kher).

Just the pleasure of watching Naseer and Anupam against the backdrop of a teeming bustling sinisterly jeopardized Mumbai city is ample reason to discard all our other misgivings about the sheer feasibility of the plot.

Cleverly the narration manoeuvres all the physical action away from the two aging protagonists to a couple of hot-blooded young cops played effectively by Jimmy Shergill and Aamir Bashir, who hurl into camera range in a meteoric rush of adrenaline to remind us that the streets of Mumbai have always created a flutter in the clutter in our films. Just go back to every film from "Satya" to "Aamir" and see what we mean.

Cinematographer Fuwad Khan captures the blood on the roads of Mumbai with a disaffected relish. A lot of the film has been shot in stylish top-shots where the terrorists and counter-terrorist manoeuvrings appear larger than life and yet miraculously shrunken in the cosmic scheme of things. Violence in this way is made both comic and cosmic.

By the time Naseer's eruptive enthusiasm climaxes, the narration goes into the realm of the improbable, contriving to create an atmosphere of utter escapism in a film that you thought was stubbornly wedded to reality.

But that's where Pandey has been heading all along. His narrative hurtles towards a photo-finish where the newspaper headlines are swallowed up in a swamp of thriller-rituals that take the plot aback to create an aura of unstoppable suspense.

Sanjoy Chowdhury's background music over-punctuates every sequence. But then that's precisely what this out-of-the-box terrorist-thriller was looking for.

The humour, when it strikes, is like the bomb blasts. Sudden and unexpected, though a little on the grimmer side.

Veejay Gaurav Chopra as a shit-scared film star getting extortion calls is mousy enough to remind us that heroes don't come out of the movies. But heroic movies surely do come along once in a while from the movie industry. "A Wednesday" is certainly one of them.

Watch it to see how cleverly the director subverts the real-life headline-driven genre of cinema into a riveting race to the finish line.

Most of all it's the performances of the two principal actors that holds "A Wednesday" together. Moving away from his recent comic antics, Anupam delivers a controlled performance as a cop who has seen it all. He happily allows Naseer to take over many scenes giving his co-star some riveting reactive cues.

Naseer is back in full form after a rather embarrassing gap of cameo-commitments. Naseer in his element is an experience that needs no definition. He plays the jaded but spirited bomb-planting anonymous caller with a wry blunt and edgy sardonicism creating for his character a space that pitches his angst in the wide open loosely defined crowds of desolation in Mumbai.

"A Wednesday" is not quite the seamless little masterpiece on terrorism that you expected. It resorts to many wild swipes in the plot. Some characters like the dude-like computer hacker and the TV journalist, played by Deepal Shaw, give embarrassing single-note performance.

Watch Naseer and Anupam to know how a one-to-one drama works when two actors provide a psychological and emotional equilibrium from the two ends of the moral spectrum.

Movie:'Chamku'

Producer: Dharmendra
Director: Kabeer Kaushik
Cast: Bobby Deol, Priyanka Chopra, Arshad Warsi, Ritesh Deshmukh, Irrfan Khan, Danny Denzongpa, Rajpal Yadav, Arya Babbar
Music: Monty Sharma

First things first - what kind of a name is 'Chamku'? Is it the name of a detergent or a whitener? No, it's the name of a Maoist-turned-government-assassin who later becomes an avenging angel.

This is director Kabeer Kaushik's second film and he had raised hopes after his gritty 'Seher'. One went to see the film with serious reservations about the name of the film and really nothing else.

One thought maybe Kaushik could turn around the luck of Bobby Deol, who is desperately in need of a hit. But soon you realise that Bobby, who plays the protagonist Chamku in the film, is luckless.

Then Chamku is encountered and lies in the hospital with the same depressed look as a government agent Irrfan Khan, dependable as usual, makes him an offer.

He's now trained to kill, we're told. So he goes around killing, till he meets lovely Priyanka Chopra, who is wasted in the film.

Here the director lets go of a potential comic sequence when Bobby is about to introduce himself to the girl.

Eventually love happens, songs happen, even pregnancy happens. So much happens and Chamku looks even more depressed. By then, so are you.

It doesn't take you long to understand that the Maoists and the government-assassin- looking-to-get-out angle is just a guise for an often repeated revenge drama.

Danny's character should have been etched out with better imagination. The action sequence set in a train is handled well, but it isn't enough to redeem the film.

Honestly, there's little shine in this 'Chamku'.